WombatNation

Yesterday afternoon I went to check my RSS and Atom feeds at Bloglines, but it was no feeds for me. Just checked again and my list of feeds was still empty. But, that was in Firefox 3. All the feeds are showing in Safari. I disabled almost all my add-ons, but still no feed love.

Switching from the classic Bloglines UI to the beta of the new UI fixed the problem in Firefox. I should have switched over sooner. The new look is really nice.

I hadn’t exported my feed listing in ages. I just took care of that. Cloud computing is great, but OS X’s Time Machine won’t back up that stuff for me automatically. I need to create some cron jobs to connect to my various hosted services and export data like this. Hopefully, most of them have APIs to get at this stuff so I can more easily automate the logins.

This past Monday I was one of the panelists for the CRMXchange Great Debate webcast on Speech Self Service. We covered the following topics, and a bit more, during the webcast:

• Enterprise and contact center trends that are driving new investments in IVR/speech applications
• Best practices for determining the most beneficial activities to offer your customers via your IVR/speech application
• How to realize the greatest return from your IVR/speech investments
• Do’s and don’ts for IVR applications – what activities and functions should and should not be offered by an IVR/speech system
• Which parts of a business outside the call center can benefit from speech applications

It was a lot of fun and I hope I was able to provide the attendees with interesting and useful information, specifically about what we have learned at Voxify in our many customer deployments. I thought the other panelists did a good job, though I was surprised that none of them named specific customers. I think it is really helpful to people looking to deploy speech applications to hear about the successful experiences of specific customers in businesses very similar to theirs.

You can can hear a recording of the webcast (registration required) on the CRMXchange site.

Some of wife’s and my greatest memories (and stories) come from our travels in Bolivia. Today’s NY Times has a really good article that focuses mostly on the salt flats near Uyuni and “The Death Road” from La Paz to Coroico.

The Salar de Uyuni is so bizarre that I have always found it difficult to explain well to others. Ethan Todras-Whitehill does a really nice job of capturing the essence of the Salar, though. It’s a bit overwhelming to stand on a 4,000 square mile plain of crunchy salt, with tall mountains barely visible on the horizon in most directions. The mountains look deceptively small, because the terrain is so flat and unchanging for so far that you can’t quite tell how far away they really are.

The slideshow accompanying the article has a photo of a room in one of the hotels made from salt blocks, but I prefer my photo of the dining room at Palacio de Sal.

Ethan also writes about doing a downhill bike ride on the Death Road, which a friend of a co-worker is also doing soon, though on a motorcycle. I can hardly wait to hear about her experience after she returns. I was shocked at first to hear about the ride, but then I learned that a new road for cars and trucks opened in March 2007, so the dangerous, narrow road is now shared only with a small amount of local traffic. During our trips in 1993 and 1999 on that road, the risk of collision with another car or truck was very high. I doubt my heart rate dropped much below 120 during those drives. I’m sure that it’s still a white-knuckle descent, though. Even if you’re not on a ridiculously narrow gravel road (which supported two-way car and truck traffic when we did it!), winding around hairpin turns, driving through waterfalls that wash across the road, and staring over the edge down multi-thousand feet sheer cliffs, a 12 thousand foot drop over 40 miles is pretty steep.

This photo shows the view from Coroico back to the road. The part of the road you see is probably the safest, least scary, segment. The road twists around the corner and then hugs the mountainside as it twists up and around into the clouds.

This year I attended presentations by the EBay engineering team at the MySQL Conference and JavaOne in which they talked about some very interesting patches that had made to MySQL Server. I lamented the fact that they hadn’t open sourced it yet or contributed all the patches back to MySQL. Google has also announced some great enhancements they have made to MySQL, especially around semi-synchronous replication. Since then I’ve learned a bit more from posts aggregated on Planet MySQL that contributing patches and getting them accepted into a MySQL release that will see the light of day anytime soon is not so easy.

However, a group of some of the most prominent technical employees at MySQL have been joined by community members to create a fork of MySQL Server called Drizzle. Drizzle is “being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture”, partially by stripping away some of the enterprise database features, e.g., stored procedures, triggers, etc., that are much less important for highly scalable web applications.

Since Drizzle doesn’t have to satisfy paying enterprise customers, the team working on the project is better able, at least for now, to take on enhancements like the EBay and Google patches. Currently, the MySQL community edition is very similar to the enterprise edition. However, it seems that it is not common for features to appear in the community edition before appearing in the enterprise edition. In fact, there have been some proposals that it work in the opposite direction.

This is very unlike the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a much more experimental OS than RHEL, in that new features tend to show up sooner in Fedora. Also, just because Fedora adopts or drops a feature doesn’t mean that RHEL will do the same. Fedora is not a beta version of the next release of RHEL.

While Drizzle may range even farther afield of the MySQL community and server editions than does Fedora from RHEL, I think this relationship will greatly benefit MySQL in the long run. Many of the likely users of Drizzle are probably the least likely to be paying customers of MySQL. However, if they need a more traditional enterprise database server for another project, they are more likely to turn to MySQL Server. While not the same feature set, the transition would obviously be a lot less disruptive than going to a totally different database server. Also, Drizzle should provide the kind of testing ground for new features that it seems like MySQL community edition has yet to become.