Feb 10
<rant>
Please, can we not use the term “hyperscale”. It doesn’t have any meaning at all.
If you say “a cloud that has 10,000 physical hosts” or “a cloud that supports 100,000 concurrent accounts” or even “a cloud that grows baby elephants”, then people will understand what you mean. Otherwise, nobody really knows what you’re talking about and it’s all just marketing-speak in the same vein of Microsoft’s “Get Me to the Cloud” commercials.
</rant>
I often get accused, especially by my European friends, of not being a true geek for two reasons: I don’t carry an expensive camera with me at all times — nice Fisheye lens, Kaj! — and because I don’t indulge in video games. Well, for all you Jay-ain’t-a-true-geekers out there, I offer two photos today to prove my geekhood.
As some of you know, I live in Columbus, Ohio, with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and my lovely wife Julie. Last night, we got hammered with the most snow we’ve seen in March in over 40 years. By my estimation, there is about 18 inches of snow on the ground. The photo to the right was taken this morning, while the snow was still coming down, from my back door. You can see my garage and the ground covered in snow, but the most telling part of the photo is the amount of snow on the table on our back deck. I think there’s at least 18 inches of snow on it. At the very bottom of the photo, you see the height of the snow on the ground; that strip on the very bottom is my back door threshold…
So, what does this mean for me? A snow day? Heck no! I’m a MySQL employee and I work from home. I don’t take snow days, of course, so while my wife has closed her yoga studio, I’m snug and warm and working from home on a Saturday on my slides for next week’s presentation at PHP-Quebec on “Performance-minded MySQL for PHP Developers“.
If you’re in the Montreal area and want to go, I have two free passes to give away since Sun/MySQL is a sponsor for the event; we’re sponsoring a cocktail party and job fair on Wednesday evening. So, if you’re interested email me at my name at mysql dot com.
Which kind of leads me to my next photo… This one is of my dining room table covered with paper. What are all these pieces of paper? Well, each and every paper on the table is a separate form or agreement I needed to sign and fill out as part of becoming a Sun employee. Hmmm. I don’t think I remember having to sign so much paperwork when I joined MySQL over two years ago. Oh, how I yearn for the simple days of a small company! 
Hope that the photo to the left doesn’t scare anyone away from working at Sun! You know, we’re hiring…
OK, so I returned from vacation late last night, after putting almost 1700 miles on my car this past four days. A friend of mine had his Master’s thesis show (in furniture design) down in Savannah, Georgia. It was a fantastic time, and Ezra’s work is truly astonishing, but I was quite exhausted after the long drives to and from Columbus, Ohio.
You may remember that I have been helping my twin brother learn PHP and MySQL programming. I’m pleased to say that he is progressing quite well! Every time we Skype chat, he seems to have picked up more and more programming vocabulary and is understanding some of the trickier concepts fairly well. My teaching is ongoing. I have advised him to try and learn five new PHP functions every time he sits down to code, and to practice the functions by using them in his work. For instance, in the last “session”, we used the functions arsort(), preg_split(), array_key_exists(), array_map(), and explode() in learning about arrays. This is something that I recommend as a general principle when learning new languages of any kind. Bit off manageable chunks and use the newfound knowledge in your code/conversation. It helps you to remember the functions (or language elements) much faster and retain the knowledge longer.
So, tonight I have another challenge. A friend has officially had enough of Windows. The repeated crashes, spy and malware infestations, and the annoying habit of Windows applications doing “things that he can’t see or control” have pushed him to his limit. Therefore, tonight, I will be backing up his data and moving him to Ubuntu. I’ll be sure to post tomorrow the results of the move, along with solutions to any problems I might encounter. I’ve installed Ubuntu at least a half dozen times myself, and feel fairly confident that the process will go smoothly. But, you never know!
In other news, I booked my flights to and from San Jose for MySQL Camp, the unconference in November. I was reading Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post this morning about the Ubuntu Developer Summit going on in Mountain View and was delighted to see that the conference was the few days prior to MySQL Camp, which may mean some Ubuntu developers might hang around Google HQ for the MySQL unconference. That would be mighty cool.
Read a NewsForge article today about how the two lead developers of the GPU Gnutella client have amended the GPL to include a provision that bans the software’s use by military organizations. Specifically, provision states:
the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.
Interestingly, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, doesn’t think distributors have the right to restrict the software user’s activities by restricting the software’s use in this way, though he said “Nonetheless, I don’t think the requirement is entirely vacuous, so we cannot disregard it as legally void.” It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, as it has further-ranging consequences than just this limited example. For instance, what about a clause that stated the program or its derivative work cannot be executed to spy on the privacy of citizens? … Hmmm.
Jul 18
I haven’t been blogging nearly as much recently because my blog software has become almost unusable. I have been getting on average 500 spam comments and trackbacks per day, which makes actually posting comments to my blog pretty much useless, since they get lost immediately (damn those spammers!)
I plan on switching over to a new version of WordPress in the coming week or two (hopefully before OSCON, but no promises). If anyone has read this blog for a while (over a year), you’d know I have gone through a number of blog software solutions, including WordPress, Seredipity, and my own home-grown solution (a miserable failure in terms of functionality). I am going to try the new version of WordPress and see if it helps. I mean, the purpose of blog software should be to enable the writer to write, as easily as possible, with few distractions (like spam). Hopefully the new version of WordPress gets that right.
I hope everyone will join me in welcoming the newest member of the Kruckenberg family, Saul Adams Kruckenberg, who arrived in this world this past Wednesday. Another cute kid for the Kruckenbergs. Man, they are blessed!
Dec 15
In case you haven’t heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.
Now, I’m by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in FOSS projects by the (oft-ignored) “outside world”.
Secondly, even if there was an ounce of constructive, worthy criticism embedded in the nastiness, it would be missed because of the harshness or abrasiveness of the ranter (and those who stoop to the level of the rant). What the FOSS community needs is more constructive criticism, along with a healthy dose of humble pie, and the willingness to acknowledge the grey areas out there and not just see in black and white.
And … yes, there’s something to be said for simply being nice; simply being respectful. I know that if criticism is levelled at something I have written or designed, that I respond (and generally fix more quickly) those errors which have come from sources offering a respectful discourse. Those folks who cannot, or will not, stand on a respectful platform, regardless of how strongly they believe their viewpoints, must come to the realization that there mean-natured comments will only hinder true progress towards their goals.
Does this mean that I don’t agree with anything the Linus (or the folks commenting on the Xoogler’s post) have said? Absolutely not. But, when I come to argue a case before any “court” (whether it be a jury of my peers, a client, or a determined debater), I know that having all sides of the scenario and issue covered works to my benefit; it gives me a rounder, broader, and deeper perspective of the issues at hand. I also know that if I expend my energy throwing nasty-grams around, I’m not spending that energy listening to what the other camp has to say. That’s the real tragedy, and that’s why I think some of these issues take so long to resolve, or at least to come to a compromise or some sort of useful, insightful conclusion.
Dave Neary put it quite well:
Some people’s opinions *do* count more than others, and a lot of the weight an opinion gets in my mind comes from the level of respect the person across the way has for me, and the other members of [the GNOME] project.
Hear, hear.
Work has progressed quickly this week as the crew and I have worked to begin winterizing the house on Sycamore Street. The roof has been completed, with work still being done on the soffit and fascia boards. BTW, the soffit is the wood or metal board that runs parallel to the ground right below the roof overhang, and the fascia is the board which runs perpendicular to the ground, which eventually holds the gutterwork which slips in under the roof and allows for run-off. You can see both as the beige part in the pictures below.
We also removed the entire front porch after finding fire damage on the underneath side of the porch ceiling. the plan is to rebuild the porch in a gable-style (as opposed to the original hip-style) roof to match the main roof contours… but that will be done in the springtime ater all the siding and trim is complete.
Look Ma, No Porch!
Me, a Little Sooty After Removing the Porch
The New Roof! Woohoo!
The south-facing rake and fascia
The Soffit
So, today the “crew” and I completed the tear off and outer plywood decking on the east side of the house. Very good to see things finally coming together! Haven’t yet gotten the roofing complany to give me a date on the roof being shingled (you’ll see the big blue tarp I’ve nicknamed “the parachute” flying over the house), but hopefully it will be this week, as we’re expecting snow!
This morning, about 11am, the siding and windows on the east side of the house had been removed and we were waiting on the plywood sheeting to arrive from the lumber yard. Below, you’ll see pictures of the house and my “wrecking crew” (Ed, Adam, and Ezra) hard at work in the demolition.
The Naked House
The Wrecking Crew (Ed, Adam, and Ezra)
At about 4:30pm, we had gotten most of the east side of the house completely sheathed with plywood (top picture), and the crew had also completed installing the majority of the sub-floor on the second floor of the house (bottom picture).
Almost Clothed House
Subfloor Looking Good…
So far, so good. Tomorrow, the west side of the house should be completely sheeted and then we’ll move on to inside framing. Good times.