- SQL Injection Pocket Reference (Google Docs) — just what it sounds like. (via ModSecurity SQL Injection Challenge: Lessons Learned)
- isostick: The Optical Drive in a Stick (KickStarter) — clever! A USB memory stick with drivers that emulate optical drives so you can boot off .iso files you’ve put on the memory stick. (via Extreme Tech)
- CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing (Berkeley) — CrowdDB uses human input via crowdsourcing to process queries that neither database systems nor search engines can adequately answer. It uses SQL both as a language for posing complex queries and as a way to model data. (via Big Data)
- The DIY Electronic Medical Record (Bryce Roberts) — I had a record of my daily weight, my exercising (catalogued by type), my walking, my calories burned and now, with the addition of Zeo, my nightly sleep patterns. All of this data had been passively collected with little to no manual input required from me. Total investment in this personal sensor network was in the range of a couple hundred dollars. And, as I rummaged through my data it began to hit me that what I’ve really been doing is creating my own DIY Electronic Medical Record. The Quantified Self is about more than obsessively cataloguing your bowel movements in low-contrast infographics. I’m less enthused by the opportunities to publicly perform private data, a-la the wifi body scale, than I am by opportunities to gain personal insight.
"databases" entries
Four short links: 29 July 2011
SQL Injection, Optical Stick, SQL for Crowdsourcing, and DIY Medical Records
Strata Week: When does data access become data theft?
Questions surround the Aaron Swartz case and Microsoft wants to help scholars with big data.
Aaron Swartz faces felony charges for downloading "big data" (more than 4 million academic journals) from the MIT library, Microsoft's new data tool is aimed at scholars, and David Eaves looks at open data efforts in Canada.
Four short links: 21 July 2011
Javascript Helpers, 3D DOM, Hadoop Graph Optimizations, and Future Scenarios
- Sugar — a Javascript library that fixes inconsistencies in built-in classes (Strings, Arrays, etc.) and extends them with much-needed time-saving functionality (e.g., automatic iterators over regular expressions; Date creation from strings; binding scopes to functions).
- Tilt — clever Firefox plugin that lets you view the DOM on your page in 3D. Excellent for visually understanding the structure and layout of your page. I can’t wait to see the applications of this in debugging and teaching.
- Improving Hadoop Efficiency on Graph Data — three techniques: clustering data instead of randomly partitioning across nodes; allowing different data to be replicated differently; graph-optimized storage. (via Big Data)
- Learnings from the Long View (PDF) — scenario planning lessons learned from the founder of the field. Most of the scenarios they talk about are near and dear to the O’Reilly heart: smart networks, augmented reality, synthetic biology, energy from bacteria, super macro- and micro-manufacturing. (via Rob Passarella)
Four short links: 12 July 2011
Rare Visualization, Google+ Tech, Scala+Erlang, and In-Database Analytics
- Slopegraphs — a nifty Tufte visualization which conveys rank, value, and delta over time. Includes pointers to how to make them, and guidelines for when and how they work. (via Avi Bryant)
- Ask Me Anything: A Technical Lead on the Google+ Team — lots of juicy details about technology and dev process. A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you’re on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don’t run into this in practice). (via Nahum Wild)
- scalang (github) — a Scala wrapper that makes it easy to interface with Erlang, so you can use two hipster-compliant built-to-scale technologies in the same project. (via Justin Sheehy)
- Madlib — an open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Mike Loukides)
Four short links: 4 July 2011
God Games, Digitised History, git Database, and App Framework
- Let There Be Smite (Pippin Barr) — simple diversion for the 4th of July. It won’t be easy for God to save America. (via Pippin’s blog)
- Basel Wear — to answer the question I know was burning on your lips: “what *did* the Swiss wear in 1634?” Impressively detailed pictures from a 1634 book that is now online. One of the reasons I’m in favour of digitizing cultural collections is that we’re more likely to encounter them on the net and so ask questions like “how did people dress in 1634?”, “why did everyone carry keys?”, and “what is a Sexton?”
- databranches: Using git as a Database — it’s important to approach your design for using git as a database from the perspective of automated merging. Get the merging right and the rest will follow. I’ve chosen to use the simplest possible merge, the union merge: When merging parent trees A and B, the result will have all files that are in either A or B, and files present in both will have their lines merged (and possibly reordered or uniqed).
- Joshfire — open source (dual-licensed GPLv2 and commercial) multiplatform development framework built on HTML5.
Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year
JavaScript is now a necessity.
JavaScript is everywhere: servers, rich web client libraries, HTML5, databases, even JavaScript-based languages. If you've avoided JavaScript, this is the year to learn it. And if you don't, you risk being left behind.
Percona's mini-conferences target the evolution of MySQL
Percona's goal is to bring MySQL expertise out of the Silicon Valley and build community around MySQL in many locations.
Percona’s mini-conferences target the evolution of MySQL
Percona's goal is to bring MySQL expertise out of the Silicon Valley and build community around MySQL in many locations.
Wrap-up of 2011 MySQL Conference
Key themes from MySQL 2011. Plus, what you sacrifice when you use a NoSQL solution.
Two dominant themes emerged at MySQL 2011: Mix your relational database with less formal solutions and move to the cloud. This may actually be the best environment MySQL has ever enjoyed.
Brian Aker explains Memcached
Memcached lets your servers spend time on the important stuff.
Memcached is one of the linchpin technologies that holds the modern Internet together, but do you know what it actually does? Brian Aker offers a peek under the hood.