A few weeks ago I got a copy of "High Performance MySQL" (from now on referred to as HPM) and just the other day they also send me "Refactoring SQL Applications" (aka "RSA"). Actually I had a copy of HPM at the office already, but its nice to have my own, seeing that its already severely beating up from having to live in my backup. Good to have a neat copy for the company book shelve. I have gotten to chapter 4. So far there has not been all that much earth shattering, but considering the hours I spend reading posts on planetmysql, I guess its not a huge surprise. But at the same time there is also nothing I feel is missing, so in the sense this book fulfills my expectations 100%: its a well written summary of advanced techniques that people have found in the trenches. And yes of course I did learn a few things still.

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.