April, 18, 2005 archives

i guess sunday’s opinion section in the los angeles times was about transportation, because there were a number of interesting commentary pieces on the issue over the weekend: why free parking may be hurting; why tolls are the answer, not rail; how privatization could help, and why rail is a good long-term solution because it reshapes the landscape.

boing boing passes on ross mayfield’s report that the number of books you can carry on to planes will be (and is) limited. this is the sort of case where a journalist would do something tedious like contact the tsa and actually find out what the reality is, rather than relying on second-hand information that originated from a screener.

i think it is pretty clear that the policy is in regard to books of matches, regardless of ross’s impression of what the screener was talking about.

this is the sort of thing that undermines the bloggers-as-journalists argument.

i'm on the hook for being the "session buddy" for lots of talks today, which means i should be trying to make sure speakers don't go too long. (which i didn't do a great job of doing this morning, but i'll be better this afternoon!)

the crowd here is pretty impressive. the ballroom for the morning keynotes was basically full, and the expo hall had a bit of a traffic jam going afterwards (where we had cake to celebrate mysql's 10th anniversary).

andrew cowie's session on managing operations was great, with lots of references to works outside of the information technology sphere, like management within the military and nasa.

yazz atlas did a session that gave an overview of some of the monitoring tools that ostg (slashdot, etc) uses to manage their infrastructure.

"do we really need databases?" -- om malik, moderator of "scaling and high availability" panel.

(that's a paraphrase, but i thought it was a funny question.)