Velocity Online Conference is the meeting ground where emerging trends are examined, predictions are made, and business models vetted in the performance and operations ecosystem.Topics include: diagnosing and preventing JavaScript/AJAX performance issues in IE, provisioning toolchain, keeping track of your performance using Show Slow, MySQL abuse, and site performance in Google Webmaster Tools. Register now for Velocity Online. It's free!

More Upcoming Online Conferences:
Gov 2.0 Online Conference – Gov 2.0 International: Global Innovation Meeting Local Challenges

Should public cloud providers reach into the guest operating system to perform various functions? I've always held that a public cloud provider should treat the border between the hypervisor and guest operating system as a sacred barrier that should never be breached. The fear in public cloud computing is giving up control. When a public cloud provider reaches into your virtual machine, you lose too much control. Read more.

On March 11 Boston will join several other cities who have host conferences on the movement broadly known as NoSQL. Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, HypergraphDB, Hypertable, Memcached, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, SimpleDB, Voldemort, and probably other projects as well will be represented at the one-day affair. The interviews I had with various projects leaders for this article turned up a recurring usage pattern for NoSQL. What connects the users is that they carry out web-related data crunching, searching, and other Web 2.0 related work. I think these companies use NoSQL tools because they're the companies who understand leading-edge technologies and are willing to take risks in those areas. As the field gets better known, usage will spread. Read more.

As we struggle to stay on top of everything that crosses our paths, are we missing opportunities to get more out of the information? Are we becoming too much of a "right now" society? Are we able to delve into an issue at length or stick with a topic that doesn't have a quick pithy answer? My fear is that in our quest for quick information, we may be losing a vital tool in books. Read more.

gheat -- add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre's blog. This and more in today's Four Short Links. Read more.

Sometimes I am asked to interview potential Flex programmers for clients. A common requirement is to assess the candidate's ability to design and develop custom components. Today's blog post is dedicated to the hiring manager who called after regular business hours today and illustrates some great skill tests for evaluating flex programmers, code included. Read more.

O'Reilly Digital Distribution Service — O'Reilly Media announced today an innovative new digital service at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York CIty. Pascal Honscher, an 11-year veteran with O'Reilly, will lead this digital distribution service. The new division aims to help publishers meet the demands and challenges of the 21st century. For the past four years O'Reilly has invested in a technical tool chain that allows us to easily open new markets and channels. And starting today O'Reilly will make our digital tool chain and sales and marketing capabilities available to every other publisher. For more information, see: oreilly.com/go/digital

From March 1-5 there will be ~65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. There are lots of Ignite videos online. Read more.

The fourth annual TOC is now over. Thank you to everyone who participated and made it such a success. Registration is now open for next year!

News from TOC:

• Watch keynotes and other exclusive TOC interviews online
• Author, sell thyself (but in a good way)
• Announcing O'Reilly's New Digital Services for Publishers
• Web community is messy in all the right ways
• The chaos and the opportunity in Arab publishing
• The e-reader growth spurt of 2010
• The future of publishing lives on and around the web

Slashdot reviewer Ahmed Al-Saadi gives Learning Python, Fourth Edition, by Mark Lutz, a 9/10 rating, and says, "Like many O'Reilly books, this is a well-written, coherent, and beautifully type-set book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to, or already does, program using python. It should help the novice in the transition to an excellent programming language or, otherwise, make an already familiar environment more powerful in the hands of veterans." Read more.