The recent hubbub about Delicious got me thinking about bookmarking in general, and brought to mind a long-standing irritation: poorly designed web page titles.

via Daring Fireball: Title Junk.

So heres the cool and sexy part: Symform protects your data through a redundancy mechanism it calls RAID-96. First, your backup data is hacked into 64MB blocks. These blocks are then encrypted using the industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm. They are further chopped into 64 blocks of 1MB each. From those 64 blocks, 32 more parity blocks are computed, allowing you to reconstitute the original 64 1MB blocks from any 64 of the 96 resulting blocks. From there, the 96 1MB blocks are shipped out to 96 other nodes in Symforms Cooperative Storage Cloud.

via A crazy data backup scheme that works.

hmmm. but wouldn’t you need something more? if your data are in the cloud you would need multiple, redundant network connections – that’s RAIN

Summary: Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.

via Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.

Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.

via Whitespace.

Inventor: Ming-Jen Wang

Assignee: LSI Logic Corporation

Primary Examiner: John Breene

Secondary Examiner: Cheryl Lewis

via Linked list – Google Patent Search.

Do I have to pay royalties for my homework in 1979?

Compared to the physical world, one of the online world’s benefits is that items can live in multiple locations. Because websites can classify products and other content along multiple dimensions, they help users navigate locally to related items and provide faceted winnowing of a large product space into manageable shortlists that can satisfy the user’s main requirements.

via Top-10 Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

RENAME TABLE renames the metadata but leaves the old name as a synonym so that triggers, constraints, stored procedures, default, computed by, automatic as, views, etc continue to run. This synonym is required, and should only be deleted if you know there are no dependencies (the simplest of tables). So this is probably not the tool for you.

Instead I’d suggest defining a synonym for use by applications and other definitions. Then you can switch the synonym from one table to the other as required. This scheme works better than views because there is no metadata lock on the synonym name.

I believe the first time I heard about using publically-available Flightstats database for teaching databases was when Jeremy Cole suggested using it in the MySQL training program to demonstrate working with large data sets. I’m not sure it ever got used for that purpose, but others have followed up on the same idea in other contexts. The Flightstats database contains 10 years of US airline flight information, consisting of several Gigabytes of data in a fairly wide table, and so is excellent for talking about optimizations and search strategies.

The article is about book sales, but it really talks about sample databases for demonstration purposes.

By Joe Celko

There is no such thing as a “universal, one-size-fits-all” key. Just as no two sets of entities are the same, the attributes that make them unique have to be found in the reality of the data. You can decide on the kind of key you want to use based on the nature of your particular situation.

Uniqueness is Global, Not Local

Everyone agrees that an identifier should be unique. But new database programmers often think that being locally unique is good enough. This leads them to cheerfully use a proprietary auto-increment or IDENTITY column as a PRIMARY KEY instead of as a proper relational key. Aristotles Law of Identity is usually stated as “A is A,” but there was a lot more to it than a formula. Every entity has a nature and follows its nature; every entity is separate and unique from all others in the universe.

This is neat. I had to have OmniWeb fib about which browser it is, but cool!

(Via Hoffman Labs.)

Searchable

MT is a possibility…