“This allows you to build a repli­ca­tion infra­struc­ture that fits your appli­ca­tion and deploy­ment needs best: two offices with an ocean in between, no prob­lem; large server clus­ter in one or more data cen­tres, no prob­lem. And any­thing in between really.

Repli­ca­tion is not new, it has been baked into CouchDB from the begin­ning. Today, I’ll show you some of the nifty fea­tures we added to the 0.11 repli­ca­tor to make your life a lit­tle easier.”

“Since then, though, CouchDB gained a few new fea­tures to tackle the same prob­lem: fetch related data. These aren’t new in 0.11, but they did get refined, so it makes sense to revisit them here. Since 0.10, you could query a view with the query para­me­ter include_docs=true. When spec­i­fied, CouchDB would fetch, for each row in the view result, the cor­re­spond­ing doc­u­ment from the data­base. This allows users to make a trade-​​off between smaller view indexes (and hence shorter view index times) and slower view index (for each row, CouchDB makes a sin­gle request to the database).”

“CouchDB 0.11 lets you cre­ate nicer URLs. The path to nicer URLs includes two sep­a­rate steps: URL Rewrit­ing and Vir­tual Hosts.”

“Nonethe­less, the anti-​​poverty orga­ni­za­tion of 400,000 low– and middle-​​income mem­ber fam­i­lies in 75 cities was suc­cess­fully tar­geted and put out of busi­ness by Repub­li­cans; the long, con­certed smear cam­paigns intended to do lit­tle more than under­cut ACORN’s suc­cess­ful voter reg­is­tra­tion dri­ves. Those dri­ves had suc­ceeded in legally reg­is­ter­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of low– and middle-​​income vot­ers, many of whom tend to vote Demo­c­ra­tic. For that, for enfran­chis­ing Amer­i­cans to par­tic­i­pate in their own democ­racy, the GOP had to put them out of business.

Mis­sion accomplished.”

“The big change appears to be that those in school have become increas­ingly less attached to the labor mar­ket. The per­cent­age of school enrollees aged between 16 and 24 who are also par­tic­i­pat­ing in the labor mar­ket was rel­a­tively sta­ble between 1989 and 1998 at around 51 per­cent. How­ever, labor mar­ket par­tic­i­pa­tion by those in school declined between 1999 and 2008 from 50 per­cent to 42 per­cent. In con­trast, labor force par­tic­i­pa­tion by those aged between 16 and 24 not enrolled in school has declined only modestly—from 82 per­cent to 80 per­cent between 1989 and 2008.”

“Notic­ing the pain as soon as pos­si­ble and then fix­ing the prob­lem — whether it is a rigid design, frag­ile tests or some­thing else — requires skill. Not every­body is alert to the pain, but instead they keep on writ­ing bad code until mak­ing changes becomes too expen­sive and a rewrite is needed. Not every­body fixes the prob­lem when they feel the pain, but instead they imple­ment a quick hack and leave an even big­ger mess for the next devel­oper. But for those who have the nec­es­sary skills and dis­ci­pline, TDD can be a pow­er­ful tool and they can use it to write bet­ter code.”

“And that, I think, is why some Okla­homa leg­is­la­tors have voted to insu­late homo­pho­bic vio­lence from the “hate crime” label. At least on a sub­con­scious level, I sus­pect they see a con­nec­tion between homo­pho­bic vio­lence and the beliefs to which they cleave. To call gay-​​bashing a hate crime would mean they couldn’t merely con­demn the gay bash­ers. They’d also have to con­demn them­selves, their churches, and the broader cul­tural forces with which they iden­tify.
My chal­lenge to con­ser­v­a­tive leg­is­la­tors is this: If you really think your belief sys­tem is inno­cent, then you have no need to pro­tect it in this way. And if you sus­pect that your belief sys­tem is not inno­cent, then it shouldn’t be pro­tected. Either way, you ought to call a hate crime what it is.”

“Are their tac­tics are reserved for giant con­sumer fads? I don’t think so. In fact, they work even bet­ter for smaller gigs and more focused markets.”

“In the old world, Rus­sia was the King Kong of con­ven­tional gas. It was like the U.S. on mil­i­tary spend­ing: basi­cally the equal of the ROW (rest of world).

But when you look at the uncon­ven­tional gas reserves, it’s Asia-​​Pac first, NorthAm sec­ond, and the for­mer USSR a mid­dling third. In short, ris­ing Asia and the U.S. can sud­denly cover them­selves a whole lot more, mak­ing both Rus­sia and the Gulf pretty minor by com­par­i­son. Remem­ber that last Nov Obama and Hu announced a “US-​​China shale gas ini­tia­tive” that promised a swap of US tech­nol­ogy for invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in China. That’s gotta spook the would-​​be “OPEC of gas.””