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Book review: Freedom, by Daniel Suarez

I recently got to read Freedom, the new book by Daniel Suarez, and can highly recommend it. If you haven’t read Suarez’s earlier book Daemon then you should read that Daemon first. If you have read it, Suarez picks up where the first book ended. Daemon and Freedom are set in a future tantalizingly close to [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-04 more

Doing the

John Mayer had a good post about a “digital cleanse.” The idea is to step away from the busy, buzzy world for a week. John mentioned four ideas, but I’m going to try just one: “no use of Twitter or any other social networking site”. That’s right, I’m going Twitter-free for a week. I don’t really [...]
Publication date: 2010-01-02 more

on "Paragon NTFS for Mac 6.5 is free for today ($39.95 worth)"

I
Publication date: 2009-12-27 more

on "How to convert video for iPhone Free?"

This holiday I have been asked often how to watch videos on iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. Most people that own an iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS know they can enjoy videos on their iPhones but they don't know how to exactly. So I wrote this tutorial to help you to watch videos on your iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. To watch the holiday videos on your iPhone 3G you need to convert the videos to the iPhone MPEG-4(MP4 for short) format. So you should convert the video files to .mp4 (H.264 encoding) format files before transferring them onto your iPhone 3G using some video converter tool. There are lots of free tools on the Internet, the one I'm using is Free iPhone Video Converter from Aneesoft. Don't know how to convert videos to iPhone mp4 format? It's not that difficult, let me show you step by step. Step 1. Download and install Aneesoft Free iPhone Video Converter Download and install Aneesoft Free iPhone Video Converter, which is easy to use and completely free! There is no spyware or adware. It's absolutely safe to install and run! You can convert videos for your iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S. Step 2. Add videos that you want to convert to iPhone MP4 format Click the button "Add
Publication date: 2009-12-27 more

Sphinx and Gearman: A Distributed Computing AH-HA! Moment

A week ago I decided to finally get serious about putting gearman to use for search indexing. I had been batting the idea around in my head for a long time (too long, really) but figured I should just write the code and see what happens. It took less than a day to get a prototype working in our development environment, but the end result made me very happy. Today, in our production deployment, when a sphinx cluster pulls new content to index, the master does all the work. It fetches the new and changed postings, massages them into the XML format that sphinx expects (and makes a lot of small changes along the way), invokes the indexer, and makes the new indexes available for the slaves. The second step is usually the most CPU intensive. Processing the raw data into XML involves a lot of other tweaks and changes that are very specific to Criagslist. What I did was turn that into a gearman client/worker pair. The client (or master) simply submits processing tasks and then waits for each of them to complete. The workers fetch the data from the master, transform it, and make the transformed data available. When each task completes, the master grabs the transformed data an informs the worker that it can delete the file. So instead of being stuck at using only the 4 CPU cores on a single box, I can run 4 workers on each of 3 machines and get 12 CPU cores involved. The end result is that I have a solid foundation for a system that can easily scale to many machines. AH-HA! Linear scaling rocks! So does relatively seamless distributed computing. As time allows I'll have to work on deploying this in production. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-12-24 more

geeker2009 on "How to convert video for iPhone Free?"

On the MyBlogLog Shutdown

Marshall Kirkpatrick is reporting that Yahoo! will shut down MyBlogLog next year. Well, color me unsurprised. The service has languished for years. I removed it from my site a long time ago. It made me a little sad to do so, but it was just slowing things down and not really "adding value" as they like to say. It's sad because I was involved in the MyBlogLog acquisition at Yahoo! and believed in what they were doing. I worked to help get the team on board, nag the right people to make sure they got reasonable hardware on which they could grow, interviewed their first post-Yahoo engineer, and made the trek up to the Berkeley office a few times a week to help them transition into Yahoo and work on plans. I genuinely had high hopes for what MyBlogLog could do both inside and outside of Yahoo. But as I wrote in Watching Yahoo's Transformation: MyBlogLog has all but died on the vine, right? Is there anyone left of the original team of 5 or 6 engineers still working on it? No, I think it fell victim to Yahoo's larger social strategy. FAIL. On the one hand, it's sad that our collective time was wasted, but the members of the MyBlogLog team have all gone on to bigger and better things outside of Yahoo. And I suspect everyone involved learned some important lessons along the way. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-12-24 more

What charities do you donate to?

Every year I like to ask what charities people are leaning toward. So here we go: what organizations, charities, or good causes are you supporting this year? Lately I’ve been interested in transparency and reform in government, so organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, MAPLight (Money and Politics), and Change Congress are on my list. I’m also [...]
Publication date: 2009-12-18 more

Trust Oracle? Why?

In a 10-point press release issued today Oracle has listed a series of "commitments" regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun. I am not impressed. As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users. You see, for years Oracle worked agressively behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such a "toy" instead of their flagship product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. In some cases the discounts were so impressive that their motivation was clear: cut off the opportunity for MySQL to grow and spread in such organizations. (Remember what happened to Netscape when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free?) The funny thing is that it really didn't work. MySQL was already a fast moving train with lots of momentum. And it was still accelerating. It was clear that Oracle saw MySQL as a threat to their business. When they eventually bought Innobase (the company that makes the InnoDB storage engine), many of us got more than a bit nervious. That put Oracle in a position of having a choke hold on the one componenet that was critical to MySQL's future success. They could have just shut down development entirely. But that may have made their motives a bit too clear. Since then they've continued to develop InnoDB. However, the pace hasn't exactly been agressive and their openness around that has left me (and others) wondering what their longer term plans really are. The few tidbits we get seem to be overly vague. Could they have been throttling development of InnoDB? Or not providing the same resources that MySQL (and now Sun) would have? It's hard to say. But here's the thing that continues to bug me... Back a few years ago when Oracle dismissing MySQL in public while working hard against it in private, I realized that they were simply trying everything they could to protect their crowned jewels: public denials and classic FUD paired with hush-hugh backroom deals. Nobody has managed to explain, in even a mildly convincing way, what has changed since then. Why should we suddenly trust Oracle? Their crowned jewels are still threatened by MySQL. Convince me. See Also: Monty's appeal is selfless! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-12-15 more

Weird Email People Send Me

I really have no idea what prompted this: This is Rev.Willson and am interested in some of your Barrel. I need the Barrel in the specifications of 55 Gallon Barrel. Blue Plastic.So what will the total cost of the Barrel with the dimensions i gave and i need 100 quantities of the Barrel.So i will like you to go ahead and quote me the total charges of 100 quantities of the Barrel + tax without shipping charges included.Because i will be picking this up as soon as it is ready from your location.Please if you don't have the type of barrel that am interesting kindly email me back with the types that you have.And i will be very glad if you can also email me back with the types of credit card that you will accept for payment. Please advice. Thank You. It's so random that it's funny. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-12-14 more

Perfect Italian Hoagie?

When I was a kid and we visited family in New Jersey, I loved getting hoagie sandwiches. I’ve been looking for the best recipe of Italian hoagie for years. Here’s one that’s very good: 3 slices Provolone 4 slices Genoa salami 4 slices cooked salami 4 slices pepperoni 4 slices Capicola ham Lettuce, tomato, onion Salt, pepper, and oregano Oil and vinegar Sweet peppers [...]
Publication date: 2009-12-12 more

Blogging the Google Search event, December 2009

I’m not going to do a full live-blog, because it’s going to be well-covered by: - Danny Sullivan - Jason Kinkaid - Kara Swisher among others. You can also register and watch the event as a webcast. Search by Voice Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos [...]
Publication date: 2009-12-07 more

Pesto on "Paragon NTFS for Mac 6.5 is free for today ($39.95 worth)"

I
Publication date: 2009-12-04 more

Submit video questions for December 2009

It’s that time again! Tomorrow afternoon I
Publication date: 2009-12-03 more

on "Garage band slow disk space?"

I only have about 25 songs recorded and my IMac tells me that it has "slow disk space".....what is the matter? Anybody know about this stuff??
Publication date: 2009-11-29 more

jamarshall on "Garage band slow disk space?"

I only have about 25 songs recorded and my IMac tells me that it has "slow disk space".....what is the matter? Anybody know about this stuff??
Publication date: 2009-11-22 more

Live-blogging the Google Chrome OS event

I’m sitting in a room at Google waiting to hear more about Google Chrome OS. You can watch the webcast along with me if you like. For starters, here’s what Google announced about Chrome OS back in July. At that time, Google called out “speed, simplicity and security” as the key ideas behind Chrome OS. Google [...]
Publication date: 2009-11-20 more

AliceA on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

There are a lot of converters now and I like TuneCab, it has many features such as audio conversion, video conversion, extract sound from video, remove DRM, download and convert video from YouTube etc. Easy to use all in one software! http://www.tunecab.com
Publication date: 2009-11-19 more

State of the Index, November 2009

Last week I was in Las Vegas for PubCon, a conference for publishers, and I wanted to share the slides from my main presentation: When I get a chance, I’ll also re-create the talk on video and share the video with you, but in the mean time Lisa Barone did a nice live write-up and coverage [...]
Publication date: 2009-11-18 more

Speaking at San Francisco MySQL Meetup

I'll be speaking Tuesday night at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. Here's the blurb from the announcement: Jeremy Zawodny will talk about Craigslist's current use of MySQL, where it's painful, and how things are being re-architected to make the pains go away. This includes hardware changes, sphinx, redis, memcached, and some custom Perl work. Despite not living too far away from the SF MySQL Meetup venue, I'm a little annoyed at myself for never having attended. So this will be my first time and I'm really looking forward to meeting local like-minded folks. Thanks to Mike and Erin for recruiting me. If you're coming and have specific things you'd like me to talk about, drop me a note in the comments or on Twitter. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-11-17 more

01F150 on "Don't Buy Apple"

You Bought a lemon, It Happens...
Publication date: 2009-11-16 more

Beaubeau on "Don't Buy Apple"

I have also had a hard time with my Macbook. The wireless access is spotty - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I actually set up my three year old Dell next to the Macbook once to see how they compared - the Dell connected, but the Mac did not. I also lost my HD within the first year - had to pay for data recover. Get a more reliable machine.
Publication date: 2009-11-14 more

Expect Caffeine after the holidays

Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that [...]
Publication date: 2009-11-10 more

Fixing Poor MySQL Default Configuration Values

I've recently been accumulating some MySQL configuration variables that have defaults which have proven to be problematic in a high-volume production environment. The thing they all have in common is a network blip or two can trigger some very undesirable behavior. max_connect_errors If a client is having trouble connecting to MySQL, the server will give up waiting after connect_timeout seconds and increment the counter which tracks the number of connect errors it has seen for the host. Then, when that value reaches max_connect_errors, the client will be locked out until you issue a FLUSH HOSTS command. Worse yet, if you have occasionally network blips and never need to restart your MySQL boxes, these errors can accumulate over time and eventually cause you middle of the night pain. See Host 'host name' is blocked in the MySQL docs. Sadly, there is no way to disable this check entirely. Setting the variable to 0 doesn't accomplish that. Your only real solutions are (a) setting it to a very high value (max_connect_errors=1844674407370954751), and (b) running an occasional FLUSH HOSTS command. connect_timeout This is related to the above problem. In situations of network congestion (either at the client or server), it's possible for an initial connection to take several seconds to complete. But the default value for connect_timeout is 5 seconds. When you trip over that, the max_connect_errors problem above kicks in. To avert this, try setting connect_timeout to a value more like 15 or 20. And also consider making thread_cache_size a non-zero value. That will help in situations when the server occasionally gets a high number of new connections in a very short period of time. skip-name-resolve MySQL does a reverse DNS lookup on every incoming connection by default. This sucks. It seems that no matter how good your infrastructure is, there are blips in DNS service. MySQL's host cache exists to keep those lookups to a minimum. Yet I've seen this cause pain off and on for eight years now. I can only assume there's a bug in the host cache or the resolver library when this happens. I recommend adding skip-name-resolve to your /etc/my.cnf to skip DNS entirely. Just use IP addresses or ranges for your GRANTs. It seems that slow replies from DNS servers can also help you to trip over connect_timeout as well. Imagine having 2 or 3 DNS servers configured but the first one is unavailable. slave_net_timeout When the network connection between a master and slave database is interrupted in a way that neither side can detect (like a firewall or routing change), you must wait until slave_net_timeout seconds have passed before the salve realizes that something is wrong. It'll then try to reconnect to the master and pick up where it left off. That's awesome. However, the default value is 3600 seconds. That's a full hour! FAIL. Who wants their slaves to sit idle for that long before checking to see if something might be wrong? I can't think of anyone who wants that. My suggestion, if you're in a busy environment, is that you set that to something closer to 30 seconds. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-11-09 more

on "The new ipod nano 5th generation video to computer and DVD to ipod?"

hey well i got my ipod nano 5th generation the one with the video camera. i have heaps of videos that i have taken with it, but i dont no how to get those videos and put them in my computer. they wont show in my itunes wen i plug it in i dont get it, how do i get those videos and put them on my comp. I also want to upload a home movie from a DVD to my PC and put it on my IPOD. Can anyone please walk me through the steps. I have no clue what I am doing!
Publication date: 2009-11-08 more

tongjun on "Tips for Creating ISO Image to Backup DVD on Mac OS"

Aimersoft DVD Backup for Mac is the perfect solution to create burnable ISO image to backup DVD movies on Mac OS X. It offers Mac users a fast and efficient way to backup DVD to ISO file with the highest quality, and it
Publication date: 2009-11-07 more

nikeshoescenter on "hotsell new kids shoes polo t-shirts adidas shoes lv bag coogi jeans d&g t-shirt"

FALL SALE!! For a limited time we are offering FREE worldwide shipping and handling on all items! Take advantage of this promotion NOW, it won't last long! We specialize in popular and rare sneakers, clothing and accessories at low prices. Some of our exclusive customized models and colors were not even released anywhere else! Be the first and only to sport these custom colors and models. Please welcome to visit: http://www.nikeshoescenter.com Msn&E-mail: nikeshoescenter@hotmail.com Msn&E-mail: selldepartment@hotmail.com E-mail: nikeshoescenter@yahoo.com.cn
Publication date: 2009-11-07 more

nulyjeyo on "The new ipod nano 5th generation video to computer and DVD to ipod?"

emin on "new iPhone free Apps website"

taaam taam taraaaam.. http://www.iphone-ipod-freeapp.com Whats the difference between this one and other free apps websites..? Well.. i don't know.. it looks nice, apple-like.. all apps are on one page.. links are direct, so no one is making money unless you click on the ad..
Publication date: 2009-11-03 more

Gaping hole costume for Halloween 2009

This year for Halloween I tried to do a see-through hole in your body costume: It worked okay, but not great. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a gadget lying around the house that could output live composite video. Both my normal video camera and my digital camera had exhausted batteries that wouldn’t recharge, [...]
Publication date: 2009-11-01 more

Recent Sphinx Updates

If you use the Sphinx search engine and have been watching the development branch (0.9.10) and wondering when to upgrade, I'm here to tell you that "now" is a great time. As of r2037, the last major issue I regularly saw has been fixed. The other big bug was fixed in r2031. Late last week I began testing those fixes in a "burn-in" test I've developed that makes liberal use of indextool --check. Instead of seeing index corruption within an hour, I saw none. After 3 days of no failures, I deployed it to a subset of our search back-end servers. Yesterday we deployed it to half of the remaining servers. So far, so good! I should note that all our index corruption was merge related. Sphinx wasn't building corrupt indexes out of the box, but the merges (usually filtering merges) could produce corrupted indexes. We were upgrading from a lightly patched version of r1894. That meant rebuilding our indexes to use the new and more compact format. Some of the obvious benefits of the upgrade: smaller disk and memory footprint pre-fork support to spawn searchd children at start up more reliable shutdown and pid file handling kill lists mysql protocol support lots of small optimizations and fixes Thanks to the Sphinx team for their excellent work. I look forward to the release of Sphinx 1.0. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-10-30 more

Export your Google Docs data

One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data. In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-26 more

One million video views!

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners. We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-22 more

Oracle and MySQL

In The EU and MySQL, Tim Bray treads lightly on the topic of Oracle's pending ownership of MySQL if the Sun acquisition goes through. I left a comment on his post, but he's likely to be heavily moderating what appears there since he works for Sun. So here's what I posted on his blog. I haven't yet seen anyone explain what motivation Oracle has for pouring resources into MySQL, especially if it eats away at their DBMS business on the low end. I've been puzzling over this since their acquisition of Innobase Oy (the makers of InnoDB) years back. Is Oracle serious about seeing MySQL grow and succeed, or was that just a way to get a strangle-hold on a critical piece of MySQL? I've never had the chance to ask Ken Jacobs that. Actually, I have but it would have been kind of rude. And even if I did, I'm not sure I could trust the answer. I doubt this comment will get published, but as a MySQL long time user, supporter, advocate, and author I'm really glad to see things like PBXT, MariaDB, and Percona's XtraDB out there. Really, we need that kind of diversity in Open Source. A MySQL/InnoDB "monopoly" wouldn't have been healthy in the long run. A reporter contacted me today to ask, among other things, if I think Oracle was/is threatened by MySQL. Oracle claims that they serve two different markets, etc. He wasn't so sure. Sadly, there's some background information that I should not publish here, but suffice it to say that Oracle was and probably still is threatened by MySQL. Their sales/marketing tactics made this quite clear long ago. But those deals were rarely public--for good reason. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-10-22 more

on "Various ipod charging/connection problems"

My wife has thew same type issue. She tried to transfer a CD to her ipod nano and it tottaly crashed. She also tried the softboot with no resolution. No matter what it will not get past the freek'n apple icon. HELP!
Publication date: 2009-10-19 more

Happy Diwali for 2009!

Hey everybody, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Diwali! I hope that everyone has a wonderful festival of lights. It’s a good time today for introspection and reflection on the past year, and for hope for the year to come. Whether you celebrate with firecrackers, sweets, or appreciation for what you [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-17 more

Emantras on "Lucky Me Lite"

Lucky Me Lite is a series of 7 mini games which helps test your luck. At the end of the 7 games, you get you get your luck score with a fortune quote which describes how good or bad your luck is heading to. Store URL: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=333277762&mt=8
Publication date: 2009-10-13 more

jonatilano on "Various ipod charging/connection problems"

Lazy Shopping Carts

What's with all the lazy shopping carts? It seems that through the years, shopping carts have become progressively more lazy. Years ago, when a shopping cart was done with its duty, it had to find its way all the way back from your car to the store entrance--either just inside or just outside. But, apparently as the result of an aging population of shopping card, grocery store designers started scattering "cart corrals" around the parking lot so that the poor carts only had to scoot a few dozen yards before coming to rest. But even that is starting to seem inadequate. I was at Trader Joe's earlier today and noticed quite a number of carts that could only make it as far as the little curbs that surround the trees that in the parking lot. And at Safeway, where there seem to be cart corrals every 15 parking spots, I still see carts that aren't able to make it even that far. Modern technology has done so much to our modern food system in the last 20 years (a fair amount of it quite questionable, I'm sure), yet so little has been done to help these carts! Why is that? Who are the cruel people that insist on keeping these carts in service long after they're able to perform up to very basic expectations? What is this world coming to? It's sad, really. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-10-12 more

Learn more about robots.txt

We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want: This answers a couple questions such as: - Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url? - How do I make that url disappear from Google? I hope the video [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-07 more

Disclosure

I was glad to see that the FTC unanimously approved new guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials. The updated guidelines affirm the principle that material connections behind endorsements should be disclosed. This seems like a great time to offer my own disclosure information. I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-07 more

Where have you been in the USA or world?

Googler Douwe Osinga has a great personal project that demonstrates the Google Chart API. Just by clicking a few boxes, you can make an image to show the countries (or states in the USA) that you’ve been to. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States: Clearly I need to do a trip across the northern [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-07 more

BusinessWeek articles on Google

A few weeks ago we had a visitor at the Googleplex: Rob Hof, the Silicon Valley bureau chief at BusinessWeek. Rob talked to a bunch of Googlers and sat in on one of our weekly quality-leads meetings. The resulting story is out now. The first part of the story covers some of the challenges facing [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-05 more

30 day challenge for October: No Microsoft Software

In September I didn’t do a 30 day challenge because, frankly, I had a lot of work that I really needed to crunch through at the Googleplex and I didn’t have much spare time. But October is a new month, and so it’s time for a new 30 day challenge. For October, I’m not going to [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-05 more

Search Quality > Politics

[I wrote this in January 2008 but never posted it. I think people might still want to read this, so I'm posting it now.] In an election year, everybody gets a little more sensitive about politics, so I wanted a write a pre-emptive post in case anyone accuses Google of political bias in our search results [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

on "WowPrizes - Win Apple TV - Incent"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4xpapZeoqmWiGNqmo2igpmJkGybYJ-B
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

on "New 13" Apple Macbook - 186621"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJxnoKmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZZw
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

on "New 16GB iPod Nano - Get it for FREE!"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJ1eoqmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZp4
Publication date: 2009-10-04 more

kashshahf on "WowPrizes - Win Apple TV - Incent"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4xpapZeoqmWiGNqmo2igpmJkGybYJ-B
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

kashshahf on "New 13" Apple Macbook - 186621"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJxnoKmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZZw
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

kashshahf on "New 16GB iPod Nano - Get it for FREE!"

http://network.adsmarket.com/click/imJyl2XKfJSNZG7EXsp6w4pncJ1eoqmdjmhxxGOcfZW3Y2uVZp4
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Depending on what your functionality requirements are there is always the option of using Google Docs, Zoho, or one of the other free cloud-based solutions.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "short survey"

I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Rumor or not? iPod Touch 3rd generation will launch"

I found this on website today, http://www.uxsight.com/category/168541/ipodtouch3rdgencases.html and I have no idea if it's a rumor or reliable. It is said some place had started to sell the case of the new generation iPod Touch. I still haven't got any news of the new generation Touch, or this is only a rumor?
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "trouble bootcamp partition and bcd file"

Hi I'm having trouble with vista 64 loading on the bootcamp partition. The screen turns black after logon for way too long. I want to use easybcd from neosmart to rescue the boot sector since I think this is where the problem lies. Does anyone know if doing this will interfer with the normal loading of holding the option key down or booting directly into osx. I'm desperate for an answer. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks Alan
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

This forum posting process bites - It took me about 15 attempts before my post took (And it loses everything you typed in if you don't copy it before hitting the post reply button)
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to download free iPhone games"

awesome~
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "iphone downloads"

hi rags, there is no such virus that delets the contents on your iphone or any other memory devices. you do one thing you just connect your phone to pc chose the data storage mode. go to search files option and enable searching of hidden files in the advanced option, if you know the name of your file or a folder which you think is deleted and hit search. then you will find them hiding on your iphone. rightclick on them and uncheck the hide option
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

Great! I'd still prefer using Clone2Go DVD to iPhone Converter, which helps me to convert DVD to iPhone, convert video to iPhone and even download YouTube (HD) videos onto iPhone.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "safari 4 browser"

Well, it's been a couple of months now, & I've gotten used to the new Safari configuration .... and it really isn't causing any problems for me. So I'm really OK with it for now. But I do want to thank all of you for your feedback !
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

In fact there are many tools can realize that function in copy DVD for mac, like Handbrake, but on my side, I more prefer to use this DVD converter for Mac
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

on "Don't Buy Apple"

I don't know what to tell you man. They are usually pretty good about replacing stuff if you bring it in to a store. The warranty's last only a year because they want you to purchase the extended warranty for all their products. Lame, i know, but almost every retailer does this. I'd switch to a PC, much cheaper than Apple products, 99% of the software is written for PC's and can be easily fixed. + Windows 7 is coming out pretty soon.
Publication date: 2009-10-03 more

Studying a study

[A couple things to note: 1. This is a purely personal blog post--like other blogs posts I do, I haven't run it by anyone else at Google. 2. I'm writing it quickly because I have a lot of work to do. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it.] This morning [...]
Publication date: 2009-10-01 more

Pass the Duct Tape

Reading
Publication date: 2009-09-24 more

Watching Yahoo's Transformation

Having not worked at Yahoo in a bit over a year, it's interesting, amusing, and frustrating to watch what's going on over there. Some of their moves confirm feelings I've had for some time, while others are more puzzling. The Search deal with Microsoft was basically inevitable. You could see even two years ago how out-gunned Yahoo was compared to Google and to what Microsoft was rumored to be thinking of doing. Based on what I knew, Yahoo was spending less than 20% of the money on search that Google was and they were trying to do the same worth with about 1/10th the hardware and less mature infrastructure software. Meanwhile, the web kept growing and became more and more real-time. It seems that Yahoo wants to sell Zimbra. I remember when that acquisition happened. I thought it was cool technology and would be great if we actually wanted to compete in the on-line "office suite" market (or whatever), but that never happened. Instead it remained as one of those "enterprise" products that Yahoo has a history of trying and failing at. Remember Yahoo's enterprise instant messaging product? FAIL. Now comes news that Yahoo wants to sell Small Business which includes their web hosting and domain registration businesses. This makes good sense to me. While it's a business that I think has usually made money, it simply wasn't competitive in a day and age when you can get a full virtual machine, storage, and bandwidth from any number of vendors who aren't scared to offer good remote access (ssh anyone?) to the server: Slicehost, Rackspace, Server Beach, Amazon, and so many others. Yahoo's offering may have made sense back in the year 2000 or so when it really competed on price, but this is one of those race-to-the-bottom commodity business and has been for years. People picking on Carol for selling some stock recently? Well that's just dumb. Yahoo is a public company and she really didn't sell that much. I hope that Carol is able to trim the parts of Yahoo that no longer make sense and help bring some focus to the company. I really do. But to be honest, I've seen it before. Terry Semel tried to do something similar when he came on board. But that was a wandering effort that ultimate lacked focus and wasn't ambitious or forward-thinking enough. Jerry and Sue tried this when Terry left, but I really think they were too "Yahoo" to transform Yahoo into what it needs to be. I see how Carol is trying to be smart on the business side, but I'm not sure how Yahoo plans to wow its users. And coming from the Yahoo! Developer Network, I wonder if Yahoo will ever get serious about outside developers. Conferences and Hack Days are great, but I suspect they still haven't figured out how to offer buisness-class APIs (with an exchange of money and an SLA). Aside from YUI and Hadoop, can you really go beyond a prototype with this stuff? It could simply be that I never really drank the YOS/YAP kool-aid and never will get it. Oh, and what about those smaller startups? Should I start to worry that del.icio.us or Flickr is going to go away? What about Upcoming? When their founders start to worry, I feel like I should too. At least Flickr has a business model and appears to still be kicking some ass. MyBlogLog has all but died on the vine, right? Is there anyone left of the original team of 5 or 6 engineers still working on it? No, I think it fell victim to Yahoo's larger social strategy. FAIL. I hope that Carol can be clear, focused, and agressive in re-shaping Yahoo. The half-measures attempted over the last few years simply haven't been enough and never will be. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-09-22 more

Google doesn

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search. To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-22 more

How my netbook taught me to love xmonad

I've had this low-level urge to try a new window manager for a few months now. I work on a Linux box (Ubuntu) daily and mostly run a number of terminals, GNU Emacs, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. Nothing too fancy, really. Oh, and a shitty VPN client. Background Most of the time I'm doing this in front of a 24" (or larger) monitor running at 1920x1200, so there's a lot of screen real estate. Yet I was always annoyed by how much time I spent moving windows around or trying to find the optimal layout--always reaching for the mouse. Years ago when 1024x768 was the norm, I ran a heavily customized fvwm2 and enjoyed it. But then I made the move to Windows for a few years and came back to Linux with Ubuntu/Gnome as my "desktop." The Netbook Months ago I wrote about how I love my Samsung NC10. When I'm not at my desk, I'll often use PuTTY to login, resume my screen session(s), and continue working. For what it's worth, I find that the free DejaVu Fonts (specifically the Monospaced one) works exceptionally well. What I realized is that my method of having one terminal in full-screen mode on each "desktop" (thanks to the VirtualWin virtual desktop manager) is surprisingly productive, even on the little 10" screen. At first I considered this a fluke and attributed it mainly to the novelty of working this way. But after a while I realized that it was the focus that this setup enforces. There simply isn't enough room to have a browser on screen to distract me while I'm coding something, reading email, etc. I really need to focus one or a few tightly realted tasks. The cognitive overload of having the whole Internet available really gets pushed off-screen and mostly out of mind. Trying xmonad After a discussion in our chatroom at work the other day, I finally decided to give a new window manger a try: xmonad. A big help was Tom's Introduction to the xmonad Tiling Window Manager which gave me just the information I needed to get started. I used it most of Friday and a bit off and on Saturday, both on my primary work computer and my "home" Linux desktop machine. The experience has been surprisingly positive so far. Most of the hassles have revolved around re-training my hands to learn some new keyboard shortcuts and finding replacements for the few GUI things that Gnome provided on my previous desktop. On thing I particularly like is that most of the keybindings seem very sane out of the box with xmonad. I haven't really needed to customize anything yet. I have found that a couple keystrokes that I use in GNU Emacs appear to be intercepted by xmonad and I haven't found an easy way to undo that or at least discover what they're supposed to do: Alt-w and Alt-q are the two I've noticed. I also needed to resurrect an old xmodmap file that I could use to turn my CAPS LOCK into a Control key and re-discover the right xset command to set my key repeat rate higher than the default: xset r rate 250 30. Other than those few nits, it's been pretty smooth sailing. I definitely feel like I'll be more productive in the long run a result of switching. Have you tried a tiling window manager? Did you stick with it? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-09-20 more

gadgetfreak475 on "Don't Buy Apple"

How to Unlock the Amazing Secret of Unlimited Productivity

All of us could use some help increasing our productivity. So I’m going to share one of my best productivity secrets. This secret can literally CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!! Are you ready? Step 1. Buy a productivity book. Any productivity book will do. I use a book called “The Now Habit.” It doesn’t matter what book you order [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-17 more

Looking for good Yahoo search engineers

I was talking to an excellent new Googler that joined from Yahoo this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring. If you want to [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-16 more

Bad Experience with U.S. Airways Dividend Miles

I’ve been having an ongoing bad experience with U.S. Airways over their Dividend Miles. I’d accumulated about 15,000 miles with them and the miles were about to expire. I didn’t have any trips coming up, so I looked for a way to redeem those frequent flyer miles before they expired. U.S. Airways provided a way [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-14 more

Hidden Google Gem: Google Mobile App

We recently recorded a video of one of my favorite “hidden gems” at Google: the Google Mobile App, which does voice recognition to make searches easier on a mobile phone. It’s available for the iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows Mobile. In the video below, I ran the Google Mobile App through its [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-12 more

mooreee on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

In fact there are many tools can realize that function in copy DVD for mac, like Handbrake, but on my side, I more prefer to use this DVD converter for Mac
Publication date: 2009-09-11 more

30 Day checkin: book challenge

So how did I do on the “15 books in 30 days” challenge? Not too badly–I made it through 12 books. I could probably have squeezed in three more books, but I’d rather take my time and enjoy books than artificially force things for a deadline. I’ll make up those last three books later. [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-10 more

Digg adds nofollow to some links

Digg recently added nofollow to some links on their site: We
Publication date: 2009-09-03 more

Chrome Market Share: One Year Later

Google released the Chrome browser on September 2, 2008. Now that Chrome has been out for about a year and it’s been almost six months since I last looked at Chrome’s market share, let’s take another peek. For the last 30 days, here are my Google Analytics stats for mattcutts.com: For me, 8.97% of my readers run [...]
Publication date: 2009-09-01 more

BlackBerryBold9000 on "BlackBerryBold9000"

Hi I am new here. We are selling blackberry quality sets. BlackBerry is a line of wireless handheld devices that was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager. We want to discuss more about these sets. "BlackBerry Bold 9000, BlackBerry Storm 9500 BlackBerry, iPhone, BlackBerry Housing Cases, BlackBerry Repair Parts, BlackBerry Curve 8900, BlackBerry Curve 8300, BlackBerry Curve 8330 BlackBerry, iPhone, BlackBerry Housing Cases, BlackBerry Repair Parts, BlackBerry Curve 8900, BlackBerry Curve 8300, BlackBerry Curve 8330" http://www.sellebuy.com/paa
Publication date: 2009-09-01 more

Hidden Google Gem: My Tracks

I’ve really enjoyed making videos for webmasters. In the most recent recording session, we decided that it would be fun to talk about some of the “hidden gems” of Google: features, products, or tips that you might not know about, but you might like. One of my favorite hidden Google gems is a program for Android [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-28 more

Pandora vs. CDs

I've been using Pandora for streaming music on-line for a while now. I enjoy it so much that I pay the roughly $5-$6 per month for a higher quality stream and because I want to do my part to make sure they stay viable as a business. What's so great about it? Pandora is unobtrusive, easy to use, and really good at finding similar and related music that I'm likely to enjoy. I'm always amazed at how good it is when I create a new station. Just a few weeks back, I told Pandora to create a "U2" station. A few hours later, I realized that I'd been listening to an excellent selection of tunes. I never get bored of the music on Pandora. It's just a part of my day, always playing good music to keep me happy while I'm coding or fixing things. I feel like an idiot for the thousands of dollars I spent on CDs years ago, not to mention all the time and effort that went into digitizing that library multiple times (my own code, iTunes, WinAmp, etc.). If I thought I could get any real money for my 550 CDs, I'd just sell 'em all and send the Pandora crew a nice check with a note: "Keep up the great work." If you've not yet used Pandora, I highly recommend it. You'll be surprised by how often it plays music you like, even with the most minimal input from you. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-25 more

WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

By the way, if you enjoyed my Straight from Google: What You Need to Know talk from WordCamp 2009, you might also enjoy my WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. For convenience, I’ll include the video below: And here are the slides from the 2007 WordCamp talk: Not everyone has seen this talk, so I hope [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-24 more

New Knol developments

Google launched Knol about a year ago. The big worry back then was that Google might favor Knol in our search rankings. I stopped around various places on the net to debunk that idea back then, but I think it’s safe to call this idea fully debunked now. As I said six months ago: Google Knol [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-21 more

More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results

Some folks that I respect were giving me a bit of a hard time because they felt like I punted on this webmaster video: So let me take another stab at the question, and tell me what you think. There’s a couple effects going on: - first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-21 more

lescieyq on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

yep.. Tons and tons video converters. The thing is, iPhone usually supports mp4 or mov imput format, and DVD usually comes with avi format. In this case you need to convert avi to mov format. Aimersoft Total Media Converter for Mac does a good job on it. I myself are using it right noww. I'll share some pics with u.
Publication date: 2009-08-20 more

30 day reports

For the month of May, I didn’t watch any TV. I learned that I don’t miss summer TV that much. For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax. For the month of July, I biked [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-19 more

Send To trick for Google Reader: Autotranslate

You can use Google Reader’s “Send To” feature for lots of fun things. Suppose you subscribe to a blog in another language, such as this French blog. You can add an “Autotranslate” custom link: I used the values Name: Autotranslate URL: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=${url} Icon URL: http://translate.google.com/favicon.ico Then when you’re reading the blog, just click Send To -> Autotranslate: And you’ll open the [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-14 more

Google Reader adds

I’ve wanted this forever. Google Reader just added a feature where you can send items directly to Twitter, Reddit, and a bunch of other places: To enable it, click on “Settings” in Google Reader and then click on the “Send To” tab to choose which services to add. Note: make sure you disable pop-up blocking so [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-13 more

More info on the Caffeine Update

Google recently opened up a preview of our new Caffeine update, and I wanted to give a little more background on this change. At the Real-Time CrunchUp a few weeks ago, I joked that the half-life of code at Google is about six months. That means that you can write some code and when you [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-11 more

Firefox vs. Google Chrome Revisited

Last week, in Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE, I ranted a bit about how slow Firefox 3 (notably tab switching and the "awesome" bar") was on my Ubuntu 9.04 machine. Needless to say, I got some good feedback from that post and it prompted it me to do a few things. I've since been running both Firefox 3.5 as well as the Firefox 3.6 trunk code and can say that both are notably faster than Firefox 3.0.xx. The difference between 3.0.xx and 3.5 was substantial and really helped to close the gap with Chrome. Going to the 3.6 alpha nightly builds made it even faster in some places and slower in others--not surprising since it's still in development. Scrolling was drastically worse, but I'm told that's currently in flux. I have to hand it to the Firefox team. They're not taking Chrome lying down. I've found no real issues with running 3.5 so far and it's a bit of mystery to me (which is to say "I haven't researched at all...") why Ubuntu 9.04 isn't upgrading folks to it. I'm really looking forward to seeing 3.6 stabilize. The Javascript and layout performance seems really good in my use so far. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-10 more

dragon on "iphone downloads"

rags on "iphone downloads"

hi guys, i've come to download a cd to my iphone and on doing so it's gone and deleted everything i had on my phone, pictures, videos, other music, i'm gutted. anyone else had this issue with the iphone? cheer, steve
Publication date: 2009-08-09 more

forgo.ltd on "Apple iPhone 3G S 32GB Unlocked $ 300 without contract"

Apple iPhone 3G S 32GB Unlocked $ 300 without contract Meet the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. 3GS iPhone features video recording, voice control, 16 GB or 32 GB of storage, and more. LATEST IPHONE 3GS PROCESSOR WITH UPGRADED FEATURES AND! This phone is unLocked to AT & T. With an adapter is unlocked SIM. SOFTWARE also unlocked. This phone does not come with a contractual obligation! PLEASE CONTACT U.S. Web: http://www.qudus.page.tl email: forgo.ltd@hotmail.com IF YOU ARE A CUSTOMER WANTS AND ORDER. Note that shipping is through FedEx and took 3 days to reach you. We deliver TO YOUR DOOR STEP. PLEASE NOTE THAT RETURNS ARE ACCEPTED past 3 months from the date of purchase. Size and weight Height: 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) Width: 2.4 inches (62.1 mm) Depth: 0.48 inches (12.3 mm) Weight: 4.8 oz (135 grams)
Publication date: 2009-08-07 more

yasaki on "How to download free iPhone games"

awesome~
Publication date: 2009-08-06 more

Waynett on "How to make a iPhone Ringtone"

<div id="post_message_641105" class="post">Do you love to have a variety of ringtones for your iPhone? But then, do you also think that it's a waste of money to buy ringtones from iTunes store for your iPhone? This tutorial shows how you can make you own customized iPhone ringtones using [color=#1b4ca2]iPhone Ringtone Maker[/color] and the songs/movies on your local computer. Make preparations: [color=#1b4ca2]Download[/color], install and launch the software. 1. Input video or audio files Click the "Browse" button right beside "Input File" label to select the file you want to create ringtone in the window that pops up, then click "OK" button. You will see the file path and name are displayed in the "Input File" textbox. 2. Play video or audio files Click "Play" button to hear the music before creating ringtone and find the part you want to use. Then drag and drop the start & end slider to get music clip to convert, or type the start & end time in the corresponding text box directly. 3. Set output destination Set output destination by clicking "Browse" button on the right side of the "Local Output File" label. 4. Export to iPhone directly If you want, check "Export to iPhone" option to let the program upload the output ringtone to your iPhone directly after conversion. 5. Start creating your iPhone ringtone After all above are finished, click "Generate" button to start creating your own iPhone ringtone. During the creation, you can check the process by the progress bar at the bottom. Just in a few minutes, you make your own iPhone ringtone from the loved music. For mac users, please choose [color=#1b4ca2]iPhone Ringtone Maker for Mac[/color].</div>
Publication date: 2009-08-06 more

Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE

I spent too long on Friday screwing around with stuff on my work laptop in an effort to make Firefox's apparent performance not SUCK ASS. Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 I've been somewhat unhappy, mostly as a result of the well publicized issues with Intel Video on Ubuntu 9.04. I read about possible hope with upgrading the driver which also required a kernel upgrade, so I did both and rebooted. And, as I hoped, video seemed a bit snappier. But Firefox still SUCKED ASS. At this point I was REALLY PISSED. Sure my new video was nice and all but making new tabs (or switching between them) was still slow, and the disaster known as the "awesome bar" (how to disable) still sucked. So on a whim I went and installed Google Chrome. It totally rocks on my Samsung NC10 netbook (running WinXP), so I figured what not give it a try. It turns out that Chrome on Linux is DRAMATICALLY FASTER THAN FIREFOX!. It's been quite stable on Windows, so I'm hoping the same is true on Linux and I can just switch over to it. As of now, Firefox is my primary browser on only half my computers. Chrome seems to be slowly displacing it, just like Firefox replaced the bloated pig known as Mozilla years ago (and the long since stagnant IE on Windows). It's funny. Browsers seem to be like Internet companies. Every few years a new, small, faster one comes along to kill off some (or all) of the previous generation. I guess this is just the latest in that constant evolution. It'll be interesting to see how this new competition really affects Mozilla Firefox. I spend most of my day in gnome-terminal (to screen, mutt, irssi, etc.), GNU Emacs, and a browser. When they're not fast and stable, my life sucks. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-03 more

Good books to read for Summer 2009?

I’ve decided what I want to do for August: read 15 books in 30 days. I read three books this weekend: - The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich. - Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh. - World War Z, by Max Brooks. I enjoyed all three. Now I need your help. What books would you recommend that [...]
Publication date: 2009-08-03 more

Flying an Ultralight Trike or Weight Shift Control Aircraft

On Saturday Kathleen and I took advantage of the chance to take a short class in Trike flying and then go up for introductory rides. This was an event organized by AreoDynamic Aviation (formerly Amelia Reid Aviation) at the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose. We arrived to find Pete Marsh's Antares MA-34 R912 Ranger with an 80 horsepower Rotax 912 engine sitting outside the hangar. So I took several photos of the engine, cockpit, and wing while we got a good look at it. A view of the cockpit. Beefy landing gear! The Rotax 912 Engine Glass Cockpit After checking it out, Pete spent about an hour telling our class about Trike flying in Alaska, answering our questions about the sport and the machines, and giving us a little bit of an idea what to expect. For the record, this Trike has electric trim and will cruise at about 70-75mph while burning 2.5 gallons of high octane auto gas per hour. So mileage is comparable to most cars. But the ride is a hell of a lot more fun! And with a 15 gallon fuel supply, you can fly a lot longer than your bladder will let you. Several of us had reserved times to fly 1 hour $99 introductory rides with Pete, and before I knew it my time had arrived. I was really looking forward to the experience. Pete helped me get strapped in and I took a few pictures and a vide as we taxied over to the run-up area for runway 31R. My turn! Strapped in and ready! View out the front. Engine running and we're taxiing! We sit close together. Here's a short taxi video: After a couple other departures, we were cleared to take off! Takeoff video: Check out that view! Look, Ma. I'm flying the Trike! And before I knew it we were in the air and flying. The first few seconds were kid of freaky, given how open the cockpit is. But that quickly faded away and I began to really enjoy the flying. We headed a bit south and then over the first ridge toward the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton where we could play around a bit and I could get a better feel for flying the Trike. Heading for the hills... Me again. All those houses... Another great view. Back there I got to try various flight maneuvers, really get a feel for the air, and even did some soaring in thermals. I was really impressed by how well we could feel the air as the wing tried to move and the distinct changes in temperature as we flew into different pockets. Turns were easy once I got over the idea of forcing them. We also performed a few stalls (though they hardly compare to stalls in a larger airplane or glider)--very benign. I was impressed by how stable the aircraft was too. Let go and it'll pretty much fly straight and level if you're in calm air. The view was, of course, amazing. And being able "feel" the air more directly makes you feel a lot more connected to the atmosphere you're flying in. All in all it was a much more "raw" experience then the glider flying I'm used to. I really enjoyed it. After almost an hour of flying, it was time to head back in and land. Heading in to land. Landing video: After landing, we taxied back to the hangar so that Pete could pick up his next victim passenger. Next up was Kathleen... Strapped in. Ready to go! The took for for a similarly fun 1-hour flight. Takeoff video: I was there to grab a few pictures as the taxied back to the hangar area. Thumbs Up! What a blast!!! Time to let someone else play... Conclusion We both had an absolute blast flying the trike. It's a little like flying a power plane and a little like flying a glider, but it's a very different experience from both. It's a very raw and natural form of flying that really puts you in touch with your surroundings and gives you an amazing view of the area you're flying in. Thanks again to AeroDynamic Aviation for organizing this event. Not only do they provide excellent flight training and aircraft maintenance, Owner Zdravko Podolski has consistently organized events to help pilots expand our flying horizons. We're both very tempted to get a weight-shift control add-on for our pilot certificates. It's worth noting that many Trikes make it easy to swap out the wheels on the landing gear for floats (land on lakes!) or skis (land on snow/ice). Pictures and Video I have the whole set in this Picasa album: Trike Flying at RHV Or you can see a subset in my Trike Flying album on Flickr. The videos are in my YouTube channel as well. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-08-02 more

Who came out ahead in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?

MSFT and Yahoo announced their deal earlier today. I’m curious what you think--who did better in the deal? Let me know what you think.
Publication date: 2009-07-30 more

Loose Fuel Cap and Losing Fuel In-Flight (with Video)

While our flying trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons was great, we had a few problems along the way. Like they say, bad things often come in groups of three. This was our third one. (The other two involved a hiding cat and a blown tail wheel on the airplane). On our way home Saturday, we flew from Jackson, Wyoming (JAC) to Burley, Idaho (BYI) to get a bit of fuel, grab a snack, and take a restroom break. A few minutes in the air after leaving Burley, Kathleen looked back at the left wing and saw fuel streaming back. And it didn't seem to stop. Uh oh! She shot this video. We were closer to Twin Falls (TWF) at this point, so I called up the tower and began our descent down from 9,000 feet to land and check it out. We fully expected the fuel cap to be completely missing. Unlike the fuel caps on a Cessna, there is no chain that keeps it connected to the fuel tank. So if the cap comes off in flight (or was never put back on), you've lost it. The tower cleared us for a straight-in on runway 25 and we landed shortly after a Turbo Ag Cat came in on the opposite runway. We landed, taxied over to the full service fuel and FBO, and parked. I borrowed a a bucket (no ladder handy) from the guy who came over, climbed up, and was astonished to find the fuel cap was there and it felt tight! There are two flanges on the fuel cap that serve to lock it to the neck of the fuel tank. Normally both of them are fitted tightly below the rim. But the guy who fueled it in Burley manage to put the cap on in such a way that only one of the two flanges was engaged below the rim. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-27 more

Good workout music?

Okay, so I registered for a sprint triathlon (400m swim, 11 mile bike, 3.1 mile run) in August. Maybe that will turn out to be a really stupid idea, but I’m going to see if I can at least finish. So I need some good workout music, because my current tunes are getting tired. [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-27 more

toptradea on "Wholesale Apple mobile phones, Iphone 3G 16gb&8gb,Iphone3Gs,M89,M88,T32,G1,G2,TV"

Toptrading Co.,ltd found in 1995, our Email&MSN is toptradea@hotmail.com. As a manufacture supplier,we have more than 10 years experience of this business.All products are at prices from original factory.All items have been verified by us, so they are credible.Veries of styles can meets the different customer need, fit customer demand to adjust the production.AAA quality,most competitive prices is our promise. Our main products are Mobile phones, Laptop,MP3/4/5, video games, PSP, Watches and so on, you can click our website http://www.toptradea.com to have a look.
Publication date: 2009-07-25 more

delta1149 on "design metal detector"

<div>Dear Forum,</div> <div> </div> <div>I am looking for someone to design me a state-of-the-art, sleek and ergonomically <span class="yshortcuts">shape metal detector</span> for <span class="yshortcuts">treasure hunting</span>.</div> <div> </div> <div>I was told to call a student at mit or caltech that maybe they would be interested , but no they weren't. I even called an engineering department at a Singapore University and they wouldn't call back.</div> <div> </div> <div>I know there are people out there that would be excited about designing a <span class="yshortcuts" style="cursor: hand; border-bottom: #0066cc 1px dashed;">metal detector</span>. Maybe you lead me to someone.</div> <div> </div> <div>Thanks,</div> <div> </div> <div>Peyton Jones</div>
Publication date: 2009-07-23 more

Sunset over the Grand Tetons

Our trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone is going very well. We've been pretty busy, so I haven't had a lot of time to write. But here's a picture of the sunset from tonight. We're taking lots of pictures and video with the Flip and enjoying the scenery. Weather looks good for the next several days too. Not a bad vacation at all. :-) (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-20 more

Flying to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

We're heading out on a little summer vacation flying trip this morning in our Citabria. We'll be visiting Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We'll be flying from San Jose to Twin Falls, Idaho today. Then tomorrow we'll fly from Twin Falls to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For those pilots or aviation buffs out there, here is our list of waypoints for both days. Day #1 RHV - LVK (Livermore) LVK - L53 (Lodi) L53 - PVF (Placerville) PVF - TVL (Lake Tahoe) TVL - MEV (Minden) MEV - CXP (Cason City) Rest/Fuel CXP - LOL (Derby) LOL - BAM (Battle Mountain) via V6 airway BAM - EKO (Elko) Rest / Fuel EKO - LWL (Wells) LWL - 06U (Jackpot) 06U - TWF (Twin Falls) Rest / Fuel / Spend Night Day #2 TWF - BYI (Burley) BYI - U01 (American Falls) U01 - U02 (Mc Carley) U02 - U56 (Rigby Jefferson) U56 - DIJ (Driggs Reed) DIJ - JAC (Jackson Hole) And you can see our day #1 navigation log as well as our day #1 flight plan (though we filed each of the 3 legs separately with the FAA). Pictures and video to come! We just got a Flip camera for the trip (test video here). (comments)
Publication date: 2009-07-17 more

Summer Book Reviews

I’ve been doing some summer reading recently. Here are a few books I’ve read: Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell. Bazell introduces us to Peter Brown, an overworked doctor at a Manhattan hospital. A patient at the hospital sees Peter and believes him to be a hit man who disappeared into the witness protection program. This [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-17 more

Submit video questions for July 2009

This Thursday afternoon I’ll record some new videos, so I created a Google Moderator page where you can post suggested topics and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions and a few interesting questions. Please suggest topics that lots of people would be [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-15 more

Opinion poll: do you like webmaster videos?

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you might not know that for the last few months we’ve been posting daily free webmaster videos on our webmaster video channel. That YouTube channel has over 100 videos on it now. We just finished up the most recent round of videos, and now the question is whether to [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-14 more

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash

Anil Dash wrote a great piece about Google recently, and I think all Googlers should read it. Anil makes several good points, including this one: I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads
Publication date: 2009-07-13 more

john mosher on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

Jim Andrews on "How to Get Back my Deleted Mac Mail ???"

I need serious help ... !!! I accidentally deleted a folder (with lots of folders inside!) of very important e-mail containing years of research ... !!! Is there any possible way to get it back? I was trying to change the names of folders, from lower case to upper case, and I got a message telling me that I couldn't do that, because there was already a folder like that. I saw an extra folder, and clicked on it, but there appeared to be nothing in it, so I chose Delete from the menu. Only to find out it was the real folder with many other folders inside. I’m using Mac Mail, OS X 10.4.11 -- I did NOT choose Erase Deleted Messages from the menu yet ... !!! Is there still hope to recover all those deleted messages .... ??? I need to get that e-mail back somehow .... Any suggestions ... ??? Help !!!
Publication date: 2009-07-10 more

geekmaster on "How to download free iPhone games"

I found great articles for finding and installing free games into iPhone at a Zimbio wikizine here: Free iPhone Games.
Publication date: 2009-07-07 more

allj on "trouble bootcamp partition and bcd file"

fishup2008 on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

If you Want to Make a Copy of your DVD Disc on Mac Intel, I share you the resource as below: http://www.infopirate.org/_how-make-copy-your-dvd-disc-mac-intel
Publication date: 2009-07-05 more

Making a John Q Public account on Google

One of the advantages of working at Google is that you get to see neat products and features before the rest of the world does. But that can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes I’d like to talk about a fun Gmail Lab or a new Calendar feature but I’m honestly not sure whether the outside [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-04 more

Hailee on "Rumor or not? iPod Touch 3rd generation will launch"

30 day challenge begins: biking to work

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there. Is there something good [...]
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

Funny spam email, June 2009

I enjoy posting some of the funny emails that I get. This one made me laugh: You don
Publication date: 2009-07-01 more

ActiveSenior on "safari 4 browser"

I recommended you take the time, and switch to Google Chrome. It is an incredible browser. Really fast, they dont just say it, they mean it! Also, my connection isnt the greatest, and I sometimes would have problems such as, if 10 tabs are open, and if 1 would freeze, the rest would as well. In Chrome, even if one tab freezes, the rest do not. This really saves a lot of time. Instead of always restarting everything, I can just start a new tab, and I am good to continue to do what I was doing. Anyway, I never liked Safari. I mean for iPod its OK, but for computer, not really. Switch to Firefox ASAP, or even better, try Chrome.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

Matthew Humphries on "safari 4 browser"

pennwood, importing your bookmarks from Safari to Firefox should be as simple as: File -> Import... -> select Safari -> OK. Do that once Firefox is installed and all your bookmarks shopuld magically appear in Firefox.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

ActiveSenior on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

As you see, there are many software's to convert. All of them have their pluses and minuses. It depends on what you will be converting mostly. For example, if you will be converting .avi to iphone format, then you want a software that slacks off in converting other formats, but will be very good (ex. speed and quality) in converting .avi to iphone.
Publication date: 2009-06-29 more

Natural links are better than non-natural

I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh. So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out Make your links appear Natural Link Building is one of the most significant [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

thumb on "short survey"

I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

thumb on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

DVD and Video to iPhone Converter suite is another choice. It can convert DVD to iPhone video, AVI to iPhone, MPEG to iPhone, WMV to iPhone, VOB, DivX, XviD, MOV, RM, RMVB, Dvr-ms, etc. to iPhone video MP4 format.
Publication date: 2009-06-24 more

30 days

30 days is enough time to build a habit. Last month, I started trying to walk 10,000 steps a day for 30 days. I didn’t walk 10K steps every day, but I did keep at it until I’d walked over 10K steps for at least 30 days. In the process, I discovered that walking [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-23 more

My review of the iPhone 3GS

Disclaimer: This post is entirely my personal opinion. I also own an HTC T-Mobile G1, which runs Google’s Android operating system. I picked up the new iPhone 3G S this Friday and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts: The Good: - The iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the iPhone 3G. Especially in the browser, you’ll [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-22 more

percieal on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

4Easysoft iPhone Video Converter provides an easy and completed way to convert video to iPhone including iPhone 3G OS, such as MPEG, VOB, MP4, M4V, QuickTime MOV, etc. for iPhone and convert audio to MP3, AAC, M4A for iPhone with high output quality and fast converting speed..
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

How to read Persian (Farsi)

Google just added machine-translation of Persian (Farsi): This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian
Publication date: 2009-06-19 more

Distributed Parallel Fault Tolerant File System Wanted

After re-thinking and re-tooling some of the work I've been doing to take advantage of Gearman, I've started to wish for a big file system in the sky. I guess it's no surprise that Google uses GFS with their Map/Reduce jobs and that Hadoop has HDFS as a major piece of its infrastructure. The Wikipedia page List of file systems has a section on Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems that appears to be a good list of what's out there. The problem, of course, is that it's little more than a list. Do you have any experience with one or more of those? Recommendations? I should say that I'm only interested in something that's Open Source and have a minor bias against big Java things as well as stuff that appear as though it would cease to exist if a single company went out of business. I'm not too worried about POSIX compliance. The main use would be for writing large files that other machines or processes would then read all or part of. I don't need updates. The ability to append would probably be nice, but that's easy to work around. More specifically, these three have my eye at the moment: CloudStore (was KFS) by Kosmix, a C++ clone of GFS MogileFS from Danga, what can I say--I'm a Perl guy HDFS the Hadoop file system It's interesting that some solutions deal with blocks (often large) while others deal with files. I'm not sure I have a preference for either at the moment. But I'm open to hearing about everything, so speak up! :-) (comments)
Publication date: 2009-06-18 more

Matthew Humphries on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Depending on what your functionality requirements are there is always the option of using Google Docs, Zoho, or one of the other free cloud-based solutions.
Publication date: 2009-06-17 more

BobbyBluehen on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

Hi: I want to buy a MacBook Pro, but am confused concerning comments I’ve been reading about what software to buy — iWorks or Microsoft Office 2008. Many say MO2008 is not good, yet some say iWorks is good, but not as good as how MO2008 works on a PC. My question is this: Does Microsoft make an inferior MO for Macs and a better one for PCs. Also, is it true that iWorks doesn’t transform documents into Word very well.
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

awesomeo on "Microsoft Office 2008 or iWorks?"

I don't know as I've never used either version. You should give OpenOffice.org Aqua before buying anything. It's free and pretty comparable. http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

My Drizzle Article in Linux Magazine (XtraDB and Sphinx too!)

After a few years off, I've been doing some writing for Linux Magazine (which is on-line only) again recently. First off, my just published feature article is Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel. As you might have guessed, it looks at Drizzle and some of the reasoning behind forking and re-working MySQL. I'm also writing a weekly column that we've been calling "Bottom of the Stack" (RSS) which started a few weeks ago. Recent articles are: Sphinx: Search Outside the Box XtraDB: InnoDB on Steroids The State of MySQL The basic idea is that I'll be writing about back-end data processing and systems--the sort of stuff that lives in the bottom half of the traditional LAMP stack. If you have ideas of stuff you'd like to cover, please drop me a line. As a side note, I wrote my first article for Linux Magazine back in June of 2001: MySQL Performance Tuning. Those were the MySQL 3.23 days. How time flies! An amazing credit to some of the folks involved with Linux Magazine, all of my past writings are available there. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

PageRank sculpting

People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

Watch my site review session from Google I/O

At Google I/O a few weeks ago I did a site review session with fellow Google colleagues Brian White and Greg Grothaus. The video from that session is live now and I’ll include it below: About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

franklino on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

to view dvd and video on iphone, you can get clone2go dvd to iphone converter to get the dvd and video converted to the iphone compatible mpeg4 format and then transfer the output files to iphone with the sync of itunes library. This dvd to iphone converter can 1) convert dvd to iphone 2) convert video to iphone 3) be used as youtube downloader.
Publication date: 2009-06-16 more

pennwood on "safari 4 browser"

I really (REALLY) don't like the pretty pictures on my bookmarks pages that came with the latest update. I surf (A LOT), have over 500 bookmarks, and Apple just made it a whole lot harder for me to look 'em over. (I'm steamed about this) I already know what the websites look like and who my favorites are, thank you. I'd like my bookmarks back ! Anybody else feel this way too ?
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

pennwood on "Don't Buy Apple"

My wife bought a Dell desktop & we spent as much on security & service as the Dell cost in just 2 years ($600) before the 'bad guys' trashed it. My Apple cost a little more but I haven't spent a dime on either security or service .... and it's trouble free for almost 4 years. Easy choice for me.
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

pennwood on "short survey"

Hi Beth. I bought my Apple for security reasons. No viruses. I surf, a lot. Everything works good for me. I'm not addicted to my Mac - I may be addicted to the internet .....
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes

By the way, you might have missed it at Google I/O, but the Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML. From the Custom Search Element web page, I copied [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-11 more

Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap--mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-10 more

Search your bookshelf with a $65 barcode scanner

(Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.) Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-07 more

Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

I just gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic folks for a great time! I think there will be a video up soon, but if you want to browse the slides in the mean time, here they are: You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.
Publication date: 2009-05-30 more

Hulu Desktop vs. Hulu in Browser vs. Nexflix (Flash vs. Silverlight?)

For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video. Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight). Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system. It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning. I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in. That said, I'm glad to see Hulu Desktop out. It makes a lot of sense to have an app that can be controlled via IR remote instead of the wireless keyboard we had been using. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-29 more

The Big ALTER TABLE Test

As previously noted, I've been playing with XtraDB a bit at work. Over a week ago I decided to test compression on one of our larger tables and it took a bit longer than I expected. (root@db_server) [db_name]> ALTER TABLE table_name \ ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4; Query OK, 825994826 rows affected (8 days 14 hours 23 min 47.08 sec) Records: 825994826 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 Zoiks! It's too bad we couldn't use all the cores on the machine for the ALTER TABLE, huh? On the plus side, the file sizes aren't too bad. Before: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1638056067072 2009-05-24 09:23 table_name.ibd After: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 587617796096 2009-05-27 07:14 table_name.ibd I'll have more to say about XtraDB and the compression options in a later post. But given the interest that my Twitter messages about this big ALTER TABLE generated yesterday, I figured I'd share a bit more detail here. For anyone doing the math at home, that's going from rougly 1.5TB to 500GB (the new file size is slightly inflated, since this slave managed to replicate about a week's worth of data before I caught it). I was hoping for 4:1 compression and managed about 3:1. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-28 more

Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux

In this post you’ll learn how to make a working Bluetooth weight sensor + fast real-time graphical display with about 200 lines of Python code. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Talking_to_a_Wii_Balanceboard_in_Ubuntu/'; You can code any Nintendo Wii-like video game for Ubuntu/Linux and the Nintendo Balance Board very easily. Here’s a video demonstration: This post assumes that you can already [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-23 more

awesomeo on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Something like this is about the cheapest you'll be able to do: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=209708411&listingid=32657468&dcaid=17902 Also, a long USB cable won't work since the maximum length is 16 feet. You need to use special "active" cables or an Ethernet extender.
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

What you should do next week

Next week is going to be a humdinger. If you’re in the Bay Area, here’s what I think you should do: - Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

grampa on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Good afternoon, I would like to know if there is an inexpensive wireless usb device that is capable of transmitting approx 50 ft to my PC with out having to use a long usb cable. Gefen, Belkin and Iogear have them [wireless usb hub] available but are rather expensive. I have a contoller for a Remote Control flight simulator program but it requires to be connected directly to my PC via a usb connection. Thank you for any consideration. grampa
Publication date: 2009-05-21 more

Letter to a young journalist

Don’t conclude from my previous post that I dislike journalism. All through middle and high school I woke up early to read the local newspaper each morning. I was the editor of our newspaper in high school. My mother wanted me to be a journalist. I’ve been thinking of the issues confronting journalism for a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Recent piece by Sanford and Brown

(I work for Google, but this is my personal opinion.) Last week I was on vacation down in Florida and I had a chance to tour Thomas Edison’s winter vacation home. The tour guide told us that Edison wired his house and switched on electrical lighting in 1887. Then the tour guide leaned in and quietly [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Our CEO Tells It Like It Is

I haven't said a lot about the ongoing battle between Craigslist and certain overly-agressive politicains, but after reading his most recent blog post, An Apology Is In Order, I have to say that I'm really proud of Jim. Having a CEO standing up to politicians and media for what he believes is right and true really reaffirms my decision to join Craigslist last year. Better yet, he's outdone most of the media by, *gasp*, actually linking to relevant information in his post. Many prominent companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media, not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more “adult services” ads than does craigslist, some of a very graphic nature. For a small sampling, look (careful NSFW) here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. Have you fully considered the implications of your accusations against craigslist? What’s a crime for craigslist is clearly a crime for any company. Are you really prepared to condemn the executives of each of the mainstream companies linked above, and all the others that feature such ads, as criminals? craigslist may not matter in your world view, despite our popularity among your constituents, but mightn’t you want an endorsement from any of the SC newspapers for your gubenatorial campaign, whose publishers you’ve just labeled as criminals? Do you really intend to launch a criminal investigation against the phone company? What about potential new jobs connected to big data center buildouts in SC by Internet companies? Are you *sure* you want prosecute all of their CEOs as criminals??? Keep it up, Jim. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-18 more

Smoked Tilapia with Honey Glaze

Tonight we tried smoking Tailpia for the first time and it came out very well. The full recipe is below the before and after pictures. The fish in the smoker, before adding honey and spices: The fish after smoking: Dinner! Recipe This recipe is very simple but surprisingly tasty. It has some sweet, some smoky, and some spice. Arrange the fish on the smoker grate and coat liberally with honey. Then sprinkle on a bit of each of the following: Salt Pepper Garlic Powder Cayenne Pepper Then smoke for 18-20 minutes with hickory chips. The resulting mix of honey, cayenne, and smoky flavor is truly excellent. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

MySQL 5.1.34 and XtraDB 1.0.3-5

For a couple weeks now, we've had a MySQL server at work running MySQL 5.1.34 and the Percona XtraDB 1.0.3-5 plug-in. I'm testing an upgrade path for our current MySQL 5.0.xx based servers. Aside from some confusion about the initial setup (getting the built-in InnoDB to stay out of the way), things have gone very well. All of our largest and most active tables have been converted to the new Barracuda file format and I tested compression on the two largest. The first didn't fare so well, but it's a fairly over-indexed table with small rows. The second, however, contains a decent sized TEXT column (classified posting bodies) and it compresses quite nicely. Any change in CPU utilization is not significant. I hope to soon get a second server running and try to increase the compression ratio, going from KEY_BLOCK_SIZE of 8K to 4K to see if we can squeeze some more out of it without much penalty. I love all the extra stats provided by the InnoDB plug-in and the Percona (and Google) enhancements. There are a lot of knobs that I've not yet tried to turn, but it's good to know they're available when that day comes. More to come... See Also: Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

What was new at Searchology?

Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before. - Pat Riley mentioned a couple [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

Google Searchology 2009: Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets

Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things: Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

On vacation for a week or so

Just to let you know, I’m on vacation for a week or so. If you send me email or tweet in my direction, don’t expect a reply for a while.
Publication date: 2009-05-08 more

MoonRiver on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

You can also finish your work through Disk Utility . Just follow this guide : How to Copy DVD with Disk Utility to DVD on Mac
Publication date: 2009-05-07 more

5 things you (probably) don

(I was rooting around and found this leftover post from 2006 and figured I’d throw it out here.) It looks like blog tag has come to the search bloggers. I’ve been tagged by so many people that I yield and surrender obscure facts about me. When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, there wasn’t always a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

Thinking about thunder

I read an interesting blog post by Mike Markson, VP of Marketing for Blekko, which is the working name for a new search engine planned to launch to the public in a few months. The title of Mike’s post was “Google Likes To Steal Other’s Thunder,” and he mentions several anecdotes to back up that idea. [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

I love my Samsung NC10 Netbook

A couple months back I got a Samsung NC10 Netbook. I had been on the fence for a long time, trying to decide between the an Eee PC from Asus, the MSI Wind, and the Samsung NC10. Right about the time I was going to finally do it, the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE was announced. I read a lot of reviews from folks who'd bought those netbooks and eventually settled on the NC10. The main deciding factors, in order, were: keyboard layout, build quality, ease of upgrade (mine as 2GB RAM and a 320GB disk, twice the standard in both departments), and Linux support. The MSI Wind was okay in most of those areas, but based on the many reviews I read, the NC10 was a little bit better across the board. So I ruled the MSI Wind out on that alone. The Eee PC 1000HE had just been announced and would have required waiting a few more weeks. Plus, its keyboard had a few quirks--notably the right shift key being too small and offset. Keyboards are really important to me. It had the advantage of a claimed 9.5 hour battery life vs. the 7-8 claimed on the NC10. However, I picked the NC10 and couldn't be happier. Running Windows XP, I routinely get 7 hours of battery life with Wifi on and the screen brightness set low (don't need it any higher most of the time). They range is excellent, keyboard feels right, and it's surprisingly snappy. Building a computer this small and light is really an exercise in design compromises and I thing Samsung nailed it perfectly. I've traveled with it a few times and used it all day at the MySQL Conference without having to worry about being near power outlets. The 2GB RAM is more than enough for anything I'm likely to throw at the Atom processor and 320GB is enough space for all my music, pictures, and pretty much everything except my extensive video collection. I use the NC10 a bit day to day. I think of it as a "couch computer" in addition to use in travel and at a conference. But I've also hooked it up to a HDTV to show off pictures to family and that worked just as well. I could easily see doing a day's worth of work on it with an external monitor and mouse. A couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and booted the NC10 off a USB stick to see how it worked. Much to my surprise, it seems that everything worked well without any tweaking. I'll probably stick with XP for now, but it's good to see that Ubuntu would work for me too. If I was looking to buy now, I'd look really hard at the Samsung NC10, ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, and the Samsung NC20 (the 12" model). (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

neil on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

can anybody help. i can't seem to get my Mac on-line. i am using 10.1.4 on a G4 eMac, (it's all i have right now). i did manually insert the IP address from my provider, but still no luck. they suggested i try forums for help. cheers to all Neil
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

beccagal on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

Hi. Try going to your Network settings in the System Preferences and make sure the modem is not checked. Becca
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade?

Of the many things I noticed last week at the MySQL Conference, one of the most notable was how many companies have not upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 yet. Craigslist is in that camp and it seems that we're joined by the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and about half a dozen other companies that use MySQL heavily. Come to think of it, SmugMug are the only folks I've talked with who've made the jump (video). So it's not much of a surprise that Percona is asking if they should backport 5.4 fixes to 5.0. Given our usage of MySQL to date, the only really compelling reason to upgrade is to get access to the InnoDB plug-in (and XtraDB). I'd like to get compression, some of the various performance patches, and tuning options, so plug-in support is a requirement. But beyond that, I just don't see anything new in 5.1 that we need. As I noted in The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!, the storage engines matter more than the various add-on features in the server itself. Have you upgraded or are you thinking about it? If so, why? If not, why not? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-01 more

MySQL and Drizzle Tip: Checking configuration file syntax (faking configtest)

In the Apache world, you might be familiar with tweaking your config file(s) and then running $ apachectl configtest to see if the config parses. We've been discussing this on the drizzle mailing list and talking in general about configuration handling and management. Well, it turns out that you can fake it in MySQL and Drizzle too. If you have a new configuration in /tmp/new.cnf, try this: $ mysqld --defaults-file=/tmp/new.cnf --verbose --help And it'll run mysqld (or drizzled), parse the config, report any problems, print help, and exit without initializing storage engines or trying to grab a port. Neat trick! Thanks to Baron Schwartz, Arjen Lentz, and Sheeri Cabral (book) for helping to demonstrate this. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-30 more

Slides from "MySQL and Search at Craigslist"

Last week I delivered a talk titled "MySQL and Search at Craigslist" as part of the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. I talked about some of the good and bad of our MySQL work and also talked a lot about our recent Sphinx deployment. The slides are embedded below and here, thanks to SlideShare. (Anyone know why Google Docs doesn't yet handle OpenOffice presentations?) MySQL And Search At CraigslistView more presentations from jzawodn. I gave a copy to O'Reilly but don't yet see them on the conference site. The usual disclaimers apply: I said a lot that's not well reflected in the slides, and I'm sure they're less informative without the audio or video that may or may not have been captured. Either way, hopefully they're useful to folks who saw the talk and even a few of those who did not. I also delivered a condensed version of this talk at the Percona Performance Conference and those slides are available too. Thanks to everyone who provided useful feedback and discussion before and after the talks. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

cloris on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Movie DVD Copy is also a good choice. Never miss backing up a DVD with Movie DVD Copy. And if you just make copies to your computer, DVDSmith is freeware and can meets your requirements. Both these software can be found at http://www.movie-dvd-copy.com
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Azymov on "Don't Buy Apple"

NetBSD 4 with OpenBox window manager is a good option--lightning fast, even on hardware deemed 'slow' for Windoze. Apple OS X is a beautiful system--it should be, since it's based on freeBSD, another FREE operating system. Nevertheless, Apple sells their hardware for TOO HIGH A PRICE, being that they essentially use hardware primarily sold to the PC market. (Putting it plainly, Apple loves profit--with little effort on ingenuity. They're not so ingenious as their marketing department wants you to believe.)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Hack on Drizzle Full-Time for Rackspace!

Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified. At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle. Here's what he sent to the mailing list. I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project's mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success. Talking with him a bit, the rationale is simple: Rackspace wants to offer the best cloud resources they can. Part of that means having infrastructure that their customers need and works well. They're betting the Drizzle is part of their future, and hiring a few people to work on it makes that future a reality sooner than later. It looks like Mark Callaghan likes the idea too. Anyway, ping me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Slides from What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle

As I previously mentioned, on Friday I attended the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun in Santa Clara. While there I had the chance to speak to the group while everyone ate their salad, pizza, and cookies. The talk was titles "What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle" and is available as a Google Docs presentation here. I've also embedded a version of the slides below. I should note here, as I did at the talk, that this presentation is neither comprehensive or completely representative. That is to say that I'm sure there are things I've forgotten. Plus, the fact that I was working with MySQL in other high-volume web shops before coming to Craiglist means that there's definitely some personal bias and pet peeves addressed in there too. Anyway, that's what I presented. Thanks to the fine folks at Sun (soon to be Oracle) for hosting and organizing the day. And special thanks to the Drizzle developers for getting together and showing the rest of us how things work and taking time to talk about their plans. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Switching things around

This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around: - I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks. - I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com. - I changed my blog layout to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-26 more

MySQL and Percona Conferences Rocked

Now that it's Friday, I can finally come up for air and say that both the MySQL and Percona Conferences (which I wrote about earlier) surpassed my expectations. Having the two going on semi-concurrently worked out pretty well. At no time did I find myself without at least two sessions I wanted to see. Often times I had to really cut lunch short to make sure I didn't miss anything. Other MySQL Conference veterans I asked has very similar responses. There's a ton of other stuff to digest, and I hope to write up some thoughts in the coming days and weeks. As usual, a big part of the conference for me was being able to meet up with people I don't see often or who I've never met face to face. Meeting up with people solving similar problems at places like Facebook, Google, Mixi, and other high-traffic sites is invaluable. Being able get a good sense of what new storage engines are out there and how modern hardware is changing database systems (SSDs, multi-core servers) proved to be very educational in ways I didn't expect. All the politics and posturing around the Oracle/Sun buyout weren't as significant as I'd expected. People really wanted to get down to business and technology. I enjoyed giving my talks and answering questions about problems that we have and haven't solved yet at Craigslist. I'm heading over to Drizzle Devloper Day in a couple hours. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-24 more

Grabbag questions, April 2009

I scheduled some time today to record video, so I opened up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I
Publication date: 2009-04-23 more

MySQL and Percona Performance Conferece Lineup

Amidst all the Oracle/Sun/MySQL news today, the MySQL Conference kicks off this week. So I just spent a few minutes putting together my picks for the sessions I'd like to attend at the MySQL Conference and the Percona Performance Conference (schedule). There's quite a lineup and I have some hard choices to make. Both groups have put together excellent events. And, wow, there are a lot of new storage engines and appliances coming out. To make my life easier, I'm putting the list of interesting sessions from both conferences here so I can try to decide where to spend my attention. Sessions I'm Presenting or Part Of I'm presenting MySQL and Search at Craigslist on Tuesday morning and am part of The Great Open Cloud Shootout on Wednesday morning. On Friday, I'll be at the Drizzle Developer Day to talk about "What Craigslist Needs from Drizzle." Tuesday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - State of the Dolphin - Karen Padir 9:15am - This is Not a Web App: MySQL at Google - Mark Callaghan 10:50am - MySQL and Search at Craigslist - Jeremy Zawodny 11:55am - InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection - Ken Jacobs, Heikki Tuuri 2:00pm - Falcon Storage Engine - Designed for Speed - Kevin Lewis, Ann Harrison 3:05pm - The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges - Paul McCullagh 4:25pm - Solving Common SQL Problems with SeqEngine - Beat Vontobel 5:15pm - Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits - Frank Mashraqi Wednesday Sessions: MySQL 8:50am - The Great Open Cloud Shootout - panel 10:50am - Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine - Chuck Bell, Mats Kindahl 11:55am - Using Q4M: A Message Queue Storage Engine for MySQL - Kazuho Oku 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 2:00pm - Maria: The New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL - Monty Widenius 2:00pm - SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming SSD Revolution - Matthew Yonkovit 2:00pm - Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB - Heikki Tuuri 3:05pm - MySQL Performance on EC2 - Mark Callaghan 4:25pm - Perl Stored Procedures for MySQL - Antony Curtis 4:25pm - High Availability and Scalability Patches from Google - Ben Handy, Justin Tolmer 5:15pm - Optimizing MySQL Performance for ZFS - Allan Packer, Neelakanth Nadgir 5:15pm - Redundant Storage Cluster: For When It's Just Too Big - Bob Burgess 5:15pm - Inserts at Drive Speed: Designing a Custom Storage Engine for Write-Mostly Applications - Ben Haley Wednesday Sessions: Percona 9:00am - Maria In Depth - Monty Widenius 9:55am - The Return of Gearman - Eric Day 11:15am - Fighting Replication Lag - Peter Zaitsev 12:45pm - Evaluating Disk Backends for MySQL Servers - Ewen Fortune 1:35pm - Database Performance with Proxy Architectures - Robert Hodges 2:00pm - Covering Indexes: Orders-of-Magnitude Improvements - Dr. Bradley C. Kuszmaul 5:00pm - Sphinx and MySQL: A Perfect Match - Andrew Aksyonoff 6:15pm - InnoDB Performance Tuning - Peter Zaitsev 7:05pm - CouchDB: Behind the Buzz - Jan Lehnardt 7:55pm - Linux Filesystems: Who, What, and Where - Stewart Smith 9:10pm - Open Q&A: Performance - panel Thursday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - The SmugMug Tale - Don MacAskill 10:50am - SQL is Dead - Monty Taylor 10:50am - Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman - Eric Day, Brian Aker 10:50am - Dormando's Proxy for MySQL - Alan Kasindorf 11:55am - Memory Management in MySQL and Drizzle - Stewart Smith 11:55am - Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times - MC Brown 2:00pm - MySQL Row Change Event Extraction and Publish - Gene Pang 2:00pm - InnoDB Performance and Usability Patches - Vadim Tkachenko, Ewen Fortune 2:50pm - Make Your Life Easier with Maatkit - Baron Schwartz 2:50pm - BLOB Streaming: Efficient Reliable BLOB Handling for all Storage Engines - Barry Leslie 3:50pm - Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (of the Obama Campaign) - many speakers Thursday Sessions: Percona 9:55am - Pushing the Envelope - Don MacAskill 10:50am - The Life of a Dirty Page - Mark Callaghan 1:35pm - High Performance MySQL from a Boring Architecture - Baron Schwartz 3:15pm - Hypertable - Doug Judd 4:30pm - Drizzle's Approach to Improving Performance of the Server - Jay Pipes 7:50pm - MySQL Replication: Getting The Most From Slaves - Peter Zaitsev 9:05pm - Open Q&A: Feature Request Bonanza - panel Friday: Drizzle Developer Day Drizzle Developer Day is on Friday at Sun in Santa Clara. I'm looking forward to many of the talks (some of which will be completely over my head but interesting anyway). Back To Work! And, with that, I need to go work on my presentation! See you at the conference... I'll try to post interesting tidbits on Twitter and tag 'em with #MySQLConf like others appear to be doing. I just found out that I can share my public MySQL Conference Schedule. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

Oracle Buying Sun, Gets MySQL

Interesting news this morning, just as the 2009 MySQL Conference is starting. As is being reported all over the place, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun at $9.50 per share, giving them to a ton of great technology (Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, DTrace, etc.). One one of the biggest threats to Oracle's core database business (at the low end, at least) for a while now has been MySQL. And now they're poised to own MySQL after Sun bought it not long ago. (It seems like yesterday that Oracle bought Innobase.) As I noted a while back, the MySQL landscape is changing. This news is sure to make the conference more... interesting. Oracle, please get the InnoDB team together with the MySQL team and see about GPLing ZFS. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

My 8.7M pixel display

A while ago I wrote about Synergy and showed a picture of my desktop as of July 2007: That’s two 24″ Dell monitors (one for a Windows computer, the other for a Linux computer). I’ve had that setup for a couple years and I recently decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought a 30″ [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

yanyouyu on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

you can visist this site to get more information about this Helpful guide
Publication date: 2009-04-18 more

Lim Bangla John on "How to download free iPhone games"

You gotta either "jailbreak" your iphone or install a special software for that.Jailbreaking can be done at your own risk for free or by a professional ,the jailbreak will allow your iphone to install third-partysoftware for free.;) But with everything there is a price to pay!! GOOD LUCK.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lim Bangla John on "wanna buy a mac!"

YES!This is very much of a big hassle ,there are quite a number of compatiblity issues on the mac.In other words ,you should buy the mac but NEVER usethe mac to do office work!!
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lucy Burr on "wanna buy a mac!"

I much prefer the Mac to Windows. A new program called Parallel can be installed on Macs that will allow Windows users to install a version of XP or Vista (?) on the Mac. You might want to look into this since it might make the transition easier. MacMall has bundled versions of these new programs with their newer iMacs.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

xiaogongzhu on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

iPod Video Converter for Mac Hello,everyone.If you want to know about"How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3",I am very happy to enjoy it with you. iPod Video Converter for Mac(http://www.ipod-video-converter.com/) is useful audio and video conversion software for iPod. Its powerful function enables you to convert all popular audio and video files, such as AVI, MPEG, WMV, MOV, MP4, VOB, DivX, XviD, AAC, AV3, MP3, to the formats supported by iPod including MP4, M4A, MP3, etc.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Eric4679 on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

How about AnyDVD? As this program remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software. Free latest version downloading http://www.dvdripsoft.com/anydvd.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

Eric4679 on "iPhone too expensive for you? Check this out!"

LOL, the most powerful program for iPod at here: http://www.dvdripsoft.com/dvd-ripper-ultimate.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

winniel on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Handbrake is the best choice, it is nice and free.
Publication date: 2009-04-14 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds!

Jeffrey Soleim on "Don't Buy Apple"

Both PCs and Macs *gasp* may have hardware problems! We seem to have gotten to a place in our society where the everyday computer is a simple piece of technology that is 100% without flaws. In reality, if you sit down and think of the sheer mechanics required to manufacture a computer, of any kind, you will quickly gain a huge appreciation for what they are and can do. Let's take most of the components out of the equation for a moment and look at the processor. Assuming it's a white, Intel-Chipset Macbook, it has a mobile Core2Duo processor in it. They have *millions* of transistors in them. These are not simple pieces of technology. Will a few broken transistors affect the overall performance of a processor? Maybe not, but if you get a flawed chip, it can overheat as it's checksum fails for the billions of calculations it does per minute. Get real!
Publication date: 2009-04-07 more

Sponsor Our Ride For Diabetes (Tour de Cure 2009)

In early May, Kathleen and I will be participating it the Tour de Cure 2009, a bike ride to raise awareness and money for Diabetes. Craigslist (my employer) is sponsoring a team that we'll both be riding on. Collectively, our team is trying to raise $75,000 during this years ride. If you have a few bucks to spare for a good cause, please consider sponsoring me or sponsoring my wife (or both!). It's for a very good cause. We're both riding the 25 mile course and would love even a $1/mile contribution. As a bonus, Craigslist is matching all our donations. So if you donate $25, your contribution becomes $50 thanks to the company's generosity. Here are links for a bit more information: Our Team Page Kathleen's Page My Page You can visit either of our pages to pledge on-line. And if you're interested in riding, visit our team page. Thanks for any support you can offer! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-06 more

rootusercyclone on "Don't Buy Apple"

Just because you have had trouble with Apple doesn't mean you should go around preaching to everyone that Apple computers suck. Most people here have never had problems with their Mac/iPod, and if we did, Apple fixes/replaces the product without hesitation. Just because your computers broke doesn't mean that you should discourage others from buying from Apple. Why does it bother you that we use a computer you don't like?
Publication date: 2009-04-05 more

Happy 4.04 Day!

Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day — even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-04 more

Chrome marketshare for March 2009

Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics: Some different browser marketshare numbers: - Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days. - StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-03 more

Looking into latest live metrics

(Doing the “type up a quick blog post” thing. Let me know if I had any typos.) Thanks to everyone that contacted me in the last few minutes and hours about changes in our search products and quality; we’re seeing the impact in our metrics as well. I hear your feedback loud and clear–no need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-02 more

stockshoes1 on "wholesale nike shoes, Nike dunks,"

Welcome to our website ( http://www.sellstockshoes.com ) , we are a leading company specialize in exporting various of brand shoes, such as Nike , Adidas, Shox, Max, Puma, Gucci, etc. All these shoes are Aaaa quality, with certificate logo and cards. Bulk stocks and many styles for you to choose, We accept the mix order and drop ship. Handling all kinds of shipping methods. such as DHL, EMS, FEDEX, UPS, SODEX, TNT, 3-4 days arrival. Online tracking # is available for you.
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!

Yesterday Patrick Galbraith asked What is the official branch of MySQL? which got a lot of attention, including on Slashdot (and the token PostgeSQL comments quickly appeared). Here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter anymore. Patrick's question is interesting in an academic sense, but it's mainly a distraction from what really matters. (Hint: What's the official Linux and who really cares? Ubuntu? RedHat? Debian? CentOS?) Storage Engines Nowadays what matters is the set of available storage engines. InnoDB, Percona's XtraDB, PrimeBase's PBXT, Maria, Falcon, and several others are available or will be soon. I predict that for the foreseeable future, any MySQL distribution or derivative must support the storage engine plug-in API that MySQL 5.1 defined. And since that's the case, it largely won't matter which flavor you using. Protocol(s) Look at what's happened in the world of key/value databases in the last few years. More than a few of them speak the memcached protocol as either their native and default or an optional add-on. I suspect the same thing will be the case here. All MySQL distributions and derivatives will speak the "traditional" MySQL protocol (just like memecached has the old protocol). Some of them, notably Drizzle, will have other (newere, better) protocols available as well (much like memcached has the new binary protocol). Summary In summary, the choice of MySQL version or derivative won't matter as much as you might think because they'll have the same Storge Engine plug-ins available (thanks to the shared plugin-in API), they'll all speak a common protocol (this may not be true for replication--watch that area closely), and will largely offer the same subset of SQL and SQL extensions. They'll all be supported by different groups/companies (including some "database appliance" vendors), will all be tuned differently and aimed at slightly different uses cases, and will certainly benefit from a lot of cross-pollination. That doesn't sound so bad to me. The fact that nobody can point to the "real" MySQL in a few years just won't matter. Does anyone ask (anymore) which is the "real" Linux? Nope. And for very similar reasons. Think of MySQL as "kernel" and Storage Engine as "filesystem" and you'll realize we've been down this road before. We're looking at the upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 soon at Craigslist and don't know if we'll be using InnoDB or XtraDB yet. Time will tell. See Also: The New MySQL Landscape, which I wrote a few months back--before a good chunk of the MySQL team had left Sun. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Garlic Shrimp and Scallops Recipe

Last week we tried a new Garlic Shrimp recipe that was so simple and delicious that we planned to try it again. On Saturday my wonderful wife came back from the local Safeway and presented me with 1 pound of shrimp as well as about 1/3rd of a pound of small sea scallops. Here's what the final product looked like: Preparation is simple and quick. Cut 2 red chilies lengthwise and remove the seeds. Rinse the shrimp and scallops, keeping the separate. Using a garlic press, crush 6-9 cloves of garlic. Add 5-6 tablespoons of olive oil to skillet or wok. Put the wok on high heat. Once the oil is hot, add the garlic, chilies, and shrimp. Stir frequently. After about 2 minutes, add the scallops. Continue cooking for another 2-3 minutes until the shrimp are pink and the scallops are just starting to get a gold color on the outside (they'll still be tender inside). Serve and enjoy! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-30 more

Enable Visual Effects in Ubuntu to Increase Performance

For a while now, I'd been running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T61 (work machine) with Visual Effects disabled. Why? There were weird bugs with compiz and xterm that caused corruption at times. So I shut it off and never thought about it again. But a few days ago, I upgraded to 8.10 despite the apparent increase in WiFi related lock-ups I can expect to see (apparently I don't have the Intel wireless in this machine... grumble). Switching virtual desktops, or "Workspaces" as they're called, seemed to be even slower than before--almost intolerable. Just for kicks I decided to go play with the settings. Imagine my surprise when switching that selection from "None" to "Normal" resulted in an dramatic increase in virtual desktop redraw perfomance. Yay! Counterintuitive, but yay anyway. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-25 more

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