jcole’s weblog

Are you coming to the MySQL Users Conference 2006? This year it’s April 24-27, 2006 in Santa Clara, CA. Sadly for me, I don’t get to travel anywhere for the conference: It’s practically in my backyard.

I’m presenting a session and a tutorial, and participating in a Panel and a Hackfest session this year:

• MySQL GIS: Overview and Tools — I’ll talk about what GIS is useful for, how to get data in and out, and give some demos using PHP.
• Replication for Scaling and High Availability — An honest look at how replication really works, when it doesn’t work, and what you can expect. An in-depth look at how replication can be used to meet your high availability goals as part of a robust failover system.
• HackFest A: Creating New UDFs — Build your own UDF, ask questions, see examples, participate in discussion about MySQL’s support for User Defined Functions (UDFs).
• Panel: Scale Out — Ask questions, compare notes, get expert advice about scaling your high performance MySQL applications.

I’ll see you all there! If you want to meet up with me, or have some ideas for a discussion, BoF, dinner, etc., drop me a line.

Guy: You know, just about everything that’s food you can squirt out of a can is delicious…

I’m not so sure. I’ve never been a fan of “food” squirted from cans… easy cheese, canned whipped cream… blech.

A few months ago, I found out about a non-profit called Kiva that allows basically random strangers via the Internet to lend money to businesses and individuals in third-world countries. Kiva relies on donations to cover their administrative costs, so every dollar you give them goes to the business you are funding. They do not pay interest, so there are no capital gains to be had. When I found Kiva, they had just gotten quite a bit of press, so they had no more businesses in need of funding available on their site. I signed up for their newsletter and updates and have been checking back with them fairly often since then.

In the past month, they have signed up with a few new partners in new countries in order to increase their reach. This morning, they sent out an email announcing that they had listed a number of new businesses on their site… and luckily I got to it pretty quickly. They raised an incredible amount of money in only a few hours, and now they have no more businesses in need once again.

I managed to get in before all the businesses were funded, so I’ve now funded $150 of a $500 loan to Shawqat Al Kahwaji, a Palestinian electrician in Gaza. I’m excited to read about his progress over the coming months. Good luck, Shawqat!

Kiva rocks. You can make a difference in the world, you can help a fellow man get his business and his life off the ground and feed his family and help his community.

If you’re interested in being a part of this awesome new idea, go read about the existing businesses, sign up, and wait for new businesses to be listed (and act quickly once they are!).

It’s been reported a million times elsewhere, but Oracle has acquired Sleepycat, maker of the BerkeleyDB database. This will probably affect various users of BDB itself, but not MySQL users. If Oracle bought Sleepycat to mess with MySQL, they’re smoking something really good. I don’t think they’re that stupid.

I was quoted by Computer World magazine, in their article Users unworried by Oracle’s purchase of Sleepycat as follows:

Despite its popularity elsewhere, BerkeleyDB isn’t widely used by MySQL users, said Jeremy Cole, a former MySQL employee who now helps oversee about 8,000 MySQL databases used worldwide by Yahoo Inc.

“Basically, the BDB storage engine was added to MySQL in the early days as a prototype for adding transactional support to MySQL,” Cole said. “Once BDB was working with MySQL, InnoDB came along shortly afterwards and quickly surpassed BDB in usefulness, speed and features. No one has looked back since.”

Oracle is making some interesting moves. Interesting times ahead…

Heard over the cubicle wall today:

Guy: Cock-a-Leekie soup? Cock-a-Leekie… that sounds like something you need antibiotics for.

Yes, “Cock-a-Leekie Soup” was on the menu yesterday. Apparently it’s Scottish.

I had my favorite light rail conductor again today… and he did the same thing!

A lady pushed the button for some reason, and he answered with the familiar “Is this an emergency, or are you disabled?” line. I knew immediately that it was him. After the woman responded “Stop here!” he hung up on her and made the same train wide announcement: “Would the parents of the small child please keep them from pressing the red button unless it is an emergency”.

Oy.

Today at the light rail stop, there was a guy with his pant leg hiked up, on purpose… upon closer examination, I noticed that it was purposely hiked up so that everyone could see his house arrest thing around his ankle.

How pathetic is that? House arrest is supposed to let these people off a little easy, so they can keep their job, and try to reform. Instead, it becomes some sort of badge that he shows off to the world, to let everyone know how “bad” he is…

Ugh.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl XL, this year… in fact I never watch it, as I couldn’t care less. I usually catch the commercials on the internet afterwards, since it’s not worth suffering through hours of football just for some funny commercials.

This year there was a commercial for the Toyota Camry Hybrid, which featured a hispanic man and small boy. Their conversation went like this:

Boy: Papa, why do we have a hybrid?
Man: For your future.
Boy: Why?
Man: It’s better for the air, and we spend less because it runs on gas and electrical power.
Man: Mire—mire aquí. Man points to console display, which shows the engine, battery, and electric motor status.
Man: It uses both.
Boy: Like you with English and Spanish!
Man: Si!
Boy: So why did you learn English?
Man: For your future!

What the hell? The subtext of the whole commercial is: immigrants need to learn English. I won’t argue against that point—that battle has been played out many times by many people. Instead I’ll just hit the point I care about: Why did they include this subtext in a car commercial. It would’ve been a fine public service announcement if not sponsored by Toyota. Instead, it just seems in poor taste, at least to me.

There was a great crazy woman on the light rail today. She got on at Santa Clara station, cell phone in hand. I first noticed that she was talking to the phone, not into the phone. She was holding it in front of her face, rarely if ever holding it to her ear.

I thought maybe she was using speakerphone, so I muted my iPod Shuffle to see. I didn’t hear anything. Weird, but hmm. Then, she fumbled around in her bag for a minute, dropping the phone into the bag. She pulled out a blue case, vaguely phone shaped, and started talking to that. I stared for a while.

My suspicions were confirmed. She was now talking to a make-up case. And holding it to her ear now. Bona fide crazy.

You might have noticed that there are Google AdSense ads scattered accross the jcole.us as of last night. This is an experiment to see how having the ads affects traffic, and if I actually make any money on it.

I tried to place the ads in unobtrusive places, for now. Maybe next month I’ll try more obtrusive placement and see if that makes a difference. Let me know what you think.