Pimptel – An Open Source Porno

I watched Sintel, an open source short film.  During the buzz of the release I thought, “An open source movie?  How the hell…”  I downloaded it off a torrent so that I could feel like I was stealing, just like all of the other movies I steal.  The intro screamed of awesomeness — battles for power, fights to the death!  What is this super cool ninja struggle for?  Why isn’t that hot bitch taking her clothes off while she fights in the snow?

I was pumped the first 110 seconds of the movie, then it was all downhill from there.   It was completely retarded!  Something about a bleeding heart liberal agenda for saving injured animals, with a guilt trip ending about mistaken enemy identity.  (Disguised as a cheesy morality play)

This really mirrors my experiences with crappy open source software.  “WOW, OMG PONIES!  Something free and awesome at the same time!”  Then a big let down after you experience the quality of the product.  Sintel reminded me of the Final Fantasy movie with slightly cheesier graphics, and a Sesame Street plot.  I guess that means open source movies are 10 years behind in technology, and 25 years behind in content.

But hey, it’s open source right?  I can do whatever the hell I want with this movie!  All I need is 8,000 hours of free time to spare.  I’m going to make my own porno, called Pimptel!  It’ll have this skinny bitch as the main character:

She’s going to do everything naughty I can imagine.  It’ll be distasteful, and incredibly funny.  Pimptel will be part Final Fantasy and part Japanese RapeLay with sprinklings of HBO’s Rome and World of Warcraft.  She’ll take a pounding in the butt from Roman Titus Pullo, then get sloppy seconds from an Orc.  The baby dragon model will be involved too.  And maybe a few chickens.

Is this degrading to the movie?  Of course!  But that’s what open source is all about.  Anyone can take a product, rape it, and probably arrive at greater success than the original developer.  *cough* *cough* MySQL *cough* *cough*.  I’m not providing an opinion on whether this is good or bad, it’s just a choice made by the original content creator.  You can enjoy the (cheap) popularity of making something for the public, or enjoy a rich, full life by selling intellectual property rights.

(Extended Caveat:  I realize advertising can be a big revenue maker for open source projects like this…  but I believe anything with a primary cash flow from advertising is a shitty business model to begin with.  But that’s another blag post.)

Redis vs Memcached

This month’s Linux Journal has an article about Redis.  I read about it while sitting on the shitter, because that’s about all that Linux Journal is useful for.  The article itself was crap, but the introduction to this product was at least tempting.

The basics:  take memcached and add a disk backing, replication, virtual memory, and some cool additional data structures.  Hashes, lists, sets, sorting, joining, transactions, yay!  I instantly got a geek boner scanning the feature list.  My boner quickly faded to about half mast when I saw the C clients that are available.  No consistent hashing?  Wait, no server hashing at all? Yet they have a gay Ruby client, fully featured?  C is the lowest common denominator when it comes to language support.  Start there, then add high level bindings using this low level library.  libmemcached got it right.  You start on the bottom and work your way up to higher level bindings.  It seems that Redis took the wrong approach to this which will result in every language having a different client implementation.  This leads to inconsistencies between languages, which is bad news.  That on first glance gave me that headed-for-the-toilet feeling for this project.

With a half-mast boner, I decided to do some benchmark comparisons.  Perhaps I’ll see some real numbers that might arouse me.  Stand back, I’m going to do some science!