Four short links: 21 October 2010

Nat Torkington — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Using MysQL as NoSQL -- 750,000+ qps on a commodity MySQL/InnoDB 5.1 server from remote web clients.
Making an SLR Camera from Scratch -- amazing piece of hardware devotion. (via hackaday.com)
Mac App Store Guidelines -- Apple announce an app store for the Macintosh, similar to its app store for iPhones and iPads. "Mac App" no longer means generic "program", it has a new and specific meaning, a program that must be installed through the App store and which has limited functionality (only one can run at a time, it's full-screen, etc.). The list of guidelines for what kinds of programs you can't sell through the App Store is interesting. Many have good reasons to be, but It creates a store inside itself for selling or distributing other software (i.e., an audio plug-in store in an audio app) is pure greed. Some are afeared that the next step is to make the App store the only way to install apps on a Mac, a move that would drive me away. It would be a sad day for Mac-lovers if Microsoft were to be the more open solution than Apple. cf the Owner's Manifesto.
Privacy Aspects of Data Mining -- CFP for an IEEE workshop in December. (via jschneider on Twitter)

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Four short links: 26 October 2009

Nat Torkington — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.
Bits of Evidence -- Slides for a talk, "What we actually know about software development and why we believe it is true". (via Simon Willison)
Wordnik API -- definitions, frequencies, examples APIs. See the announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit.
The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing -- Brian Aker eloquently describes why he feels that dual licensing is anti-open source. Brian obviously has considerable experience informing this opinion--his years as Director of Technology for MySQL.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN