Just a few assorted things that I thought I would share:

MySQL 5.1 rc

I’m still having a problem with MySQL 5.1 hanging. I removed the innodb plugin as an experiment and now I’m pretty sure that it is a bug in MySQL. Not only is it suspicious that the same workload never caused deadlocks in 5.0, I’m pretty sure that either innodb’s lock detection or the fallback lock_wait_timeout should be kicking in.

I’ll probably downgrade to 5.0 soon. The before/after performance graphs will be interesting.

Reading

This week I read Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” and Josh Porter’s “Designing for the Social Web“. Shirky’s book was great – try out some of his writings on media and community if you want a (free) taste. Porter’s book was more of an ego booster – sort of a catalog of lessons that we’ve already learned. If you are working on a web site that will have human users, do pick it up. The book is concise and well organized and you’ll get *something* out of it (I did).

Bookmarked this week

• Presentation Zen – Jess, MH, and I are going to be giving a 1 hour presentation at Knitter’s Connection in June. We don’t want it to suck, so I’ve been digging around for ideas.
• Google is hosting your favorite Javascript framework for free. Speaking of free stuff from Google – I love the Chart API.
• If you use last.fm, visualize the ebb and flow of artists with Lastgraph.
• Rails stuff: Akita’s 2.1 rundown, better_partials, acts_as_reportable, using git submodules to track plugins (I haven’t made the jump to git yet but I’ve been playing with it and it is tempting).