Eric Bergen

When Jeremy left yahoo a lot of people were left wondering “who would be the next Jeremy?” some people thought it would be me. Since then I have been asked several times why I’m not going to take a turn in the ivory tower. Now that things are in place the secret can be let out. Jeremy’s startup Proven Scaling is not just Jeremy’s startup but our startup. We have decided to take our MySQL skills and apply them to the problems of several companies.

Eric Bergen
MySQL Geek / Owner
Proven Scaling L.L.C.
eric@provenscaling.com

At the first ever MySQL Camp Proven Scaling is holding a session/BOF on replication. We want to hear what you like and don’t like about replication. What better to get conversation going but FREE BEER!

There is one tiny problem. We don’t know how much to buy or what kind. If you’re going to the camp help us out by putting your name and your favorite brew (brand and type) on the MySQL Replibeertion page.

….caps lock key. today is international caps lock day. i’m not going to link anywhere because i don’t want this disease to continue to spread. continuing the recent negative-nancy theme of my blog i’m voting to put a stop to this shit too. as part of my protest this blog entry will be in lower case. i’m very happy today to say that i don’t have a caps lock key. the designers of my keyboard of champions ditched that useless annoyance and replaced it with control. yes folks, my keyboard may be small and cute but control is where it won’t torque my wrist out of it’s socket just to change desktops.

talk like a pirate day is bad enough. now not only are people declaring bullshit months but they are declaring bullshit days as well. at least talk like a pirate day is somewhat creative. this is just stupid.

If you can remember back to mid ‘05 when MySQL 5.0 was being released there was something missing. I have been thinking about writing about MySQL 5.0 being released too soon but I don’t think that was the case. Was 5.1 released too late? Maybe. Was something wrong with the 5.0 -> 5.1 schedule and feature set? Oh yeah.

Looking back at the change logs for 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1 I noticed something that I hadn’t though about before. I knew there was a difference in the release dates for 5.0->5.1 from 4.1->5.0 but I didn’t realize how drastic the difference was until I drew it out (on paper, sorry) today. Here is a summary of the major milestones from 4.1 Alpha to today:

• Apr 03 - 4.1 Alpha
• Dec 03 - 5.0 Alpha
• Jul 04 - 4.1 Beta
• Aug 04 - 4.1 Gamma
• Oct 04 - 4.1 Release
• Mar 05 - 5.0 Beta (Where is 5.1 Alpha?)
• Sep 05 - 5.0 Gamma.
• Nov 05 - 5.1 Alpha (Oh! Here it is!)

There is a 6 month period where 4.1 and 5.0 are simultaneously in alpha. 4.1 was in beta for 2 months and gamma for 2 months. 5.0 was in beta for 6 months and gamma for 1 month. 5.0 was in beta for 4 months longer than 4.1 but was in gamma for only a month. Does this mean that 5.0 was in beta too long or wasn’t in gamma for long enough. I think it was the latter and Jeremy seems to agree.

Why am I writing about this now? This post has been braincrack for quite a while. What brought it back to the surface is Kaj’s blog entry about MySQL Community/Enterprise, “This way, contributors don’t have to wait until the next major release for their improvements to get into use, and enterprise users can continue using 5.0 without seeing any destabilisation of the code base due to new functionality being introduced.” I think we have to wait because 5.1 wasn’t developed in parallel with 5.0 like 4.1 and 5.0 were. I can’t think of a valid reason for 5.1 not to follow the same pattern as 5.0.

I think the short gamma period for 5.0 was caused by Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase. 5.0 was in beta for 4 months longer than 4.1 and yet only in gamma for 1 month. It was released a few weeks after the announcement. On a side note, I’m happy that Oracle presented a few new features at the user conference showing that they aren’t going to kill innodb and are continuing development of it.

Declaring a month is when a group of people/company whatever says that it’s national something month. Some are non profit ‘poetry month’, ‘violence awareness month’, and ‘breast cancer awareness month’. Others are purely profit driven. Domino’s national pizza month is a great example of this. Way to try to ride the coat tails of black history month on that one Domino’s, you pricks. I’m ok with black history month and cancer awareness month (not breast cancer but all kinds of cancer). I think we’re almost to the point where black history month can be taken back to a week or two but it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is all the others. The copy cats that are trying to gain more awareness of themselves by declaring a month. These people can die in fire.

If you own a company and your marketing team tries to declare a month for your product, fire them. Then kill yourself for hiring such a shitty marketing team. Having a worthy cause does not mean you get to declare a month for it. Months are limited we can’t be declaring them for random crap. Besides this whole month thing could backfire. Is violence awareness month about being aware of violence? What should I do when that’s over with? I know! I’ll beat the shit out of people that declare months! Better yet let’s all make the people declaring new months aware of violence by kicking the shit out of them!

Using the word ‘national’ doesn’t make it any more official. It’s not endorsed by the government, nobody cares, die in fire.

Now I’ve got myself so worked up that I can’t keep what I want to rant about straight in my brain. I should have been nicer to ‘violence awareness month’ but it just happend to be the first one that came up. This issue isn’t worth that kind of anger built up. I’m done.

I’m not the first person to run into this and I certainly won’t be the last. This is also already covered in: Bug #19093 I just want to say again how annoying it is that the default for show status is session instead of global. It bit me again yesterday. I ran show status and was confused because most of Com_* is 0 yet uptime was a few days. Then it hit like a brick to the face that I was working on 5.0 instead of 4.1 and the default for show status is session. I know the default has changed and it still bites me. This is going to cause people hours of confusion the first time they do what I just did.

If you want the default changed please go to Bug #19093 and add a comment.

I’ve tried to write 4 different blog entries tonight. After driving 700 miles today I can’t complete any of them. Until my brain recovers these blog entries will join several other ideas that will exist as brain crack until I can get enough rest to form a complete thought.

Apple has managed to knock one more item off the list of things I think are missing from Mac OS X. Leopard is going to support virtual desktops with an app they call Spaces. I know that Spaces has already been done with an app called VirtueDesktop. While VirtueDesktop does solve the problem it’s clunky and not very intuitive to manage. Spaces borrows a few tricks from it’s older brother Exposé using Mac OS X awesome graphics engine to give an overview of all desktops and drag windows between them. I hope it works as well as they say it does on their site.

I would like to be able to specify window specific settings to be applied to windows that are created. Things like when the javascript viewer in firefox opens it will be a specific size, always on top, and open at a specific position. These things are all possible in KDE but not Mac OS X. They aren’t so important on the laptop as they are on a desktop. On Mac laptops I have found it works well enough to simply flick a finger across the trackpad to an Exposé hot corner to show all windows instead of having several desktops. When that laptop is docked another profile should load that sets up shortcuts for switching to virtual desktops and automatically moves all those windows to the correct desktop.

• The list is down to
• Window specific settings for on top, size, and location.
• Easy profiles for being docked vs mobile.
• Shortcut keys for most window operations like maximize, close, minimize, and open.
• Ability to map those shortcut keys to anything not just a few choices.

Mac OS X is the current leader for my primary OS choice for portable and docked environment. Once they fix the items above (or you submit comments telling me how to easily accomplish those things) I will be able to run my entire computer life from a single box. Something I have wanted to do for a long time. The end to this quest is getting closer but it’s not over yet..

I just want to say that Adam Corolla is a better death than Norm Mcdonald on Family Guy. Debate it if you want but Norm Mcdonald is a turd.

I tried to write a post comparing different operating systems on desktop vs laptop. I also really hate starting blog posts and sentances with the word ‘I’ but I’m not backspacing this one because the keyboard delay is killing me. I’m not going to upgrade wordpress in hopes that they fixed the ‘fing delay! If it does you will get a post on mac vs linux, desktop vs laptop for development.

Similar to the useless use of cat award. The useless use of if award highlights code examples where people use the if function or ternary operator when the return of the expression does the exact same thing. I first noticed this with returning boolean values from php functions. To protect the innocent the winner of today’s award will remain anonymous.

<anonymous> to my knowledge, youll have to SUM(IF(your_field <> “”, 1, 0)) as total_non_empty

Ignoring that the whole query should be using where your_field != ‘’ and group by the non if() way to write this is:

SUM(your_field <> ‘’)

These examples aren’t an award to a specific person since I’m digging them up from my memory. This pretty much applies to both C and PHP.

< ?php

function foo()

{

$str = 'foo';

return $str == 'foo' ? TRUE : FALSE;
}

?>

Can be written as

< ?php

function foo()

{

$str = 'foo';

return $str == 'foo';
}

?>

I hope this helps you save a few keystrokes when writing code in the future.