From Fiction to Freedom
Sat, 05/17/2008 - 09:45 — ScreaminIke

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

ParanoidLinux.org

The subquery has to do a join based on the outside id (which happens to be a self join - ie back to the same database table), then we group & order the results together.

select id,
count(outside_example.*),
array_to_string (
array(
select val from example inside WHERE inside.id=outside_example.id
), ','
)
FROM example outside_example
GROUP BY outside_example.id
ORDER BY outside_example.id
;

PostgreSQL & PHP Tutorials - Group Concat - Simple Example

How To Index For Joins With MySQL
From time to time I see people asking "What do I index to join these tables efficiently?" Often, someone just gives them an answer without really explaining the basic theory behind how to index for joins. The purpose of this document is to describe the basic theory behind indexing for joins with MySQL, starting first with a very simple example that demonstrates the basic principle of MySQL joins, and then applying the principle to a more complex 4 table query.

How To Index For Joins With MySQL

Great tool to figure out if buying makes sense.

Is It Better to Buy or Rent? - NYTimes.com

JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)
What’s the JIT?

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.
The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)

Catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games.

When we demo Delicious Library to people, about ⅔ of them instantly say this:

“Wait, I just hold a CD or DVD or video game or book or whatever up to my webcam, and it magically reads the UPC and downloads that item’s cover and all pertinent information about it, and displays all my stuff on photorealistic shelves? I’ll take it! Right now! This is why I bought a computer in the first place! ”

But a few people are skeptical, or slightly less obsessive. “Ok,” they say, “then I have my stuff in my computer. Big whoop. I can just look at my real shelf, right now, for free.”

Delicious Library 2

Now you know what not to say. Here's what you should say:

"This is what my company does..."

It's that simple. What you're trying to do is get potential investors to fantasize about how your product or service will make a boatload of money. They can't fantasize if they don't know what you do. And they don't want to be your friend, mother, or psychiatrist until they understand what you do, so cut the crap and explain what you do.

Sun Small and Medium Business - Guy Kawasaki on Innovations

Summary

Scalability is sometimes called a "non-functional requirement," implying that it is unrelated to functionality, and strongly implying that it is less important. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, I would say, scalability is a prerequisite to functionality - a "priority-0" requirement, if ever there was one.

I hope that you find the descriptions of these best practices useful, and that they help you to think in a new way about your own systems, whatever their scale.

InfoQ: Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, ‘beamed up’ Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a ‘face to face’ discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

Beaming your job to Bangalore using holograms!

Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing

While the pain is still fresh. Let's stop talking about my son. Let's start talking about you. Any by you I mean all the web application developers out there that have been mis-using HTTP. Now I've been telling you over and over how to use HTTP correctly, how to build you web applications in a RESTful manner, and the consequences you could face if you didn't. Well, you didn't listen to me, did you 37Signals? Did you? Now Google releases their Web Accelerator and your application is broken. Apparently you used GET to delete items from Backpack and when Googles Web Accelerator pre-fetches that URI in you web app, items get deleted. Let's make this clear, Google didn't break your application, your application was broken, Google was just the first person to point it out to you. Do you feel the pain? Do you feel it?

"See! See! I told you not to use GET for non-safe and non-idempotent actions! I told you your web applications would break!"

Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | I'm sorry, I can't kiss it and make it better.