Colin Charles Agenda

The NoSQL/relational database debate has been going on for quite some time. MariaDB, like MySQL is relational. And if you read these series of blog posts, you’ll realise that if you use MySQL correctly, you can achieve quite a lot.

1. It all starts with Kellan Elliott-McCrea with his introductory post on Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr. Follow the entire series.
2. He starts of the series with Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap. Flickr scales using shards, and ticket servers give unique integers to serve as PKs.
3. Richard Crowley talks about OpenDNS MySQL abuses. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but it shows MySQL getting the job done.
4. Mikhail Panchenko talks about using The Federated engine for his series.

If you’re using the Federated engine, know that MySQL disables FEDERATED by default. In MariaDB 5.1.42, you get FederatedX, which is a maintained fork of FEDERATED, by the author himself! Bugs are fixed, and this is a supported engine, so if you’re using the FEDERATED engine, it might be wise to try out FederatedX.

I’d also like to bring to attention, an interesting essay by Dennis Forbes: Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie. Monty says: “NoSQL is for very smart people who need a very sharp knife. People who are not capable of mastering SQL should not even attempt to try out NoSQL.”

Found a cool Malaysian company, eoe. They apparently have physical stores, but what’s cool about them is online printing of photos — something which I believe is totally new in Malaysia.

They’re cheap – RM0.30/4R print. They’re even trying the viral marketing thing – get bloggers to write about them (no, I am not participating) in exchange for free photos.

I might try there services at some stage, but not today. Why? Because I have to upload photos through my browser. Their “Easy Upload” app displays a silly message saying they don’t support Firefox (so I don’t get the fancy pants editing of images, et al.).

<free advice>If they want to be a smarter Malaysian company, they would partner with Flickr, and harness the Flickr API, so that people can make easy prints from Flickr. After all, advertising for Flickr is already done for free, thanks to Maxis (they love advertising Flickr and how easy it is to use on their phone network). Printing images that are already there, rather than re-uploading (with slow, unreliable Streamyx) will make a whole lot more sense. Besides, each photo coming out of my camera, is probably 5MB in size — so I’ll pass.</free advice>

Here’s wishing Eoe much success, and hope they partner with the likes of Flickr, or just harness their darned API, for easy printing.

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos – this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, and they make use of InnoDB. Recently, Chief Operations Officer, John Allspaw, showed how fragmented one of their databases was. Reminds us all, that running optimize from time to time, is useful. Flickr is also using MySQL 5.0.51 currently.

Flickr make extensive use of Ganglia. I found that there are Ganglia graphs for MySQL metrics available now. Interesting stuff.

Today I read that co.mments bit the dust. Another web service (who remembers the I Want Sandy discussion a while back), ceasing to exist (though from what I see, a lot of folk are using Disqus more).

It got me a little worried. I rely quite a bit on online services.

• Bookmarking, once previously living in my bookmark.htm file, now is shared on delicious. It has proven to be invaluable, storing 3,108 bookmarks. They are a Yahoo! run company.
• Photo storage and sharing, once previously sitting in directories on my web server, are now kept on my Flickr account. Flickr is great, because I can share photos with just friends, family, or participate in a vibrant community of photo enthusiasts. I currently have 16,813 items stored there, with backups on various media sitting in my various homes. They are a Yahoo! run company, and I happily pay them for a Pro account.
• I depend on Google Reader (read my shared items) to read RSS feeds. In fact, I have been sharing items as a form of bookmarking them. Ditto with adding stars to items. Don’t say Google doesn’t close services – they have.
• I use Google Calendar, because it simply rocks. I also use Google Docs, and I also use GMail (hosted, and regular).
• I use Twitter, who has no business model, as of yet. I like it over FriendFeed for one minor detail – I can update via SMS.

Most of these services have ways for you to get your data out of them, assuming they don’t exist in due time. But what will replace them?

Sure there are desktop applications. But with the variety of devices I utilise, I’m trying to cut down from using desktop applications and just focus on working online. In fact, all that is open now is Firefox, Adium, iTunes, TextMate (where I carve this text out), Terminal, Skype and twhirl. On my work laptop, its just Thunderbird, Firefox, Terminal, and Skype that’s open.

So maybe I need less desktop applications. It’s good, because that’s the hope of online services – live right in your browser.

But in tough(er) times, what do you do if the online service you use, disappears? Where’s the continuity (i.e. will my grandkids be able to browse my Flickr photo albums?)

I do wonder, if this will lead to more open source, peer-to-peer/federated run, online services. Like if Twitter folds up, who’s to say its excellent community won’t move to identi.ca ? (till then though, the latter probably doesn’t stand a chance, besides the very geeky top-of-the-trend open source folk…)

I have always been excited about location based services. I’ve found it daft that its taken so long to get a camera integrated with a GPS chip for this amount of time, considering how cheaply available GPS chips are.

Yes, its taken a while for me to go the GPS-phone route… Nokia has had a bunch for a year-18 months already I’m sure (their Navigator phones, the N95, etc.), but for me it all came with the E71 purchase.

I like photos. Its quite natural, that I like Flickr. Its also nice to know that EXIF has so many unused fields, that you can embed location data. Flickr takes the embedded location data and then pairs it with a map. Just look at the following photo of a garden.

The meta information includes Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, as well as GPS Time/GPS Date. The Time/Date fields seem inaccurate (or non-parsed), but the Latitude, Longitude and possibly the Altitude are very correct.

Unfortunately, when I click “map”, I am disappointed. “We’re sorry, the data you have requested is unavailable. Please zoom out to see more map information or refresh your browser to try again” is the sad message I see. Yahoo! Maps doesn’t work too well… but…. Google Maps does! I enter the latitude/longitude combination, and it shows me street level accuracy. In fact, the phone’s GPS picked up the data almost as accurately as a device from Garmin did.

Flickr (and by this I mean, Yahoo!) should tear down the walled garden, and allow people to let the “map” link point to Google Maps.

How does all this work?
In Flickr, make sure you allow it to Import EXIF location data.

On the E71, I installed Nokia Location Tagger. I run this application, allow it to auto-hide, and the camera does its thing. The only way I know Location Tagger is running, is when taking a photo, has a significant lag, as the GPS data is being written. This software can start in the background – just make sure you have a fairly sensible data plan.

I upload images either via Share Online (direct to Flickr from the camera) or via transferring the images to my laptop and then uploading them. The way it gets to Flickr is immaterial – the location data is embedded in the EXIF tags.

Other thoughts
Some say this is a violation of one’s privacy. Because now, people may know where you live, and stalkers may show up. Sure.

I’ve seen examples of this on Picasa (which integrates with Google Maps, and is cool), but I haven’t used the service myself.

Searching for Creative Commons photos, by location, can be a really useful technology for stock photography. Might this disrupt the industry? Might this help, enhance the industry for someone who harnesses it?