1. Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
2. Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
3. Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, …

Congratulations to Khailee for getting GroupsMore sold to Groupon (in a record five months since its inception!). He tells me they’re now Groupon Malaysia and Joel (his partner, co-founder of YouthSays) is going to be CEO of Groupon Malaysia. A lot of people instantly said that since Groupon is now in Malaysia, all the other deal sites can go the way of the dodo.

I don’t think so. For a site that does group purchases to be successful, people need to know it exists. Savvy Malaysians have always been into group purchases because a) our currency generally sucks, b) its difficult to get cool stuff shipped to Malaysia. Of course the currency is improving now, and there are virtual postboxes that ship stuff to Malaysia for a small fee.

But I digress. Group purchasing has been happening for years, heck over a decade. I remember …

For a few years, I've tried to recap here some events I've found notable over the past year and offering some guesses on what might be ahead of us. I'm somewhat late on these things this year, due to being busy with other stuff, but I didn't want to break the tradition, no matter how silly my wrong guesses might seem later. And again, others have covered generals, so I'll try to focus on specifics, in particular as they relate to what I do. For a look at what we achieved for Habbo, see my recap post on the Sulake blog.

This time last year Oracle still had not successfully completed the Sun acquisition due to some EC silliness, but that finally happened over the 2010. It seems to be playing about how I expected it to - …

I did a clean install on my Macbook Pro this morning, part of the clean install means, re-downloading things like MySQL.

When I installed it, I noticed that the pref-pane wouldn’t start MySQL. Even when it asked for my admin password. I thought maybe it was a boot up issue, so I rebooted, and got an error telling me that the permissions for the start up item were in secure.

Here’s what I did to debug/fix the problem.

• Change permission of /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM
• edit /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server and edited line 46 and 47 to say

chown -R root:wheel /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
x

[content_box style="yellow-box" title="Edit mysql.server file"]
basedir=/usr/local/mysql
datadir=/usr/local/mysql/data
[/content_box]

[break]
There is already a …

How I lost 30 pounds in 2010 – a weight loss guide for developers Posted on December 30th, 2010 in blog, personal, zippykid.

2010 was a great year for me, I started a new company, and it’s been profitable since month 2, I closed my consulting company, and most importantly, I lost 30 pounds, and am more mobile/agile than I was in college. I’m 32 and I feel better than I did when I was 24. I’ve talked [...]

View Comments …

When it comes to web page load time, she should always say “wow, that was fast”.

A Quick update based on Frederick’s comment below

** Please do not take these tips as THE answer, this is a complement, not a replacement. I have purposely not given specifics on how to configure anything, or what value to set, because I don’t want people copy pasting things, and then having their site crashing. Regarding mod_pagespeed, I said it’s the most bang for OUR buck.. it’s not recommended in production, nor do we have it on for everyone else. **.

Webpage load time is getting more and more important these days, if you go into Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll see “Site Performance” under the labs link. This is a very good indicator of what Google thinks how fast your site is compared to the rest …

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).

DuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a partnership now, so you can simply change the settings to display WoT ratings instead of the favicons when …

Mat Keep and I will be presenting this free webinar on Wednesday 14 July.

The MEMORY storage engine has been widely adopted by MySQL users to provide near-instant responsiveness with use cases such as caching and web session management. As these services evolve to support more users, so the scalability and availability demands can start to exceed the capabilities of the MEMORY storage engine.

The MySQL Cluster database, which itself can be implemented as a MySQL storage engine, is a viable alternative to address these evolving web service demands. MySQL Cluster can be configured and run in the same way as the MEMORY storage engine (ie on a single host with no replication and no persistence). As web services evolve, any of these attributes can then be added in any combination to deliver higher levels of scalability, …

1. Conflict Minerals and Blood Tech (Joey Devilla) -- electronic components have a human and environmental cost. I remember Saul Griffith asking me, "do you want to kill gorillas or dolphins?" for one component. Now we can add child militias and horrific rape to the list. (via Simon Willison)
2. Meteor -- an open source HTTP server that serves streaming data feeds (for apps that need Comet-style persistent connections). (via gianouts on Delicious)
3. …

The replay of this webinar is now available from http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-545.html

MySQL and memcached has become, and will remain, the foundation for many dynamic web services with proven deployments in some of the largest and most prolific names on the web. There are classes of web services however that are update-intensive, demanding real-time responsiveness and continuous availability. In these cases, MySQL Cluster provides the familiarity and ease-of-use of the regular MySQL Server, while delivering significantly higher levels of write performance with less complexity, lower latency and 99.999% availability. This webinar will discuss the use-cases for both approaches, and provide an insight into how MySQL Cluster is enabling users to scale their update-intensive web services.

The …