They’ve gone ahead and been idiots. On screen, mouse activated big keyboard. Signing into online banking when other people are even remotely around (think conference, think at home, think anywhere really) is no longer secure.
Go get a clue Westpac.
(the following few entries were written at various times, but are now posted after the events).
So back from New Zealand for only a few days before heading off again. This time for a bit of a holiday though!
The plan is as follows:
– Jessie leaves on Wednesday (the day after I get back from NZ), taking my car over so we have a way to drive around and see the countryside.
– I join on the Saturday, taking a week off work to see some of Tasmania as I haven’t been since I was a foetus and would like to actually see and remember the trip this time
– Michael joins us the following Thursday. Ordinarily Jessie would have probably convinced him to do the boyfriendly thing of being there the whole time, but at about a month into a new job, he’s figuring it’s probably not the best idea to skip out for a week.
Just to make things interesting, at the same time I’ve got a bunch of work to do as well as a trip to organise.
I’ve now discovered that in some parts of tassie, mobile phone reception is sketchy (or just non-existent) especially for my carrier (Optarse – oh, I mean Optus – they’re cable Internet bandwidth limitations seem to have scarred me there). So I’ve been playing answering machine message tag with my travel agent Andrew.
In March, I’ll be in London (probably just for a day doing some touristy things on the way through), then Stockholm spending some time with Jonas getting further with online add/drop node and nodegroup for ndb (as he’s not coming to our developer conference due to impending new baby) before finally heading off to Sorrento, a bit out of Naples for the MySQL DevConf. I got hold of Andrew last night (when we stopped in Burnie) and aparrently he’s found a way so that I don’t have to go London -> Stockholm -> London -> Naples and can just go Stockholm -> Rome. That’ll be nice.
Anyway, back to what I’ve been doing in tassie…
Working down to the wire, packing at the last minute to head to the airport. Had a bit of the “hope i packed adequately”-itis as heading out, but oh well – worst case scenario I hear they have shops down south.
Drink in the lounge followed by the short flight from Melbourne (a *lot* shorter than the boat – Jessie said about 11 hours and then a 3hr drive to Hobart – she says she’s not sure if she slept or not, but was pretty tired at the end). The approach into Hobart is pretty impressive (as was the approach into Dunedin a few weeks ago) where you get hills, mountains and trees and not much sign of people. It’s also just great fun to fly into an airport you haven’t flown into before.
Hobart airport is pretty small, but sure enough, you can land a 737 there. Bag came right off the carousel (like the fourth one off) and was out the door in no time. Brilliant.
Oh, and the planes do a u-turn on the runway – there isn’t a taxiway for the whole length. All the stairs also roll up to the plane and it’s sorta like “the terminal is that way” when you get off :)
I got to have the interesting experience of getting picked up by your own car in a different place after just having gotten off a plane. Weird. But nice, as then you don’t have to futz about with a cab or a bus or subway.
Met her brother Mark again – I think we met breifly once in Melbourne… I think…. like for a minute as he was heading out after visiting Jessie. I think… could be wrong. Also met her mother – which was certainly a first. She’s who we’d be staying with for some of the trip. I wonder how Michael will go with the meeting of the gf’s mother? Probably one of the longest relationships without mother meeting among our group.
From what I recall the main events of the rest of the evening was driving home (where home is in New Norfolk – about 30mins out of Hobart – so about 45 from the airport) and dropping Mark off on the way. Had some tea and went to bed (after making some rudimentry plans for the morning)
On the MySQL Cluster Forum, there was a thread “any production clusters yet?” to which this was a reply
I’m using NDB in production with a high-traffic web site. We have about 500,000 members and lots of surge activity at specific times. What I’m finding is that the web server goes but the cluster doesn’t break a sweat.
sweet.
Something that makes me always just go to dev.mysql.com or php.net for documentation is the user comments. sometimes you just find some real jems that are really worth reading.
It would be great if this somehow could get integrated into the (offline) help system in GNOME could somehow have this stuff integrated. maybe some AJAX foo to fetch comments from the Interweb if you’re connected. So then you get the best of three worlds: good graphical documentation interface, good documentation and user comments to the docs!
So, naturally, while at linux.conf.au I still need to get to my home mythtv box to set (and check) what’s going to be recorded.
I can also have a look to see what my flatmate has set to record.
It looks like I’m missing the tennis one day to have “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation” recorded.
Hrrm… for some reason I’m not unhappy with that….
Trying to fiddle with my linux.conf.au presentation in OpenOffice.org2 (the version that comes with Ubuntu Breezy).
It’s as buggy as all hell.
At the moment, after pasting in some slides from another presentation (if it doesn’t randomly crash some short time afterwards) I can’t save the file. Really useful.
grrr….
MySQL: Can MySQL be run from a CDROM?
The question is asked. The answer is – yes!
Temporary tables can be store anywhere – e.g. the system’s temporary directory (/tmp on unix, probably c:\temp or something on windows… i’m sure there’s one of those %FOO% things for it).
IIRC you may need to start it with a flag or something – but the embedded library – libmysqld (where the mysql server runs within your process – you link to libmysqld instead of libmysql).
Of course, if you’re linking mysql with non-gpl code, you’ll need a license from us.
knife left out overnight – with stuff on it. I should point out that I’m not the one who left it out.
Washing it this morning, trying to get gunk off it (what looks like garlic) managed to slice into my right thumb. Also a little on the finger next to it. Blood pouring out. Crap.
No more washing up for me this morning.
At least the knife is sharp though.
dry some tofu (tea towl, paper towl, intense concentration).
marinade of:
came up yummy – at least with tomato sauce. And really, it’s the only sauce that counts.
Adapted from: http://www.silcom.com/~noster/martofu.htmlÂ
It’s there for you to take a read. I’ve just read through it and it does sound like a good improvement. I would certainly feel happy licensing my code under this license.
It’s also good to know that MySQL has been and will be further involved in the process (as are many other orgs and companies).
I picked this up in a market in Stockholm.
It’s sitting on top of a diagram of a bunch of classes in ndb_mgmd and in front of The Art of Computer Progromming (Knuth, Volumes 1-3). On top of that is Transactional Information Systems.
Every so often you come across people desiring intense XML and RDBMS interaction. Recently, here: Technical Notes and Articles of Interest » MySQL 5.1 is gaining some momentum.
In MySQL land, this usually means “An XML Storage Engine would be great”. hrmm… a storage engine is a way to store a table. A table is a relational thingy. Surely what’s wanted is a good way to query an XML document and search for a specific XML document.
So, is what’s really wanted good XML indexers and the ability to extract parts (or the whole) of a document? Maybe there’s some extension to fulltext (along with some funky functions) that could bring an immense amount of power with dealing with XML?
What is there now? What do people do now? What do they want to do?
All interesting stuff
ticketmaster.com.au – The White Stripes
Damn, damn, damn, damn damn. Only January 28th – and I’m in NZ.
Note to future organisers: make sure dates don’t overlap BDO or any really cool band tour dates.
Of course, the real disaster would be if Tool were touring at the same time as a work thing. How will people take it if i leave a company event for however long is needed to see Tool live. as many times as possible. I am dearly hoping that travel co-ordinates itself to see them in different cities, countries. Heck, even another planet if we can do that by the time the new album is ready :)
Some people don’t seem to get the Tool thing. It’s just good music. But that’s the thing – it is good music. Also, great music to hack with. I reckon each album gets played at least once per week – still.
Finally got arround to upgrading the mythtv box. Less RAM being used is good – it’s only got 512MB and some of the recordings were getting pretty fragmented due to having to flush things to disk a bit too often. Hopefully things will be a bit better now.
Annoying things were:
But a lot less painful than previous big upgrades. The debian way between releases is so nice it’s not funny.
Things left to do:
I’ve also set it up to tape the tennis, although at a low priority so my lovely flatmate doesn’t get annoyed if she misses her shows :)
Oh how I need more tuner cards.
Thanks goes to jdub for quickly asking what the upgrade issue was. No thanks goes to me for making my things left to do list look like it was related to the upgrade.
that is all.
err… okay, a bit more. Breakfast this morning consisted of doing the dishes (good first step), some toast with jam and vegemite and a mango. Yum. All the time listening to the recording of the company-wide conf call from the other day (2am was just a little bit late that night).
These conf calls are really good actually – being able to throw questions directly at the top (and have them answered) is a great thing. Also getting to know what is going on from a higher perspective is really valuable.
Microsoft’s file system patent upheld: ZDNet Australia: News: Software
Saying any part of the FAT file system is “novel and non-obvious” is rather like saying being stabbed in the eye with a fork is “novel and a good way to spend a sunday afternoon”.
Seriously – what the?
I’m really glad I work for a company that opposes software patents.
Thanks to Pia for the links.
The process for starting up a cluster is pretty interesting. Where, of course, “interesting” is translated to “complex”. There’s a lot of things you have to watch out for (namely you want one cluster, not two or ten or anything). You also want to actually start a cluster, not just wait forever for everybody to show up.
Except in some situations. For example, initial start. With an initial start, you really want to have all the nodes present (you don’t want to run the risk of starting up two separate clusters!).
Bug 15695 is a bug to do with Initial Start. If you have three nodes (a management node and two data nodes) and break the network connection just between the two data nodes, and then reconnect it (at the wrong time – where the wrong time means you trigger the bug) the cluster will never start. A workaround is to restart one of the data nodes and everything comes up.
Note that this is just during initial start so it’s not a HA bug or anything. Just really annoying.
This seems to get hit when people have firewalls stopping the nodes talking to each other and then fix the firewall (but not shutting down the cluster).
As is documented in the bug, you can replicate this with some iptables foo.
One of the main blocks involed in starting the cluster (and managing it once it’s up) is the Quorum manager – QMGR. You’ll find the code in ndb/src/kernel/blocks/qmgr/. You’ll also find some in the older CMVMI (Cluster Manager Virtual Machine Interface).
A useful thing to do is to define DEBUG_QMGR_START in your build. This gives you some debugging output printed to the ndb_X_out.log file.
The first bit of code in QmgrMain.cpp is the heartbeat code. execCM_HEARTBEAT simply resets the number of outstanding heartbeats for the node that sent the heartbeat. Really simple signal there.
During SR (System Restart) there is a timeout period for which we try to wait for nodes to start. This means we’ll be starting the cluster with the most number of nodes present (it’s much easier doing a SR with as many nodes as possible than doing NR – Node Recovery – on lots of nodes). NR requires copying of data over the wire. SR probably doesn’t. Jonas is working on optimised node recovery which is going to be really needed for disk data. This will only copy the changed/updated data over the wire instead of all data that that node needs. Pretty neat stuff.
We implement the timeout by sending a delayed signal to ourself. Every 3 seconds we check how the election of a president is going. If we reach our limit (30seconds) we try to start the cluster anyway – not allowing other nodes to join).
Current problem is that each node in this two node not-quite-yet cluster thinks it has won the election and so switches what state it’s in to ZRUNNING (see Qmgr.h) hence stopping the search for other nodes. When the link between the two nodes is brought back up – hugs and puppies do not ensue.
I should have a patch soon too.
For a more complete explanation on the stages of startup, have a look at the text files in ndb/src/kernel/blocks. Start.txt is a good one to read.
Well, went out for food with jp, rupak and owen before heading down to a bar to meet with others for beer.
Slow start to this morning. Anyway, got some piccies. some people even smiled!
I wish there was a way to bulk transfer photos from my phone to my computer via bluetooth. It’s a real pain going “Send” on each friggin photo.
Pity phone cameras really suck, but hey – i guess they’re pretty portable. Notice how the really noisy pictures are taken with the phone’s “Night Mode”. Which really just means introduce more noise into the photo.
