Made by Mikal – Page 105

Two things

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 29, 2006
Post category:Link

One, wikipedia rocks. Especially for technical topics I previously found hard to research like image encoding formats like YUV. Kudos to those who write pages there. Secondly, is it just me or is the history of television formats fascinating. For example: The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations: Western TV was popular in the East, authorities were well aware of this, and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black&white, because the underlying TV standard B/G remained the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television". Later East German produced TV sets even included a dual standard PAL/SECAM decoder. In any case the majority of TV sets in East Germany were monochrome (black & white) until well into the 1980s.

Phoenix for business

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 23, 2006
Post category:Travel

You know that somewhere has to be special when people tell you that the good points of a place are that land is cheap, it's geologically stable, and there are lots of banks. Well, that's Phoenix and the bit they're not mentioning is that you're in a desert. It's warm. Really warm. Oh, and dry. It's a nice spring afternoon as I write this, and it's 108 Fahrenheit (42 Celsius). Fortunately that seems to be about as hot as it gets here. Phoenix is so far a nice city, although I have only haven't seen much (I'm here on business). Not very built up, and quite spread out. Some parts of town I drove through also have billboards in Spanish only.

Mental note: get an eccentric father

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2006
Post category:Link

Then I too can get out of traffic fines.

Greg likes MySQL cluster, oh and Stewart’s talk

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 12, 2006
Post category:Mysql

Greg Linden (Google watcher, search engine dude, ex-Amazon) saw Stewart Smith's talk on Google Video about MySQL cluster, and likes the idea. That's cool. Time for more content on Google Video?

Twisted conch

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 9, 2006
Post category:Python

It seems to me that every time I go to write some networking code in Python, the twisted guys have got there before me. Today's adventures are involving twisted conch, which seems very cool. The documentation is a bit patchy though.

Proposition 82

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 9, 2006
Post category:Link

California has this strange direct funding system, where the electorate can mandate a given amount of funding for a specific line item, and not involve the politicians in the future decision making. Wikipedia doesn't have an article on proposition 82 yet (I might make one...), but here is an example of a previous proposition. Proposition 82 proposes free preschool education for all California kids (these guys have the noon82.com site as well as the yeson82.com site). It does have opposition though. It's strange living somewhere where I get no say in the political process, and where I don't feel obligated to live with the long term effects of any given change. So, I say give me the free stuff!

Interesting: Vote on other sites with your links

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 7, 2006
Post category:Link

I find the vote links proposal quite interesting. I wonder if anyone has adopted it?

Buy Toshiba!

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 6, 2006
Post category:Link

It certainly seems to be working out for the best for Rory: When I fired up the machine for the first time to make sure he did everything right and it wouldn't explode in my face, I couldn't help but notice that I wasn't getting any WiFi signal. I told him what was wrong. He said he didn't even see a WiFi card in there when he was repairing. That didn't surprise me since, at least from what I saw, he tried to fix my computer by repeatedly body-slamming it on the ground and bitch-slapping it. Hard to see the details that way.

MySQL Tech Talks

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 6, 2006
Post category:Mysql

Three intrepid MySQLers came to Google after the user conference to give internal tech talks. They were kind enough to agree to us hosting them for other people to see. The first two are up, so I'll mention those now, and put a link to the last one when it's available... Click on the thumbnail to be taken to the video. Jay Pipes is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), which covers all of the newest MySQL 5 features, as well as in-depth discussion and analysis of the MySQL server architecture, storage engines, transaction processing, benchmarking, and advanced SQL scenarios. You can also see his name on articles appearing in Linux Magazine and can read more articles about MySQL at his website. Jay Pipes is MySQL's Community Relations Manager for North America. Learn where to best focus your attention when tuning the performance of your applications and database servers, and how to effectively find the "low hanging fruit" on the tree of bottlenecks. It's not rocket science, but with a bit of acquired skill and experience, and of course good habits, you too can do this magic! Timour Katchaounov The first part of this talk describes…

Interesting quote

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 5, 2006
Post category:Link

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked...A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. John Gall via Marc on the O'Reilly radar.