beer planet

By now I think most everyone has used Google maps and seen the street view feature. Lately the maps team has been doing an amazing job covering the bay area, so now you can literally walk the streets for hours.

Virtual walking aside, there are some really creative uses of this feature posted in this video by the Google team today. I never myself thought to check my own street for street cleaning signs - saves a trip downstairs! Or look at the toll road prices (like the Bay bridge toll). Or at least watch people falling off their bikes. Anyway, just watch the video (thanks to zefrank for posting it).

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL - the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster - parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database - definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) - should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features - an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications - more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment - I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL - tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System - sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design - I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL - sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) - more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) - even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database - by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle - probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks - more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures - man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime - by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP - by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?

Courtesy of OSnews. This comic still cracks me up, weeks after I saw it. It's one of those comics that your CS teacher would print out and slap on his door, so that in the moments of doom students would at least have something humorous to look at. Here it is:

This is going to be epic.