Today I called a San Jose Yellow Cab taxi, and ended up with a new, yellow, shiny Toyota Prius.
The driver said it was the first one in the fleet, and he loved it because he was only spending one-third on gas: idling is free now.
Watching the large LCD Energy Monitor reminded me of Quest’s Spotlight for MySQL product: nearly the same graphics.
There was a meetup tonite for Twiki users from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm at the Plug and Play Tech Center, 440 North Wolfe Road, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.
I attended most of it, though 5:30 pm is pretty early for most people to leave work and drive there. Nonetheless, turnout was good, with over 30 audience members plus staff from twiki.net, the company providing support for Twiki.
The format was a slide show, followed by a very energetic community evangelist who got the audience involved.
Several members of other local Bay User perl and linux user groups dropped in.
Twiki is notable in offering many plugins that combine to create a very feature-rich wiki. For example, it’s possible to embed twiki spreadsheets, forms or do programming in twiki pages.
I’ve used twiki, confluence, mediawiki and trac. I’d say twiki is my favorite for complex wikis.
The pizza was not great, although it was nice of them to serve both soft drinks and wine.
Karl Hong, from Sun., gave a talk on the OpenOffice.org Internationalization (I18N) Framework at IMUG.
Although ICU is a comprehensive i18n API today, it was not mature enough for most of OpenOffice’s development history. So at this point OpenOffice is about 90% custom i18n API and 10% ICU. George Rhoten, from IBM, was available to provide commentary on areas where ICU had matured, for example the calendar features and transliteration.
Karl mentioned that a lot of features in OpenOffice were added to remain competitive with features in Microsoft Office. Unicode normalization has not been a requested or supported feature yet.
After the talk, Karl showed a live demo of OpenOffice rendering and transliterating Simplified and Traditional Chinese. He also showed mixed Chinese and Hebrew BiDi issues. The Japanese search dialog in Impress is pretty amazing to look at.
Thanks again to Apple for hosting the meeting!
I worked on an IT SoX project for a famous Silicon Valley networking company a couple years ago.
Each publicly-traded company ended up spending millions on SoX-compliance – more than anybody realized – for technical measures. The aim was to improve accountability and auditability of large companies after corporate meltdowns like Enron.
Yet here we are, a short time later, and Citibank and Merrill have had billions of dollars in losses, no succession plan, and little accountability to shareholders for reporting the losses in a timely manner.
I guess SoX did not go far enough in addressing the real problem – the human management component of corporate governance.
cnn.com: Prince Alwaleed: Why Chuck had to go
Citi’s giant write-downs: What did it know, and when did it know it?
cnn.com: Wall Street’s money machine breaks down
cnn.com: Airbus: Prince buys flying palace
I was impressed to see a young 5′ tallish Asian woman doing bent-over rows at the gym … with a 45-pound dumbbell.
Way to go, girl!
Just leave some weights for me though. 
(It ends up she was a former collegiate athlete on a bobsled team.)
I was reading an interesting samba mailing list comment about using rsync on live MySQL databases.
The author said this:
“Assuming a short break in accessibility is tolerable, I’d
Combining rsync and mysqlhotcopy we can get a little fancier:
Ghetto Innobackup-style backup with rsync
Note that the read lock and unlock must be done while on the same database connection, and innodb continues to update indexes even when read-locked.
Also, record the master and slave status values. They may be very useful later if you want to apply binlogs to the backup, or initialize a slave.
This technique would be very suitable for non-critical snapshots like QA copies and on quiet databases.
It may be suitable for busy databases if other methods aren’t working out, for instance you don’t have LVM snapshots setup and innobackup is locking your MyISAM tables too long.
rsync -a is also useful for backing up master binlogs every 5 minutes on a live site. Normally you’re better off setting up a slave just running the slave IO thread, though.
Many databases have features to allow “log shipping.” With MySQL, similar functionality is accomplished by doing FLUSH LOGS and rsync, or using replication (there is a command to not execute the replication stream, just save it to disk.)
Above: Waikiki 180° Panorama. Canon S400 ©
Hi, I'm James Briggs, an Internet software developer and MySQL DBA in Silicon Valley.
I've been programming for 20 years for companies like Netscape, eBay, Cisco, Yahoo!, Apple and startups.
In my spare time I do Open Source programming and enjoy flying airplanes, karate and studying Asian languages.
This blog talks about events, places and things in my life.
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