Columbus could be the next startup city

Ever since I wrote about the Midwest last year I’ve been keeping my eyes on Columbus. I decided to hold a small pitch-off to meet some of the startups I saw last time I had driven through. The pitch-off was a success and a company called Wyzzer took first place and the quirky Hopper Carts came in second. But what I really came away with was a new respect for Columbus as a startup hub.

You see, I grew up in Columbus and I wanted to see how much it’s changed.

And it has changed. A lot.

On the aggregate a city like Columbus is the model for the future. There is manufacturing, farming, retail, brewing, and ecommerce all in a few square miles. The people are ready to expand and learn and there are plenty of smart folks who are willing to leave high-priced real estate in New York and San Francisco to get a house with a back yard down the street from a beer garden in one of the city’s urban enclaves. I asked around and heard that things are getting even better. Here are a few points I discovered during my visit.

All eyes are on Columbus. And they can’t fail. The city just received a $277 million Smart City grant from the federal government to build out tools and techniques that will define the city of the future. So far it looks like the Mayor Andy Ginther and the city government is dragging its feet but there is hope. While other cities – most notably Pittsburgh – vied for the grant, Columbus got it on the power of private industry and public infrastructure. And now it has four years to deliver. I’ve met a few small startups who are trying to work with the Smart City task force to build out the initiative but there’s little promising thus far.

That said, it’s great Columbus got the nod. There is a lot of promise here as long as government gets into gear and starts working with local entrepreneurs and, most important, this grant can help a thousand startups blossom. It’s a win-win for the government and the city. It just can’t be squandered.

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Further, the quality of life is about to hipsterize. In comparison to cosmopolitan Chicago and small, cool towns like Raleigh, Columbus is still a mixture of malls and suburbs. That’s swiftly changing. I lived in Columbus until college and I saw the rough and ready bars of the Campus and Short North District slowly wink out one by one. Then, when I began returning in the 2000s, I saw entire swathes of urban business turn into a sterile sprawl. In short, between 1993 and 2008 or so Columbus got boring.

That’s swiftly changing. The Short North District is a booming pleasure dome dedicated to deep fried pickles and great drinks. Upstarts like Hot Chicken Takeover and carts like PutItInYourFace are replacing the T.G.I. Fridays and Applebees. Microbrews have rousted Coors and Bud. Columbus, like so many other cities, has become comfortable, artisanal, and pleasant. But, because that process is just beginning, there’s still time to get in on the ground floor. There is plenty of room to grow. While many of the rich suburbs are hopeless as magnets for art and commerce the are still places in the city that have plenty of promise. As I wrote last week the city has plenty of rotting malls it can easily turn into unique shopping and eating experiences.

One con? The Columbus ecosystem is small. Columbus has a population of 835,957 with a regular influx of students that leaves over the summer. It’s long been known as a collector of corporate offices – Chase is here as is Nationwide and the Limited. It has never been an “entrepreneurial town” per se and instead depending on the steady flow of students from the halls of OSU to the cubicles of the corporates. That’s changing.

The ecosystem, however, is as nascent as other similarly-sized cities. A few things have been tried but few of the accelerators are able to keep successful entrepreneurs rooted to the city, an important aspect of ecosystem building. I’d like to see more of that over time and I’m sure that slowly but surely we can see some folks settling down to enjoy some Jenni’s and Donato’s with the natives.

Columbus startups need seed badly. There are a few VCs in the area – Rev1, Drive, and Loud Capital are names you hear often – but like most smaller markets the drive to fund smaller startups in negligible. Loud, a startup itself, is the closest to an on-the-ground seed group while Drive is looking for comfortable later stage investments. Accelerators like Fintech71 see the value of seed in specific markets but they’re finding deal-flow difficult. Therefore both investors and startups in the city are usually stuck – a situation is extremely common in cities like Columbus.

One answer to this problem is to activate the older angels to bet on new things. Whereas the angel network in places like Boulder and Denver are well-established and risk tolerant, the same can’t be said of the Columbus check-writers. However Loud has exhibited some success in talking to doctors and other younger professionals who want to experience entrepreneurship but are too busy saving lives to learn Django. The resulting network the Loud team has built allows them to spin up funding quickly when they find something interesting.

Further, the token sale prospects of many small startups are just as valid in cities like Columbus as they are in the Valley or Berlin. I expect many upstart VCs to feel the pinch of founders who no longer want to play their long game.

I asked people why they came to Columbus. Many had the same answer: the talent, the house prices, the quality of life. Shaul Weisband, co-founder of Jifiti, moved to Columbus from Israel to be closer to US retail. His company allows people to send gifts via ecommerce. He’s glad he made the move.

“I’m seventeen minutes from my house to my airport gate,” he said. He also has ready access to local talent and contacts and he and his growing family have more room. He just misses the hummus.

“But I just make my own,” he said.

Featured Image: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images

via TechCrunch
Columbus could be the next startup city

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL Using the Adjacency List Model

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use adjacency list model for managing hierarchical data in MySQL. Introduction to adjacency list model Hierarchical data is everywhere. It can be blog categories, product hierarchies, or organization structures. There are many ways to manage hierarchical data in MySQL and the adjacency list model may be […]

The post Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL Using the Adjacency List Model appeared first on MySQL Tutorial.

via MySQL Tutorial
Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL Using the Adjacency List Model

The Nerdiest Debate Ever May Finally Have a Winner

Image: HBO

If you’re not a programmer, you’re probably not going to know this, but there’s a vicious rivalry lurking in the code of every app you use. If code isn’t written consistently—using either the tab or the space button to create indentations—the format can get all wonky, making it difficult for multiple authors to contribute to the code. While the methods produce virtually the same result, lines have still been drawn.

On one side are the tab fanatics, like Richard in HBO’s Silicon Valley. On the other side is everyone else—those who use the space bar. But now, thanks to science, the fight may finally have its knockout punch: space fans apparently make more money with their code than tab fans. Which means there really is one winner.

This news comes from Stack Overflow—a popular online resource for developers—which issued a survey earlier this year to programmers. Of 28,657 respondents, a little less than half of whom also provided their salaries, Stack Overflow learned that 41.8 percent of devs use spaces for indentations, while 40.7 percent use tabs. That’s a fairly even split, and different than the results we saw last year, when a dev sourced all their space vs tabs data from GitHub and found that an overwhelming majority of users preferred spaces.

While the findings from GitHub and Stack Overflow don’t match exactly, spaces were victorious in both, and when it came to Stack Overflow, spaces won out in more ways than one. If you’re looking to make some bank, then using spaces over tabs will, statistically, result in an 8.6 percent higher salary. That number takes into account a wide number of variables including country of residence, education and language. But even considering all those factors, the pay discrepancy amounts to approximately 2.4 years more experience than a tab user. In other words, according to these numbers, if you’re a 24-year-old space coder, you’d be making about as much as a 26-year-old tab coder.

Winner! (Image: Stack Overflow)

In hard cash terms, the median salary of the space developers was $59,140, while the median salary of tab developers was a gonna-struggle-to-survive-in-Silicon-Valley $43,750.

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David Robinson, the Stack Overflow data scientist who revealed these numbers, cautioned in his post, as we would, that “correlation is not causation.” While Robinson makes an effort to account for many variables, including location, experience, language type, and even formal education, he cannot account for everything. Perhaps all space users, no matter when they live in the world, are just born with a silver spoon stuck in their mouth and are more prone to make extra money. Or maybe white men use spaces while white women and people of color use tabs.

If you’re a data scientist yourself, or a tab person burning with something to say, than you can download the raw survey data yourself and double check Robinson’s numbers. For those of us who want to roll around in money, however, the answer is clear.

[Stack Overflow]

via Gizmodo
The Nerdiest Debate Ever May Finally Have a Winner

Jeff Bezos tweets a request for ideas

Here is the tweet link, here is the text:

This tweet is a request for ideas.  I’m thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time — working for the long term.  For philanthropy, I find I’m drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now.  As one example, I’m very inspired and moved by the work done at Mary’s Place here in Seattle.  I like long-term — it’s a huge lever: Blue Origin, Amazon, Washington Post — all of these are contributing to society and civilization in their own ways.  But I’m thinking I want much of my philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now — short-term — at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.  If you have ideas, just reply to this tweet with the idea (and if you think this approach is wrong, would love to hear that too).

Thanks!

Jeff

After I see what you all come up with, and after I edit out the most brilliant ideas, I’ll tweet back your responses to him.  I’ll come up with something of my own as well.

The post Jeff Bezos tweets a request for ideas appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.


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Jeff Bezos tweets a request for ideas

E3 2017: Nexon’s ‘Durango’ exiting long development, releases for iOS in tail-end of 2017

 

E3 2017: Nexon’s Durango exiting long development, releases for iOS in tail-end of 2017

Nexon’s survival title “Durango” has made an appearance at the 2017 E3, showing off a combination of isometric role-playing and survival in a creature-infested post-apocalyptic world.

The open-world isometric-view title from Nexon takes place in a world populated by dinosaurs and other similarly prehistoric creatures. Players are forced to gather resources to survive, and can band together for larger projects and building construction.

Developers Nexon call it a “pioneering open-world massively multiplayer online role playing game” with a focus on crafting, and camp settlement. While solo play is possible, Nexon encourages group-play as other player assemblies can be cooperative, or hostile to the player.

The new trailer released at E3 features a dinosaur attack on a commuter train, and showcases the many survival mechanics of “Durango,” including fishing, harvesting materials, farming, settlement building, and crafting. Also shown are some of the ways players can team up to tame wild dinosaurs.

VIDEO

The early beta on Android in January garnered players mostly from Korea and Thailand. The title will arrive worldwide on iOS at some point in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Hardware requirements are not yet known for the finished title, but the game was spotted running at E3 on an iPad Air 2.

via AppleInsider
E3 2017: Nexon’s ‘Durango’ exiting long development, releases for iOS in tail-end of 2017

Watch the tutorial: backup best practices for MySQL, MariaDB and Galera Cluster

Many thanks to everyone who registered and/or participated in Tuesday’s webinar on backup strategies and best practices for MySQL, MariaDB and Galera clusters led by Krzysztof Książek, Senior Support Engineer at Severalnines. If you missed the session, would like to watch it again or browse through the slides, they’re now online for viewing. Also check out the transcript of the Q&A session below.

Watch the webinar replay

Whether you’re a SysAdmin, DBA or DevOps professional operating MySQL, MariaDB or Galera clusters in production, you should make sure that your backups are scheduled, executed and regularly tested. Krzysztof shared some of his key best practice tips & tricks yesterday on how to do just that; including a live demo with ClusterControl. In short, this webinar replay shows you the pros and cons of different backup options and helps you pick the one that goes best with your environment.

Happy backuping!

Questions & Answers

Q. Can we control I/O while taking the backups with mysqldump and mysqldumper (I’ve used nice before, but it wasn’t helpful).

A. Theoretically it might be possible, although we haven’t really tested that. If you really want to apply some throttling then you may want to look into cgroups – it should help you to throttle I/O activity on a per-process basis.

Q. Can we take mydumper with ClusterControl and is ClusterControl is free software?

A. We don’t currently support it, but you can always use it manually; ClusterControl doesn’t prevent you from using this tool. There is a free community version of ClusterControl, yes, though its backup features are part of the commercial version. With the free community version you can deploy and monitor your database (clusters) as well as develop your own custom database advisors. You also have a one-month trial period that gives you access to all of ClusterControl’s features. You can find all the feature details here: http://ift.tt/2qeERU7

Q. Can xtrabackup work with data-at-rest encryption?

A. It can work with encrypted data in MySQL or Percona Server – it is because they encrypt only tablespaces, which xtrabackup just copies – it doesn’t have to access contents of tablespaces. MariaDB encrypts not only tablespaces but also, for example, InnoDB redo logs, which have to be accessed by xtrabackup – therefore xtrabackup cannot work with data-at-rest encryption as implemented in MariaDB. Because of this MariaDB Corporation forked xtrabackup into MariaDB Backup. This tool supports encryption done by MariaDB.

Q. Can you use mydumper for point-in-time recovery?

A. Yes, it is possible. mydumper can store GTID data so you can identify last applied transaction and use it as a starting position for processing binary logs.

Q. Is it a problem if we use binary logs with xtrabackup with start-datetime and end-datetime instead of start-position and end-position? We make a full backup on Fridays and every other day an incremental backup. When we need to recover we take the last full and all incremental backups and the binary logs from this day starting from 00:00 to NOW … could there be a problem with apply-log?

A. In general, you should not use –start-datetime or –end-datetime when you want to reply binary log on the database. It’s not granular enough – it has a resolution of one second and there could be many transactions that happened during that second. You can use it to minimize timeframe to look for manually, but that’s all. If you want to replay binary logs, you should use –start-position and –end-position. Only this will precisely define from which event you will replay binlogs and on which event it’ll end up.

Q. Should I run the dump software on load balancer or one of the MySQL nodes?

A. Typically you’ll use it on MySQL nodes. Some of the tools can only do just that. For example, Xtrabackup – you have to run it locally, on the database host. You can stream output to another location, but it has to be started locally.

Q. Can we take partial backups with ClusterControl? And if yes, how can we restore a backup on a running instance?

A. Yes, you can take a partial backup using ClusterControl (you can backup separate schema using xtrabackup) but, as of now, you cannot restore a partial backup on a running instance. This is caused by the fact that the schema you’d recover will not be consistent with the rest of the cluster. To make it consistent, the cluster has to be bootstrapped from the node on which you restore a backup. So, technically, the node runs all the time but it’s a fairly heavy and invasive operation. This will change in the next version of ClusterControl in which you’d be able to restore backups on a separate host. From that host you could then dump contents of a restored schema using mysqldump (or mydumper) and restore it on a production cluster.

Q. Can you please share the mysqldumper command?

A. It’s rather hard to answer this question without doing copy and paste from the documentation, so we think it will be the best if we’d point you to the documentation: http://ift.tt/2rkeP32

Watch the webinar replay

Related whitepaper
 
The DevOps Guide to Database Backups for MySQL and MariaDB
This whitepaper discusses the two most popular backup utilities available for MySQL and MariaDB, namely mysqldump and Percona XtraBackup.

via Planet MySQL
Watch the tutorial: backup best practices for MySQL, MariaDB and Galera Cluster

BREAKING: Active Shooter Situation on Travis Air Force Base in California

screenshot2017-06-14at6-29-45pm

We are getting reports of an active shooter situation at Travis Air Base base just outside Fairfield, California.

Officials at the base posted the following statement on the Travis AFB Facebook page just before 3:30 p.m.:

“Travis Air Force Base is currently responding to a security incident,” Fairfield Police Department said this afternoon. “More details will be released as they become available. The public is being asked to stay away from the base to ensure emergency responders can respond accordingly.”

Travis AFB had been conducting exercise drills earlier today, but officials at the base have confirmed this is a “real world security incident,” not a drill.

We will update you on the situation as more information becomes available.

The post BREAKING: Active Shooter Situation on Travis Air Force Base in California appeared first on Bearing Arms.

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BREAKING: Active Shooter Situation on Travis Air Force Base in California

Smith & Wesson M&P22 Full Size .22 lr Pistol

When the Smith & Wesson M&P22 was rolled out in 2011 many shooters rejoiced that there was a new full size .22 on the market that closely resembled a centerfire handgun. At the time of its introduction, the number of choices in that segment was rather limited. In this episode of TFBTV, Patrick pulls the […]

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The post Smith & Wesson M&P22 Full Size .22 lr Pistol appeared first on The Firearm Blog.


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Smith & Wesson M&P22 Full Size .22 lr Pistol