Since Oracle's takover of Sun, and by extension, MySQL, I have been quite curious about the various MySQL alternatives around, as well as some of the new storage engines coming out for MySQL. Well, today I decided to test-drive MariaDB (http://mariadb.org/), a less-well-known derivative (the developers call it a "branch") of MySQL. It installs very nicely on Ubuntu, drops in seemlessly in place of MySQL, and everything works as expected out of the box.

Step one: Open Google Chrome and type: 127.0.0.1 [Enter]

Step Two: view a log of web requests from my local Internet Gateway:

Here is what I see (and what Google sees):

The following is a note I posted on Facebook in January, 2011. Just to clarify (since it's the first post I'm putting in this blog): I am not particularly paranoid about "big brother" watching you, but I posted my thoughts because I found the idea amusing and somewhat interesting.