SQLFusion blogs

"If I dig a very deep hole in the Earth, where will I arrive?"

When I was a kid I read a book by Jules Vernes called "Voyage au centre de la Terre" (Travel to the center of the Earth). I became fascinated by all the mysteries which might lie just under our feet. However, no matter how deep I tried to dig back then, I could never reach the center. The dream was alive, but it seemed unlikely it would be realized.

Some weeks ago, I read "The World is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman and discovered that this planet is being "flattened" by technology today. People can work with each other wherever they are in the world, using nothing more than a computer... it is as if everybody is all in the same room, hearing each other, interacting immediately with one another.
The funny thing is that SQLFusion takes part in this astonishing phenomenon, by developing software which provides real-time collaboration capabilities to those who want to build web applications using Open Source technology.

Today, surprisingly, I discovered that my kid's dream has become true... it is now possible to dig through the Earth. It is possible to travel through the center of the Earth... using an original Google maps application. If you dont believe me, check: http://grad.icmc.usp.br/~cipriani/bighole.php?lang=en

Here comes my conclusion for the day, and for my first blog entry:

No matter how absurd our hopes and dreams can be, they are worth sharing. Think of how many pages Jules Verne wrote, for instance. Indeed, those dreams could become true one day. :)

So I hope you will enjoy reading about the dreams we have here, at SQLFusion. The entire SQLFusion team hopes you will contribute with your own wildest dreams...

...just be aware that those wild dreams might soon come true!

We were affected by the power outage.
Our servers are in the Garland building in downtown Los Angeles. They have a UPS backup, but after the batteries ran out the generators failed to take over. The power outage began at about 12 pm and our servers shutdown at around 2 pm.
We were fortunate in that the downtime was only about 10 minutes, and then power was restored and most machines came back up on their own.
One of our servers didn't boot, so I went to the data center to manually reboot it. There were a lot of other people there doing the same.
This is a good wake-up call for disaster recovery plans.

A Bill Gates Interview on Google, Web applications and Open Source.
Very interesting, although it's a bit of a sales pitch. But the difference between the Microsoft software legacy and future trends is clearly evident.
He even talks about Frontbridge (an email company) -- we helped manage their massive MySQL Open Source database. It had more than a terabyte of data.
I don't know if Frontbridge was still using MySQL at the time of purchase, but when we worked with them they had a very strong open source culture, using Postfix, MySQL, PHP and Perl.
http://news.zdnet.com/Bill+Gates+takes+on+Google/2100-9593_22-5864352.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn

That news is about Microsoft targeting the SMB market. Microsoft is also going after the web designers and web developers:
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.aspx