Posts

The Business 2.0 weblog has a recap of Sergey Brin’s talk at the Web 2.0 conference. Here’s my favorite quote: The No. 1 factor that contributed to our success over the past seven years is luck. One of the biggest mistakes people make in assessing their success or failure is discounting the effect of luck. People prefer to think that they are masters of their own destinies but the truth is that in large parts we are victims of circumstance. Yes, you should avoid problems that you see and make the most of the opportunities that you are presented with, but luck is the main factor. Heck, I was born a white male American with responsible parents who placed a high premium on education. Furthermore, I was born during the period of time when a natural curiousity in computers and the Internet could lead to a decent career. That alone makes me luckier than a huge majority of the people in the world. People are fools not to take those sorts of things into consideration. ...

Jeremy Zawodny has a great post explaining why Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy is a huge issue for MySQL and MySQL customers. Innobase provides the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL. It’s the one that supports foreign keys, transactions, and all that stuff that made MySQL a useful option for real applications. I use MySQL pretty much exclusively these days, but this deal is at least going to prompt me to look a bit closer at PostgreSQL. Fortunately for me, these days I’m using Hibernate and Ruby on Rails for most of my database work, so the specifics of which database I’m using are largely abstracted away. ...

Tristal Louis has an interesting post looking at the flow Weblogs, Inc generates in relation to how much AOL paid for them, coming up with a dollar value for each inbound link. The analysis is fascinating and does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that hard cash is being spent on vapor already … very early in what looks to be a growing bubble. Of course, the real question we have to ask is how long it took Tristan to run all of those URLs through Technorati to come up with his numbers? He has the patience of a saint. ...

One interesting aspect of the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is all of the reading of tea leaves going on to see where she stands with regard to various litmus tests. Right wingers want a pro-life judge who is opposed to gay rights. Liberals want someone who’s as liberal as possible given the circumstances. Since Miers has never been a judge and has a background mainly in corporate law with no experience arguing federal appellate cases, and given that nobody expects her to answer questions about her beliefs in her confirmation hearing, everybody is doing their best to look for clues from her past that tell us what she thinks. William Saletan has a good piece at Slate today explaining how her supporters are <a title=“Culture of Litmus - Don’t you dare�judge�Harriet Miers on abortion. By William Saletan” href=“http://slate.msn.com/id/2127679/">getting the word out to the right wing that she’s one of them, and that they don’t need to be afraid. Elsewhere I’m reading about her work at the American Bar Association promoting what seem like liberal ideas, donations to Al Gore, and her sponsorship of a feminist lecture series at her alma mater. ...

Scott Rosenberg says that a new Internet bubble is in full swing, based on his observations at Web 2.0. I definitely think we’re already in the “throw the bad money after the good” phase of investing in “Web 2.0” companies. And once again, it sure looks like another bubble will pass by without my walking away with filthy lucre. So it goes. Update: $25 million for Weblogs, Inc. Need I say more? ...

The big news today seems to be that stealth startup 24 Hour Laundry has decloaked, launching Ning. (I sent these guys my résumé a few months ago on a lark, they turned me down.) The idea of the site is to provide people with tools to build their own social applications like del.icio.us, Flickr, and even “Hot or Not.” I guess Yahoo Groups on steroids would be one way to think about it, but I haven’t digged down enough to really tell. I have to subject it to the two vectors of analysis that are required for all interesting new Web applications – what can I use it for and what ideas can I steal for my own applications? ...

Congratulations to the guys from Upcoming.org for their acquisition by Yahoo. You can read Andy Baio’s take on it over at waxy.org. The three creators of the site will be working at Yahoo, and I’m sure they were paid for their troubles as well. Not only is this great news for them, but it’s great news for the little guy in general. It’s always nice to be reminded that if you build something cool in your spare time, it can turn into something much bigger. ...

Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson argues that you should keep your business logic in your business layer rather than in your database. In other words, leave those stored procedures, triggers, and constraints aside. This is a debate that I’ve had many times on various projects. I’ve walked into a room more than once and had to face down a customer who wanted to restrict all access to the database to an API composed of stored procedures that my code could call. I’ve won every time but one. ...

This is purely a plea for aid, and nothing more. I have Ruby 1.8.2, Rails 0.13.1, and MySQL 4.14 running under Mac OS X 10.4. I have a simple Rails application that works fine, except that most of the time when I try to perform an operation that uses a database transaction, WEBrick hangs. The only way to stop it is to use kill -9 or restart MySQL. Usually the output in the log looks something like this when it hangs: ...

I’m working on a proof of concept Rails project. It’s a relatively simple application that will be a lot more complex down the road, and I need to decide whether it makes sense to write it (and perhaps subsequent applications that are related) in Ruby on Rails, or whether I should write them with the usual stack that I’m more familiar with: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat, etc. While I really like the ease of getting things up and running with Rails, I’m reminded frequently of the value of experience. When something isn’t working right in a Rails application, I have no idea what I need to do to fix it. Five plus years of coding in Java means that I at least know where to start looking when things break. In Rails, I’m clueless, and the framework does a lot of stuff somewhat magically, so popping the hood is that much harder. ...