I’ve hosted standalone servers at ev1servers since 2003.  This past March I had a problem and received some moderately bad customer service, so I decided to look elsewhere.  I migrated most of my sites to gate.com, a lower cost option - I don’t have many hosting needs anymore, and it was a decent value for [...]

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http://videoeta.com/news/2236 has the full pictures, but this has got to be some of the best DVD packaging I’ve ever seen.  We just got the disc through netflix, and my wife came upstairs and said “we got a pirated copy!”  She was afraid we’d be blamed for keeping the original and sending back a cheap copy.  [...]

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I’m here listening to ThoughtWorks’ Neal Ford, who gave the keynote yesterday. He’s talking about being a productive programmer, and has already given me some interesting things to think about. One, ‘monad’ (powershell) is a new shell for Windows Vista and XP. I may look at installing that, as it looks to [...]

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I’m attending the caffienated php session - this will demonstrate the java/php bridge. This is put on by Kevin Schroeder from Zend.
Kevin started off by giving a rundown of Zend - products, services, etc. No mention of ZendFramework project (yet?).
Why use PHP and Java together? PHP is easier for most tasks, and [...]

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Scott Guthrie is giving a keynote about LINQ - Language INtegrated Query, a new data processing approach from MS.
talked about migration from Dbase-era, to mid 90s, to OO mapping approach today (hibernate, active record, etc).
Still have issues:

how do you deal with non-relational data?
how do you interactive with ‘plain old objects’?
how to enable rich data shaping/transformations [...]

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Bruce Eckel is giving a keynote, starting with mindmapping. I was going to write about this, but it’s being recorded, and I assume it’ll be on the codemash.org website. Interesting:
Induction: proof through observation
Deduction: reasoning from exisiting principles
Adbuction: logic of possibility - “what might be”
Oddness - all sw/development is treated the same, but not with [...]

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I’ll detail how I got here later, but I’m now listening to Jay Pipes talk about mysql benchmarking and optimization techniques. Initial tools talked about include

sysbench - sysbench.sf.net
mysqlslap - throws in randomized data
apache bench
supersmack - www.vegan.net/tony/supersmack
mybench - jeremy.zawaodny.com/mysql/mybench

profiling

diagnose a running system
identify performance bottlenecks - memory/cpu/disk/network/os

show processlist / status / innodb status (http://dev.mysql.com/show)
NOTE: when ‘using [...]

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During the mysql meeting last night, Tobias mentioned the sphinx search engine project.  Apparently some ex-mysql guys split off and formed a consulting company, and are also working on this project.  I don’t know the nitty-gritty details, but I do know this seems pretty fast.  Tobias said it smokes Lucene for speed, and my initial [...]

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In no particular order, these were just some classics I’ve recently found.  If you have more, share them here or email me 
Congress Awards Itself Congressional Medal of Honor
133 Dead as Delta cancels flight in mid-air
Struggling Blockbuster Eliminates Rental Fees
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Some friends of mine are selling their house in Ypsilanti, MI, and I put together a small website to help them out.  If you know anyone looking for a family home in that area, please have them check out http://8172thornhill.com and arrange a viewing.
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