The Emacs Conference is happening, it’s real, and it will take place at the end of this month in London. Check it out, and register at Emacs Conference Event Brite. It’s free and there’s still some availability. *It's all about Emacs, and it rocks!* We have a great line-up for this conference, which makes me proud to be able to be there. If you’ve ever been paying attention when using Emacs then you’ve already heard those names: Sacha Chua is frequently blogging about how she manages to improve her workflow thanks to Emacs Lisp, John Wiegley is a proficient Emacs contributor maybe best known for his ledger Emacs Mode, then we have Luke Gorrie who hacked up SLIME among other things, we also have Nic Ferrier who is starting a revolution in how to use Emacs Lisp with elnode.

If you’ve been following along at home the newer statistics developments, you might have heard about this new State of The Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm called HyperLogLog. This technique is now available for PostgreSQL in the extension postgresql-hll available at https://github.com/aggregateknowledge/postgresql-hll and soon to be in debian.

While making progress with both Event Triggers and Extension Templates, I needed to make a little break. My current keeping sane mental exercise seems to mainly involve using Common Lisp, a programming language that ships with about all the building blocks you need. *Yes, that old language brings so much on the table* When using Common Lisp, you have an awesome interactive development environment where you can redefine function and objects while testing them.

I’ve discovered recently another Emacs facility that I since then use several times a day, and I wonder how I did without it before: C-M-SPC runs the command mark-sexp. *Well, `mark-sexp` apparently is related to the Sex Pistols* It’s pretty simple actually, when you have the point at the beginning of a word or an identifier (containing numbers, dashes, underscores and other punctuation signs), you can select the whole of it in a single key chord!

Some skytools related new today, it’s been a while. For those who where at my FOSDEM’s talk about Implementing High Availability you might have heard that I really like working with PGQ. A new version has been released a while ago, and the most recent verion is now 3.1.3, as announced in the Skytools 3.1.3 email. *Upgrade time!* Skytools 3.1.3 enters debian First news is that Skytools 3.1.3 has been entering debian today (I hope that by the time you reach that URL, it’s been updated to show information according to the news here, but I might be early).

This year’s FOSDEM has been a great edition, in particular the FOSDEM PGDAY 2013 was a great way to begin a 3 days marathon of talking about PostgreSQL with people not only from our community but also from plenty other Open Source communities too: users! *PostgreSQL at FOSDEM made for a great event* Having had the opportunity to meet more people from those other development communities, I really think we should go and reach for them in their own conferences.