Lately I've been making my own trail mix, and munching it while I compute. I've been throwing in chocolate chips, peanuts, almond slices we happened to have around, raisins, and whatever cereals I feel like, usually Quaker Oatmeal something or other and Corn Chex. It's pretty darn good.
Any recommendations of other foodstuffs to throw in?
Great quote: "Geeks tend to find the most difficult solution to any given problem."
I think I like Simon's new time since feature (you can't see it unless you go to the home page). I think I've seen similar things elsewhere but I can't remember where. It might be a little distracting on his home page since it's kind of big. But, thanks to his girlfriend Natalie for making the code available. If I can find a place to put it I may use it.
Hey, she uses the exact same type of URL scheme I do. Score.
The only reason I think the time since may not be the best idea is because it has to change every time the page loads, as opposed to the time of a post which is static. This would seriously hurt static caching. However, Simon's point that it erases the time zone distinction is a really good one. But because of the caching issue alone I don't think I'd want to use it.
My whole philosophy while developing my CMS has been that even if some things are more inefficient than they would be without the CMS, it's more important to make things easy to use, because whatever inefficiencies there are can be completely eliminated by having pages cached and served from static files.
This is a great new feature. Read this post from Sam Ruby and follow all the links. I think what this means is that for every item in an RSS feed, in aggregators like SharpReader we should soon be able to hit a plus button on the left and see a list of all comments on the post without having to leave the aggregator. And they can be checked for updates, etc. All this will be auto-discovered from the site's main RSS feed, assuming the site's feed supports this new feature. Sounds awesome.
One of these days I have to update my RSS feed to 2.0. Now that most of the rest of my CMS is together, I think I can finally devote time to this 
P.S. Even though Sam's post is titled "Collaboration through namespaces", I still stand by my earlier rant on XML namespaces. This feature isn't dependent on namespaces, in that it wouldn't have been impossible without them.
Most importantly, the way this evolved was exactly how I said these types of things evolve. Someone proposes something to add to a spec, the owner of the spec agrees, and the community goes on to accept and write software around the new feature. Namespaces (as in putting a "wfw:" in front of the tag name) ultimately don't get you anything.
Though I'm not sure, I think I had heard about this deal earlier, but I had no idea of the significance this has:
BusinessWeek: A Baby Database's Chance to Grow Up?
To date, though, MySQL has been viewed mainly as a cheap database for running Web sites and as relatively unsophisticated compared to the whiz-bang wares of the database Big Three, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Further, MySQL was never seen as an apple-cart tipper on the order of Linux. But Mickos and his minions served notice to the database sector on May 27 when MySQL announced an alliance with German software giant SAP. Then on June 3, MySQL announced a $19.5 million venture-capital financing round including marquee Silicon Valley VC firm Benchmark Capital.
Combined, the two developments could give MySQL much needed momentum. SAP, which racked up $7.4 billion in 2002 revenues and net income of $597 million, is the top dog in complex business software. It claims that as of April, 2003, it controlled about 54% of that market, up from 50% at the end of 2002 and well ahead of rivals Oracle, Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards (the latter two have announced a merger deal in which PeopleSoft will pay $1.7 billion in stock to acquire Edwards). So the SAP deal gives Mickos the blessing of one of the most dominant companies in enterprise software, much the way IBM gave Linux a seal of approval that more than anything else helped the Penguin people crack the corporate operating system market.
I don't quite understand what SAP's software does. I knew about SAP DB, their underlying database, but thought that was their main product. I didn't realize that their real product was super-enterprise business software to do something. But what's happening is that SAP is basically giving their database code to MySQL, MySQL will improve at a faster pace by integrating the SAP DB code, and MySQL will become the software that is intended to underly SAP installations.
The shadow play here is SAP's long-held desire to commoditize databases. Most of SAP's customers now install Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft databases as the underpinnings necessary to run SAP's business software. That means SAP customers have to pay extra for a database license, often thousands of dollars per server. Compare that to annual support costs ranging from $1,500 to $48,000 for MySQL and free downloads of the software if customers want it.
The current setup of separate database and enterprise software is an additional barrier to SAP's sales. It also means it has less control over its customers. That's precisely why SAP has long offered its own SAP DB product, which is more sophisticated than MySQL but still lags behind Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft in terms of features. Three years ago, in hopes of catching the open-source wave, SAP even tried revealing its database's source code. But that didn't spark many new sales nor did it attract a community of interested open-source developers.
In this light, SAP's deal with MySQL is a natural. Under its terms, the German company will pass development of SAP DB to MySQL. The Swedish company then picks up commercial rights to SAP DB. Mickos plans to merge SAP DB's code with that of MySQL. And he hopes to incorporate heavy-duty computing features into MySQL's next release.
If he's successful, that could save MySQL years of development time and immediately put it on competitive footing with the big guys for lower- and middle-tier types of commercial database installations. "We're typically used in Web sites and departmental applications, but we're not the database for a business application in the enterprise. And we want to change that," says Mickos.
So, this deal is extremely significant. It won't fully play out for years, but MySQL is going to get a lot better and become a lot more important in the business market in the years to come.
Update: Read what Jeremy has to say, and check out the press release for the MySQL and SAP deal as well as the press release announcing the VC funding MySQL recently got.
Simon: "I think the psychology of a blog's design is easily under-rated"
Absolutely.
Saturday, June 14, 2003
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new⇒Quantum physics and free will
I knew you were going to say that....
Tom Massey: Mar 15, 9:26pm