Archive for July 2009

RethinkDB all the rage today

RethinkDB is all the rage today, as its a Y Combinator funded startup, which also launched a developer pre-alpha today. So what is RethinkDB you ask? Yet-another-MySQL-storage-engine, that’s what. But this time, its tuned for solid-state drives (SSDs), which also happen to be all the rage these days.

Anyway, check them out more, and the materials currently tell me that they’re using append-only algorithms, which allow for live schema changes and hot backups, with instantaneous recovery from power failure. Those are just some of the exciting bits.

What didn’t excite me so much was the fact that you were only getting 32-bit or 64-bit Linux binaries, built against MySQL 5.1.31 and you’ll just install it via the INSTALL PLUGIN option. But they are trying to get some semblance of a community growing, with their getting involved page, filled with some papers, as well as a support mailing list (I see Mark Callaghan is already busy asking them questions). And of course you can follow them on their blog, or on Twitter. All this without source ;-)

One of the developers also confirmed that they’re adding “features required by WordPress so we could eat our own dogfood”. They haven’t started profiling (much yet?), and they’ve probably got ways to go on performance. Seems like “getting it working for WordPress”, is slowly becoming a good testing ground – Jeff Waugh did so for WordPress and Drizzle, too.

Anyway, it seems like its time to get some SSDs, as we start seeing things like this pop up. RethinkDB will also face another problem for mass adoption – how many hosting providers are using SSDs? Probably not many (if at all).

Have you tried RethinkDB? Your thoughts?

ChurpChurp: Nuffnang’s new Twitter offering

I’ve written about Nuffnang in the past, but today, I will focus on their new service ChurpChurp. This is Nuffnang’s latest foray into the advertising space – they’re into Twitter advertising. All Singapore and Malaysian Twitter users, this is something you should read about and understand.

This isn’t new

Twitter advertising has been around for about a year, with the first service that launched, being Magpie. This is similar to what ChurpChurp is – it identifies campaigns, matches them, and will then automatically tweet them for you (visually, how it works).

Magpie allows you to pre-approve all magpie-tweets before it goes out there an automatically posts them. Its not clear if this is just an option or something that happens all the time – auto-posting at random seems more interesting eh?

Magpie has a tweet average – once every ten tweets – by default. You can change the ratio (to once every 200 tweets too, it seems). Magpie supports disclosure, via a customised disclaimer, so you can have a hashtag to say it is sponsored. You can read this and more in their FAQ.

Disclosure is encouraged even via IZEA (the people that mass marketed sponsored conversations). They also have Sponsored Tweets, a yet to be launched service.

And in quick Googling, I also found RevTwt.

ChurpChurp

Register Twitter « ChurpChurp A quick view of ChurpChurp, without signing up (the last thing I want is my followers to be spammed). The registration page is most interesting, considering they use your age, race and religion potentially, for targeting purposes. They quite blatantly state: “Although optional, depending on the country you are in, we may use race and/or religion to target sponsored posts.”.

Register Twitter « ChurpChurp But Nuffnang has always shone because they err on the side of fun – they associate themselves with alcohol and possibly tobacco (I can’t remember a recent tobacco related campaign) related companies, and its no different on ChurpChurp. Imagine following funny-man Kenny Sia, and he tweets something like:

Just had a smoke. The menthol feels so good, you should definitely give it a try http://www.ciggies.com.my/ #churp2

But that’s a matter for another day. Alcohol related advertisements are rife in the Malaysian blogosphere, and I can almost guarantee that all readers aren’t of the legal drinking age.

How does ChurpChurp work? Two ways: automated insertions, or via customised insertions with just the appropriate keyword and link. The automated insertions might be easy to figure out, but the customised insertions with just a keyword, and potentially a different shortened URL (for tracking purposes, quite naturally)? Without disclosure, this could potentially be great for advertisers, and in fact, unsuspecting Twitter users will fall prey to ads too. I should make mention that ChurpChurp does support disclosure.

ChurpChurp has an FAQ for Twitterer’s as well as one for advertisers. There’s an interesting list of items that ChurpChurp will not advertise for.

ChurpChurp has defaults – up to 10 ads per week – but this can be customised. You can cash out after earning RM100/SGD100, and I wonder if the rates for the “chosen ones” go up higher enabling them to cash out faster? Or are “chosen ones” really chosen based on Twitter follower count? Remember, if chosen ones are based on follower count, it changes quite rapidly, as and when Twitter decides to clean out spam accounts.

Does this work?

Magpie has been around for a while and seems to not be going anywhere. In fact, I even follow one Magpie advertiser, @WoNoJo. He tells me that he’s just experimenting with Magpie, and I find his other tweets have more value, so I still listen to what he has to say.

That may seem like a blatant “OK” to this ChurpChurp idea, but it isn’t. Remember, you are enabling Churpers, and you can stop by just unfollowing them.

Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr, has published a telling piece on how he used Magpie and what he thinks about it in: In-Stream Twitter Advertising: Does It Work?. All potential ChurpChurp advertisers should be reading this.

I’m following someone who’s Churp-polluting my stream. What can I do?

If you value his/her tweets, tell them via an @reply that you do not like it. Direct message them if they follow you.

Alternatively, you can always unfollow them.

However, if you feel strongly about this, feel free to drop a direct message to the @spam account on Twitter. Gareth tells me in a comment that its best to direct message the @spam account on Twitter, so as not to mistake your account as a spam account too.

I’m thinking of joining ChurpChurp, should I?

Well, quite simply, you should not. But the promise of earning money is there, right? Just ask yourself: do you want to alienate your followers?

Also, please look at Twitter’s terms of service – #8 states You must not create or submit unwanted email to any Twitter members (“Spam”)..

Anything else?

I invite you to share your comments about ChurpChurp in the comments section. On Twitter, it seemed like most people weren’t too thrilled with Nuffnang polluting the Twitterverse, but it was only a matter of time after they had polluted the blogosphere.

Update: Thanks to Gareth for telling me in comment #1 that its best to direct message and not @reply the spam account on Twitter.

What Wikipedia looks like when their database goes away


This wiki has a problem

An unknown error connecting to MySQL on 10.0.6.28? Oh dear me… It came back up within 2 minutes though from the time I got the screenshot.

Yasmin Ahmad at TEDxKL

Yasmin Ahmad passed away recently, and I guess I was lucky to hear her speak. Her inspiring talk was given at TEDxKualaLumpur, on 3rd June 2009 and in my books, was the best talk of TEDxKL.

There is supposed to be video, but that never made it online as of yet, so while this isn’t a transcript, these are excerpted from my notebook.

  • How do you choose an actor? charisma. You need to display charisma.
  • Learn to let go – “empty yourself”. The advice here is to create great stuff, then move back. Its the key to happiness. This is a common mantra in Zen Buddhism.
  • Observe.
  • Remove one’s arrogance, and once self importance. You’ll then be part of something larger.
  • “I don’t know anything about film making. I just empty myself.”

Her talk garnered many laughs from the crowd. She didn’t stick around for TEDxKL much, rushing on to her next gig, but I think her talk certainly moved people in the audience.

I haven’t had the chance to watch any of her movies yet (I was just a fan of her inter-racial 1Malaysia muhibbah styled-ads). Surprised I was that none of them made it to the Malaysian Film Festival held two years ago in Melbourne. They’re high on my to-buy-and-watch list now, so I do hope the local Speedy has her DVDs in stock.

Update: (30/07/2009) Her video from the talk has made it online!


Some Planet MySQL changes over time

First up: I normally read Planet MySQL from an RSS reader. I am assuming you do too. But in the interest of all the new features that the website itself has, I thought I’d take some time to talk about them in brief (to respect your time). Needless to say, go forth and check out Planet MySQL if you’ve not been there in a while.

A change in URL

We used to go to http://planetmysql.org but now it redirects to http://planet.mysql.com/.

Its also worth noting that from a Google PageRank of 8, Planet MySQL has dropped to a PageRank of 6. One wonders why?

Voting

Planet MySQL voting internalSometimes, Planet MySQL has got totally unrelated posts. They might be press releases that no one likes, or a post like this, which talks about Planet MySQL. Planet MySQL is after all touted as “Your blogs, news and opinions”, so I guess this post is in line with that. So unless I’m blatantly selling sexually enhancing drugs, or talking about thing that are unrelated to MySQL, I don’t think one should be voting down such a post. Anyway, I digress.

You get 5 votes per 24-hour period. This is to probably prevent gaming the system. And there’s visual appeal too, to voting. Planet MySQL - voting

Anyway, you can see the top voted (last week), and top voted (last month), on the left hand column of planet now. So if you want something to be located prominently, start getting your friends to “digg” the site ;)

Searching

searching
A feature that is not talked about often enough… Everytime the planet crawls your site (:20 minutes off the hour, if I remember correctly), it slurps the entire page. Sure, it displays it as an excerpt (so we don’t take away Google juices from you), but we do keep a massive archive of all planet postings… So even if your blog goes away from the Internet, it will always live on in the archives.

Its worth noting its searchable! So maybe you read something that’s interesting two years ago, but have no idea what its about. You can search, even by tags. Wow! I think this could be a pretty useful feature, if using Google itself, has failed you…

Tags

In WordPress, there are options for “tags” and “categories”. Tags only came around relatively recently, it was always categories previously. Now, SimplePie reads those tags when it slurps the entire page, and it gets displayed. When logged in, you can even edit the tags. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to quite work yet, even when logged in. Maybe I just found a bug, let me report it…

Buzz

Have you seen MySQL Buzz? Its a dashboard, showing you where people talk about MySQL in its entirety – voted entries, forums, Google love, and those fabulous word frequency clouds!

Today, I noticed that on Planet, we’ve seen famous words like: data, database, time, server, innodb, chrome, table, performance. In the Forums, its quite different: string, long, table, null, insert, code. Ha!

Anything else?

Go forth and vote for this post, if you’ve read this far. Next time, I’ll talk about the Librarian after I’ve tried it out. A post like this would never make it there (since this is very community focused), but think of it like a knowledge base/bank and it can be rather powerful.

Google Summer of Code in the mid-term

We had 12 projects, and by the time we’ve hit mid-terms, we’ve decided to cull 2 project so far, leaving us with 10 projects.

This year, the MySQL project can really divide itself into three groups – those hacking on MySQL, Drizzle, or phpMyAdmin. Next year, will we see others? I certainly hope so…

Drizzle – Padraig O’Sullivan is doing an excellent job at working on a new implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Nathan Williams is doing great work at code cleanup for Drizzle, and making it conform to C++ standards. Jiangfeng Peng is hacking on batch nested loop join’s in Drizzle.

phpMyAdmin – Derek Schaefer is adding import improvements to phpMyAdmin, while Tomas Srnka is working on adding MySQL Replication support for phpMyAdmin (and impressing his mentor!). Zahra Naeem is working on change tracking of data/structures, and you’d expect some more work after the mid-term, once some problems are worked through.

MySQL – Joseph Lukas is working on new commands to allow the changing of session variables temporarily as needed in a query. Haihao Tang is working on WL#4034, which is focused around the I_S storage engine. Tulay Meuzzinoglu is working on an SQL optimiser for mod_ndb, and there’s a lot of good stuff already going into the codebase, as is.

Common problems? Timezones and language barriers. How do other open source projects deal with this?

Much thanks to all the mentors who are doing a great job! If you want to keep track, either watch the individual Launchpad accounts, or check out the summer of code list for weekly progress reports


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