The author is both a long term meditator and used to be a neuroscience professor. The book teaches meditation in a stage by stage way which is very easy to follow.
One of the great things about Ruby at the moment is the number of Ruby implementations around, including several Ruby like languages which attempt to do things slightly differently.
Crystal is one language with Ruby like syntax and the goal of compiling to efficient native code. ( http://crystal-lang.org )
Mirah is another statically typed Ruby like JVM based language, although its development is a bit slow. (http://www.mirah.org)
I wish, instead of adding new features, they had a release which dealt with all the problems from previous versions.
Its generally a good product, but one thing that I find really annoying (with the Rubymine branch of the product) is the way tabs randomly reorder. It is frustrating to have to search for a tab when you have more than about 6 files open and find that it has moved to a different place.
The tabs in intellij are definitely weird. I just don't really even pay attention to tabs or use them for navigating. I use keyboard commands for selecting files by name.
It would be great if they just kept all tabs on one row and shrunk them as needed. I end up relying a lot on ⌘⇧N. (I should probably map it to something shorter though.)
One thing you can do is split it into two vertical tab groups: each will hold about six to eight tabs, depending on file names (possibly more, I haven't counted).
I tend to do ctrl-shift-o to open files by name (I forget the default binding), though, unless it's to quickly swap back and forth between tabs. I am less upset about tab ordering (as we can drag to reorder), and more frustrated by it hiding tabs once you open too many.
Because the "Navigate File ..." feature is SO robust (it searches based on partials, and is pre-indexed), I almost always use that instead of browsing a project tree, which helps me use that space for more code.
Partial support for SASS will be out next week (together with Foundation). The way it works is that when CSS rules are saved Pinegrow saves .css, .less and .scss versions. Variables, expressions and most of the functions are supported.
Looking at the Sibdo pricing page, it looks like much higher pricing (compared to the more established competitors) at $95 a month for use on a SINGLE website with a confusing limitation to "50 users" whatever that means.
Not only that, the example graphs and charts look very basic.
The linked post says : "I think we shouldn't release 9.4 unless it goes in."
I haven't been following the PG developers mailing list that closely recently and the article doesn't go into any details as to why it may be delayed.
From the link that @masklinn posted (Thanks, very interesting!) to a hstore presentation, it looks like the hstore side was developed by November last year, so I'm wondering why it wouldn't be ready for release by this September or whether its just the integration of hstore/JSON side of things that is the hold up.
For me, the new PG feature - although its an outside project - which I am most looking forward to in the 9.4 time frame is a newer JDBC driver for Postgres ( https://github.com/impossibl/pgjdbc-ng ).
http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/jsonb-and-nested-hst... seems to be the relevant threads. Apparently there are issues over wire format, and jsonb being in core (and unless I'm misreading things jsonb is to be a new type separate from json, which is unwelcome news, I didn't know about that although it does make sense from a "binary copy of database files" sense)
He came up with it based on reinforcement studies in pigeons. There are more details on the linked page, but basically whilst working you just put a dot on a piece of paper every 6 minutes in the shape of a square, then join all the dots with a line. Something about doing this essentially meaningless thing improves motivation and throughput for me.
That said, I've also used Oracle quite extensively in the past when clients have needed it and it has some features that would be great to have in Postgres - as well as some features which we won't see in Postgres as they don't match the Postgres philosophy. Lack of one or more of the features below have driven the choice for various clients to use Oracle despite the cost, so having them would help grow the Postgres ecosystem.
Features in Oracle I'd like to see in Postgres :
1) Flashback. This name encompasses lots of ways to see data as it existed at a previous point in time.
If you drop a table, make a big (wrong) change etc, being able to flashback to just before it is brilliant. Or if you have a multi-terabyte sized performance test database, running a test and then a flashback to before the test is much quicker than restoring from a backup.
2) More robust partitioning - Postgres is quite lacking in comparison here.
3) Better backup options. PG really needs an in core incremental backup to start with, with something like Oracles block change tracking for backups thrown in to do quick incremental backups of a large database.
4) Replication - the lack of something like Oracles switchover which is used in a lot of architectures where you have a application and DB replicated across two sites, with one site being the active one at a point in time. When you need to take one site down for whatever reason, in Oracle you can just do a planned "switchover" to the replica DB and then switch back whenever you want without having to do anything as the DB knows it was a clean switch.
5) The diagnostic and performance monitoring built into Oracle are more extensive than those in Postgres.
The one other really useful feature Oracle has which will likely never be in Postgres is RAC (Real Application Clusters) which lets you create a multi-node active-active DB cluster quite easily.
Continuous archiving (WAL) is something quite different from incremental backups.
Incremental backups involve taking a full backup once in a while and then making interim backups of the changes since the base backup. WAL ( or archive logs in Oracle terminology) are still used for point in time recovery for changes that have occurred since the last incremental backup. One advantage is that if a row is updated 100 times between the base and incremental backup, you will only essentially be backing up the last change in your incremental backup versus WAL which will have all 100 changes. For big DBs, this can be very handy.
"somewhat harder to swith back"
Thats my point exactly. In Oracle switching between primary and standby is easy and you can do it back and forth as needed with no need to worry about rebuilding the database. In Postgres this is not yet the case, but most of the infrastructure is there already so its surprising it hasn't been done.
I'm also looking forward to logical replication. RAC is different however from master-master replication. Essentially its a specialized cluster with storage thats shared between all nodes in the cluster (so there is no replication going on) with "cache fusion" to share in-memory data between nodes .
PG lets the OS do the stuff it does best versus RAC which is largely a OS cluster solution specifically tailored for a multi node DB - so its unlikely (in my opinion) that the PG developers will ever produce anything similar.
I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and they may not have another buyer for years.
If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or whatever they have come down to.
IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for negotiation on those.
If you make a low enough offer that they can't accept, they will tell you and they have told me in the past that its because its below the sellers reserve. Whois may also give you a clue as to who owns the domain.
They have fairly decent margins for discounts - I used to get marketing emails offering 20%+ off prices in the past.
The author is both a long term meditator and used to be a neuroscience professor. The book teaches meditation in a stage by stage way which is very easy to follow.
Another excellent book is "Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook" (https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Bliss-Beyond-Meditators-H...).