[Interesting side alley: I was talking to a friend yesterday and encouraged her to speak at an upcoming conference. She said, "No way. I don't know enough." I explained that volunteering to speak was the best way to be sure that she'd end up knowing enough by the time she was through.]

I agree completely — the best way to learn something is to teach it. Not only does it force you to be prepared, but the questions you’ll get from the audience are often more enlightening than anything you’d ever read.

Some of my photos are below for you folks to enjoy while I get my act together here. :-)

MySQL documentation states that replicating from a 5.0 master to a 5.1 slave should work. This is very different from stating that it does work. That section of the manual should enter the 5.1 no-use case competition.

Frankly, I hate the word “should.” To see it in vendor documentation like this is terrible, because it’s a weasel word. It puts the onus of testing and support on the end user, and gives the vendor a cop-out when it doesn’t work. “Well, we only said it should work, not that it does.” Not saying that MySQL does that, but other vendors certainly do.

For me, seeing “should” in this situation always translates to “does not” when I start thinking about the reasons for the hedging. Have they not tested it? Maybe they have tested it but it fails sometimes and they haven’t figured out quite why. Maybe they want to say it “does” work, but they just need to qualify it with more criteria they haven’t documented yet.

Regardless of the reasons, and for most people who need to rely on features like this for production systems, having “should work” in your documentation is functionally identical to not having the feature at all.

Leckrone suspended the band Friday night from performing in today’s home football game against Ohio State because he said the allegations were serious enough that they required immediate action… There will be no replacement act at tonight’s Badgers football game to fill the absence of the UW Marching Band.

Of course, it’s the one football game a year I actually make it to. I’m not going to make any in-depth comments, except to say that the band has been rowdy and fun for decades, and if people don’t like it, well, all the members are adults (well, they’re over 18) and can make their own decisions. Welcome to life. Personally, I always enjoyed the band parties I went to.

Perhaps I can suggest some replacement halftime activities:

• interpretive dance by randomly-selected fans (or all the seniors taking the band’s tickets tonight).
• contests like those that happen between periods at a hockey game, like “who can score the highest on the breathalyzer and still make a field goal.”
• a high school football game.
• a deathmatch between mascots, or at least a swordfight or jousting with the team flags.
• get Donald Lipski, artist who created the sculpture “Nail’s Tales,” on the field to talk about what the hell he was thinking.

Just a thought. We’ll see what they actually do.

Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution — one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages.

Continuous OS releases are an interesting idea. One of the annoying aspects of OSes is that every few years you have to go through a big upgrade cycle, as a vendor stops support for version X and forces you to version X+2. For my organization these upgrades haven’t been a problem because you can do the OS upgrades with the normal hardware replacement cycle, every three years or so as leases run out, etc. Now that virtualization is taking over we won’t have the same chance to replace the OS, though. Being able to upgrade the OS more easily and often sounds like a great idea.

The problems with continuous OS releases, though, are numerous. First, application developers are going to hate this. They don’t want the underlying OS to change, ever, and to have it changing constantly means a lot of trouble to them. Time spent testing against new OS releases is time not spent making their software better. That goes double for vendors who have to support things running on these OSes. How do they test & certify their software, hardware, and/or procedures against a constantly changing OS? It would be hard, especially since open source projects already have a terrible time with compatibility issues & QA. Last, all these issues apply to system administrators, too. Instead of having two or three operating environments to track you have the possibility of an infinite number of them. Admins will need to superimpose the old system of releases on top of these continuous release models in order to get any testing done, just like we do now with patch management.

Instead of continuous releases, perhaps a better solution is to make the upgrade process between releases much easier, cleaner, and seamless. It would also help some vendors to do more frequent releases (five years between Windows releases is a long time, for example). Red Hat releases new Enterprise Linux versions every two years or so, and supports them for seven years. Two years is a nice interval, and offers a controlled, regular opportunity to add new technology. If they’d make the upgrade from RHEL 5 to 6 (or 7, or 8) seamless we would get all the benefits of continuous OS releases without all the support problems.

That’s the sort of upgrade feature I’m hoping for, something as easy as a “svn sw” command for my OS.

“Hey, do you know what time sunrise is tomorrow?”

“Not yet.”

Still quite a ways from being able to download the know-how for flying a helicopter, though. Luckily Apple does let copious numbers of weather apps into the App Store, despite duplicating existing functionality.

It’s rated arrrrrr.

Have a happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! Last year I was able to order grog at my local bar. This year I’m going to try for some bumboo, in order to avoid scurvy.

I’m proud to announce that the first show of our 2008-2009 season opens tomorrow at the Bartell Theatre in Madison. It’s Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley. It’s about a Catholic nun that protects a boy from the advances of a priest, and it’s about an hour and a half long. The Bartell Theatre is a great place to see a show, because they not only serve good beer and wine but, unlike other venues in the area[0], you can also take your food and drink with you to your seat.

If you live in or around Madison, WI[1] and are interested in seeing it I have some free tickets available for this weekend. Shows start at 7:30 PM on Thursday (tomorrow), 8 PM on Friday, and 4 PM & 8 PM on Saturday. It’s a great & free way to get out of the house for a couple hours.

If you’re interested I just need to know who you are, how many tickets you want, and what show you’re coming to so I can set the reservation. Leave a comment for me below.

——-

[0] If you ever build a big, expensive theater realize that white seats are a dumb idea, especially since wine comes in red varieties.

[1] If you don’t live in the Madison area but end up here visiting sometime and want to see a show, just drop me a note.

Bamberg, Regensburg, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, and finally Munich were wonderful. I’m very grateful to the hundreds of folks that helped all six of us out, translated my terrible, broken German and hand waving, and generally made everything enjoyable.

In 12 days I took 2718 photos with my Nikon D80 and my little Panasonic FX-01. I drank 43.5 liters of excellent beer in numerous beer gardens, usually a Helles or Pils, a Maß at a time. I ate like a king, probably several pigs worth of pork, a bunch of roasted chickens a half at a time, roasted fish, pretzels, and those amazing huge radishes, salted of course. I know that sauerkraut should be sweet, good beer can be very smoky, and onions are awesome when stuffed with meat and baked. And I walked it all off, 5 to 10 miles each day. We didn’t drive in the cities once we got there, but we did bicycle in Munich, which was great. The Autobahn is very nice. Germans are serious about driving and it’s refreshing. I got to just over 222 kph in a Mercedes S-350 and felt comfortable the whole time. We also had a Mercedes CLS, which was definitely built for speed. Its tires were rated to 240 kph. Navigation systems are a must in strange territories, but even so, getting lost can be awesome. I probably learned as much German from the navigation system as anywhere else. :-)

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

The late Jim Gray had a fantastic interview in ACM Queue back in 2003 where he talked about disk access times vs. capacity vs. Moore’s Law, and especially how he was mailing computers and disks to people. His price comparisons are a little dated now, but the rest is a good use of ten minutes, if you ask me. (and you didn’t, I know). :-)

Enjoy.

…but by 134 years into the future?

I didn’t actually get to see what it was set to, as the machine fixed itself via NTP shortly afterwards. I suspect the last mount time is some sort of unsigned integer that overflowed.

Of course, on the subsequent reboot it needed to check the filesystems yet again, putting the last checked time back to normal.

“Those servers should come up cleanly after a reboot.”
“That storage array upgrade should not cause an outage.”
“The customer should be fine with this.”

Right.

If you can’t say “going to” then you need to do more work.

Update: if you think I’m wrong don’t take it personally, join the comments where the beatdown is already happening. Please, no nails in the 2×4s, though. :-)

Lesson here: autofocus doesn’t work very well on fires.