To ZFS or not to ZFS

First Apple puts ZFS into the beta versions of Leopard, then Jonathan Schwartz says that ZFS will be the default file system in Leopard, then Apple says that it won’t be, and now it says that it will be in there in limited form.

Makes your head spin…

Fonts and anti-aliasing

Much (digital) ink has been spilled over the subject of Apple’s font anti-aliasing choices for Safari on Windows. Jeff Atwood’s orginal post on the subject has two screen snapshots showing the differences, and Joel Spolsky adds a few soothing words saying that we pick what is most familiar to us.

But I am left with one question, if Safari on Windows can control the anti-aliasing policy, how does Firefox do it? I would be interested to see screen snapshots showing how it handle anti-aliasing on both platforms.

Om on line 1

I like Om Malik’s blog, he does not mince his words and usually has something smart or controversial to say, or both.

His post on the 5 ways the iPhone will change the wireless biz is well worth reading if you are interested in that space.

Final words on MySQL and RAID

Jeremy Cole has some very good final words on MySQL and RAID, and he also points to all the articles that were written about the subject.

One paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Use data partitioning (sharding). I haven’t talked much about this in my previous posts, because it’s sort of a given. My participation in the HiveDB project and my recent talks on “Scaling and High Availability Architectures” at the MySQL Conference and Expo should say enough about my feelings on this subject. Nonetheless I’ll repeat a few points from my talk: data partitioning is the only game in town, cache everything, and use MySQL replication for high availability and redundancy.

Data partitioning is the key to scaling, there is indeed no other way to do this, whether you partition horizontally or vertically, caching really helps if done right, and use MySQL replication for high availability and redundancy, not as a means to spread the read load (I learned that the hard way.)

Update (June 12th, 2007), Peter Zaitsev has some more words on the subject.