I can comment on Amazon Aurora:

> Is the product a fork of PostgreSQL or a wrapper round the current version?

Aurora is a fork: they've re-written a significant chunk of the engine. Note that Amazon also offers RDS PostgreSQL, which is a managed version of the "regular" PostgreSQL engine. RDS PostgreSQL also offers a HA setup (no version upgrade without downtime, however). It works quite well.

> Will the DB engine keep in lock-step with new PostgreSQL releases or might they diverge?

Amazon promises to keep it in lock-step. How soon they will release an upgrade to a major version remains to be seen.

> When new versions of Amazon Aurora/Azure DB for PostgreSQL are released will our live instance get automatically updated or will we be able to choose a version?

Minor version upgrades are applied automatically. For major version upgrades, it's unclear at this time (there hasn't been one yet for Aurora PostgreSQL), but I think it's unlikely they will be applied automatically.

Olive oil is actually excellent for frying. Extra virgin olive oil has a smoking point of 405 deg. F, which is similar to canola.

If it is labeled "extra virgin olive oil" you really don't know what kind of oil it is. Particularly if it has Italy anywhere near the name.

Yes, in theory it should be extra virgin olive oil. In theory there are people who inspect it. But if they raise doubt about the authenticity of a clearly subpar product, they get sued in a stacked court system. So everyone cheats and nobody calls them on it.

See http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/05/business/la-fi-olive... for an example of a lawsuit that was filed over this in the USA. (Because you really can't sue about it in Italy.)

Um, no. There's a lot of misinformation on oil smoke points on the net unfortunately. Going way off topic here for HN, but see http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/SmokePointOil.htm for an accurate chart. It's ~320F for EVOO vs ~400F for canola.

That makes a noticeable difference in the kitchen. Using olive oil you'll find yourself overheating more often. It's also more expensive, and imparts a flavor, which you typically don't want in your oil when sauteing or pan frying. If you want that flavor, pour a little high quality olive oil on at the end. I do that with something like a pan seared halibut, it's heavenly.

Thomas Keller mentions in his books (I believe both Ad Hoc and Bouchon) that he uses canola for sauteing and pan frying for exactly those reasons. (Grapeseed oil is great, he mentions, but very expensive. Peanut oil is typically used for deep frying.) He's probably the most technical of the chefs with numerous Michelin-starred restaurants so I'm inclined to take his advice.

From the same chart:

Extra Light (Olive Oil) - 468°F

Maybe that's what GP was referring to. I would put the oils with higher smoke points in the chart closer to exotic territory (avocado, ghee, rice bran, tea seed). I buy my Extra Light OO in jugs at Costco.

Short takeaway: I use EVOO for dressing/cold applications, Extra Light for frying.

Extra light olive oil is garbage. One should not use it for anything. It is "a mixture of refined olive oils that are derived from the lowest quality olive oils available through chemical processing."

Do yourself a favor and buy jugs of canola instead. (Really you should buy small batches, as oil does degrade over time, but it's arguably worth the cost tradeoff.)

I use Grapeseed oil for stir fry and like the fact that it produces no smoke at all. I get from trade joe in a small bottle. Do you know anyplace that I can buy in larger size? Thanks.

Grapeseed oil is expensive. It's a better oil than canola, especially for something like mayo.

I believe it goes rancid though (just like canola) after a time so you should continue to buy in small sizes.

Something is quite wrong indeed. I disabled the dynamic pager, and now my system is working as it's supposed to. Snappy and responsive.

I opened all of my apps, expecting it to crash miserably: instead, the system started paging as it should, stayed responsive (though slower), and promptly returned to normal once it regained memory.

I don't know what's going on, but I can definitely say that this is how I want my computer to work.

clutch -> crutch

Three years ago the state was much worse, so I ended up writing my own ORM, which tries to address some of the issues pointed out here.

My primary need was to be able to map the same models to different schemas, including very badly designed legacy ones, so the mapper layer had to be clearly separated from the model and very hackable. Also, the query syntax had to be powerful enough to avoid SQL whenever possible, so that the same queries could be applied to different environments.

Right now it implements Units Of Work and Identity Mappers; it has deep querying and multilevel strategic loading (not limited to one level as with DataMapper); functions and aggregates; and many other features, wrapped in a familiar easy syntax.

If someone wants to try it, I'd love to hear some feedback: it's at https://github.com/me/spider.

I don't believe this is a good example. Ruby has case..when instead of COND, though it's a language construct, not a function; but I think COND can be trivially implemented in any language that has anonymous functions. In Ruby:

  def COND(*args)
      args.each_slice(2){ |s| return s[1].call if s[0].call }
  end

  COND(lambda{ false }, lambda{ "not this"}, lambda{ true }, lambda{ "this" })

(not a lisper, though, so I might be missing something).