With no other outlet, I've previously been linking to interesting posts and stories from my Google Buzz account. Not many (if any) of them had additional commentary from me, so I'm just dumping the links here for any interested parties (in chronological order). You'll notice a lot of them are DB-related, as that's what a large bulk of my time this year has been devoted to.

• Linux not quite ready for 4K sectors
• TokuDB 3.0 out
• Twitter is moving to Cassandra
• InnoDB index lock and adaptive search
• Why English is hard to understand
• InnoDB mutex contention
• Ubisoft new DRM cracked in one day
• Kennards drops Puppet
• Unlimited Detail Technology (graphics rendering)
• BMW S1000 RR tablecloth trick
• Lavalamp in a centrifuge
• When not to give Windows advice
• DB Hyperthreading performance
• Enterprise workflow
• A good use for bulldog clips
• Open Source deduplication
• First Meego Release
• Very cool status indicator board
• Quick MD5 check of DB query results
• Interesting airfield visualisation
• Storing cryptographic keys with invisible tattoos
• Dedicated server count visualisation
• RHEL6 Beta 1 release
• Fixie blog
• High latency DB replication
• Some more investigation into the effects of TSO
• Level 2 flash cache
• Qt SDK beta
• Simulated swimming pool room
• PostgreSQL 9.0 Beta 1
• You should know how to use awk
• Battle against any guess
• IT Infrastructure as a house of cards
• Cloudshark packet repository
• Nokia flagship phones will run Meego
• Epicwin app
• 22 cheap VPS providers
• Do not give ZFS all of your HDD
• Ninjas and Rockstars
• Complicated mechanisms explained in simple animations
• 7 Reasons to switch to Dvorak
• Membase, another interesting Key/Value store. I like the idea of vbuckets.
• Hard drive clock
• Source of Google's Android logo
• What's system administration like at Google
• BDD with Puppet using cucumber-puppet

And other interesting tidbits:

• Has anybody managed to migrate a git repository to svn? Yes, but with a lot of difficulty.
• hp f4580 + xsane + ocropus + tesseract = pretty decent OCR of my German mail, wirelessly scanning from another room! All of the other OCR tools I tried on Linux sucked badly.
• $RANDOM in bash automatically generates an unsigned 0 to 2^15-1 number.
• On an otherwise reasonably performing link with some latency, generic segmentation offloading enabled on the sender side completely destroys network performance. Could be related to some interaction with QoS settings in the path....
• Safety tip: don't rsync to /dev/null, it WILL replace it with a file!
• I installed Spacewalk in a VM to test it, and like most other things that involve Oracle, it involves a LOT of pain.