stormbrew

Brian Aker, one of the main engineers on mysql at Sun, has posted a presentation he did on the project he’s been working on for the last year and a half: Drizzle. I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in the state of the art of database technology watch it.

To summarize:

Scalability: A large part of [...]

I’ve long been a fan of djb’s method of writing software. Over the years, three of his tools have served me very well: djbdns, daemontools, and qmail.
But djb has a dark side. He has some strange views on filesystem layout (I’m no booster of the linux standard layout, but his views on layout are just [...]

I was up late last night (not unusual for me lately) watching something kind of amazing unfold. The Alberta Legislature was debating a new version of their human rights legislation that included two major changes:
- on one end of the spectrum, the addition of sexual orientation to protected status’. Technically, this was just a gesture, [...]

Here’s the thing: Facebook should not try to be a better twitter. When we were lagging behind on features at Nexopia for two years, we constantly ran into the trap of thinking about how we needed to do these things our competition did and do them better. When we finally came out with something that [...]

So tonight, for the first time in about 4 years, I did public speaking. Back in college there was a fair amount of public speaking and presentation giving to do, and I enjoyed it then. I always come away from doing public speaking feeling like I’ve done a good job, and I hope that perception [...]

Google just announced something called OpenSocial, which is a facebook apps-like mechanism running on an open platform of essentially embedded js and html. At least, that’s the jist I’m getting.
But where’s the security? Letting untrusted apps run js on my social network site (and that’s not just a hypothetical. 1 million actual users, more like [...]

I suspect that most people, when visiting a non-chain restaurant, don’t wonder about whether they could manage to buy the restaurant and if it’d be a good investment… Honestly, there’s a place downtown that I think has huge potential that it’s not living up to and If I Were A Rich Man, badle-beedle-badle-beedle-beedle-bum, *ahem*, I [...]

So my bank has recently decided to start DEMANDING security question/answer pairs for their web page login system. In order to log in, you MUST answer one of your security questions in addition to your password.
They give you 5 sets of questions to choose from and a freeform field to put the answer into. Am [...]

qmail has a limit of 900 characters on email addresses it’ll relay.