The weather today was wonderful, time for the kilt.

I met up with sierrascape at her studio, picked up sushi at Hah-Nah, and ate lunch outdoors on the grass at Cal Anderson Park.

This afternoon I met up with krow at Victrola Cafe, and watched and assisted as he wrote up a skeleton UDF for MySQL. The idea is that I use the UDF mechanism to load my SNMP agent for MySQL into 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0.

This evening Paul came over, and we did Knuth, with Eric on Skype.

And now, Kidde keeps coming over and yelling at me to come to bed.

So, probably like lots of people - i run a few web apps locally that I use for various purposes. In my case, this also includes some cool custom developed things.

I also use Zeroconf to easily discover all this foo around a network.

I run my critical mysql install by hand - it’s not constantly up. This is so, as somebody noticed (during Eben’s keynote at the MySQL Conference where he talked a lot about privacy) that one of the apps i run is entitled “tax”.

Since I’m somewhere other than at home, my mysql instance was stopped (much harder for people to grab the data out of it if the process isn’t running to begin with).

So yeah… good points - check what random people out on the network may have access to on your laptop - and know what you should not run as default (I’m careful there).

I arrived earlier in the afternoon (on my second Friday now), and was waiting in the shuttle, for apparently another colleague. Twiddling thumbs, getting bored, and just when half an hour passes by, I think of the advice Stewart gave me, saying that the shuttle service was a little dodgy. Suddenly, I see a “familiar” face - its Lenz Grimmer, my colleague that I’ve been working with for ages. I say familiar, because all I’ve seen are photos, and made contact regularly via conference calls, IRC, and email. We met face to face, for the first time, just today.

Amazing, working in a distributed environment, no?

All that aside, Jay, Lenz and I couldn’t resist catching up by the poolside. Dinner ensued at Nicolino’s Italian restaurant in …

Nine dollars (US) of Water (how many hours would somebody on minimum wage have to work to buy this 1.5L of water?):

Apart from that, jetlagged - managed to find food, TV, internet. All good.

I’ll be putting photos up on my gallery (which is running a MySQL Cluster 5.1 backend - with disk data) over at:

http://saturn.flamingspork.com/gallery/v/conf/mysql2007/

Tomorrow morning (11.5hrs time actually) I’ll be on a plane to SFO (then down to Santa Clara) in preparation for the MySQL Conference.

So, if you’re in the area - give us a buzz. My aussie phone will work, as will traditional email.

Also on IRC… should be easy to find me (freenode).

I’ve used OfflineIMAP for quite a while now. On the whole I’m fairly happy with it. Today I sent this to the list:

Forgive the potentially bad python, not my native tongue :)

This patch is motivated by three things:
- offlineimap is extremely slow at syncing lots of locally deleted
messages
- offlineimap uses lots of memory
- LocalStatus files aren’t written safely (a hard crash can cause
corruption)
        - I’ve been bitten by this in the past, causing a complete resync of
the folder… so I get duplicate messages.

I am currently using 4.0.14 (from Debian) with this patch. I used it to
convert the files and everything. Seems quite reliable and quick.

In my tests, execution time for a normal sync is relatively the same.

Execution …

Okay, so one of the disks in a JBOD (well… single LVM) has been on the way out (hopefully can recover some stuff off it… there’s nothing completely important… but still).

I’ve now learnt and desktop has three new 320GB drives in a RAID5.

Currently installing Ubuntu 7.04 on it. I do have to say that the alternate install disk (which uses debian-installer) has a REALLY nice RAID and LVM setup now. If only it also let you pass parameters to mkfs it would be ideal.

Update: It got the bootloader horribly wrong though and I’ve gotten to piss-fart around trying to get LILO to install and boot. Current result? Blinking cursor in top left of screen. Fantastic… fucking fantastic.

Currently in the MySQL Cluster team office in Stockholm - and have been since Wednesday. I’ll be here for the next 3 weeks working in the office. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve worked in an actual office (instead of working from home) in more than 2.25 years!

I found Veronica Mars on TV last night… which is great, because I’ve sort of become addicted. Unfortunately, Sweden is a few episodes ahead of Australia…. so I’ve skipped a few now (go MythTV, record them for me baby). One really good thing about Swedish TV is that things are subtitled instead of dubbed - excellent if your Swedish isn’t that great (mine isn’t). Whenever here, I also seem to find some TV shows that look really interesting, except for the fact that it’s all in a language I don’t understand… certainly an interesting dilemma.

Today I’ve been working on material for the …

In about 4.5hrs, I’ll be in a cab to the airport. At about lunchtime (1:30pm or so) London time, I’ll be in London. I’ll be there for a few days - until the 27th. If you’re around London or can make it, it’d be cool to hang. I plan to be a bit of a tourist here and there as I haven’t seen heaps of London and I do hear it’s nice :)

After that, I’ll be in Stockholm for about three weeks (I leave on the 19th… as it’s currently planned). So if you’re around, give me a yell!

My cell (mobile) number is pretty easy to find (hint: google my name along with my employer and look for a post on a mailing list… my work email sig has my phone number).

I’m in Stockholm for work, I’m going to be working in the office (which will be the longest amount of time I’ve gone to work in an office in over 2 years).

Two weeks into the New Year, and four weeks since I got back from Thailand, I finally get round to updating this thing. By “updating”, I don’t just mean posting. Gojira the One-Lung Webserver has had an overhaul as well: I’ve added some more RAM, caught up with the last couple of months’ worth of Windows 2000 patches, updated to the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Cygwin. (Tip: If you’re running PHP and MySQL on Windows, be sure to get rid of the libMySQL.dll that comes with PHP — because it’s crap — and to use the version that comes with MySQL instead.)

So… 2006 was a pretty decent year, with a number of positive changes:

• I got to see my daughter grow up some more. She’s just more amazing every time I see her.
• I got out of the hell-hole of a house that I’d lived in for 3 years. I must admit that I had some mixed emotions about that. I’d lived there …