Introduction

PostgreSQL is the most advanced and flexible Open Source SQL database today. With this power and flexibility comes a problem. How do the PostgreSQL developers tune the default configuration for everyone? Unfortunately the answer is they can't.

Really good, comprehensive introduction to tuning Postgres.

Performance Tuning PostgreSQL

Pawpaw (Asimina) is a genus of eight or nine species of small trees with large leaves and fruit, native to eastern North America. The genus includes the largest edible fruit indigenous to the continent. They are understory trees found in deep fertile bottomland and hilly upland habitat. Pawpaw is in the same family (Annonaceae) as the custard-apple, cherimoya, sweetsop, ylang-ylang and soursop, and it is the only member of that family not confined to the tropics.

Flowers that smell like rotting flesh, and tasty too!

Pawpaw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The US banking system faces losses of over $3,000bn. Japan is in a depression. China is headed for zero growth. Some still hope that urgent surgery can restore the status quo. But more feel that we are at one of those rare points of inflection when nothing is the same again.

But if one dream is over, what other dreams wait in the shadows? Will capitalism adapt? Or should we be asking again one of the great questions which has animated political life for nearly two centuries: what might come after capitalism?
Only a few years ago that question had been parked, deemed about as sensible as asking what would come after electricity. Global markets had pulled China and India into their orbit, and capitalism’s triumph appeared complete, with medievalist Islam and the ragged armies that surround the G8 summits jostling to be its last enfeebled competitor. Multinational companies were said to command empires greater than most nation states, and in some accounts had won the affiliation of the masses through their brands.

OOooooh you gonna sit there and take this stuff, Fukuyama? Where's your last man now?

After capitalism

However, one still cannot sail against to the wind purely by tacking the sail. To do this, one needs to not just harness the power of the wind, but also that of the water beneath the sailboat, thus exploiting (barely) the third available dimension. By combining the use of a sail in the air with the use of sails in the water - better known as keels, rudders, and hydrofoils - one can now sail in certain directions against the wind, and at certain speeds. In most sailboats, one relies primarily on the keel, which lets one sail against the wind but not directly opposite it. But if one tacks the rudder or other hydrofoils as well as the sail, then in fact one can (in principle) sail in arbitrary directions (including those directly opposite to v_0), and in arbitrary speeds (even those much larger than |v_0|), although it is quite difficult to actually achieve this in practice. It may seem odd that the water, which we are assuming to be calm (i.e. traveling at zero velocity) can be used to increase the range of available velocities and speeds for the sailboat, but we shall see shortly why this is the case.

Sailing into the wind, or faster than the wind « What’s new

I learned exactly seven things at Stanford Graduate School of Business getting an MBA degree in 1972. I always used them and never wavered. They were principles that enabled me to put the cookbook formulas that everyone revered in context and in perspective. I think they served my clients (and perhaps me) rather well. Here are those seven principles, and who taught them to me:nullnull

What they Used to Teach You at Stanford Business School - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com

Next-generation DNA sequencing machines are generating an enormous amount of sequence data, placing unprecedented demands on traditional single-processor read mapping algorithms. CloudBurst is a new parallel read-mapping algorithm optimized for mapping next-generation sequence data to the human genome and other reference genomes, for use in a variety of biological analyses including SNP discovery, genotyping, and personal genomics. It is modeled after the short read mapping program RMAP, and reports either all alignments or the unambiguous best alignment for each read with any number of mismatches or differences. This level of sensitivity could be prohibitively time consuming, but CloudBurst uses the open-source Hadoop implementation of MapReduce to parallelize execution using multiple compute nodes.

CloudBurst's running time scales linearly with the number of reads mapped, and with near linear speedup as the number of processors increases. In a 24-processor core configuration, CloudBurst is up to 30 times faster than RMAP executing on a single core, while computing an identical set of alignments. In a large remote compute clouds with 96 cores, CloudBurst reduces the running time from hours to mere minutes for typical jobs involving mapping of millions of short reads to the human genome. CloudBurst is available open-source as a model for parallelizing other bioinformatics algorithms with MapReduce.

SourceForge.net: CloudBurst - cloudburst-bio

Now that the catastrophe is here, Taleb's anger at the economic establishment that drove us over this cliff—and populates the Journal's conference—makes him a representative figure of ordinary people. Like most Americans, Taleb is seething with rage about the financial establishment's role in bringing the about credit crash. "Nobody saw the crisis coming," he says. "Bernanke, all these guys, I want them out. They proved incompetent, they crashed the plane."

Mr. Taleb Goes to Washington: A black swan meets some ugly ducklings. | The Big Money

David Coombs is a high-tech guy with a low-tech hobby.

The CEO of software development startup Coreopsys Inc. raises Tennessee fainting goats as a hobby.

Software CEO raises ‘fainting goats’ for fun - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

...

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

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The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone

If you have an unwieldy text file that you are trying to process, splitting it in sections can sometimes help processing time, especially if we were going to import a file into a spreadsheet. Or you might want to just retrieve a particular set of lines from a file.

Enter split, wc, tail, cat, and grep. (don't forget sed and awk). Linux contains a rich set of utilities for working with text files on the command line. For our task today we will use split and wc.

Split a text file in half (or any percentage) on Ubuntu Linux :: the How-To Geek