Monthly Archives: November 2006

MySQL Camp Google Notes

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

Continue reading MySQL Camp Google Notes

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.

Boxely Gone

I blogged about Boxely a few days ago, it seemed like a neat framework. I’ve been thinking more about the desktop the past month or so, hence my blogging around it. Joe has updated saying “Well, that was fun while it lasted. AOL has taken down the site already. Apparently not all executives in the company were aware of the release, and ordered it removed when they caught wind.” On the other side of the web Jason Calacanis is waving the AOL banner, yet a company that stifles innovation like this and flip-flops releases isn’t one I would invest in. Is this a continuation of Nullsoft-style rebels inside of AOL fighting to make a difference? Update: It’s back!

Firefox Followup: Parakey

Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross’ secret new project, Parakey. It gets to the meat on the third page.

“Although it looks like a Web site–down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section–it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”

It uses a new language called JUL. I haven’t found anything about Parakey online, besides Parakey.com registered about a month ago. Most disappointing quote from the article?

“If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”

I’m guessing this might be a misquote. Investors are for money, advice, and connections, not product leadership. There are good examples now of scalable businesses being built on top of open source — don’t let anyone take you down a path you can’t believe in 100%. Think long term. I don’t know who Parakey’s investors are, but I’m sure Blake hooked up with (or could demand) folks smart enough to understand this.

Update: Blake says in the comments, “That is, indeed, a misquote. Parakey will be open source, as I repeatedly told the magazine while the article was being edited.”