PostgreSQL stuff

I really don't know if this is funny or sad:

In an article at High Scalability this article explaining HBase on a conceptual level was referenced. It's a very good starting point for understanding the basic concept of HBase (and BigTable) and it's no more than a five minute read.

Meet the Meeting Ticker.

Thanks Josh Berkus for hinting about The Manga Guide to Databases! Just placed my order for a copy of this must have. :-D

This is just so geeky but I can't help myself. I think it's fun!

Epoch Time 1234567890 countdown to the big party on Friday.

Remember to bring your best party hat. :-)

I just read blog post about the benefits of working from home.

Apart from the obvious benefits it concentrates on the focus span, the importance of being able to get in, and stay in, the zone when programming.

In addition to the benefits described in the post I would like to add that when working in a distributed environment it forces you to write things down; write a mail, discuss things on IRC (of course everyone saves their logs!), describe a solution or work flow on a wiki. This way things doesn't get lost due to not getting written down.

This is highly off topic but ...

While watching The Animatrix a philosophical question came into mind:

"Would intelligent machines evolve on their own given no outside input or would they just strive to sustain status quo?"

Any thoughts on this?

Max Indelicato, who's blog I occasionally read, posted an entry with the nice long title The I.H.S.D.F. Theorem: A Proposed Theorem for the Trade-offs in Horizontally Scalable Systems.

Now, I'm not crazy about abbreviations. I think there are far too many of them thrown around mostly causing confusion without being useful.

This article is one of those articles I wish management would read (and understand!) since this is one of those failed communications issues between management, the system architect and the developer. A good architect would make management understand the problems faced and which trade offs are made (and what implications they will have on the future system). This is, in my limited experience, seldom the case (and since developers in general is terrible at, or just don't care to, explaining this will become a potential bomb).

When bloging about PostgreSQL and programming I often want to post code examples. The platform I'm using doesn't support automatic syntax highlightning (and sometimes I want to create a stand alone HTML page with syntax highlightning too).

Since I use Vim as my editor I make use of the command :TOhtml.

I find it convinient to make use of the CSS type of conversion insted of the default one and then just copy the contents of the body from the converted text to my blog entry. I already have my own settings for the code highlight in my own style.css.

I also finds it very useful to use TOhtml on conjunction with visual mode to convert only a part of a source to HTML.

Working from the command line is also an option. Example:

$ vim -c 'TOhtml' -c 'wqa' myscript.sql

The above exampel generates a file myscript.sql.html.

Finally an example of a highlighted file:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Say hello to the world.
"""

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print "Hello World!"

# vi: set fileencoding=utf-8 :