Links for Wednesday, December 24, 2008

• Don MacAskill: Great Things Afoot in the MySQL Community – “For anyone who lives and dies by MySQL and InnoDB, things are finally starting to heat up and get interesting.“
• MySQL Performance Blog: Announcing Percona XtraDB Storage Engine – “Percona XtraDB includes all of InnoDB’s ACID-compliant design and advanced MVCC architecture, and adds features, more tunability, more metrics, more scalability on many cores, and better memory usage. We choose features and fixes based on customer requests and on our best judgment of real-world needs.“
• New York Times Open: Represent – “Using your address as a starting point, Represent figures out which political districts you live in and who represents you at different levels of government. It draws maps that show how where you live fits into the political geography of the city. And using information collected from around the Web, it presents a customized activity stream that tracks what the people who represent you are doing.“
• Paul Krugman: Life Without Bubbles – “The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.“
• Andy Geers: The Curse of Information Addiction – “I’ve been thinking lately about the detrimental effects that I’m suffering as a result of information overload. Over the last few months, the number of blog feeds I follow in Google Reader has been steadily creeping up, not to mention people I follow on Twitter and FriendFeed. Most notable has been the effect on my concentration span – I now seem completely incapable of focussing on anything for more than a few minutes before I suddenly find myself back on the Google Reader tab looking at what’s new.“