Xarg blog Archive

General Bits is a column loosely based on the PostgreSQL mailing list pgsql-general. To find out more about the pgsql-general list and PostgreSQL, see www.PostgreSQL.org.

I had known about this newsletter for a while but noticed recently they had an rss feed. It's a nice collection of articles and getting a feed for it is even nicer.

This article (via Jon Sequeira) addresses something we have been thinking about a lot here.

Kellan (I’m guessing) offers some insightful thoughts about hosting software for nonprofits. He raises two challenages facing folks who build nonprofit solutions using so-called ‘niche’ platforms like Zope or Rails… well, really anything other than PHP, right?

Our current project is to extend the software used for CASWeb which is OpenACS based, to have stronger CMS functionality and to support vhosted subsites better. Local authorities would then provide free (or very cheap) hosting to community organisations via subsites and we would host (or in some cases just support) the overall site.

We do the heavy lifting that the extremely cheap PHP hosted sites don't provide (backups, a failover box, bug fixing) and the local organisation gets a high functioning database backed website.

About the only story I remember having read in elementary school was Examination Day by Henry Slesar. It was originally published in Playboy in 1958 and elsewhere and it somehow found it's way into my fifth grade reader...

I wonder if it's still read in elementary school in the US?

I have been using a personal css file with firefox for a while and recently added two rules:

*:target { border: 1px solid red !important; }
a[rel="nofollow"] { border: 2px solid green !important; }

The first puts a red border around an anchor element and the second highlights links that are rel nofollow (I want to watch what people are actually doing with this -- and so far the answer is not too many people do anything at all with it). Here is an example of using :target from w3c; naturally :target does not work in IE.

The file to add these to is ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOURDIRNAMEHERE/chrome/userContent.css for firefox.

(btw, You might want to play with the useChrome.css file while you are there...).

The postgres performance documentation has gotten pretty good.

Another great place to look for this sort of stuff is this article PostgreSQL 8.0 Performance Checklist by Josh Berkus and Joe Conway (frequent posters to the pgsql-performance list -- which is itself a tremendous resource for the lore of db tuning); They are running the site for their upcoming book Power PostgreSQL and have a blog as well.

Open source software development should strive for even greater code maintainability -
A study of almost six million lines of code tracks how freely accessible source code holds up against time and multiple iterations.

Nice issue focused on QA. More wisdom than concrete data though.