Ramblings

When in the throphy room and Hermione keeps telling you to cast Reducto, don’t (she is, in fact, very wrong). Instead, think about what should be in the cabinets you’re repairing.

For a start, you shouldn’t be using a web forum. Are you too stupid to use email or what?

Ask yourself, does your question boil down to “pls do my job 4 me. kthxbye” (because it’s in stupid speak because it’s an obviously stupid question to be asking). If it does, don’t post it. Instead, RTFFM (where F is for Fine…. at least one of them is anyway), look at the archives. You will then find approximately eleventy-billion messages pointing you to exactly the right tool and docs to let you answer your question - easily.

Went for food and coffee and gelati around Acland street yesterday and saw this gem of a sign:

I do hope they change it to “any social networking site”

Productivity will be reduced due to Wii goodness.

2 out of 2 reviews on Amazon for “Practical MythTV” are 5 stars. That’s a good feeling.

Although 1,000,000 copies sold would be an even better one :)

So, if anybody is crazy enough to grab patches from the commits@lists.mysql.com list and try and use them… you may have run into this problem (which I do every few weeks/months): new files aren’t created. That’s right kids, BitKeeper (or at least the post-commit hook that mails out the patches) produces patch files where new files are in a completely different format than GNU patch expects. Not even BK can import these patches (bk import -temail or -tpatch just don’t do it).

So… I present this script - unfuck_bk_patches.pl which once run across a patch that includes new files, allows you to apply it using patch (or, for example, quilt).

I release it under the “sworn at software license”… which means you’re allowed to do anything you want with it as long as at some point you have sworn at computer software for being crappy.

Thoughts on latest changes:

• don’t think there’s really much to it.
• I rather disagree with this slashdot headline  (MySQL Closing Off Its Source) as I just don’t think it’s true.

However, I have other thoughts (that are a lot more interesting to discuss):

We should:

• Release major version every 6 months. e.g. N.0, N.2, N.
• Odd numbers are used during the 6months of development, with very frequent releases. In fact, with a strict policy of keeping pushbuild green, you could automate this. Yes, some of these releases would be utter shit due to whatever problem seeped in. Get over it - it’s called a development release.
  • No new features merged for last 3 months of cycle for release.
  • source only releases… if you can’t build from source then you’re too stupid to run this. (or, diplomatically “you shouldn’t run this”)
  • For features that take longer than 3 months, we can have a “-proposed” patch set. i.e. a staging area for new things before they go in.
• Minor versions to latest N.x when needed (N.x.z)
  • Until the next N.x version, where N.x-1 is forgotten. I mean forgotten as in no patches at all… others can if they care.
• Pick a N.x and support it for Y years (a good N.x that is)
  • i.e. provide N.x.z
  • this can be our “RHEL” so to speak.
  • fixes go here.
  • call it ‘enterprise’ or whatever.

Past problems:

• 5.0 took too long to get to a real GA status
  • A bunch of things were broken in that release cycle… Although I joined it relatively late.
  • It’s been a decent release for a good while now, so that’s a good thing.
• 5.1 has taken too long to get to GA
  • good news is that 5.1 at GA should be a lot better than 5.0 at GA
  • As a developer I can honestly say I think we’ve improved processes a lot for making sure that a release doesn’t suck.
    • and as a result of this… I feel like 5.1 is the release where a lot of this stuff is fixed, and others should go a lot smoother.
  • It’s passed the dot-twenty rule for a release that doesn’t annoy you.

There are a lot of things looking good and being done right too (or if not right, a lot better than a year or two ago). e.g.

• NDB -telco (Carrier Grade Edition) releases
• worklog (open to the wider web)
• forge
• bugs db
• commits, code reviews and all that

Things we should fix with commits, code review and all that:

• drop the commits list all together except for crazy people.
• everything posted to internals@lists for review, and reviews take place there
  • or IRC or whatever… but outcome posted there
  •  hrrm… i should make people do that to get me to review things… (i.e. i should listen to myself)

Things we should fix internally:

• We should have 20% time… if only for random MySQL related things… lots of cool stuff has come out of engineers just hacking… even when we weren’t 100% meant to.

Things I don’t think will happen but could be useful…:

•  dropping commercially licensed product
  • It would be really nice to use  GPL licensed libraries around the place instead of either having #ifdef or reinventing the wheel.

What if it all goes proprietary:

• Some people speculate this could happen. Well, what then happens is a crapload of engineers leave the company - and not on good terms. So at least unlikely to happen without a massive implosion.
• I’ll say it here: if the code I’m writing isn’t available under the GPL (or other good free software license), I’m looking for work (and you should contact me with offers).

My thoughts on the non-free Network Monitoring and Advisory Service:

• It’s not free software… so really isn’t interesting to me personally.
• Others see it differently and attach value to it - good for them. I hear it makes us money as well - which does keep me in adequate supplies of scotch.
• I have used it a bit and it is quite neat - so hats off for a neat product.

P.S. there’s nothing here I wouldn’t say to anybody… and they’re welcome to disagree (and they do… sometimes even for good reasons).

This morning, found this blog post:

Herman Bos » Blog Archive » Got new hardware (DG965WH); yay; doesn’t even boot
Normally Linux doesn’t need to have its partition marked with the boot flag (windows does), so I didn’t really guess something like this myself. But it seems that the Intel BIOS checks the partition table and only agrees to boot from a disk if a partition is marked with the boot flag.

Intel, you utter, utter cocks.

(after apt-get install kpresenter)

$ kpresenter
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 170
Major opcode:  146
Minor opcode:  3
Resource id:  0×0
Failed to open device
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 170
Major opcode:  146
Minor opcode:  3
Resource id:  0×0
Failed to open device
koffice (lib kofficecore): ERROR: kpresenterpart.desktop not found.
koffice (lib kofficecore): ERROR: Run ‘kde-config –path services’ to see which directories were searched, assuming kde startup had the same environment as your current shell.
koffice (lib kofficecore): ERROR: Check your installation (did you install KOffice in a different prefix than KDE, without adding the prefix to /etc/kderc ?)
$

stab stab stab.

Dear Lazyweb,

I really want a GNOME application with a big button that says “backup” and proceeds to ask for a series of DVDs, on which it writes out everything on the hard disk (/ and /home) which can then (relatively easily) be used to restore the system.

I figure this would work for mum.

The old “drag and drop onto a blank DVD” doesn’t really work:

• things get bigger than 1 DVD (e.g. Photos)
• Important things like mail and bookmarks are hidden away in special dot folders (begging the question “so how do I back up my email?”)

Even a GUI around xfsdump that split the dump file into DVD sized chunks would be great…