Stuff I'm reading, World Cup finals weekend edition

I know it's summertime, because we get to attend the first performance of the summertime outdoor community theater at Oakland's Woodminster Theater this weekend, yay!

And when I'm not at the theater, at least I won't be bored:

• A Proper Server Naming Scheme

  Since we’re starting fresh with this data center, we wanted to come up with our own naming scheme to address the common problems we’ve seen elsewhere. We gleaned ideas from numerous sources such as data published by large-scale companies, various RFC‘s on the topic, and blog/forum posts a’plenty. Taking all of that into account, we’ve developed some best practices that should work for most small-to-medium businesses naming their own hardware.

• Finding All the Red M&Ms: A Story of Indexes and Full‑Table Scans

  A common question that comes up when people start tuning queries is “why doesn’t this query use the index I expect?”. There are a few myths surrounding when database optimizers will use an index. A common one I’ve heard is that an index will be used when accessing 5% or less of the rows in a table. This isn’t the case however - the basic decision on whether or not to use an index comes down to its cost.

• Fallacies of the Cost Based Optimizer

  This paper identifies three basic assumptions made by the cost based optimizer in the estimation of cardinalities of the results of relational operations on the base and intermediate row sources and ultimately the query result set.

• Cache coherency primer

  This is a whirlwhind primer on CPU caches. I’m assuming you know the basic concept, but you might not be familiar with some of the details.

• "I actually was hunting Ewoks." The Original Lucasfilm Games Team Talk About Life at Skywalker Ranch.

  Booger Hunt. George Lucas avoiding tax penalties. Monkey Island and dependency charts. The Lost Patrol. A file drawer full of crazy ideas. This is the story about life at Lucasfilm Games - as told by the people who lived it.

• Procedural Content Generation in Games: A Textbook and an overview of current research

  While the field of PCG is mostly based on AI methods, we want to set it apart from the more “mainstream” use of game-based tasks to test AI algorithms, where AI is most often used to learn to play a game.