After almost 15 years, GeoCities will be closing down its doors later this year. It is a sad day as one of internet’s oldest icons will finally be made to rest.

For those who weren’t old enough, GeoCities is a free website hosting service that was extremely popular during the early days of the internet. Back then, hosting your own website was still prohibitably expensive, but GeoCities offered a free option for new users. This caused an explosion of content within GeoCities, hosting anything from computer tutorials to humor and gossip. And all of these content were done with less than 10MB of space! Who couldn’t remember all those blinking text and animated backgrounds that became a trademark of that era? And who didn’t hate Yahoo’s ads that inserted itself on every opportunity it gets?

But sadly, in this time and age, Yahoo’s business model is now being disrupted by Google. Yahoo has now choice but to let go.

GeoCities, you will be missed…

With Sun’s announcement that the company will be bought by Oracle, a very big question comes into mind: What will happen to MySQL?

MySQL is currently under Sun, and soon Oracle, one of its competitors will buy Sun and claim MySQL. What does this forebode with MySQL’s future? Right now, MySQL is a huge threat to Oracle. For one, MySQL is free and open source, while you need to purchase Oracle. And MySQL’s market share cuts off Oracle’s bottom-line.

One scenario is that Oracle can simply drop MySQL support to kill off competition in the low-end market. They could also send MySQL to a slow death where future developments for MySQL are slowed or halted. Another possibility is that MySQL will be transformed into Oracle Lite and better integrate itself with Oracle. This opens up additional revenue from upgrading from MySQL to Oracle. The last outcome is that Oracle fortunately leaves MySQL alone to continue its normal operations, but everything is still uncertain at this point.

But in any case Oracle decides to be business-minded(greedy), expect a fork in the future.

Here is another one of those Google map mysteries…

What the heck happened here at Los Angeles Airport?

This article is a continuation to the Filtering Lists Using jQuery. In the previous article, we’ve discussed how to filter a simple list using a single category. However, in real life this isn’t simply the case. What if we have a new column for our database table which adds a new category to our fruits list:

tbl_fruits

The front-end would be a products list with all of the products in place and customers can filter which color and type of fruits they need to find.

Traditional wisdom would tell us that we would need to make a script that would send a query to the backend for every post request the reload the page for the search results.

SELECT fruit FROM `tbl_fruits` WHERE color = “Red” AND type = “Berry”;

However there are some instances that this approach has too much overhead on our backend and our database. In cases where all data has already been preloaded, we don’t have to query the database once again for data that is already available. We can simply use jQuery to control this information.
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