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.

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Posted in Hacking

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.

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Posted in German, Politics

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.

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Posted in Politics