sheff

From what I've read about the Salesforce Oracle backend in the past, they are big users of Oracle RAC .

Hopefully if Salesforce switch they will develop some form of Postgres clustering solution which would be great for the Postgres community, as an active-active clustering solution with the characteristics of RAC would make Postgres even more competitive in the enterprise.

I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for.

According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going.

[1] http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...

Thanks for the update on the licensing.

Barman does have a lot of great features, and hopefully I will be able to try it out on a test system sometime soon.

Terminology conflict I think :-) The pg_rman docs call backup retention management "backup maintenance" , and retention management is one of the things on the barman todo list.

As for compression, I think barman does log compression not the backups, but it could simply be that the barman docs [1] are out of date where they say :

"Barman’s most wanted features include: backup catalogues, retention policies, remote recovery, archiving and compression of WAL files and of backups."

[1] http://docs.pgbarman.org/

Another option which I've been looking at is pg_rman ( http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman/ ) .

It's several years old, from NTT, and with a BSD license. It seems a bit simpler , and lists a couple of useful features such as compression and backup maintenance which don't seem to be in barman yet.

Also, from looking at the barman FAQ : "We are currently seeking sponsors willing to fund the addition of this feature to the open-source version." is something it would be nice to get clarification on, in case some features in the future only go into a closed version.

In case anyone thinks of buying the book above, John Locke is mentioned in this NY Times article which says part of his "system" which is not mentioned in his book is buying Amazon reviews.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-fo...

My opinion is that without the £3.5 billion a year that comes from the UK license fee, and the infrastructure and resources that the Beeb has built up over the years due to that income (plus what they also get from general taxation), they would be hard pressed to make these kinds of programs.

As a license is required for pretty much everyone who wants to watch any live TV in the UK, its always worth the trouble for any license fee payer to ask them to justify why BBC content is (apparently) available to non UK based viewers but not to those in the UK . http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Have you looked at Drupal ? There is a lot of overlap between its custom CMS features and what you describe above. See http://drupal.org/documentation/structure .

The other place to look for books is Pragmatic Programmers ( http://pragprog.com/titles ) who do the Agile Web Development with Rails book which is usually fairly up to date, along with some other in depth titles.

A subscription to Railscasts pro ( http://railscasts.com/ ) is also well worth the cost.

An update to PL/Ruby would be great.

It doesn't appear to have been updated for a couple of years or use Ruby 1.9 : https://github.com/knu/postgresql-plruby . There is also a newer fork : https://github.com/globegit/postgresql-plruby , which does appear to be worked on.

I hope they allow a mechanism for people to opt out. I can't really see this helping the reader, or even proper publishers. It will just aid the Demand Media equivalents of the publishing world in churning out crap.

Its been a couple of years but the process in the UK is very simple - check out http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-formsfees.htm for the various services plus they have some useful documents covering the basics.

The IPO also offer a service where they charge you something like half price and tell you if something is trademarkable. I believe I paid around £80, filled in a form, and they wrote to me to tell me that the text I wanted to trademark was too common a phrase to be trademarked, and gave me a number so I could have a chat with the person who dealt with the application for any further questions.

Completely agree with this. If you look at some of the CERN infrastructure pages, you see they use both open source and commercial apps wherever they make sense. For example when I checked out the DB infrastructure a while ago, they seemed to use a lot of Oracle[1] (with some MySQL in there as well), Scientific Linux for some stuff and RHEL where needed ( presumably for support reasons).

[1] https://openlab-mu-internal.web.cern.ch/openlab-mu-internal/...

I was just going by the "Do I need to use Google Maps API for Business?" in the FAQ here :http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html .

"If you are charging a fee for access to your Maps solution, whether for a business or consumer audience, you are required to purchase the Maps API Premier."

To me this reads as, any SAAS web app which used a Google map anywhere would be required to pay $10,000 per year plus usage charges.

This price reduction looks like it is only for sites supported by advertising / unmonetised sites.

Any startup planning on charging for an app or service which incorporates any kind of map will still have to pay a minimum $10,000 a year license fee to use Google Maps, which is ridiculously high as a starting point.

What Googles mishandling of the charging changes has done is to heavily publicise the fact that the alternatives (mainly OSM) are now good enough for major companies to switch to without much hassle.

Have you tried one of the website selling marketplaces like Flippa.com ?

One of the other nice things about Postgres is the pretty much annual release of a new version. 9.2 should apparently hit beta in the next week or so, which will bring some cool new features : http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2012-05/msg0034... .

repmgr is one option but its still command line. In my opinion Postgres is more likely to gain traction in Unix environments where it can replace MySQL pretty much anywhere and Oracle in quite a few use cases.

I like Postgres, however in my experience, where money is not a consideration, Oracles RAC with its (fairly) easy multi node DB clusters is often the competitive advantage that prevents Postgres from being used more widely in the enterprise - maybe that could be something that the Postgres team look at replicating.

I've had the same annoyances/issues when using recent base Ubuntu distros.

I really dislike alterations in user interfaces for what seems to be little end benefit, so looked around and found Xfce and LXDE which both have Ubuntu variants.

I've been running Lubuntu for a few weeks now and have been quite happy, and hopefully it will only change at a glacial pace.

Rails 4 looks like it will have some nifty features - anyone have any information on when the first Release Candidate will be ?

This will definitely make me buy more Tor books.

I'm one of the "voracious" readers that Charlie mentions and while I really like the Kindle DX hardware, I'm increasingly concerned at being tied into an Amazon ecosystem long term.

Baen, O'Reilly , Pragmatic Programmers and Fictionwise are some of the places I look for new books for my Kindle before Amazon these days, as they have DRM free titles.

You're absolutely right, there is still a lot of dross in there without a doubt - probably because very few people sell their decent, stable, money making sites.

I use it as more of an idea generator and its one of the few places where you can get some indication of revenue levels for particular types of sites .

Flippa has a lot of sales listings of somewhat questionable value. However the "Just Sold" section ordered by descending price is a good place to look for valuable business niches, as it filters out a lot of the spammier listings : https://flippa.com/just-sold?sort_col=price&sort_dir=des....

The Experienced People forums are also a treasure trove of information about dodgy website sellers : http://experienced-people.net/forums/forum.php .

Unless the penalties from Google are long term I can't see this as being very effective, as you would assume competent SEOs will just tweak their processes in response.

From what I've read over the years, basic SEO mainly boils down to :

- Have good, relevant content

- Choose your page titles and URLs carefully

- Get lots of links to your pages , from as many different domains as possible, and try to get them from high Pagerank domains

- Where possible try to get anchor text relevant to the terms you want to rank for - but don't go overboard with a large percentage being the same phrase, as it appears artificial

- An older site can benefit you, as will exact match domains for the main TLDs

Except for site age, they are all easily changeable by the SEO.

Maybe Pagerank is too easily gameable, and what is old will become new again, and some of the approaches tried in the 90s and replaced by Pagerank will return with a new twist.

Couldn't help but laugh at this bit from the linked article :

"It even has a nice restful API so you can spawn companies and file for bankruptcy 100 companies/second. If you want more there is a premium plan."

One of my favourite tech entrepreneurs.

If any of you haven't read Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing" ( http://www.amazon.com/New-Thing-Silicon-Valley-Story/dp/0393... ) its a great book about Jim Clark and the dotcom boom.

I also had a problem with this URL being inaccessible from my phone without logging into Google.

The course they are talking about is this one : http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253 .

Somewhat off topic, but I remembered the author of this Excel add in's "Ask HN" when it first came out ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794317 ). 2 or 3 years later, it looks like he's expanded and now has 2 software products and a SAAS ( http://www.OakFocus.net/ ), so very inspiring.

The keyboard is what I look at first as well, as I dislike laptops without a decent arrow key layout.

Engadget ( http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/10/dells-xps-13-ultrabook-an... ) had some pics recently, including some of the keyboard.

If your window tiling needs are simple, check out Spectacle ( http://spectacleapp.com/ ). Its open source as well.