Eben talks at length of the modern Memory Palace and how on-line email and photo services have the potential to undermine our privacy and freedoms.

Here are the links….

Download and direct play

Matt’s post on managing the ‘No Open Source’ clause cites stats from the recent Forrester report that shows a perniciously high percentage of respondents are concerned with ‘legal liabilities for copyright and patent infringement” (43% if I read the data properly), and how a dual license strategy takes this issue off the table.

That all makes perfect sense.

But what if the reason dual license open source companies like mySQL are successful is because Enterprises overstate the real risk of using open source software!

Wouldn’t that be ironic: As Enterprises gain awareness and sophistication about open source licensing issues and IP, they become …

We’ve been doing a lot of performance analysis of MySQL and SATA disks over the last few days and I wanted to get some thoughts out in the open to see what you guys thought.

Now that Debian Etch is out we’re seriously looking at making the jump to a full 64bit OS with 8G of memory on each of our boxes.

This also involves benchmarking SATA and potentially migrating away from MyISAM which, while very trusty, is seriously showing its age for us.

First off is raw IO tuning.

XFS benchmarks show about a 20% performance boost from bonnie++ over ext3. This is pretty obvious. Tuning readahead with ‘blockdev’ didn’t seem to help performance much. SATA seems pretty tuned when compared to hdparm and IDE drives.

After fully tuning it seems we can get about 90MBps out or our disks. Not to shabby. The Linux md driver on RAID 0 didn’t seem to boost IO performance much (and I’m pretty disappointed). Even …

Baron Schwartz was nice enough to make recordings of about a dozen talks at the recent MySQL conference. The original uploaded files were in ogg format and wouldn’t work on an ipod and weren’t very portable.

With his help, I uploaded the original MP3 files and made a podcast which contains all the links to the sessions and should work fine with iTunes and an ipod.

Here’s the link to the podcast. Just add it to iTunes or your favorite podcasting software and off you go.

Over at Tecosystems, SOG was trying to explain a misquote of his in Computerworld re:MySQL and somehow drafted a great explanation of dual-license models. The short version of my explanation went something like this: in layman's terms (I know there... READ MORE

Domas Mituzas (who works for MySQL AB and works with Wikipedia) has published a workbook (pdf) about about the design and architecture of Wikipedia.

Expect to see lots of common infrastructure tools used in common across sites like Livejournal, Digg, etc.

Basically, everyone is using about the same core technology:

Started as Perl CGI script running on single server in 2001, site has grown into distributed
platform, containing multiple technologies, all of them open. The principle of openness
forced all operation to use free & open-source software only. Having commercial alterna-
tives out of question, Wikipedia had the challenging task to build efficient platform of freely
available components.

Pasha Sadri from Yahoo gave the final keynote presentation at the mySQL conference on his work with Yahoo Pipes. He began his presentation talking about problems he was having grinding through craigslist and other RSS feeds to extract useful information. He thought about how he could build something that solved similar problems for others trying to do the same kinds of things.

Pipes is a RSS mashup tool that allow you to combine RSS feed and apply transformations on the data and create a new feed. If you haven’t seen it, you ought to check it out. Several good technical reviews here, here and …

LinuxWorld has a good (and flattering :-) post on Alfresco and the rise of open source Enterprise Content Management that is faster, more usable, and a heck of a lot cheaper than traditional proprietary ECM.

But ease of use should not be underestimated as a key driver in Alfresco's, and other open source applications', growth. Who cares about technology that no one knows how to use?

Terry Barbounis, CTO at the Christian Science Monitor, answers:

Content management technology, in general, has been something to be desired for sometime now, Barbounis says. “Systems are just not easy enough to use and as a consequence customers either don't use them or get little value from what they do,” he says. “ECM when properly leveraged can stretch …

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk in person.

The slides used in the talk is available at ZRM for MySQL wiki

If you have questions or comments, please send them to me.

I find Wal-Mart fascinating. Wal-Mart is a near perfect example of Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma," in many ways. The very things that have made it spectacularly successful are also causing its stuttered growth, as BusinessWeek captures in this illuminating article.

...[Wal-Mart's] fundamental business problem is that selling for less no longer confers the overwhelming business advantage it once did. Low prices still define the chain's appeal to its best customers, the 45 million mostly low-income Americans who shop its stores frequently and broadly. But the collective purchasing power of the "loyalists," as Wal-Mart calls them, has shriveled in recent years as hourly wages have stagnated and the cost of housing and energy have soared.Even if this pool of low-income "loyalists" were flush with cash, Wal-Mart still has to …