October 2006

Finally I got one of the Subversion pieces out. I also published a holding page on the Netflix Prize, but that isn't going to get interesting until I write more code to describe.

It does seem that I've been settling into a rhythm of a couple of long articles per month. My guess is that I can probably keep this up for quite some time as I have a lot of articles in various states of readyness and I seem to get more than two ideas a month for new things to write about (of course not all of them work out).

I'm loath to promise anything though as I know what sort of delays that leads to — even if I did get one Subversion piece out…

New internal schema

The database schema that I put through on this and several other sites running FOST.3™ hasn't made any impact on visitors, but it has made some changes behind the scenes.

The major issue that we tackle when we do schema migrations (as opposed to just updating a running schema) is what to do about the internal identifiers. At the moment these leak out through things like the properties pages and {{/Thread:/?thread=2006-10-19T10:38:17.748Z}forum pages}.

We think we know what the right balance is between internal IDs and external references, but trying it out will require another schema update. Don't hold your breaths though.