For best performance, use RAID 10. Always.
Tom LaRock challenged me to write an 11 word or less blog post. I decided to offer some succinct advice as well as tag two people, all in under 11 words.
Personal Goals for 2011
Jan 4, ’11
9:00 AM
These aren’t all of my goals, to be sure, but I thought that it’d be a good idea to get some of them out in public and start sharing a bit more.
Be More Personal
I want to be more personal on this blog. Historically, I haven’t injected a lot of my personal details into my writing. I did it a few times last year when I talked about a bit of personal history and again when I talked about leaving the PASS Board of Directors. According to my blog, I’ve using the “goats” tag more than I’ve use the “personal” tag. Even when I do blog something personal, it’s almost entirely related to databases, presenting, or presenting about databases. I’m not going to start talking about my innermost secrets, desires, or even my home address.
I will put a bit more of myself out there for people to see.
Contribute
I’ve taken a lot from the community over the years. It’s safe to say that we all have, it’s part of why community exists. I’d like to contribute in a more direct way and in a way that I love. Over the course of the year I’m going to contribute directly to open source projects where I can help out. Contributing to the open source world is about writing documentation, testing, and giving back. It’s something that we all do every day, but for me it’s about putting my money where my mouth is and actively supporting free and open software.
Yes, I am aware that I work for a massive multi-national corporation that makes large profits through the sale of proprietary software. No, this isn’t a reaction.
I will give back and help people build better software.
Write
You could say that I write here on this blog, and that might be true, but it’s not the same as actively practicing writing. I used to write a lot more. There were have been a few months where I know that I have averaged close to a blog post a week day. While I don’t know that I
can always produce great content five days a week, I want to write more frequently. Writing is a craft. If you don’t practice it you get worse at it.
I will set aside time every day for writing.
Predictions for 2011
Dec 31, ’10
1:00 PM
Better watch out, future's here!
These are my predictions for 2011. I suspect that they will easily be as accurate as anything else you read this year. Maybe even more so.
Cloud computing will take over. The shift in cloud computing will be slow at first, but uptake will dramatically increase over the course of the year.
Sick of slow adoption of their technologies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com will create a shaky alliance and secretly build underground factories to assemble an army of clouds. Realizing that the cloud is too ephemeral for many applications, Microsoft will devise the concept of the hybrid cloud and license it to its allies.
Boxbot needs you to join the fight.
Amazon has to pull out of the war because of an autonomous hegemonizing swarm arises within their japanese shipping center.
While Amazon’s boxbot swarm is easily defeated by rain or a thorough soaking with water the camouflage, cheapness, and near ubiquity of the swarm make it difficult to destroy. Amazon’s is unable to put down the rebellion and is slowly consumed by a pile of soggy cardboard boxes.
Everyone is doomed.
Clearly, I have no idea what I’m talking about. All of these images are copyright other people through the Creative Commons license. If you’d like to look at the source material, feel free.
Things I Read This Week – 2010.08.03
Sep 3, ’10
9:26 AM
Just in case you want to live vicariously through my reading choices, here are some of the things that I found interesting this week when I should have been doing my job.
Data
An Illustrated Guide to the PostgreSQL Buffer Cache – Just in case you were wondering how a buffer cache works in a database. Because, you know… it’s cool. For you SQL Server people out there, this is conceptually identical to how buffer pool scans work in SQL Server. I suspect this is the same everywhere and probably based on an obscure academic paper.
Inside the Optimizer: Plan Costing – The SQL Server optimizer is an interesting creature. You can’t see what it’s doing directly because it’s full of patents and secrets (and probably dragons). Paul White (blog | twitter) has been doing a phenomenal job recently of taking apart the optimizer step by step and showing how it works.
The problems with ACID and how to fix them without going NoSQL – You know all of those reasons your developers are giving you to abandon SQL Server for a NoSQL database? This guy claims to have the answer. It boils down to using stronger ACID compliance and sounds suspiciously like Postgre-XC. If you don’t want to read several lengthy academic papers (really? you don’t want to?), the basic premise is that we should use stronger ACID controls by strengthening isolation levels and making the database deterministic such that the outcome of three transactions (A, B, and C) on all nodes will be the same regardless of execution order.
Using Riak’s map/reduce for sorting – Many NoSQL databases use something similar to MapReduce instead of SQL. The magic of map/reduce isn’t always apparent (it isn’t always apparent to me, that’s for sure). This article gives a well-commented example of the code you would use to write an ORDER BY date DESC query.
Configuring Mongo Replica Sets – Kristina Chodorow covers how you would set up Replica Sets to eliminate any single point of failure in MongoDB. Good to know 
10 things you should know about about NoSQL databases
Code
RubyDoc.info – I haven’t really been reading this one so much as I am amazed by it. RubyDoc.info combs the Ruby source code in a few locations and dynamically generates up to the second documentation based on the current stable versions of libraries. Go go magic clouds!
TextMate’s Missing Drawer – Mac fiends, take note! I’ve always thought TextMate’s project drawer was a bit lacking. This really improves on the built in drawer and integrates it a lot better into the application. (Found via The Hidden Magic of TextMate.)
Other Stuff
The Importance of a Mentor – My good friend, and long time unknowing mentor, Jonathan Kehayias talks about the importance of having a mentor. Take some time and thank the people who have mentored you throughout your career.
Interviewing (A Gently Stolen Idea)
Jul 21, ’10
8:32 AM
I totally ripped this idea off. I think that’s okay, I’m giving credit.
The premise is responding to a set of interview questions written thusly:
I like _____________________ .
I love _____________________ .
I want _____________________ .
I was _____________________ .
I am _____________________ .
I will _____________________ .
I think _____________________ .
I know _____________________ .
Answers:
I like making up the plan as I go.
I love summer thunderstorms. Especially late at night.
I want to be remembered for the small things and celebrated for the big ones.
I was born on a pirate ship.
I am never going to be as grown up as they want me to be.
I will not compromise, but I will listen and change.
I think a lot of things are overrated.
I know many things. I don’t know which ones are important.
The Key is…
May 17, ’10
8:30 AM
It was a typical Saturday afternoon in Blacklick. The day had gone well – I had entertained a number of guests with some of my uproarious tales, a short self-penned one act opera, and a round of polo using burros instead of horses.
The classiest entertainment for the classiest people
After having one of my many servants clean the burro “leavings” from the polo field, we began setting up for the afternoon games – we mainly play lawn darts. The neighbors complained after their poodles went missing, but I informed them that there was no way I could hit a poodle in their lawn from my lawn because I have tried on a number of occasions but we were bear baiting last weekend and the bear got out and I hid under my car for an hour so I’m not really sure what happened to the poodle.
Does this thing play Spellicopter?
Long story short of it, we were rudely interrupted when the neighbor with the missing poodles brought over a misdelivered, but clearly addressed, package. I opened it and, to my surprise I found a strange key sealed in a clear material. With a note from my good friend, Lord Trololo of Ozar. I tried to open it with my hands, but it wouldn’t budge.
This is less than flattering, but I need that key!
I must have the key. It was taunting me, humiliating me in front my guests.
I'm sorry it's had to come to this, key.
When I finally opened the key, I found that it was a device of the USBs. Knowing that Lord Trololo frequently listens to the melodies of Lady Gaga, I attempted to plug my stereophonic headset into the USBs key that he had sent me. ALAS, TWAS NOT MEANT TO BE!
Nary a bad romance to be found
Thank you, BrentO. I wish I could be at TechEd to trololo with you. It was not meant to be… this year.
iPhones, Robots, and Cookies
May 11, ’10
9:00 AM
I traded my iPhone for a batch of cookies. That’s right: one white iPhone 3GS was traded for a batch of cookies. This has been a long time coming.
My Growing Disappointment
I’ve had an iPhone since Apple first unleashed them on unsuspecting consumers. I was happy with the first generation iPhone. I was even happier with my iPhone 3GS. It was fast, I could download applications, and everything integrated smoothly with the software on my MacBook.
Over the last six months, my disappointment has grown. There was no good way to sync my contacts between the iPhone and Google without some irritating third party add-ons for the Apple Address Book on my Mac. The same problems applied to my calendars – I could either have up to date calendars on Google or on my laptop. It was possible to sync everything using webcal (WebDAV for calendars), but it was not an optimal solution. Heck, I couldn’t even open a calendar invitation sent to my phone even though Apple wrote the original specification.
In order to sync third party applications with the apps on my computer, I had to manually sync each application. That’s not that bad when you only have one application, but once it starts growing you start to forget which apps you have and haven’t synced up – maintaining your external brain shouldn’t be a huge trial. Smart phones are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead I found myself doing more work to keep things up to date than I really liked. It wasn’t a ton of work, but it was still extra work.
Enter John
What does John have to do with this? Well, John Keyes (twitter) and I were talking on Friday. He pulled out his phone and I started asking him questions. John had an HTC Incredible. I’d never used an Android phone before and I wanted to take a look.
After just a few minutes I was really impressed with John’s phone. To be honest, I called around to a number of Verizon stores just to make sure I could get my stinky little hands on an HTC Incredible.
Fancy Robots
First impressions of Android on the Incredible – this is really nice. Some of the earlier Android phones were rough around the edges and I didn’t expect things to be as polished an iPhone. I was right: things weren’t quite as polished as the iPhone but they were really close. The icons were consistent, things were fairly smooth scrolling between the main application screens. Things got a little bit slow scrolling through the list of all programs, but it was nowhere near as bad as I’ve witnessed on other Droid phones.
Multitasking was a really nice change from the iPhone. I was able to stream music through last.fm, check my email, and chat on gtalk at the same time. Sure, I don’t normally use my phone like a computer, but because of the multitasking it was easy to accomplish some pretty cool things – I streamed music through last.fm while using my phone to get directions.
Getting Set Up
In order to get all of my calendar appointments on my phone, I exported them from iCal and then imported them into Google calendar. In a few minutes, everything was down on my phone. Completely and totally. I split everything into separate calendars. I even sent myself a meeting invitation from my work email to my phone and I was able to accept the appointment and it showed up on my calendar.
For three years I haven’t been able to accept a simple appointment on my phone. It was such a welcome relief to be able to see and accept an appointment on my phone and then have it show up in my calendar.
Contacts syncing was a bit hairier because Google doesn’t support contact synchronization from an exteral source (my address book) if there are multiple contacts with the same primary email address. This process has been manual but well worth it. I’ve culled about 300 contacts from my contact list. You know how Google will create a contact for anybody you’ve ever emailed or who has ever emailed you? Yeah, I have about 1,000 contacts like that. It makes you laugh and think you’re popular until you try to dial a phone number have to scroll through 14 pages of ‘\/1agra peni5 c0cks’ before you get to someone named Aaron. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to delete a giant pile of dong from Gmail’s contact manager (one of the few things it gets right), so my contact list was free of unwanted penises in no time.
The Rest of the Internet
One of the coolest things that I’ve found so far is that the phone has synced up my contacts from Facebook as well as the contacts I have in Google. I’ve been able to link them up so that I don’t have three or four entries for a single person in my phone. I can just tap their name and have all of their contact information immediately available.
Browsing has been great. Since Verizon’s 3G network is allegedly the best in the universe, I decided to put Verizon’s tubes to the test. I streamed last.fm in my car between Cinci and Columbus. I would routinely lose any form of signal on AT&T’s network. Instead of losing signal, I was able to listen to some of my favorite music while finding new music. Uncanny. The experience of browsing the internet has been remarkably similar. I suspect that both run similar builds of WebKit optimized for a mobile device. Either way, it works and it works well.
It Works and It Works Well
At the end of the day, that’s what I have to say about this HTC Incredible: It works and it works well.
Is it as polished as the iPhone? I’m not sure. As I get used to the phone, I think that it might be as polished as the iPhone, just different. Things work in a way that makes sense to me. Settings are accessed through each application and not a global settings menu. Applications are consistent.
I am, on the whole, quite pleased.
Speaking is so done
Apr 1, ’10
9:00 AM
Take three steps to your right to advance to the next slide
Honestly, I’m tired of speaking. PowerPoint is overrated. People want more or less bullet points. It’s never enough. More graphs. More pie charts. Less funny images. More dinosaurs. Stop showing pictures of Zeus sexing up a goat. I don’t know what you people want!
Demos – you can shove those, too. People complain when the code doesn’t fit on the screen or when my resolution is too low or when they have some kind of vitamin deficiency and they can’t look at the color #0f0015 for more than 32 seconds without suffering from a migraine. I’ve spent hours coming up with the perfect demo code only to have someone poke holes in it over and over again. I see this all the time on speaker feedback.
No more. You will no longer have this opportunity. PowerPoints are done. Demos are over. Speaking? That’s right out, too. Greek pornography… The jury’s still out on that one.
So here’s a note to everyone who is expecting me to speak at their event in the future: I won’t. I’ll be there, but I will not speak. I need you to secure velvet ropes for my “room”. I will be available for hushed conversations, but I want my work to speak for itself. I need dim, dramatic, lighting and access to numerous power sources so I can light my “slides” in a variety of ways.
Speaking of slides… They have been carefully painted on using oil or egg tempera paints. A few paintings contain other, non-volatile, material when I was experimenting with a different style of art work, but I cannot promise that everyone will like this.
Presenting is an artform and this is art. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to understand it.
This is art, goddamnit!
Pay Attention
Mar 9, ’10
8:45 AM
Are we not men? No, we are Hammurabi!
I’m here reminding you that you need to pay attention.
This isn’t like in Middle School history when you were learning about the Epic of Gilgamesh and how he killed a demi-god with the help of a hairy little man and together they survive watching the movie Ishtar and end up wearing a cow’s ass as a hat or something. Did you pay attention to that story? Yeah, me neither. This is nothing like that.
I’ve noticed something that bothers me – we constantly distract ourselves. People are always on the phone or listening to music or basically not paying attention. Stop it.
Breathe
Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Breathe in. Breathe out. Fill up your lungs, focus on breathing.
Do you feel that? That’s you calming your tiny little primate brain and making it pay attention to one very simple thing that it already does on its own. Feels good, doesn’t it?
Keeping doing for a bit. Focus on your breathing. If you drift off for a second, just focus on your breathing. Your mind is still there, you just shifted your focus. This page will still be here when you get frustrated.
Think
What’s the point of this?
Honestly, the point was to get you to stop for a minute.
Think about how often you’re constantly worried about what to do next. Think about how often you’re thinking about a meeting you had earlier in the week, an argument, or anything else that happened in the past. You think about the past and the future a lot, don’t you?
Now, think about how much time you spend focusing on right now. Be really honest with yourself. I bet it’s not a lot.
This is really mature, guys.
You’re boring.
Did you perk up and pay attention just now? I thought so. You probably aren’t boring. You’re probably a fascinating person with diverse and varied interests and I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, but you’re boring the shit out of me. Fact: life is not full of roller coasters and orgasms. Sometimes you have to peel potatoes. When you’re peeling the potatoes, peel the potatoes. Don’t think about how you’re going to have pie for dessert or how your 14 disk box set of Quantum Leap is going to come in the mail in a few days. Just peel the potatoes.
Be
Zen students are with their masters at least ten years before the presume to teach others. Nan-in was visited by Tenno, who, having passed his apprenticeship, had become a teacher. The day happened to be rainy, so Tenno wore wooden clogs and carried an umbrella. After greeting him, Nan-in remarked “I suppose you left your wooden clogs in the vestibule. I want to know if your umbrella is on the right or left side of the clogs.”
Tenno, confused, had no instant answer. He realized that he was unable to carry his Zen every minute. He became Nan-in’s pupil, and he studied six more years to accomplish his every-minute Zen.
from Zen Flesh Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki
To put it another way – an ordained monk was so humbled by his own inattention that he once again became a student. We all slip up, but if you try you can manage to pay a little bit more attention to what you’re doing. Take pleasure in the things you’re doing. When it’s time to peel the potatoes, peel the potatoes. When it’s time to indulge in your Margaret Thatcher fetish, don’t call me.
T-SQL Tuesday 4: Io, Io, it’s off to disk we go
Mar 9, ’10
7:47 AM
Fact: the earliest recorded use of cloud computing was ancient Greek porn
Anyway, it is rumored that Io was attractive. So attractive, in fact, that Zeus, lord of the perverts, saw her taking a bath and got more than a little bit aroused. Zeus then behaved in a way that would end up in a savage beating and restraining order back where I come from – he pestered Io for nookie until her father drove her out of the house – probably because some horny lunatic who could shoot children out of his forehead was bothering his daughter. Io, being a bit strange in the head, relented. Or something. My records aren’t 100% clear seeing as how they’ve been written on pottery. The point is that Zeus turned into a giant cloud and turned Io into a cow (no, your hooves don’t make you look fat).
Somehow Zeus’s wife got involved and there was bondage involving a cow tied to a tree or something. Eventually Io gets turned back into a real live girl and gives birth to Zeus’s son. Which brought about an ethics probe into cross-species cloning.
Disk… disk… oh yeah I already mentioned that the ancient Greeks were clearly insane and thought that the world was a giant metal plate floating on a huge river name Oceanus all of it encased in a hemisphere with clouds and the sun and the moon and stuff painted all over the inside of the hemisphere.
What’s outside of the hemisphere? Shut up, that’s what. It’s turtles all the way down.
There’s a bit of humor thrown into your T-SQL Tuesday
