I saw a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream yesterday at the Cornell Plantations. It was put on by the Durham Shakespeare Company from Durham University in Durham, England. The plantations are a pain to get to, but the production was good, and MSD is an excellent play to see outside.
Heartwarming
The colloquium speaker this week was Tom Leighton, an applied math professor from MIT who founded Akamai in the late 90s. Akamai now serves something like 20% of the web’s traffic and is worth on the order of $5 billion. The neat thing was that Leighton works in the Theory group at MIT. People often say that theoretical computer science is of no use in the real world, but Akamai’s techniques (based on consistent hashing, among other things) have certainly made a difference!
Texify
Stonebraker
The latest ACM Queue has an interesting interview with Michael Stonebraker about the future of databases. Stonebraker was an important figure in the early development of relational database systems, and now he’s agitating for a move away from the relational model. Coincidentally, I’m giving a presentation on Stonebraker’s latest paper (pdf) in the DB seminar this semester.
Update: Stonebraker’s certainly been getting a lot of press. See his post in The Database Column and an blurb on Slashdot. I found myself agreeing with some of the comments on Slashdot suggesting that while Stonebraker may provide ample evidence for changing database system architecture, that’s not necessarily the same as abandoning the relational model. I’ll continue to follow his work, but I’m also going to order the definitive guide to relational database theory, just in case.
NBC
I was sorry to hear that NBC’s shows will no longer be sold on iTunes. I regularly bought Heroes last season, but it sounds like NBC was making unreasonable demands. There’s no way I would spend $4.99 on one episode of television.