I can relax now, My talk is done and I’ve been talkinq to people about more specific things. Several have congratulated me on it.
Looking forward to the BOF, although sleep would be nice.oh how I’m going to sleep on the plane
talk went well
1
About a third of the keynote room at MySQL UC
It should be also noted that showing up can win you stuff. Mikal did a survey thing ore something and his name has been flashing up on the screen saying he’s won stuff. Don’t know if he knows yet :)
found (by anonymous source) on a table in a meeting room…
“Not good to hear Monty arguing with Brian…”
My UC Talk tomorrow (what you should know)
MySQL Users Conference 2006 – MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements
If you are coming to my talk, make sure you know a bit about cluster beforehand. Being at Johan’s talk today was a good idea.
Or reading the manual chapter.
Otherwise you may end up being quite lost for a lot of the talk. Mine isn’t an intro to cluster one.
2 More Photos from last night
that is not beer
Piano singing
wall Of Photos
we love our work
.techtalk
We are Totally not working at the staff party
Photo of us looking at Patg’s talk
Welcome to the USA
Today my TV told me to be scared, I had a good (late) sandwich for lunch. Some nice local beer (no big brewery), a salad and the most scary looking pasta for dinner. Also hung with people. Now sleep.
PostgreSQL 7.3: SQL Key Words
PostgreSQL: Documentation: Manuals: PostgreSQL 7.3: SQL Key Words
It’s very annoying that ‘user’ is a reserved word in postgresql. You also get really crappy error messages (at least with the various forms of quoting I’ve tried to use) when you try to create a table called ‘user’
$ psql web
Welcome to psql 7.4.8, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.Type:Â \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help on internal slash commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quitweb=# create table user (a int(10), b int); ERROR:Â syntax error at or near “user” at character 14
web=# create table “user” (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:Â syntax error at or near “(” at character 27
web=# create table ‘user’ (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:Â syntax error at or near “‘user'” at character 14
web=# create table `user` (a int(10), b int);
ERROR:Â syntax error at or near “`” at character 14
web=#
web=#
You will even get the “at character X” if you’re piping something into psql. Hrrm… a line number would be useful.
It also means that I can’t compare results from MySQL and Postgresql involving a table called ‘user’. Bummer.
Any postgresql gurus out there got a solution for me?
Boys Don’t Cry (She’s the Man) and other such cross dressing.
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
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.
Rusty on floating point (and keeping neat code)
Rusty talks about the “fun” of floating point and how this all ties into Wesnoth.
Platform consistency is certainly a good thing – so I’m guessing the attack_prediction code isn’t run by each node in a network game in a way where machines could disagree on the outcome.
This does however bring up an interesting thing. What if, in the future, it was going to be on a per-node basis and people wanted it to be consistent. How do you warn that this isn’t the case (to somebody who is really just reading the docs on this function)?
Is it easy (or is there even a good way) to separate code that’s on one machine versus every one? In NDB we have some protocols where some things are done on a master and others on the slaves (and sometimes, when we go back to refactor the code, we move some of this stuff around – e.g. some work on the BACKUP block that I did a while ago).
In NDB we rely on separate documentation (a diagram showing what signals go where and from who) and keep the code for executing the signals together in the code. We require the coder to think when they’re changing things about where the code is going to be executed (on the master, the slave or both).
We’ve also started to get some better habits in naming structures that are only going to be filled out on the master (or slave) or both. Writing code that looks at the wrong thing has been a source of bugs (especially while hacking on something) that are annoying to track down.
So how do we have these functions that in some cases shouldn’t be used (e.g. when consistency across platforms is important, or should only be used on the slave side of a distributed protocol)? Or rather, how do we warn others (and ourselves) from getting it wrong in the future?
Is the ultimate answer just that “you should read the code and understand it before you use it”? Probably, because any comments are going to be out of date anyway….
i now look forward to some sort of discussion.
Lunch in Sorrento
A picture I just found on my phone of my laptop on the table at lunch in Sorrento at the MySQL DevCon.
I find it humorous that my laptop isn’t an apple (first non-apple laptop I’ve owned) but is much healthier and is even trying to impress the teacher.
The Swag Report » AUUG2005 Shwag for Speakers
The Swag Report » AUUG2005 Shwag for Speakers
I’ve started writing some stuff over at the Swag report. My first one is about this pen I got at AUUG2005 for being a speaker:
Beat on “state of the dolphin” (or: Why Software is never really ready until a .20 release)
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.
My MySQL UC2006 talk – more working on it
MySQL UC 2006 – April 24-27, 2006 – Santa Clara, CA – MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements
So I’ve done some more run throughs to get things running smoother (and made some more edits along the way). At some point I will stop fiddling with the darn thing. It’s going to be fine (repeat, take 8 times and call me in the morning if pain persists).
Some features take a lot longer to explain than others. It’s quite interesting really.
I’ve tried to strike a balance between good overviews of technology and the down-and-dirty details. Hopefully it’s a good balance and fits the audience. I’m assuming a bit of knowledge about Cluster (I think the SQL knowledge should be a given – it’s a technical talk at the MySQL UC!). I’m expecting to be thrown a bunch of questions througouht – and hopefully really good questions (and one’s that I’ve anticipated and if people only wait for the next thing i was going to say…).
I’ve put a lot of prep into this talk – hopefully the effort shows (in a good way!).
So come along and hear me talk about what we’ve been up to in the lovely land of Cluster.
in the meeting tonight…
“this just shows you should always check your other pair of pants”
I love the smell of fresh Basil
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.