BillMonk.com
Google engEDU
40 min – 16-Jun-06

Google TechTalks
June 16, 2006

Gaurav Oberoi & Chuck Groom
Co-Founders, BillMonk.com

ABSTRACT
The web 2.0 bubble inflates as geeks pump out an astonishing number of web-based solutions to daily problems. But a lot of these solutions only appeal to a small niche. What goes into a service that appeals to a broad range of people?

How can it start and grow without a generous helping of capital? The two guys behind BillMonk.com, a service for helping friends with the casual borrowing of money and stuff, will share their views from the trenches. They will share the story of what it took to quit their comfy jobs at Amazon, how a handful of philosophical axioms dictated the entire site design and interface, anthropological observations about the 18-26 year-old demographic with respect to money and computers, and some of the technical challenges they’ve faced. There will be room for discussion about Ruby, Linux, when to open-source parts of your platform, and business lessons for geeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL
Google engEDU
43 min – 28-Apr-06

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Jay Pipes
Jay Pipes is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), which covers all of the newest MySQL 5 features, as well as in-depth discussion and analysis of the MySQL server architecture, storage engines, transaction procesing, benchmarking, and advanced SQL scenarios. You can also see his name on articles appearing in Linux Magazine and can read more articles about MySQL at his website.

ABSTRACT
Learn where to best focus your attention when tuning the performance of your applications and database servers, and how to effectively find the "low hanging fruit" on the tree of bottlenecks. It’s not rocket science, but with a bit of acquired skill and experience, and of course good habits, you too can do this magic! Jay Pipes is MySQL’s Community Relations Manager for North America. Read the rest of this entry »

Connexions – Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge
Google engEDU
53 min – 11-Apr-06

Google TechTalks
April 11, 2006

Richard G. Baraniuk
Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and Founder of Connexions.

W. Joseph King
W. Joseph King is the Executive Director of Connexions. Previously, he was an investment banker focused on incubating new technology companies.

ABSTRACT
A grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The "open access movement" is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that textbooks present.

In this talk, we will overview Connexions (cnx.org), a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999 that aims to reinvent how we write, edit, publish, and use textbooks. Read the rest of this entry »

The Reiser4 Filesystem
Google engEDU
1 hr 3 min – 6-Feb-06

Google TechTalks
February 6, 2006

Han Reiser

Hans Reiser was concerned that hierarchical and relational naming systems add structure not inherent in the information, and that boolean algebra fails to represent structure, and so he develeoped a set of semantics which attempt to match rather than mold structure.

He then founded Namesys in 1993 when he went to Russia and hired a small team of programmers to implement the storage layer for these semantics, known as the Reiserfs filesystem for Linux. He spent 5 years arguing over algorithms on evenings and weekends, and working day jobs in Silicon Valley, and then finally the code started to work well enough that he could quit the day jobs.

Then he took all the code, chucked it, and rewrote it from scratch to reflect what he had learned the first time doing it. The new code is called Reiser4.

ABSTRACT
The ReiserFS project aims to add support for semi-structured data querying to the filesystem namespace. Reiser4 is the storage layer for this. It stores all files in a dancing (not balanced)tree, and is currently the overall fastest filesystem for traditional filesystem usage patterns. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source Drug Discovery for Neglected Diseases
Google engEDU
50 min – 7-Apr-06

Google TechTalks
April 07, 2006

ABSTRACT
Marc works with an initiative that seeks to make biological and genomic data open and available such that anyone can go play with it and form communities around working with this data. The hope is that by having data freely available people there will be many more people working with the data and thus more leads into potential therapies and cures. Read the rest of this entry »