Over on the 37signals blog, DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding. His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again.

Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

Depending on future improvements to fix your own bad planning is a risky way to build an on-line service--especially one you expect to grow and charge money for.

It's easy to forget history in this industry (as Paul pointed out in the comments on that post). There was a point a few years ago when people still believed the clock speed of CPUs would be doubling roughly every 18 months for half the cost. Putting aside …

I was running a hard drive diagnostic using SeaTools for DOS v1.09PH on two exactly the same Maxtor hard drives, see details of the drives below. When I attempted to run a quick scan and then a long scan it received a warning “Overtemp–253″. After doing some research I have come to the conclusion that with certainty that this doesn’t mean the hard drive is running at 253 degrees Fahrenheit. My two drives are well ventilated and do not even feel warm to the touch. In fact this message apparently means according to Seagate that the hard drive does not support SeaTools reading temperatures.

• Brand: Maxtor
• Model: 6Y060L0
• FW: YAR41BW0

Source: Incorrect temperature values for a Maxtor disk

My friend Alex Poole was laid off two days before Christmas from his job as CTO at BGD Group. He's decided to go back into freelancing instead of looking for another job. I've worked with Alex in the past at both LoveFilm and Library House and I can safely say he knows his stuff when it comes to PHP / MySQL development. He can talk non-geek when needed as well!

If you need a senior PHP / MySQL freelancer, you could do a lot worse than to get in touch with Alex.

Here are a few key posts from my various blogs from the last year.

From my InfoWorld open sources blog:

• Open Source Trends for 2009
• John Kotter on Urgency
• MySQL 5.1 Released
• Gartner Reports 50% Growth in use of Open Source DBMS
• …

MySQLers share many activities that they take part in during the course of a year. One of them is flying. Another is running. Running is considerably more pleasurable than flying. Case in point: There is a MySQL Runners Club, but no MySQL Frequent Flyer club — although the latter would count a huge number of us working with MySQL at Sun as potential members.

The Dopplr Raumzeitgeist shows where I was 2008

I think I am a fairly eager runner, and a fairly frequent flyer. Thanks to Dopplr (a traveller’s social website that I evaluated last year), I know that I’ve travelled 283 659 km since the first trip I’ve entered into Dopplr (which was early January 2008). If I assume that I’ve flown ten thousand …

This post is more of a personal note than most on the Pythian blog, but over the holidays, I couldn’t help thinking about my turbulent last year.

First, MySQL

In 2008, I worked at three different companies. It was about a year ago (January 15th will be a year) I was at MySQL AB’s first company-wide meeting in a few years with more than 400 of my colleagues, when all of a sudden we get the announcement: “Sun acquired MySQL for 1 billion dollars”. Many thought it was a joke, just in time to watch Jonathan Schwartz come up live on video to greet us. Talk about an intense way of starting a year! For some reason, nobody thought that toasting with a shot of vodka before 9:00am was the oddest thing to happen that morning.

Working for MySQL was, most likely, the wildest ride I will ever have. True Open Source spirit (no matter what the rest of the world says), start-up mentality, and growth equal to one order of magnitude …

The MySQL Cluster product seems to intimidate a lot of folks with its complexity. The North Texas MySQL Meetup had a presentation at the January meeting titled 'A Gentle Introduction to MySQL Cluster' where a cluster was setup on a single laptop. The presentation was full of information that needs to be shared to encourage others to try out this valuable piece of software.

The following covers how to set up a cluster on a single computer. The cluster will consist of two data nodes, a SQL node, and a management node. In this case the SQL node and the management node will be on one system. The data nodes will be virtual systems running on the same host. This is not the optimal performance configuration but it will let those new to MySQL Cluster try out the product with a minimal investment in equipment and time.

You will need two free software products -- …

Changes (as compared to 7.14) include:

Features:
* Added an option to use Base64 encoding for communicating XML data stream with the HTTP tunneller. Using this option can be required to work around this XML-related bug in PHP.
* Improved editor performance with large scripts if Wordwrap was enabled.

Bug fixes:
* On Windows Vista Business edition, SQLyog could crash while closing down. No other Windows OS (and also not any other Vista edition) was affected.
*  Also a ‘hang’ could occur when closing down. It could happen with all systems, but Windows Vista was mostly affected.
* Schema Sync failed with identically named Foreign Key CONSTRAINTs on identically named colums of basically same type (that could still differ in LENGTH, SIGNED/UNSIGNED specification etc.)

This Tip Of The Day answers the following comment on my blog:

How to Configure a MySql database to be able to connect Netbeans6.5.?

I've tried using mysql Server 6 many times, but it fails.
Please, let me know how to fix that problem.

• Download MySQL 6.0 from here.
• Install and start MySQL 6.0 on Mac OSX using the clearly written installation instructions.
  • Basically the download is available in .tar or .dmg format. Using .dmg format is the easiest way, double-click and follow the instructions taking all defaults.
  • MySQL is installed in …