Currently, PostgreSQL replicates a database WAL (change log) files to the slave databases, which made it more difficult to get slave databases to have less than a minute of lag. This wasn’t a big deal, since before 9.0, which is in development, you couldn’t query the slave databases until you failover, which stops replication, and that’s a rare event. With streaming replication, it will be possible for the slave databases to be as little as one second out of date, which makes them much more useful for offloading read-only queries from the master database.

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2010/02/01/waiting-for-9-0-streaming-replication/

It’s still not clear what the root cause of the sudden unexpected acceleration in Toyotas is, but this article at least gives us an idea of how widespread the problem is. Toyotas for 2008 are between 10 and 16 times as likely to experience this problem as GM, which had the best ratio of number of cars sold to the number of complaints. The reason for the range between 10 and 16 is that Toyota received a significant jump in complaints due to media attention. Of course, Toyotas are generally rated as having higher reliability than GM cars. Also, not all of these incidents result in accidents. Therefore, it would be nice if there was a comparison of how often defects in cars from a given automaker cause an accident.

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/12/sudden-unintended-acceleration-sua-analysis-2008-toyota-lexus-ford-gm.html

This is a very insightful article on the very different issues that you will encounter when you put a large application in the cloud and how common solutions to these problems can’t be applied.

http://gojko.net/2010/01/25/designing-applications-for-cloud-deployment/

While PostgreSQL has had trigger based replication for a long time, it can be difficult to set up and maintain. Since 8.1 or 8.2, it has had warm standby, where you could fail over to a slave but not query it while replicating. The code for hot standby has been committed to the 8.5 development branch. From what I can gather from the mailing lists, 8.5 will probably be released around June.

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2010/01/08/waiting-for-8-5-hot-standby/

It’s funny how this tool makes the UI look like it was drawn in pencil so that no one mistakes the mockup for a final product design.

http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

Some users can’t or just don’t scroll web pages. Here is a tool that will help you figure out what impatient or inexperienced users are missing.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Yesterday, we got to the airport really early, which was good, so the line to check our bags was only half as long as the picture shows. The line moved pretty quickly after they started processing the luggage manually. I’m not sure what they did for people who didn’t have bording passes already. The power was out for about an hour. I wonder if they have a generator that was just giving them problems. I guess we won’t be recreating the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles after all.

Of course, we will have to wait and see how big of an effect this has on the country’s prosperity.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/evaluating-ceibal

This is a pretty impressive demo.

http://280atlas.com/what.php

This is an interesting javascript library that will actually parse each chunk of a multipart/mixed mime response as it comes in. I’m not sure if it has HTTP Pipelining’s same weakness of returning the results in the same order as requests, but you could easily modify the ordering that the library accepts, since you don’t have to worry about http firewalls or load balancers trying to collate the requests and responses for you, because everything is in a single request and response. Of course, this means that multiple requests will hit a single app server, so you would have to roll your own load balancer if that’s something you need.

http://about.digg.com/blog/duistream-and-mxhr