- Using MysQL as NoSQL — 750,000+ qps on a commodity MySQL/InnoDB 5.1 server from remote web clients.
- Making an SLR Camera from Scratch — amazing piece of hardware devotion. (via hackaday.com)
- Mac App Store Guidelines — Apple announce an app store for the Macintosh, similar to its app store for iPhones and iPads. “Mac App” no longer means generic “program”, it has a new and specific meaning, a program that must be installed through the App store and which has limited functionality (only one can run at a time, it’s full-screen, etc.). The list of guidelines for what kinds of programs you can’t sell through the App Store is interesting. Many have good reasons to be, but It creates a store inside itself for selling or distributing other software (i.e., an audio plug-in store in an audio app) is pure greed. Some are afeared that the next step is to make the App store the only way to install apps on a Mac, a move that would drive me away. It would be a sad day for Mac-lovers if Microsoft were to be the more open solution than Apple. cf the Owner’s Manifesto.
- Privacy Aspects of Data Mining — CFP for an IEEE workshop in December. (via jschneider on Twitter)
"database" entries
Big data, but with a familiar face
Martin Hall explains how Karmasphere is integrating Hadoop into enterprises.
You don't have to throw away existing investments in skills and tools to use Hadoop for big data, as Karmasphere's Martin Hall explains.
Four short links: 21 October 2010
MySQL as NoSQL, Handmade SLR, Mac App Store, and Datamining Privacy Workshop
Four short links: 24 September 2010
Crawlable Ajax, Security Lessons, Graph Database, and Toy Hardware
- Making Ajax Applications Crawlable (Google) — Google’s system for allowing Ajax applications to provide HTML snapshots for search engines. (via alexdong on twitter)
- Security Lessons Learned from the Diaspora Launch — great explanation of the programming mistakes that were in the Diaspora code, and the security risks that resulted. Again, I recommend the OWASP site if you aren’t aware of the types of security mistakes you are making.
- A Brief Tour of Graphd — the triplestore behind Freebase. Want. (via timclicks on Twitter)
- Toybots — startup working on Internet-aware hardware for toymakers: 3G, WiFi, GPS, and accelerometer waiting to be embedded in toys.
Four short links: 20 July 2010
Hardware Hacking, BI Reporting Tool, Book Recommendations, and Winning the Futurist Lottery
- Dangerous Prototypes — “a new open source hardware project every month”. Sample project: Flash Destroyer, which writes and verifies EEPROM chips until they blow out.
- Wabit — GPLv3 reporting tool.
- Because No Respectable MBA Programme Would Admit Me (Mike Shaver) — excellent book recommendations.
- The Most Prescient Footnote Ever (David Pennock) — In footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p. 228) of Graham’s classic Hackers and Painters, published in 2004, Graham asks “If the the Mac was so great why did it lose?”. His explanation ends with this caveat, in parentheses: “And it hasn’t lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”
MySQL migration and risk management
Database expert Ronald Bradford on the pros and cons of migrating from Oracle to MySQL
Ronald Bradford has been guiding DBAs through key aspects of database integration for years. In this Q&A, he discusses the pros and cons of migrating from Oracle to MySQL (hint: it's not just about cost savings). He also weighs in on how Oracle's acquisition of Sun will shape the future of MySQL and its community.
Four short links: 12 August 2009
Health Data, Python Term Extraction, Network Neutrality, New Database
- Improving Health Care — Adam Bosworth’s speech to the Aspen Health Forum. It starts strong and just gets better: There is a lot of talk about improving health care. And there is a lot to improve. Inadequate Evidence: We don’t know enough about what works. We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst.
- topia.termextract — Python library for term extraction, so you can get a list of the nouns and noun phrases used in a piece of text. (via Simon Willison)
- Key to Understanding Network Neutrality — David Pennock neatly identifies the crucial issue, that service quality and price levels be uniformly applied and not arbitrary based on how much the service provider thinks they can gouge from the customer. The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet.
- (the item I linked to releases in a week’s time, I will link again when it’s live–sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a monkey washing a cat)
Four short links: 3 August 2009
Mathematics Collaboration, Risk, Visualisation, and SemWeb
- Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration — Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration.
- 2845 Ways to Spin The Risk — introduction to the ways in which our perception of risk (and numbers in general) can be distorted by how it is presented. (via titine on Twitter)
- Logstalgia — OpenGL app to visualize Apache log files.
- 4Store — “scalable RDF storage”. 4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people. (via joshua on Delicious)
OSCON: The saga of MySQL
At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are…