1. Defragging the Stimulus -- each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery data.
2. Memetracker -- site accompanying the research written up by the New York Times as Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million …

Some unsettling things happened in MySQL in the past week or so.

New storage engine not mentioned in the changelog

There’s a bit of a storm brewing over at the MySQL Performance Blog, where Vadim reports discovering a new storage engine added without mention in the 5.1.33 changelog. This is in defiance of the policy of not making changes in a production release. And it certainly belongs in the changelog — but there is no sign that anyone will remedy this problem.

Arjen Lentz, who is ex-MySQL and was Employee #25, reported a bug on the licensing of this storage engine. To my eyes, the engine’s license does not look right to include in a GPL database. Arjen agrees.

But the …