The Sony Blu-ray launch has been marred by a near-endless amount of mistakes, not least of which was the two years they spent duking it out with Toshiba’s HD-DVD, which, although they won, came at something of a high cost. For example, despite being launched in 2006, 3 years later Blu-Ray players are still ridiculously [...]

In a previous article, I discussed how to get the most out of your memory usage in MySQL systems using the InnoDB storage engine. To review, MySQL has overly conservative memory usage by default. Your MySQL instance may be using only a small fraction of the available memory, leading to unnecessarily poor application performance. In [...]

I gave IBM’s data visualization tool Many Eyes a shot.  Very cool. The tag cloud visualization shows the most common words used in the JavaRanch/CodeRanch forum names and description. Unsurprisingly, words like Java, certification and discussion feature prominately.  In two word mode, “sun certified” was the clear leader. I have no doubt that other data [...]