Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts

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•Google, YouTube, Data [#] •Funniest Thing Ever, Closest to BOFH [#] •UTF8, Do we really need anything else? [#] •Wikibooks, Open Source Books [#] •Fields of Fuel [#] •Just goes to show... [#] •iPhone, SQLite [#] •Prepared Statements, Musings [#] •Apple, Tomorrow, What I want to hear [#] •Feeding Birds, Let them eat worms [#] •Bathroom design, practicals [#] •Tokyo, Walk around Town [#] •Universal Plug Adapters [#] •India thus far... [#] •APAC Memcached Talk [#] •Pssst... [#] •Tokyo May 2008 [#] •TimeCapsule'ish Backups, MySQL [#] •MySQL ウィークリーセミナー　5月23--追加開催のお知らせ　「Memcached/MySQL」 [#] •Who is found on the seventh floor? [#]

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Google, YouTube, Data

Jul. 3rd, 2008 | 06:53 am

While reading my RSS feeds this morning I picked up this: YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom
After Scientology's DMCA request on Slashdot we made an active choice to squash data on users to limit the possibility of this sort of request. We randomized incoming trackable data on users and tossed everything but aggregate data for long term storage.
Why?
For one, we simply did not need to keep terabytes of log data sitting around collecting dust. Secondly, while the data might be useful for determining trends we risked our user's privacy. We believed this was unacceptable. One court request and we could be handing over who knows what to any company that could find an uneducated judge to sign away the privacy of millions. The data was just not that valuable.
What would I like to see?
Sites handing control of data retention over to users.
It would be good to see more sites give users the opportunity to have their tracking information removed after a period of time from companies databases.
We could start a trend by having websites publish data retention policies .
So what would it take to make this happen? Would peer pressure work? I am not in favor of creating more laws.
What if we petition sites to make steps in this direction. A few at a time, with a goal of long term of putting peer pressure on sites that do not follow the lead of user privacy oriented sites.
Is this too much too ask for?

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Funniest Thing Ever, Closest to BOFH

Jul. 1st, 2008 | 09:20 pm

If BOFH is to Sysadmins, as Drucker is to MB's...
This this is?
http://thewebsiteisdown.com/
Seriously awesome...
Must share.

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UTF8, Do we really need anything else?

Jun. 24th, 2008 | 09:44 pm

I was working on a problem today and I asked myself a question that I keep find myself coming back to.
For the web, we will keep this in context, do we really need to concern ourselves about supporting anything other then UTF8?
For example here is a partial list of character sets MySQL supports: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-mysql.html
What do I find when I visit web shops?
The ones who either do not know anything about character sets, or do not care, just keep with whatever the default MySQL shipped with.
Otherwise? It is UTF8.
Unless of course they do not know, but it turned out it did matter. Those folks are typically sweating out a future where they know they will be altering all of their tables.
The question remains though, does it really matter? How about UC2?

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Wikibooks, Open Source Books

Jun. 24th, 2008 | 09:17 am

One of the projects I am working on right now needs a manual, not just man pages, but an actual manual.
My goals:
•Online All documentation should be online and editable online. Anyone should be able to edit it. Anyone should be able to extend it. We live in a Wiki world, and the day and age of collaborating via controlled copies is over. (And yes, this is something I very much dislike about the MySQL Manual)
•Hosted Find a hosted solution that I do not have to maintain. Maintaining software takes valuable time from me. I only keep hosting mailing lists but Google Apps lacks this feature. For a Wiki? Someone else can do it. The solution needs to be non-onerous though.
•Exportable. Sometimes you want a book in your hands, and for this reason I think books in the "it is a dead tree Jim" are good things. Skip a few years into the future and it is probably going to be an electronic book. People still want to have the book in their hands. In a perfect world they will want to have it in their hands, be able to change it in their hands, and then synchronize the transfer of their corrections back to the main book.
•Information Should be Free No one should have to pay to access it, and just as importantly I want to make sure that anyone is free to take the book from the website and print it. If an outside publisher can print a thousand copies and sell it, I think that it is awesome. No onerous sign up processes. Anonymous is quite fine.
So what do you think? Wikibooks? Is there another solution out there?

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Fields of Fuel

Jun. 12th, 2008 | 07:45 am

Last night I hit the Seattle International Film Festival to go see Fields of Fuel. The film has a nice evolution to it, starting off with the "get off the grid" attitude evolving to the "lets do the patriotic thing". There is a strong environmental message that runs through the entire film.
...