Inlaws Siege Update

When coming back from darkest Kent on Sunday I got a gargled message saying my Mother in Law had been evacuated by armed police due to my Father in law running amok. This is what happens when you rely upon a 10 year talking a phone message and allowing the wife to get the completely wrong end of the stick when he passes the message on and she can't make contact with her parents. Now I know Tom's home brew is a bit on the wild side but I couldn't quite believe that Tom would snap and then start waving a sword around at his age.

In actual fact both of my in laws had been asked to stay at their sisters home while a mini armed siege developed in a house a few doors down. Anyway full(er) details can be seen here: Armed excitement in Carlton in Lindrick.

Twitter...hum

For the last few weeks I've been using twitter to update my Facebook status. For those who don't know what twitter is asks the simple questions: what are you doing? then allowing you only 140 characters to reply! The ui is simple, a text box and an update button.

Twitter has been described as  Micro blogging  using the discipline of the small message size found in SMS combined with the user interactivity of IM. What's clever is that twitter allows you to follow other users (or twitters) feeds. This creates a dynamic community of short posts, with the twitters you follow updating their feeds in almost real time. You can pose questions to your followers and post directly to other users.

A community of sites has built up as an eco system of complentary sites.  Twitter hasn't yet really taken of on this side of the Atlantic compared to the US, where some of the Web 2.0 hero's can claim upwards of 20000 followers. I currently have 10 followers and follow 20 or so. I've struggled to convince friends to take it up but I'm sure in a few months it will be the 'site de jour'.

One of the challenges with technologies such as Twitter is the ability to build an application that unexpectedly capture the moment and have to scale to massive volumes. Twitter uses the LAMP technology stack so the db layer is MYSQL which is being see very heavy db writes to support the application. I'm not sure that currently MSSQL has the answers for providing this sort of scalability and responsiveness. Oracle has Times Ten (in memory single process space) or Coherence (multi process scalability). Although some users have 20000 followers the big challenge will be when a major celeb like a Paris Hilton starts using Twitter and draws in hundred's of thousands of followers.

Kevin Rose said that Digg.com was built originally to support 100k hits per month - currently they have had to scale the web site to manage  25 million unique hits per month. That means that all the original code has been replaced, at the same time limiting the length of time the site is unavailable as the upgrades are slipped in. Infrastructure technologies such as 'grid' and services such as Amazon S3 mean that Web 2.0 start ups do not need put all their startup capital into datacentres and infrastructure, but the underlying architecture and software design still has to take this into account. One of the major reasons for the failure of .com fashion retailer Boo.com, was the need to procure and build an infrastructure that had to support hugely optimistic visitor and sales numbers predicted in the initial business case from day one, yet were starting their business from scratch with much lower numbers visitor numbers.

If Twitter allowed controlled or limited access communities  (like Facebook's networks functionality) the technology could be great in the workplace, but as its currently configured it is not possible to publish sensitive questions to colleagues only which is a major drawback.

My twitter page can be accessed by following the link. Please create an account and join the fun.

End of Season

Blackheath rugby season came to an end on Saturday, as and usual the end of season festivities went on long into the warm spring evening.

The yesterdays opponents were Manchester, in what, for them, was a must win game in order to guarantee them promotion to National one. For Blackheath the season has drifted since Xmas as our own promotion push faltered. In all truth although our forwards held there own our backs came up short both in defense and attack. Still we have ended the season in 5 place and not had to worry about relegation this year.

After the game, a bbq was rolled out and the beer followed long into the evening. A number of kicking competitions took place on the field while the first team auctioned off their playing shirts. I managed to get my hands our retiring hooker shirt. Lexi had almost 200 caps for the club so I will proudly wear his shirt home and away next year.

Barmy Mark managed a life long ambition of running the score board - however this wasn't till after the game had finished.

Today I'm of the Kent cup final in Cranbrook

Royal Geographic Society

The Sun event took place at the RGS squeezed between Hyde park and Imperial College. Although the outside facade is of a post modern 60's building, once you pass through reception its clearly a Victorian building.

On the wall hang maps original created by English and Dutch cartographers in the 17th Century. In the map room large portraits of Livingstone, Stanley, Cook and Scott adorn the walls.

The lecture hall, had wonderful leather seats with each one marked by a name which I assumed to be name of its associated member.

I'll see if the society is open to the public and suggest that we take the boys for nose round.

Royal Geographic Society

MySQL - Sun take over...

After a hiatus I'm back. I promise to make more effort to keep the blog up to date.

 

This morning I've been at on the 11 world wide events Sun is running to understand the future of MYSQL since Sun competed its acquisition in February.

At least of the healthcare software suppliers is using MYSQL to store documents.

I'm also starting to use the LAMP stack for a website I'm developing at the moment. The database is MYSQL so 

 

Simon Phipps - SUN Open Source envangalist Simon Phipps is the first speaker will it be the cathedral pitch. Of interest is that Simon is English and is a

Simon quoted Gartner who are predicting that within 5 years 90% of commercial software will be based on or be completely opensource. Not sure about this - within the the UK health care market I'm not seeing the suppliers moving in that direction. (That is not say that tech's such apache / java are being shunned by suppliers). The software being built and deployed is not based upon a OS licence.

I've heard Simon talk before and this morning talk wasn't his most convincing - I'm not buying that end of the procurement model, to be replaced by the subscription model.

Richard Mason is next up - he's an salesman who came from MYSQL, with a background in RDBMS. He going to explain why Sun brought MYSQL.

first up - complementary product lines - Sun gets access in new markets such as SME. MYSQL was a 400 man company so Sun will provide the business infrastructure to grow.

Sun putting one billion dollars into LAMP, which Sun believe is into its existing products lines such as Java and Glassfish.

Sun will continue to run MYSQL as  - the product will remain open, multi platform to all market segments. A

New subscription offering 'MYSQL Enterprise' is the moneytised  support offer.

David Axmark is next up, he was one of the founders of MYSQL. It as side project back in the 1996 as side project. He thought it might pay their salaries but he never expected it be sold for a billion dollars.

After reflection it looks like at least in the short term not a lot is going to change. Will Sun make a play the large scale enterprise space currently the home of DB2, Oracle and SQL Server?