Archive for October, 2005

PDO vs PEAR DB

October 20th, 2005

For a project that we are currently implementing, we’ve asked ourselves what the best way to access the database would be. So far, a number of our projects had been realized with Pear DB, and that was mostly okay. The current project needs to be resonsive even under high server load, so we try to cut away all the slack we can. So we did a few benchmarks.

Wow.

PDO, in certain cases, is up to 4 times as fast as Pear DB.

Gut so!

October 18th, 2005

Die aktuellen politischen Entwicklungen sind sehr spannend zu beobachten. Was ich persönlich sehr spannend finde ist, dass die Politik momentan nicht mehr jeden Schritt der Verhandlungen direkt über alle Medien verbreitet, sondern die Journalisten auch schon mal ein paar Tage warten müssen, bis sie irgendwelche Informationen bekommen. So sehr ich selbst ein Informationsjunkie bin und auch Nachrichten auch einen erheblichen Teil meines Tagesablaufs ausmachen – dass hier der Druck, alles und jedes sofort als Nachricht präsentieren zu können von den Politikern abprallt, gefällt mir gut. Ich halte das für eine Entwicklung, die durchaus positiv zu bewerten ist.

Globalization

October 3rd, 2005

Wow. Has it really been that long since I last was active here? Sheesh!

During the long weekend that I’m currently enjoying, Globalization seems to be a fairly prominent topic. I’ve seen two documentaries on TV about two seperate aspects of it that got me thinking hard and deep on clutural elitism and eurocentric views, as well as trends Europe might certainly miss if it doesn’t stop looking at it’s own agendas so much. And now, going through my feed reader again, I see that one post on Joi Ito’s blog stand out to me, reminding me of my own experiences with American Express.

When I moved from Austria to Germany, I wanted to take my AmEx card with me. Alas, it was a Gold card and not the normal AmEx, so I wanted that in Germany as well. I talked to two different customer representatives on the phone, but both said that they couldn’t issue me the card I wanted. The credit history of me in Germany was not good enough for me to get the Gold card. (“Schufa-Auskunft”) I was willing to give them the card number of my Austrian card, but they said that they couldn’t access that data, so it wouldn’t be of any help. To make the long story short (and I do admit that I was fairly angry about it at that time), I signed up for a gold Visa card, got that within days and I’ve been happy with that ever since.

Maybe I might take an interest in AmEx again if they offer me a Centurion card without the yearly membership fee.