This blog is about OurDelta, my visit to PGDay (and resulting quest to search for a good nntp reader for OSX) and my long term search for a good set of bluetooth stereo headsets. So lets start with OurDelta. The other day Arjen pokes me about OurDelta. The idea is to offer a place for distribution of all those tasty MySQL patches that float around the web (like from Mark, the Google guys etc.), that simply do not fit in MySQL's research schedule. Obviously this is awesome. There are packages for all sorts of distros (I am sure Windows will come one of these days too), which takes away some of the scaryness for people not comfortable with building things themselves. Moreover you know that there are other people that are using the same binaries and I guess one of the key things that OurDelta could build is a better way to communicate about success and failure when using some of these patches.

So what do namespaces and playlists have to do with each other? Nothing of course. I am just mixing a short note that PHP 5.3 alpha3 is still delayed because of the lack of a decision on how namespaces are supposed to work, with one more genius idea I want to get published, before some idiot goes to patent town with it (though I heard that if someone is quick enough one can even get a legal patent of something that has been published shortly before a patent submission was made). So todays topic are playlists, or rather what I shall label "semi-manual continuous playlists".

While I am spewing out idea to help save the world from search engine abusers, I should also add that I am surprised that social networks have not yet been leveraged more to reduce spam. For example while I may not want my entire social network (especially 2nd and 3rd degree contacts) in my address book, I still might want them to be not marked as spam (or at least be considered less likely to be spam). Furthermore it would be kind of convenient to see where and to what degree I am connected to people right in my email client. Again this would help me weed out false positives or increase the chances of me reading the email more quickly.

While Yahoo and Google show off their search-index sizes, I am waiting for some real innovation in the way that search results are presented. For example my number one gripe with search engines is that I mostly get redundant content and that links are returned that simply give me a link which contains my search term.

Here is a little tid bit about a useful MySQL extension to the SQL standard, since I have given this same hint to several people in a short timeframe. A good friend from good old Berlin who runs a site for selling car parts was the first to ask, so I am giving him credit for bringing this nifty operator back to mind. Essentially the problem is that frequently we want to easily handle matching against some value or NULL with the same code. Obviously the standard expects you to switch from the standard equal operator to "IS" for matching a NULL. After all NULL is not equal to anything. Right, but its tedious to handle this in the code so MySQL invented the "<=>" operator aka the "NULL-safe equal to operator". Also very useful in combination with prepared statements.