Category Archives: life, the universe and everything

Nirvana

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Today I’ve put With The Lights Out in the virtual CD player (read: amaroK) and am remembering why I like Nirvana. I just haven’t listened to it in long enough. Actually, now that I come to think of it… long enough is like, what, a week? I know I was listening to it on the way to/from SFO on the plane.

Now, after spending the morning on financial issues (tax not fun, especially the weird way I end up getting payed and the complications it has) I may actually get to some work…. Well, conference tutorial preparation… Doing a tutorial where you get the people in the room to do things is always tricky – and nerve racking.

Kristian on “How to blog for a planet”

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How to blog for a planet – MySQL-dump

I have to say I disagree with the whole teaser/article body thing. I really don’t like having RSS feeds that don’t contain the full article. It means I can’t read them offline. I often like to catch up on RSS while offline. I also don’t particularly feel the need to have to make yet another click to view the content of an article.

Yes, it’s a little more bandwidth. But really, it’s cheap. Especially with mod_gzip and whatever else optimised foo we can do.

Maybe planet aggregators could get more clever in summarising entries? Or not. How many people actually read a planet from the web site anyway?

last.fm

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Set myself up on last.fm, changed to amaroK for playing music (so things go to last.fm) and added foo to the sidebar of my blog. I guess the trick now would be to get something to auto-add my current tune to the bottom of each entry. Maybe :)

I’m a GNOME boy, but amaroK seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of either rhythmbox or the version of banshee that ships with Ubuntu Breezy.

My main complaints with amaroK are that it looks nothing like my other desktop applications – it stands out that it’s a KDE app and not a GNOME app. Some clue on how to fix this would be appreciated.

Back to last.fm, I think the goal is to help suggest music that you may like by looking at what you listen to and what other people who listen to some of the stuff you listen to listen to. Seems interesting at least.

Newfangled technology to remove the “so what have you been listening to?” question from the list of things to talk about with friends :)

10,000 Days

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Have I mentioned how awesome the new Tool album is?

I can’t remember changing the star rating in rhythmbox, I think it even knows how awesome it is.

The album packaging itself is rather impressive. Stereoscopic glasses and all. I’ll take some photos and post.

I cannot wait until they tour. I’m very tempted to just fly to where they’re playing sooner. Hrrm… this could be getting a little too fanboy.

Interesting SSL with Australian System Administrator’s Conference 2006

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The Australian System Administrator’s Conference 2006
It’s interesting that the online registration doesn’t have an SSL certificate that matches. I now have to find a printer to produce dead tree to mail.

Considering that I don’t actually own a printer, this is getting interesting…

P.S. come to my tutorial on MySQL Cluster!

Boys Don’t Cry (She’s the Man) and other such cross dressing.

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Boys Don’t Cry (1999)

Found the name of it! After seeing She’s the Man on Monday night we were discussing other movies where a girl has dressed up as a guy – and I was trying to remember the name of Boys Don’t Cry – I remembered Hillary Swank’s name though.

She’s the Man was an okay flick. Maybe 2 stars. I think Amanda Bynes should be in better films – something the two friends (both female – I wonder if this has anything to do with it) I went with disagreed with me on her acting ability.

But let’s face it – anything with Vinnie Jones in it is worth a look. Especially if it includes Soccer or killing people.

parent hacks: Cottonelle Kids shows kids how much toilet paper to use

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parent hacks: Cottonelle Kids shows kids how much toilet paper to use
“Also, I buy the kind with aloe. If you’re sweet to your bottom, your bottom will whistle a happy tune.”

This gave me a good chuckle.

There has been way too much discussion about toilet habits in the free software community this year. Perhaps it was just the descriptions of gastro on the lca delegates list.

Mikal has also blogged about this.

Beat on “state of the dolphin” (or: Why Software is never really ready until a .20 release)

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Beat Vontobel blogs about “fuþark: The silence of futhark and the state of the dolphin” which is basically about how he’s found that the 5.0.20 release of MySQL is when the 5.0 release is really starting to shine.

This confirms my theory (that I’ve had for quite a while now… like years) that a software release is never really mature until it hits about .20 (that’s dot twenty, not dot two).

When something reaches .10 (dot ten) it’s no longer going to be annoying for most uses, but .20 means that you’re going to be happy. Don’t ask me really why this is the case, but it is.

Think about the 2.6 kernel (yes, Linux Kernel – honestly, you think i was talking about something else?). At about 2.6.10, it would no longer be a pain to use and get things going – everything was starting to be smooth. As we’re getting closer to .20, things are getting better too. Mind you, everything here does run 2.6 now (and so does my mum’s machine – which is always a good sign of something being ready). With 2.4 hitting .20 – you’d never even think about using 2.2, 2.4 was perfect (except when you wanted 2.6).

GNOME (and everything attached to it) is getting to be a really good desktop – ever since about the 2.10 release I’ve been using just much more of the GNOMEy way of doing things because they’re actually getting useful and usable (don’t get me wrong, previous releases were good too – but a lot more things annoyed me). As the releases have progressed, I’m increasingly convinced that 2.20 will be the “we’re here” release. 2.14 is a lot better, but there’s still a bunch of stuff that has to be done before it’s totally kick-ass.

There are no surprises in MySQL 4.0 (it’s past .20 – at .26 now). Everybody knows and trusts it. 4.1 is at 4.1.18 – which is about as good as a .20 and it’s a pretty happy release. But due to 4.0 being rather solid – a lot of people have just stuck there. We’re seeing a bunch move to 5.0 – but my theory is that this will be 5.0.20 or above. Hrrm… anybody see a pattern?

MySQL 5.1 is at 5.1.10 (or so) and it’s stopped being annoying, and that great march towards a .20 is healthy and active.

GCC 2.95 had a lot of respect for a very long time (now it’s just a bit old). Note that .95 is higher than .20 :)

EMACS is at version 21, but ed is only at .2 (hrrm.. and which is used by more people as their editor i wonder).

aptitude at 0.2.15 (getting to .20) – while apt is at 0.6.40 (above .20). RPM is only at 4.0.4 – so a bit to go there :)

The version of postgresql is 7.5.9 over here… so getting to the .1 stage, but away from the .20. (now I’m going to watch comments fill up with postgesql guys going on about something, i just know it :) But there is 7.3.14 – a lot closer to .20!

MythTV is at 0.19 – getting closer to the .20 release (it’s a lot better than even just a few releases ago).

(versions here mostly taken from whatever ubuntu 5.04 has)

Note that attempting to skip a whole bunch of versions and label your software 95, 98, 2003 or whatever doesn’t get you “.20” status. Neither does just skipping to “.20” automatically. It’s about hard work and removing annoying things (we tend to call them bugs).

This is a really stupid metric of software maturity. It is, however, disturbingly accurate.

I love the smell of fresh Basil

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even after you wash your hands, the smell is still there – it’s great! Of course, it’s bad if you’re in public and keep smelling your hands – but Basil does smell really good.

I shall now nervously look around the room to see if anybody is going to see me smell that fresh Basil smell that’s permeated my hands.

I made wikid past sauce tonight.

Perth Penguinista is back

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Perth Penguinista: How to trash a non-life

It’s really great to see you back blogging Leon.  Here too (Perth Penguinista: Free in many ways). I have a few friends who work (or have worked) in hospitals. Let us just say that the tales of computer woes are not to be underestimated.
So cheers to the hospital staff that’s made sure the words still flow (and make sense!)

Incidently, I found the DVDs of the first two series of Scrubs for a reasonable price the other day, So for the past few days I’ve been watching a lot of Scrubs.

Moo, You Bloody Choir

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Augie March – Moo, You Bloody Choir

While I was away (I think I was in Stockholm at the time… not sure actually), Augie March were doing signings of their new album at JB in the city. Jessie volunteered to go get me a copy. So when I got home, I had this waiting for me:
Moo, You Bloody Choir

with it signed by the band:

Moo, You Bloody Choir (signed)

It’s an awesome album too. I’ve really liked One Crowded Hour since I first heard it (a long time ago now) and am really pleased that it got onto a release. I’m also a fan of Clockwork and Vernoona and a whole bunch of other tracks.

They’ve got some gigs coming up, hoping I’ll be able to get to them.

crash halfway through upgrading Ubuntu breezy to dapper

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see BUG#37430 for some details. Also see BUG#37435 for why it gets really painful later on.
Basically, if your machine crashes around the time of the dist-upgrade, you’re totally screwed. mkfs and re-install.

I’d hate to have not made /home a different partition from /.

I currently don’t have much confidence in an easy upgrade for my laptop considering what I’ve just gone through for my desktop. I’m now downloading the flight 5 install CD so i can re-install from stractch. urgh. not happy jan.

My recommendation for upgrade is a full backup of everything beforehand and if anything even remotely goes wrong, restore the backup.

Naturally I didn’t do this for the desktop. but hey, the laptop is more critical. I’ll be doing it for that, as I always do.

Photo out of the hotel room window

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DSCN7380-small.JPG

At the recent MySQL DevConf in Sorrento, Italy, I decided to take a photo out the window of my hotel room. Here it is. I’ve stayed at worse places, just :)

It also looked really similar to this from the breakfast and lunch room.

Pity we were then stuck in the basement working for most of the day. But it rocked. Got through lots of stuff, which is good.

adnarim_abroad making me homesick

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adnarim_abroad: I know it’s controversial to say, but i’

I now want to be bumming around Melbourne city during the games. My house is 2mins walk from a  train station that’s less than 30mins to the middle of town. But never spend enough time there.

It’ll be good to get home.

Although i think the tired and hungover thing isn’t helping.

really unstable laptop

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I’m currently getting hard crashes about five times a day.

I thought it was the sound driver, as i got a crash during dist-upgrade (again) while on console and saw the backtrace. Basically looked like something bad happenned when the sound was muted.

So, running without sound muted – just turned down.

Well, today, just crashed again. Since running X, no backtrace. ARRRGHHH.

Also crashed when waking up too. ACPI stuff in the backtrace.

Not a happy camper at the moment. I have work to do, not futzing around with trying to find out what the fuck is wrong with my laptop (probably software) when I should be running a stable system.

I’ve already have to re-add all my liferea RSS feeds as liferea obviously isn’t doing the right thing (at least the version shipping with Ubuntu) regards writing the feeds file to disk.

So, I’m trying to prepare presentations for our DevConf on an incredibly buggy and almost unusable OpenOffice.org on an unstable laptop.

I think I’m going to have wine again with lunch.

In Sorrento (and awake!)

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(almost) enough said. Good to see people again. Now just a talk to prepare for tomorrow.

Okay, not totally prepare – but a bit of it.

The one I’m giving today – on Cluster Replication is pretty much done. Would like to run through beforehand – but not sure how that plan is going to go.