Category Archives: life, the universe and everything

Rackspace Rookie-O (in Hong Kong!)

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I’d meant to finish writing this way back in July… but I failed at that. Now is a good time to talk about Rookie-O as my again new colleague Andrew Hutchings (Buy his and Sergei’s book on MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development!) just went through the same thing (but in London instead of Hong Kong) given by the same trainer (Hi Eddie!).

Rackspace is the second employer I’ve had that has some kind of new hire training (the first being Sun). I am, of course, not quite counting Salmiakki as new-hire training for MySQL (although I probably should). To quote from the Wikipedia article: “Although the rumor of the heart attack was a hoax, the drink may still cause harm. The strong flavor almost completely masks the presence of ethanol, and the drinker may not realize he is consuming a drink almost 40% alcohol by volume (80-proof), leading to possible alcohol poisoning.” A promising introduction to the company.

Monty, MÃ¥rten and Kaj with Salmiakki singing Helan GÃ¥r at the MySQL User Conference Japan in 2007

Monty, MÃ¥rten and Kaj with Salmiakki singing Helan GÃ¥r at the MySQL User Conference Japan in 2007

I could possibly say something about the Sun New-Hire training… but I’m just trying to find something positive to say – and I can’t. I got a bit of hacking done? Seriously.

Actually coordinating a time to attend a Rookie-O (Rookie Orientation, the Rackspace name for new hire training) was rather tricky. There was one right before the MySQL User Conference back in April (not the best of timing), one during an upcoming team meeting (again, not ideal) and one that got organised in the middle of everything for the office in Hong Kong. So, I headed to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong streetlife

The Hong Kong office is relatively new (late 2008) and there were people there who hadn’t gone through the standard Rackspace Rookie-O (Orientation).

Rackers walking Hong Kong at Night

It was rather cool to hang out with other people who worked for the company – and in totally different areas than I do. I did get a better understanding for how the rest of the company operates and the people involved. The training itself was useful and substantially less geared towards not-my-job than Sun’s was.

The good news is that Andrew thought it was useful too. Pretty impressed so far.

Finding Ada

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Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

- http://findingada.com/

This is something I had wanted to do last year… and I’m finding I have the same problem this year. My idea was to write about someone who has had an influence on me. The problem is picking one person to write about. Throughout my life there have been many women in technology who have influenced me. I started going through people in my head… and got to a very long list rather quickly.

So, instead, I shall write about the future.

To the future Ada, who will think this whole exercise of picking a woman in technology to write about as absurd as if we, today, picked a woman who votes to write about.

Continuing the journey

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A couple of months ago (December 1st for those playing along at home) it marked five years to the day that I started at MySQL AB (now Sun, now Oracle). A good part of me is really surprised it was for that long and other parts surprised it wasn’t longer. Through MySQL and Sun, I met some pretty amazing people, worked with some really smart ones and formed really solid and awesome friendships. Of course, not everything was perfect (sometimes not even close), but we did have some fun.

Up until November 2008 (that’s 3 years and 11 months for those playing at home) I worked on MySQL Cluster. Still love the product and love how much better we’re making Drizzle so it’ll be the best SQL interface to NDB :)

The ideas behind Drizzle had been talked about for a while… and with my experience with internals of the MySQL server, I thought that some change and dramatic improvement was sorely needed.

Then, in 2008, Brian created a tree. I was soon sending in patches at nights, we announced to the whole world at OSCON and it captured a lot of attention.

Since November 2008 I’ve been working on Drizzle full time. It was absolutely awesome that I had the opportunity to spend all my days hacking on Drizzle – both directly with fantastic people and for fantastic people.

But… the Sun set… which was exciting and sad at the same time.

Never to fear! There were plenty of places wanting Drizzle hackers (and MySQL hackers). For me, it came down to this: “real artists ship”. While there were other places where I would no doubt be happy and work on something really cool, the only way I could end up working out where I should really be was: what is the best way to have Drizzle make a stable release that we’d see be suitable for deployment? So, Where Am I Now?

Rackspace.

Where I’ll again be spending all my time hacking Drizzle.

Bike Riding in the storm

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Out on a pier down St Kilda, the weather looked… well… like it could be a bit annoying on the way back:

but then… just a bit down the way…. it hit:

It was “a bit wet”. Big blocks of ice falling from the sky (that hurt).

Anyway, on the way back we found a storm water drain:

Yes, behind Michael is just all water (and I’m not talking about the Bay).

Still managed to get a 36.5km ride out of it, so not all bad.

H.264 Anti-features

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No, You Can’t Do That With H.264 is an excellent write up of how H.264 (“MPEG-4”) is fraught with problems that you just would not have if using Free (as in Freedom) formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

It is amazing that Final Cut “Pro” cannot actually be used to create H.264 content for commercial (i.e. “Pro”) use!

It’s the same for MPEG-2.

Oh, and if you use it to decode video that was encoded by somebody without the proper license… well, then you’re also screwed. How the heck you’re meant to work that one out I have no idea.

Photos of Burning Man: Getting to Black Rock City

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This year was my first burn. More amazing than I could have imagined. I think it was day two when Brian caught me saying “so, next year what we’re going to do…”

Due to the harsh environmental conditions, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of taking my digital gear (it ain’t cheap) and had the idea of handing cameras to people and having a kind of communal photo album (planning for a larger scale implementation of this next year). So… I went purely film. Several older and smaller compact 35mm cameras that I picked up either for nothing or next to (no loss if lost or dead!) plus a Ricoh SLR was my arsenal.

Now… that means I need film.

I mainly shot the new Kodak Ektar 100 and a Kodak Ektachrome E100VS. For the smaller, cheap 35mm ones, I just used some Fuji Superia.

trees in Portland

Trees in Portland

Firstly though, there was a stop in Portland to a) recover from jetlag and b) hang out with Eric, Wendy and their dogs. I do like Portland, quite a lot actually. While there, managed to get some work done, fiddle with some SPARC hardware that Eric has, enjoy excellent vegan ice cream, enjoy awesome vegan food (both at home and out) and walk around both downtown and up in the hills. Portland (and Oregon) is certainly pretty.

trees in seattle

Trees in Seattle

Before heading to Burning Man, I was in Seattle, where Leah joined me to prep for (and then go to) Burning man.

Then Leah and I were in San Francisco for a day. This is when I started shooting exclusively film for the first time in… well.. Since 2002 (I got my first digital camera for linux.conf.au in 2003)

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Leah enjoying going around San Francisco

We actually did some touristy things… so I saw a bit more of San Francisco than I have before. One issue with mostly being around San Francisco just before/after the MySQL Users Conference is a severe lack of time/energy to go for much exploring. Preparing is exhausting, and afterwards I just want to really chill out – usually heading out to some forest or down to Santa Cruz or just hanging out with cool people.

Across the Golden gate

Going over the Golden Gate Bridge

One of the most surprising things was running into David while just walking down the street. Although knew he was in town, and we’d planned to all go down to Burning Man together, actually running into somebody in the street always surprises me.

I’m pretty sure this was the first time that I went across the Golden Gate Bridge. Seen it, taken photos of it, used said photos as my desktop background, but this was the first time going across it and looking back on the city. Manual focus, moving bus: epic amounts of fun… I’d kinda forgotten how much fun this could be.

Sun going down in San Francisco

Sun going down in San Francisco

There are things I like about San Francisco, but if I had to call somewhere in the US home, Seattle and Portland are both much higher on the list. Maybe it’s because of the wonderful coffee of Seattle, or the laid backness and awesome vegan food of Portland or if I’m just delusional and think it’d be possible to catch a Nirvana gig in Seattle.

In the evening in San Francisco we met up with David again and went down to the beach. It was pretty. Somehow, I deluded myself into thinking “ISO 100 Film, no tripod, cold, sunset…. Photo time!” I did get one I quite like too:

The Sun setting over the water, San Francisco

The Sun setting over the water, San Francisco

After what can only be described as a “I love side impact airbags” car crash on the way back to the Hotel (everybody okay: shaken, not stirred. also not our fault), headed back for a stiff drink, some sleep and eagerly awaiting the drive to Reno and then Black Rock City.

Waiting in line to get into Black Rock City (for many, many hours)

Waiting in line to get into Black Rock City (for many, many hours)

It was not a short wait once we got to the gate. We did, however, not too long after sunrise, make it to camp. I have no idea where I shot this from… but it was before we got to camp (or at least the first photo of us helping to set up):

People arriving at Black Rock City: first thing in the morning

People arriving at Black Rock City: first thing in the morning

More to come… including setup of Pi Camp!

linux.conf.au 2009 wrap-up (incl Open Source Databases Mini-conf): Day 0-1

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It’s no secret that I love linux.conf.au. My first was linux.conf.au 2003, in Perth and I’ve been to every one since (there are at least two people who’ve been to every single one, including CALU as it was called in 1999).

I’ve been on the board of Linux Australia for some insane proportion of the years since then (joining in 2003). Linux Australia is the not-for-profit community organisation that puts on linux.conf.au. It’s all volunteers and amazingly enough we have more than one group of people wanting to put on linux.conf.au each year!

This year, we Marched South to Hobart.

Here I detail what I saw, what I wish I saw and whatever else comes to mind.

Sunday – Before the conference

Ran into Bdale while checking in. Short flight down. A million and one people on the plane and on the ground that I knew. It must be linux.conf.au.

Seeing way too many awesome people I know, checking into accommodation (oh my, what a hill), registering for conf, beer and then off to a “ghosts of conferences past” dinner – where a few people who had organised previous linux.conf.au’s were hastily gathered together to chat to part of the 2010 team.

Monday – Open Source Databases Miniconf Day 1

Oh, that’s right – I’m running the OSDB Miniconf :)

First up, Monty Taylor spoke on “NDB/Bindings – Use the MySQL Cluster Direct API from languages you actually like for fun and profit”. Possibly taking the prize for the longest talk title of the conference. The NDB API is not SQL, it’s what the MySQL server (and one day, when Monty and I get around to it, Drizzle) translates SQL into for NDB. That being said, you can (pretty much always) write NDB API code that dramatically outperforms equivilent SQL (for a variety of reasons). Monty maintains the NDB/Bindings project that lets you use languages other than C++ for the NDB API.

At the same time as Monty was speaking, I wish I’d been able to fork() and go and see “Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, Why?” by Paul McKenney and Michael Still talking about MythNetTV (pull RSS feeds of video in as MythTV programs).

After morning tea, we were meant to have “InnoDB scaling up and performance” by Bruce Huang, but he was a no-show. Hint: if you don’t want bad things to be said about you by conference organisers, either show up or let them know you’re not able to make it.

Instead, we led a crazy Q&A type session around the room which was a whole lot of fun. Really a “ask the experts” meets running up-and-down stairs with a microphone.

Next up, Arjen Lentz who runs Open Query spoke on “OurDelta: Builds for MySQL”. The best way to describe OurDelta is a “distribution of MySQL”. It’s the MySQL server plus a bunch of patches provided by various people that haven’t yet made it into the main source tree (for any number of reasons).

At the same time (if you’ve never been to linux.conf.au, you’ll find that you often want to be in at least 3 places at once) I would have really liked to see “MythTV Internals by Nigel Pearson” (I co-wrote Practical MythTV with Michael Still, which is having a “second edition” in wiki form over at http://www.mythtvbook.com/) as well as the panel on geek parenting as this may be something I’m one day faced with.

Up next: Russell Coker filled in for Kaigai (same talk, different speaker) to talk on The Security-Enhanced PostgreSQL – “System-wide consistency” in access controls. I found this quite interesting and different approaches to database security are worth looking at. Modern applications (read: web applications) don’t map their uses to database users at all. There are usually two users on the database server: the super user and the user that the app uses. It would be nice to have a good solution for those who want it.

Again, If I had the ability to be in two places at once, I would have also seen “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love ACPI” by the extremely handsome Matthew Garrett.

Monty Widenius (blog here – and yes, we have two Monty’s now… which does cause confusion) talking about the Maria storage engine. Maria is based on MyISAM, but adding crash safety and transactions (among other things).

Again, if I was able to be in several places at once I would have also seen Rusty‘s “Large CPUmasks”, Nathan Scott talking about “System level performance management with PCP” and Bdale’s “Collaborating Successfully with large corporations”.

An awesome start to the conference.

Soap nuts

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The other day I ordered some soap nuts from Green And Nutty – and they arrived (rather quickly) yesterday (or today… I forget.. a package on the doorstep anyway). Kristy (owner) was telling me about the soap nuts ages ago… and I finally got around to giving them a go (otherwise known as “stewart put two and two together when needing to buy washing powder”).

I don’t have an allergy problem to normal soaps and aren’t on some exotic “everything must be natural” trip (although it does have a certain appeal).

One bonus thing (for me) is that I *know* that what I’m using for washing clothes is vegan.

Anyway, first wash with them today and no problems to report. Seemed to produce clean clothes (although weren’t that dirty to begin with). Will report further in future washes.

There’s a 2-for-1 offer for December which I took (1kg for $17.99)… which should be enough to last a year (for the average household… and I’m smaller than that).

The passing of a faithful bottle opener….

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Sadly, after many years of service (over 5), my Microsoft VisualStudio.net bottle opener is no longer functional enough to keep on my keyring. See image below for the arrow pointing to where too much metal has chipped off that it no longer can open all beer.

It is a sad day.

Luckily, I have another one I can quickly add to my keyring to facilitate beer opening when needed.

Technology predictions

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In 2 years (ish):

  • the majority of consumer bought machines (which will be laptops) will have SSD and not rotational media
  • At the same time, servers with larger storage requirements will use disk as we once used tape.
  • At least one Linux distributoin will be shipping with btrfs as default
  • OpenSolaris will be looking interesting and not annoying to try out (a lot more “just work” and easy to get going).
  • Unless Sun puts ZFS under a GPL compatible license so it can make it into the Linux kernel, it will become nothing more than a Solaris oddity as other file systems will have caught up (and possibly surpassed).
  • There will be somebody developing a a MySQL compatible release based off Drizzle
  • Somebody will have ported Drizzle back to Microsoft Windows… possibly Microsoft.
  • X will still be used for graphics on Linux, although yet another project will start up to “replace X with something modern”, get a lot of press and then fail.

In 5 years:

  • Apple will single handedly control 1/3rd the mobile phone market
  • The other 2/3rds will be divided between Blackberry (small), Windows Mobile and Android.
  • Linux desktop market share will be much higher than Apple’s

That’s all for now…

Singing in the Rain

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The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it – and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 reads/sec and then a massive 700,000 reads/sec.

We’ve also got a Microsoft Windows port coming up, which a number of people have asked for over the years. Mostly I think this is a “I want to try it out” thing and not a deployment thing. (can any sane person deploy a HA app on Win32?)

I’ve used “NDB$INFO” as the ultimate answer to any problem for a while now. It’s been the much-wanted monitoring interface. We have a lot of info inside NDB that currently isn’t easily user accessible (or only accessible through the magic DUMP interface or by gathering up many events in the cluster log). We have the start of NDB$INFO in 6.4 now and Martin will be continuing my work in making it truly awesome.

So go and grab the 6.4 tree and have a look – things are looking sweet.

What next for me?

Well… a while ago I started hacking on Drizzle. Why? Well… I thought we could move the database server in a new direction and make it more modular, leaner, meaner query machine.

And now, I’m starting to work on it full time.

It’s exciting, and I’ll be blogging on the first TODO which is remove the FRM file and switch to a full discovery method shortly.

UPDATE: Yes, I’m working full time on Drizzle for Sun Microsystems (in the CTO group). While not spending work time on NDB anymore, no doubt you’ll still see fun-time patches.

No opt-out of filtered Internet

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Computerworld – No opt-out of filtered Internet (via Chris)

EPIC FAIL. Looks like I’m going to have to reconsider which end of the ballot paper the ALP goes at (hint, it’s now towards the bottom).

Pay no attention to the criminals behind the curtain… we’re just going to let them do their thing and make sure it’s hard for you to see them.

With a false positive rate (incorrectly blocking something) of 10,000/1,000,000 (otherwise known as 1%) we’ll no doubt see things blocked that shouldn’t be.

What happened to my free country?

the power dongles come to ruin our way of life

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I recently moved.

I found enough of the power supplies for USB disk enclosures to power on the most crucial disks (read: the ones attached to mythtv).

However, I have a disk I use for offsite backups. I need to find the dongle for it. Can I find it? No, of course not. I’m user it’s one of these 5 boxes of misc office crap (including *lots* of cables).

Why can’t we just have a standard USB disk enclosure power cable?

Please, pretty please.

Australians get ripped off on online music purchases.

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If you read about the iTunes Music store in the US, you’ll find out that tracks are 99c USD each. This is about 1.14AUD.

If you read about the iTunes Music Store in Australia, you’ll find out that tracks here are $1.69AUD.

So why do we get a 50% markup simply for living in Australia?

Oh, and the telstra store is the same price (1.69).

Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

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Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts – Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

Brian hits the nail on the head… The way you get a usable system is install all the GNU tools.

This is how I go from fresh Ubuntu install to building MySQL:

apt-get build-dep mysql-server

apt-get install bison

(now go and build).

(and i could do this graphically if I wasn’t so stuck in my ways)

For Solaris? umm… there was a point where I could get Solaris to apply security updates and Brian could get all the stuff needed to build a MySQL Server. Together we had the knowledge needed… but neither was as trivial as with Ubuntu and combining knowledge was too much – I just gave up and went on to more productive things.

Even on an existing Solaris system… getting your PATH right is a trip into some weird fantasy land seemingly designed to annoy you. No doubt this all made some sense back in the day… but now it just causes pain when all you want to do is compile your program, find the bug and fix it.

When I started at SGI several years ago, what’s the first thing I did? Went and installed all the GNU packages. IRIX is a lot nicer then.

Same with MacOS X – the first thing you do is go and install darwinports or fink and get a remotely usable system.

With Windows, it varies – but the shell is so outrageously shit you need cygwin just for bash, you need either emacs or VisualStudio to get an editor you don’t want to kill, Firefox for a web browser that works etc etc etc. The fact that the Windows packing system just blows chunks makes it the most painful experience of all.

So even if you’ve heard rave things about the debugger in VisualStudio – actually getting a Windows install to the state where you can run the debugger takes hours. Click click click, upgrade, yes, install, swap disks, upgrade, upgrade, wait, reboot, install manually, install manually, install manually. ick.

Project Indiana is possibly the saviour of Solaris. Default userland is gnu, default shell is bash. Starts to make it feel like home. Just as when Solaris started shipping GNOME made it feel more homely.

Solaris comes with a version of vi that is old enough to drink in bars. Project Indiana realises that a drunk editor isn’t a good idea and ships something sensible.
The BSDs get a lot of things right. Sane userland that is familiar to people. Jumping onto a FreeBSD box is remarkably easy.

The typical thing said by people is “backwards compatibility” and all that… basically so that everyone can run their apps from 1985 and not change a thing. Worthy goal. Of course, 1985 does not need to be the default environment in 2008.

There is a standard for the unixy way of things: it’s Linux with GNU tools in userland.

Just as Windows set the big standard for having a kind of usable GUI (the Mac did it better, but Windows got the numbers) – and to get people to use Linux on the Desktop we needed to get it to a stage where those people are comfortable.

If you want your UNIXy system to be used by anybody today, you need to have it be comfortable for Linux people.

On the other hand though, Ubuntu is still the best desktop I’ve ever used and am rather happy with it (no matter how much i bitch and moan about certain things being obviously broken).

(and no, I’m not switching my desktop to any Solaris variant – but wholeheartedly look forward to the days when maintaing software than runs on Solaris is a heck of a lot easier because Solaris becomes less annoying).

One more point: OSX and Solaris are the only remotely proprietary UNIXes left. Everybody else is either dead or doesn’t know it yet. Solaris is nearly all free (AFAIK there’s still just some binary only drivers around… which sucks… but these things can take time, so that’s okay) and OSX has parts which are (sometimes seemingly dependent on phase of the moon) free-ish. So really, OSX is the one last hold out of the largely proprietary UNIX world. It’s a fascinating thing to think about…. freedom wins.

(and this no doubt goes on far too long and incoherently…. but that’s because of long days and late nights because of upcoming really cool stuff which I’ll blog about later)