Monday, 7th July 2008
Up Ship!: New Branding. I hadn’t realised the Airpship Ventures Zeppelin (en route to San Francisco) is going to be used for the Stella Artois Star Over London promotion—they’ve just changed the livery.
Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication into core PostgreSQL, so as to leave room for development of competing solutions [...] However, it is becoming clear that this policy is hindering acceptance of PostgreSQL to too great an extent, compared to the benefit it offers to the add-on replication projects. Users who might consider PostgreSQL are choosing other database systems because our existing replication options are too complex to install and use for simple cases.
— Tom Lane
OpenTech 2008 “Impossibox” presentation. One of my favourite Open Tech sessions—Tom Loosemore describes the “Impossibox”, a cloud of PVRs collaborating to transcode and share “all decent UK TV for a year” via BitTorrent.
Django Unit Tests and Transactions. If you’re using a transactional database engine (MySQL with InnoDB, Postgres or SQLite) you can speed things up by running each of your unit tests inside a transaction and rolling back in tearDown().
3 and 1/2 minutes to sort a Terabyte, and a look at Hadoop’s code structure. Bill de hÓra uses some clever static analysis tools to explore Hadoop’s 100,000+ lines of code.
It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.
— Me, on Twitter
Growing the ORG community. The Open Rights Group want a fiver a month from 750 new people to support their excellent work fighting for digital civil liberties in the UK political arena. Going by their past performance this is a very worthwhile investment.