Archive for December 2010

Chrome Web Store – AppStore for Web?

Google recently launched a Chrome Web Store. The web browser has always had an “appstore” model, considering you could have extensions and plugins. Firefox popularised this.

What the Firefox add-on‘s appstore does not have yet, is paid apps. You can donate to applications, but you can’t buy applications. The Chrome Web Store allows purchasing applications, as evidenced by their top paid apps page. We’re generally already used to buying desktop apps (I write this using MarsEdit which I purchased, and on my toolbar I can already see OmniOutliner and TextMate). If the future is living in your web browser, you will end up buying apps within your web browser. Google is pushing this lifestyle with their ChromeOS Cr-48 notebook.

You get everything you need for the Chrome browser in the web store. Apps (extension of web pages), Extensions (your add-ons), Themes and they also have curated collections (holidays, students, et al).

In other news, go download WOT. You don’t even have to restart Chrome to have it working. This is a bonus over installing stuff on Firefox (though I hear, Firefox 4 will allow you to install extensions without restarting the browser too). I also installed Chrome for a Cause during the one week where the more tabs you opened up, the more you could donate for a cause.

Do you have a favourite Chrome extension/app? Anything I must try?

DuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a trust metric partnership

There are two search engines that have promise that made themselves public in 2010: DuckDuckGo and Blekko. DuckDuckGo has active search spam removal, you can access it via secure HTTP (HTTPS), and is a search engine that also relies on crowd sourced data.

Web of Trust has reputation ratings of over millions of websites, and has an active community of about 15 million users now. Best of all, there’s no bots doing these ratings, but community members (trust metrics are crowd sourced).

duckduckgoDuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a partnership now, so you can simply change the settings to display WoT ratings instead of the favicons when a search is done using DuckDuckGo. Visit your settings page and look for Site Icons. Change it from the default of favicons to WoT and you’ll get trust ratings in your search instantly! While you’re there, look at other ways of customising your search experience with DuckDuckGo.

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo is looking for ideas on how he can further integrate the WoT data, and has a thread at the DuckDuckGo community. Feel free to chime in on that, and lets see more search engines implement such data (even though you can already get such data if you have the browser plugin installed).

foss.in 2010

I’ll be going to foss.in this year, and am totally excited (the last time I spoke there was in 2007 – Paying it Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources – where I talked about moving from BitKeeper to Bazaar, using Launchpad, the MySQL Forge, and more). This time around, I will be giving a talk titled: MariaDB: The new M in LAMP. I feel a little nostalgia, because the MySQL ecosystem has evolved a lot since December 2007.

The database crew is going to be strong there, as we also have Gary Pendergast, my friend from MySQL (now Oracle) giving a talk titled: Tuning MySQL for Performance, Stability and Fail Safety.

We figured we’d have some kind of meetup, either over chai or if we can find space to have a little database BoF. If you have any questions, queries, etc. about MariaDB or MySQL, don’t hesitate to find either one of us. If you would like to meetup, shoot me an email: colin[at]montyprogram[dot]com.

foss.in is happening December 15-17 2010 in Bangalore, India. Register now, if you haven’t already. See you there next week!

P/S: I will be there with some Salmiakkikossu to keep the tradition alive!

Using MariaDB in production?

MariaDB 5.1 was released in February 2010. MariaDB 5.2 was released in November 2010. In terms of download numbers of MariaDB binaries from mariadb.org, we’ve seen 4x growth, and this is always good news (yes, we had our best download month in November 2010).

I run MariaDB on about six production servers of mine. All the Monty Program infrastructure that uses a database runs MariaDB (varying from 5.1 and 5.2). Monty Program have customers that are using MariaDB in production, and for that, watch out for some case studies.

Now I’d like to know: are you running MariaDB in a production environment?

Does it power your blog? Does it power a huge number of your servers? Have you migrated from another database? I’d like to know. Please shoot colin[AT]montyprogram[dot]com an email so I get a better feeling of how much MariaDB is being used in production environments. Who knows, it might even make a good case study?

P/S: Don’t forget that you can utilise the Powered by MariaDB badges.


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