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.

I guess halloween is the cause for this older picture being the most popular page on the site over the past couple of weeks. 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 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.