Posts

Ed Gerck has a really provocative post on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list on the failure of the Copenhagen conference on global warming to produce an agreement that would eventually become legally binding. (The best rundown of the Copenhagen summit comes from BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin.) In it he argues that had countries tried to come together and hammer out a legally binding agreement on the creation of the Internet, there wouldn’t be an Internet. Perhaps an understanding among countries that they will work together will lead to more substantive progress than a treaty that most countries will refuse to ratify anyway. ...

Simon Willison turned up an interesting NoSQL use case in a crowdsourcing application he built for the Guardian. In the first application he built he used MySQL’s ORDER BY RAND(), which is rather inefficient. (For more on its inefficiency, see the comments on this blog post.) The next time around, he outsourced picking out random results to in-memory database Redis: The system maintains a redis set of all IDs that needed to be reviewed for an assignment to be complete, and a separate set of IDs of all pages had been reviewed. It then uses redis set intersection (the SDIFFSTORE command) to create a set of unreviewed pages for the current assignment and then SRANDMEMBER to pick one of those pages. ...

In a review of the exceptionally good Ruby book The Well-Grounded Rubyist, my friend Duff uses the term “axe sharpening day” to describe a day spent honing skills rather than chopping the metaphorical wood. Great coinage.

The argument against gift cards is well known: they’re just cash you can only spend in one place, and they are profitable because people forget to use them or don’t use the entire balance. Andrew Leonard, though, has a good argument in favor of gift cards: So why not just give the boy cash? Surely cash would allow an even more efficient allocation of resources? But cash is inferior, I think, because cash, like it or not, carries with it some assumption of responsibility. You don’t want to waste your cash frivolously, or you might feel compelled to save it for some greater goal. You might end up, horror of horrors, being forced to use it to buy some other kid a birthday present! But a gift-card to, say, GameStop, is a ticket to freedom. Go be frivolous! Buy a game! Buy whatever game you want! It’s better than money because it comes with an explicit, unignorable directive to use it in a way that gives you pleasure. ...

The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down. ...

If you’re a liberal or progressive or whatever, chances are you fall into one of two camps today when it comes to health care reform. Either you’re in this camp (with Ezra Klein): It’s difficult to conclude that these things slip backwards rather than marching forwards. The $900 billion for people who need help, the regulations on insurers and the exchanges that will force them to compete, the structure that will make health care nearly universal and the trends that suggest more people – and more politically powerful people – will be entering the new system as employer-based health care erodes – it all makes this look even more like the sort of program that will take root and be made better, as opposed to the sort of common opportunity people should feel comfortable rejecting. It doesn’t feel like that now. But then, it rarely does. ...

Form expert Luke Wroblewski compares Apple’s revamped checkout process to their old checkout process. If you do any work designing HTML forms at all, you’ll want to check this case study out. I’m particularly interested in the pros and cons of requiring users to enter their city, state, and zip versus entering just the zip and looking up the city and state. Luke has looked at this issue before.

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.” ...

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.” Paul Greenberg: A Fish Oil Story. This is a must-read.

You can just ignore my post from yesterday and read Stephen O’Grady’s late innings Q&A on the Oracle/Sun deal to catch up.