Monthly Archives: December 2006

book writing tools

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I’m involved in the authoring of two books at the moment – both using different tools, neither of which would be my choice if it was up to me. One is using DocBook, writing raw incredibly verbose XML… which honestly, isn’t that much fun. The other is in Microsoft Word (well, OpenOffice.org Writer for me). The last time I really used Microsoft Word really seriously was probably around 1998/1999 with Office 98 on the Mac. It was a pretty awesome suite of software actually. Especially after the update that fixed a few crashing bugs :)

One thing I do notice though is the collaboration tools in OOo Writer are nowhere near good enough. The notes are small yellow rectangles where you either have to hold the mouse cursor over them to read them (ick, slow) or double click them and scroll right forever to read the whole or in conjunction with the last way, use the object browser.

Also, track changes doesn’t really track changes to things you’ve changed. i.e. i cannot edit the same thing twice and keep both changes. urgh. I’m pretty sure MS Word let me do that… It certainly allowed me to use versions in a Microsoft Word format document – which, unfortunately, a lot of the world still primarily deals with.

If these few things were fixed it would be a much better word processor.

It’s always frustrated me how poorly word processors handle large files too (except perhaps Nisus Writer… that was certainly a neat app). Add a bunch of images and your file now takes ages to open and save. blergh.

As for figures in DocBook, there seems to not be much input and output processing… i.e. if you put in SVG and you output to HTML it doesn’t output very nicely (puts in SVGs into small windows) and probably completely doesn’t work on browsers that don’t do SVG.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve really moved on to something better than LaTeX and xfig…. okay, there are better tools than xfig for a large number of diagram types.

Feeling blergh and trying to work

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Been feeling rather blergh all today – bit fevery and headachey all day. Managed to spend most of it lying in front of the TV. Bit of Seinfeld, Scrubs and now Buffy. Memorable lines from the current episode include “Q from Bond, not Star Trek” and “can you help with the thinking?”
Speaking of Star Trek, it’s been way too long since I’ve watched any of the original series… or Wrath of Kahn (which, incidently was mentioned in a Seinfeld I watched maybe today)…

ode to feelking ick and not making much sense.

bluetooth fun

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ffor Whatever reason it Seems to be impossible to
do more than one thing via bluetooth at once. i.e. i cannot fetch a photo from my phone while connected by gprs. the suck

also, the handwriting recognition on the 770 sucks. i totally miss this from the newton. it should, but obviously doesn’t tae into account the wrd you may be trying to write. thelikelyhood of me writing t9 is quite small compared to the probability of writing to.

i guess this could be an interesting thing to hack on though…

maybe i should start a ‘to hack on’ list.’ list.

more fun on Melbourne trains

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just made the train, by about 4 seconds :)

but the fun continues, according to the display in the train, it’s been Parkdale station.for the last 5 stops. glad i’m not a tourist.

i’ve brought my camera in for this trip into the cbd – desperately hoping that if needed, the batteries for my flash hold up. i’ve got a few for the camera with me, so i can resort to the inbuilt one.. but it just doesn’t seem as good as the sb800 :)

written on a nokia 770 connected through gprs while listening to an ipod. so geeky geeky

MySQL 5.1.14 has hit the streets, the kids love it.

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Over at the DevZone, MySQL 5.1.14 Downloads the cool kids are grabbing the latest 5.1 beta. Lots of Cluster fixes in this release too. We’re getting to a much more polished state for NDB with each release and that’s a good thing to see.

On a totally different topic, i bought a really sweet smelling mango today and cannot wait for the right time sometime this afternoon to eat it. All the summer fruits are really nice at the moment (benefit of being in a warm December I guess) and I’m loving it.

Although 37-41 degrees (Celcius, duh) can be less fun with a rather warm laptop.

online online online! (or restarts are for wusses)

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I often see things go past my eyes where customers (and users – i.e. those that don’t send wads of cash our way and hence are not financially supporting my beer, curry and photography habits) have amazing uptime and reliability requirements.

When talking to businesses that use MySQL, it’s not uncommon to have the “if the DB is down, our business doesn’t operate” line bandied around. How people make sure this never happens can differ (hint: it often involves replication and good sysadmin practices).

One thing I like doing is making things easier for people. Sometimes it’s also a much more complicated problem than you’re initially led to believe.

I think configuration files are obsolete. Okay, maybe just for databases. Everything should be changable as an online operation. This should also be able to be done via a standard interface – in our case, SQL. This means it’s suddenly really easy to write portable UIs around the admin functionality (no getting the parsing and generation – most trickily, the modification of text based config files right) just the issuing of SQL to the server, relativly simple. This even enables web apps to tune the database a bit, opting for various amounts of automation for various applications – in a cross platform way!

One of my visions for NDB (MySQL Cluster) is to get rid of the (user visible) configuration file and manage everything through SQL (or management client, something like that). This way you could ALTER CLUSTER ADD NODE, ALTER CLUSTER SET DataMemory=4GB etc and things should “just work”, take however long it needs – without downtime.

In a clustered environment, we could do these operations transactionally so that in the event of node or system failure we have some hope of being in a nicely consistent state and that during system recovery (or node recovery) we’re not performing a configuration change in addition to restarting (e.g. if you edited a config file and then had a crash).

Config changes could also have EXPLAIN, a non-modifying operation that would EXPLAIN what would be done – e.g. rolling restart, taking approximately X minutes per node and Y minutes total. This could help in planning and scheduling of configuration changes.

(i wonder if that made any sense)

Trains totally suck

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sitting here at Patterson station, where i was early for the train. then get told it’s running 12 minutes late. suck

i’m on way into city to look more closely at facities at RMIT.

at least the weather is nice.

back in town later tonight for luv too. going to drive for that as it’s just so much more efficient.