Xeeban’s Musings

The Demo Scene (link may not work) has always facinated me. Programmers gather to produce very compact, very cool programs that show off graphics and music in as little code as possible. The stuff produced is often less than 64k in size, but has enormous amounts of content. Its mind blowing when you see it and realize that there is only 64k of code running these things.

This group has some pretty impressive demos. They have recently released a First Person Shooter (ala Quake) that runs on less than 100k of code. Damn.

MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today launched MySQL Cluster, a new open source database clustering technology for applications requiring continuous availability. MySQL Cluster combines the MySQL? database with a clustering architecture to deliver 99.999 percent availability to mission-critical database applications. It is the first affordable, enterprise-scale database clustering software.

This is very cool! Five 9s reliability in an open source database. Great for those “mission-critical” hobbies =) It looks like its released under a dual license, one open source and one commercial license for software vendors and commercial MySQL customers.

Full press release here.
MySQL Cluster FAQ

I spent a few hours this weekend finishing up my taxes. I am always suprised each year at how much a pain in the butt the whole process is. Luckilly I’ve been using Turbo Tax for the web. Its saved me literally hours of frustration and hassle. Its a nifty web-based program that pretty much walks you through all the details of doing your taxes. It even checks for errors, gives suggestions for missed deductions, and is all around a very cool thing to use.

It just takes a few minutes to get all the various W2, 1099 and other forms you have, log into the website, and a while later you’re all done. Highly recommended. Even better, you can then file electronically and ask that any refunds be sent via direct deposit. No fuss, no mess. We live in glorious times that even tax time is easier.

There is an interesting link via Slashdot this morning called A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools.

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration — why the world’s future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn’t good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of noise is being made about Google’s new web mail service, GMail. But here is a blog entry that talks about the real power of Google and why they are going to dominate the next decade of the Web.

A quote from the blog:

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Here I am with a brand spankin’ new site. Why, you may ask? Well… its a painful story of how a stupid person picked the wrong hosting company and basically lost everything to a hard drive crash. My provider was doing a “routine” upgrade of hardware when there was a problem… then my web site went “black” (off-line, down, buh-bye) for 5 days without a single response to several frantic support tickets. Then on the 5th day, the bad news. Really bad news. They lost a hard drive. A score of customers were affected in some way. A handful lost everything. And, oops, sorry, we don’t have any backups. Yes, I was one of those unlucky few to loose it all. Poof, digital oblivion.

So here I am. New provider (that does regular backups!), new blogging software. Let’s hope that this time I stay around for a while… =)