Mechanism, not Policy

MySQLPostgres

Over on Diamond Notes, a somewhat skeptical take on the recent Postgres benchmarks news. Can’t say I agree with it, and I did comment on it, but something did go click for me while thinking about it, hence this entry. See, the problem isn’t just performance. MySQL just doesn’t do the right thing.

I mean, I can understand the principle of implementing the smallest featureset you think a user would need and then optimising the bejaysus out of it – Epiphany would be a better browser than Firefox for 90% of the time for me because of that approach (it’s just Epiphany’s way of doing bookmarks that gets in the way) because Epiphany is always faster and less of a memory hog than Firefox since it doesn’t try to do everything.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 5 Comments

m2bz

General

I guess there’s irony in this, but less than a fortnight after submitting some code to mantisBT, I’m now trying to update a perl migration script (m2bz, by Julian Mehnle) to handle a migration from Mantis 1.0.3 to Bugzilla 3.0 (currently it works from Mantis 0.17.5 to Bugzilla 2.16.3).

I know, it’s no great hunk of coding, but I thought it was worth a grin.

(I should point out, by the way, that this isn’t because Mantis is bad software, it’s just that the time tracking chunk of Bugzilla is better than that of Mantis right now, and that’s something that’s required at the moment. There are other features in Bugzilla that are nice bits of icing as well, but the time tracking’s the main thing.)… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 1 Comment

HTML 5

General

Hmmm. One of the fun things when a client specifies W3C html compliance as a requirement is that you can spend a surprising amount of time picking just what W3C standard they want you to comply with in the first place. And now it seems that there’ll be another one to choose from. HTML 5 has just been revived as a standard in development, as a reaction to CSS and XHTML. Which means that at some point in the future, you’re going to have CSS 3, XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 out there.

Daniel has a good summary of the whys and what’s involved. Some of the new features look downright spiffy – DOM support improved (right about the time that PHP is pushing away from DOM to get to SimpleXML – doh…), improved support for Forms (native data validation and better native input controls look like good timesavers to me), and more content tags (article, dialog, video, canvas and progress were listed).… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in No Comments