The Pædantic Programmer

Hey all. Please comment on this entry. I’m trying to get an idea of who’s listening to what I say.

Why do you read this blog? Are you interested in community wireless networks? OpenGL development on Linux? Family? Business Intelligence? Synchronizaton Manager news? Freecycle™ development? Random Perl bits? Something else I’ve forgotten about?

I’m finding myself over-extended and I need to cut back on some of the things I focus on. Please let me know what is important to you so I know how best to re-organize my time, energy and other resources.

For those of you who want to hear me read this instead of having to do so yourself (no hyperlinks), click here for .ogg and here for .mp3.

I migrated the blogs’ database and code from moonunit to avenger, both of which run Debian Sarge. Y’all should now notice a vast improvement in throughput. The ISP that Moonunit sits on should also see a large decrease in traffic.

Today, I added a campaign to raise funds for hosting. If you have any extra funds, please help me with colocation costs. It’s expensive and y’all use up a bunch of bandwidth. If you find this site useful please support it financially.

Today I’m looking into the syncmangui java code and getting my ducks in a row in order to make it *easy* to add bi-directional support for MySQL to the Synchronization Manager.

I took a four-day weekend on Friday-Monday. I spent a bit of time playing with the computer, but most of the time was spent organizing the house and getting some spring cleaning accomplished. Sadly, Hannah got sick and we weren’t quite as productive as we would have liked.

The thing from this weekend I consider most worth mentioning is DBMail. I hopped on the Courier IMAP server mailing list and announced my intention of building a database backend for the server and calling it MailDB. It seems someone already had that idea. It also seems that they have been doing a great job with it. It’s licensed under the GPL, and it’s being run in production. Next weekend, I plan on putting up an instance and migrating away from Maildir. I’ll let you all know how it turns out.

Yesterday, I wandered up Everett Ave to do a site survey at the building on which I’m considering putting an antenna. It’s a pretty nice setup, and provided I can re-sell some of the bandwidth, it’s even affordable. That’s a big if, though :) This will be node 1 (indexed from 0) on the Everett Wireless Network, provided I end up getting the antenna mounted. I’ve got some paperwork to get back to the real estate guy before things are ready to go, though.

I’m returning that T2000 server to Sun. It was nice and performed well. I strongly recommend it to businesses able to lay down the cash. It seems like it will scale well: low power consumption, large amounts of memory, and an adequate set of processors. Peter Z. ran some benchmarks on it and presented them (along with many others) in his talk at the MySQL Users’ Conference this year.

Alright… that’s all I have for now :)

Hannah, Scarlet and I attended the Seattle Meetup, since we heard Arjen was planning on being in town. We went to the normal location, but the owner told me they were closed due to their entire staff being involved in the civil rights march.

We arrived to a table full of the regulars. Breadsticks, pizza, calzones, salad, lasagna and the screams of a well-missbehaved young girl ensued. I spoke for a while with Rob Lanphier, formerly of Real. I met Rob via email a while ago, but every time I’ve met him face-to-face since (including last weekend’s LinuxFest) I’ve forgotten who he was. Again, I apologize Rob :)

Wez was wearing a “tag” shirt, which I didn’t understand until he mentioned metadata. Ah. I have recently added a tag category to my blog. All I need to do now is start podcasting about podcasting, and I’ll be set!

I didn’t get a chance to talk much with Joe, sadly.

Hannah and Arjen got a chance to talk about the t-shirt she recently helped MySQL AB bring back from the grave. Today, Arjen showed me a photo of someone wearing it, and it looks very good.

I only caught snippets of Brian and Arjen’s discussion at the other end of the table. Scarlet was not having any of the sitting quietly and allowing the grown-ups to have all the fun bit.

I brought up my recent (and ongoing) work on/with the MaxDB Synchronization Manager. There were sniggers and grunts about “real databases” that I think I’ve heard jocularly thrown about by the postgres community. We discussed the internals of the maxdb kernel (pascal) and how the codebase has coped with the decades.

Scarlet and I sat in the large window in the back room of Piecora’s and giggled for a while. She stood on her head and giggled some more. She was very happy, in part because Hannah and I gave her some of the ginger ale we ordered. She also seemed happy with the company.