Stoner's World

Been a while since I wrote anything…not for lack of anything to write, just real busy. I’m finding myself having to force myself away from the computer to maintain my sanity.

On the home front, I’m going to be installing a ceiling fan in the only bedroom that doesn’t have one. I had to go buy a metal junction box because all the boxes in this house are the blue plastic ones. That’s fine and dandy but I’m not going to hang a ceiling fan from one.  Don’t know if I’ll need it but I also bought a brace so I can mount the box to a rafter if it isn’t close enough to one already. After that, I’m going to start ripping down the ceiling in the basement in preparation for remodeling it. It’ll be a nice mess.

Then I’m off to California for a week – business related. I fly out Sunday morning at 7:30 and fly back Saturday.

Attended a MySQL webinar (man, do I hate that word) on replication and scaling out MySQL. I’m very familiar with replication but wanted to see what the MySQL folks are up to. Also got approval (and advance payment!!!) for MySQL training in Washington, D.C. in July. I don’t have to fork over a couple grand and submit an expense report after – which is nice.

Someone implemented an idea I had been working on – namely backing up MySQL binary logs on a MySQL replication master server. I had a shell of such a script written in Perl – this guy did it in bash. Six of one/half a dozen of the other – I can just reuse his code and not reinvent the wheel. Open Source is beautiful that way.

Found two scripts for making practical sense of the MySQL “show status” command. Problem is, they generate flat, unparsable text and don’t retain the info for later trending. Pity. I’ve started work on that project so hopefully I can start to get a better understanding of how our MySQL databases are performing over time.

It seems that every day, Microsoft gives stronger and stronger evidence that they are bad for business. Bug and security holes in products aside, they are professional double-talkers. They either outright lie or say one thing then spew something else shortly after. It’s disgusting. Here’s a couple examples.

Microsoft has, for a while, been saying that Linux and other Open Source  Software projects infringe on many software patents. They kept building up, hinting about possible lawsuits, etc. Then they finally broke out and stated that Linux and OSS violates 235 of their patents. They even break them out into general categories like email-related or GUI-related. But, when pressed for details, Microsoft claimed they couldn’t specify which patents because it would be too cumbersome, administratively, to collect that information.

Umm. Hello? If you counted them, then you already collected them into some tabular format. Otherwise, how could you count them? This is the type of bullshit business practices I’m talking about. Here’s another one.

Jamie Cansdale, of London, was awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for his work on a product that allows developers to better test the program code they write. The product integrated into Microsoft’s Visual Studio product and was available for all versions of Visual Studio. Later, Microsoft started threatening him with lawsuits because they didn’t want his product to be used with their “Express” version.

What the hell kind of message is that? “We’re awarding you one of our most prestigious honors. Oh, and by the way, we going to sue you for making it available for all versions of our product.”

So, ask yourself. Is this the type of company I want to do business with?