So long to be gone. Many reasons for it:

I got married (Woohooo!)

Yeah, I got hitched to my beautiful wife, Julie and went on my honeymoon, which was a fantastic relief to get away from all the projects I’ve been working on (the reasons I haven’t posted in so long!)

Oh, yeah, I built a house this summer

…well almost a whole house. I’ll be posting pictures of it tonight for those non-believers out there who just thought I disappeared or was slacking off doing nothing.

My business took off like crazy

At least at the end of the summer, with new e-commerce projects in a bunch of areas. I was swamped with work for about two months straight, which delayed the house-building, so I hired a friend of mine’s brother (a student in college) to help with the house.

I can be a real goofball sometimes

Every once in a while, I get this crazy idea that I will write a piece of software that’s already been written. If anyone saw my last blog post from July (I deleted it because I imported my old WordPress entries into Serendipity only) I had decided to build my own “blog software” because I’d gotten sick of all the comment spam coming through WordPress and was unhappy with its design. So I rolled my own. Unfortunately, I never got around to building the administrative end of it, and so didn’t post anything for months. Stupid me.

Anyway, now all I have to do is figure out how to make sure old links still work… I’ll just be doing a redirect through mod_rewrite probably, for the old article and about pages… But for right now, I just want to get back to writing frequently… Til next time, tah.

You know, sometimes it just pays to read the wiki every once in a while!

Recently, I was getting increasingly frustrated with Thunderbird. I have about a dozen email accounts, accumulated through the years from various locations. The default behaviour of Thunderbird is to have a separate set of folders for each account; so a separate inbox, sent, junk folder, etc. Managing my email this way was becoming a chore, since my left folder pane was getting longer and longer, forcing me to either scroll or constantly hide and expand accounts in the folder tree to see other folders in other accounts. Very annoying.

Well, then I decided to go fussing around in the Account Settings dialog, looking for a solution to my problem. I finally discovered that if you click on the “Advanced” button while in the Server Settings of an Account, you can set the account to go into the “Global Inbox (Local Folders)” area. Doing so, Thunderbird warns you that you should copy your existing inbox to the local folders before setting this option. Sufficiently scared to lose email, I headed over to the MozillaZine knowledge base and gud around for the global inbox section. I finally found it, under FAQs (Thunderbird – Global Inbox). Well worth the read.

Now, I finally have a workable solution to my growing email problems. I continue to be impressed with the applications Mozilla is releasing. Very solid. Was impressed from day one with the spam filtering. Now that I have the global inbox working, I’m even more excited. Now, when is that calendar going to be fully integrated?

No, we’re not yet directing traffic using RFID technology (wouldn’t that be scary.) But, Walmart, who plans on implementing RFID technology on an enterprise level this year, had some innovative solutions for supply chain management at the loading dock.

According to this Information Week article, a traffic light system is set up on the loading dock, awaiting arrivals from shippers like Victory Land Group, a furniture maker, and one of the participants in Wal-mart’s RFID rollout experiments. When a shipment containing RFID-tagged products is rolled into the bay, a traffic light shows red, yellow, or green to determine if the reader has picked up all the information from the shipment pallets.

I’m always interested in seeing new-old juxtapositions of technology, as in this seemingly innocous blend of the super-new and super-old. Learning about all this new RFID stuff is daunting, yet inspiring at the same time. I see MySQL becoming an industry leader in this market, because of the low-cost embeddable database market for these readers and for the aggregation needed for so much tag data. Very interested in seeing how the RFID landscape starts to take a more defined shape in the coming year or two…

After I wrote an entry on Sunday about the comments Bill Gates made in February about American high-school students, I got an InformationWeek newsletter, with the headline “Microsoft Is Hiring, But It Can’t Find Enough Skilled Labor”. Very good timing, I suppose. You can read the comments readers had on the editor’s article here

I’ve long been a fan of Thomas Friedman‘s work. He’s a columnist for the NY Times, and recently published a book called The World Is Flat, in which he argues, among other good points, that due to technological advancements and the ability of 21st century people to communicate and collaborate as never before, nations such as India and China are able to cultivate a talent pool of young, educated techno-elite which will soon challenge other “advanced” nations’ ability to effectively compete in the global marketplace.

Today, Friedman’s column in the Columbus Dispatch, “High Schools Need Top-to-Bottom Revision”, had a number of quotes from Bill Gates which I found thought provoking. Gates was speaking at a late February meeting of the nation’s governors on education issues; a meeting which received scant attention by the US media, which, as always, is focused on moronic fluff like the runaway bride story of this past week.

Gates said:

“Training the work force of tomorrow with the high-school students of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year old mainframe. Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting — even ruining — the lives of millions of Americans every year.”

This got me thinking about what kind of education Gates would wish for our high-school graduates to learn if they are to become the sort of talent which his company would hire? Is it truly the topics of education taught in American high-schools which pollute the talent pool in this country? Or is it the pervasive attitude of indifference demonstrated by American youth towards political, economic, and social issues which hinders us?

If you take an average American high-school student, I’d guess that they are more concerned with who is on top of the Source hip-hop charts than who is currently undergoing a Senate hearing for a position heading the US delagation to the UN. They’s be less concerned about the fact that GM’s health care costs now comprise a greater portion of a single car’s production cost than the steel consituting the car, than they would be interested in who got Punk’d this week by Ashton Kutcher. It doesn’t seem to matter to American youth what is going on in other parts of the world because they are so insulated from the relative chaos surrounding this nation. The media plays a huge role in this mess by putting less and less real news on the air, and more entertainment, red-carpet junk with glitter-glamour pundits talking about the latest celebrity breakups.

I’d guess that even if the educational system in America underwent the kind of systematic course redefinition that Gates seems to be espousing, we’d still be in the same boat. The difference in my mind is the contrast in levels of ambition and determination demonstrated by youth in India, China, and Bangalore compared to high-school students in America. American youth culture in general has become spoiled by years of relative peace and economic prosperity. The sacrifices of the generation which built these “50 year old education systems” are lost on today’s youth because they have no real cause celebre to gather behind.

My guess is that it will take a major disaster or national event to motivate American youth to pull their weight for the future of the nation.

You know, some things happen so rarely that when they do occur, you feel kind of special if you’re privileged enough to be a spectator while they do. The weather in Columbus has been strange recently, to say the least.

On Friday, sunny and 70 degrees. On Sunday, an inch of snow and 30 degrees. Yesterday and today, it rained all day. Until about half an hour ago, when the sun started shining. And I looked outside and saw one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long time. A double rainbow. The picture really doesn’t do it justice. This rainbow was about the clearest and biggest I’d ever seen.

Must be a sign from the Gods.

I thought I’d put down in words a number of thoughts which have hit me since Mike and I endeavoured to finish our MySQL book. Perhaps other authors might comment on their own experiences in writing, and offer some thoughts on how to lighten the burden placed on all those involved in the process.

1. There’s a lot of people involved

When I first began knocking around some ideas and a rough table of contents, I was corresponding with Mike Kruckenberg and our editor, Jason Gilmore. We just sent emails back and forth, hammering out ideas we had for chapters, or just topics we found of interest. But, when things started rolling, and we had our table of contents in place, I realized just how many people are involved in the process of publishing a book. Project managers, technical reviewers, editors, copyeditors, the list goes on. Frankly, you’ll never realize how important all these people are to the publishing process until you get your ass handed to you (gracefully, of course) by one of the many folks depending on your work in order to complete their job. Which brings me to my second point.

2. It’s a hell of a lot of work, this authoring thing

Man, if somebody had told me just how much time it takes to write clear, informative material on any topic, I don’t know if I would have accepted the offer to write this book. Come to think of it, I’m glad nobody told me how hard it would be. I’d have probably been too chicken to try it.

You go into writing a book thinking that you know everything there is to know about a particular topic — in this case, I thought I knew all there was to know about MySQL. Boy, was I wrong. You learn pretty quickly that you don’t know a quarter of what you thought you did.

My guess is that for every one hour spent writing my chapters, I spent 6 or more hours researching, testing, and reading about the topics I was writing about. But, in the end, when all’s said and done, it becomes a labor of love. Unless I truly cared about what I was writing about, and really liked the topic — which obviously I do — I don’t think I’d have ever completed a chapter.

3. I learned early how to eat humble pie

Perhaps the most painful, but critical, thing I learned in the process was how to swallow my pride and truly listen to the criticism levelled at my writing. I tell you, the first time you read something like, “I have no idea what you’re saying here…” or “Not sure of the point of this whole section”, your first instinct is to scream and yell and throw your laptop against the wall.

But, in the process of writing this book, I learned how to take criticism pretty well. In fact, I kind of welcome it now. I learned quite a bit about my writing style and about how people perceive your words from the excellent reviewing and comments from the people on the Apress project team.

As always, very interested to hear other’s views on the topic of authoring, or anything else for that matter…

It’s been over a month since I got around to writing an entry — way too long! I’ve made a pact with myself not to do such a horrible thing again. Basically, I learned that writing a technical book can be a very long process!

We’ve finally entered the second draft stage of our Pro MySQL book. I am really excited about the content. Some of this stuff simply isn’t available in anything in print so far. I just got finished writing Chapter 8 on SQL Scenarios, in which I cover, among other things, maintaining a Nested Set model for tree structures in MySQL, and handling GIS Distance Calculations. Pretty cool stuff. I hope the books fly off the shelves this July and we get some good reviews. Here’s crossing my fingers.

Though it probably doesn’t come as any surprise, Bernard Ebbers was found guilty today of securities fraud (amongst other things). This case, highly publicized in recent months highlights most of the frustrations I believe the average American worker and investor has with the upper-most levels of corporate America.

There has been too little transparency — not only fiscal transparency, but managerial as well — in large American corporations. The Sarbanes-Oxley act was supposed to confront the problems of hazy or fuzzy accounting practices, and it seems to be heading in the right direction.

The lack of transparency in corporate America has led to the unravelling of what was left of the average American’s trust in the private sector. The “little guys” have been left to wonder why their investments always seemed to be just a little too late to reap substantial rewards. It seems now, as Ebbers moves towards the sentencing phase, and in the wake of Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing and more, that we have some pretty clear answers as to the real depth of American corporate crime.

A couple things really irk me about this particular case.

First, it is astonishing to me the sheer number of companies alleged to be involved in this scandal and its ongoing class action lawsuit. Worldcom, CitiGroup, Bank of America, Arthur Andersen, J.P. Morgan, the list goes on. If collusion doesn’t apply here, I just don’t know what does.

Secondly, for Ebbers to claim he knew absolutely nothing about the accounting situation simply adds insult to injury. Either we believe him, in which case he comes off looking like just about the most clueless and idiotic corporate figurehead in recent years. Or we don’t (and we didn’t, clearly), and he is exposed as the conspiracist he really is.

Is corporate America just a cesspool of mega-rich, mega-powerful D,V, and C-level self-interested looters, or is there some saving grace to it all? Which companies out there typify what you would like

On that note, what constitutes transparency in today’s American corporate landscape? Is there a limit on where government regulation should stop and internal auditing begin? I guess my take would be: if corporate America hasn’t shown a willingness to play by the rules, why shouldn’t stricter government regulations be put in place? And, if corporations show a willingness to be transparent and meet regulations head on, why shouldn’t the US government reward them for that (tax incentives)? Carrot as well as the stick.