Simon Willison’s Weblog

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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.

# 11:13 am / airships, airshipventures, staroverlondon, stellaartois, zeppelins

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

# 2:08 pm / databases, postgresql, replication, 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.

# 2:11 pm / bittorrent, impossibox, opentech, opentech2008, pvr, tom-loosemore, tv

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().

# 2:14 pm / django, innodb, mysql, postgresql, python, sqlite, transactions, unittest, unittesting

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.

# 2:15 pm / bill-de-hora, hadoop, java, staticanalysis

It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.

Me, on Twitter

# 5:14 pm / conferences, django, djangocon, events, san-francisco, 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.

# 6:42 pm / civilliberties, digitalrights, openrightsgroup, politics

2008 » July

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