Epic Epicurean Coffee and Fig 2013 Imperial Oatmeal Stout

Last night I opened this wonderful bottle that I acquired on Friday (the only reason I didn’t open it then was the 10k Melbourne Marathon even I ran on early Sunday morning).

Epic Epicurean Coffee and Fig 2013

It was delicious. The fig really came through and lent a nice sweetness to contrast with the bitterness. I’m now wondering why I don’t make things with figs more often….

Awesome coffee beans from Cartel Coffee Roasters

The other week Leah and I went to the Royal Melbourne Show (she won free tickets which makes it a lot easier to swallow than the $35/head otherwise) and I picked up some coffee beans while there (why not!). These beans are called “The Guji” and are from Cartel Coffee Roasters down in Geelong. I opened them the other day and as an increasing number of my Percona colleagues can attest to, I’ve been raving about them. These are some seriously good beans.

amazing coffee beans

The road to Percona Server 5.6

Over a year ago now, I announced the first Percona Server 5.6 alpha on the Percona MySQL Performance Blog (Announcing Percona Server 5.6 Alpha). That was way back on August 14th, 2012 and it was based on MySQL 5.6.5 released in April.

I’m really happy now to point to the release of the first GA release of Percona Server 5.6 along with some really interesting benchmarks. We’ve certainly come a long way from that first alpha and I’m really happy that we’ve also managed to continue to release Percona Server 5.5 and Percona Server 5.1 releases on time and of high quality.

Over the same time frame that we’ve been working on Percona Server 5.6 we’ve increased the size of the company, improved development practices and grown enough that we’ve reorganised how development of software is managed to make it scale better. One thing I’m really, really pleased about is a culture of quality we’ve managed to nurture.

Keeping a culture of quality alive is something that requires constant nurturing. All too often I’ve seen pressure to ship sooner rather than stabler (yes, I just invented that word), and yes, we initially planned the GA of PS 5.6 earlier than we ended up shipping it, but we instead took the time to round out features and stability to ship something much better.

Now comes the effort of continuing good releases, promoting it and writing a Webinar to give next week.

Pictures of Auckland (where OSDC 2013 is!)

It’s getting close to time to head to Auckland for OSDC and a few days ago I blogged about how I’m speaking there). I’ll be speaking on MySQL In the Cloud, As A Service and all of the challenges that can entail as well as on The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration. Both of these talks draw heavily on the experience of Percona (my employer) and with experience from helping customers with all sorts of MySQL deployments and in our experience in producing our own high quality software.

I was in Auckland earlier this year, so thought I’d share some pictures of the wonderful city in which OSDC is being held.

Firstly, New Zealand has some pretty awesome wildlife. This is possibly not the best example of it ever as there are way more odd looking birds than this one:

Auckland

The waterfront is quite nice, and when we were there earlier in the year it was awfully nice weather for it:
Auckland

I’m pretty sure there isn’t going to be a triathlon in Auckland for OSDC, but I’m still hoping to get out for a run while there (anybody else up for one?). We left home at something like 3:30 in the morning and got some silly early flight (6am or before) and were totally walking around the city a little like zombies, realising that we simultaneously wanted to go for a run and sleep.

Auckland Triathlon

We were meeting friends from Seattle and managed to spot this coffee place down by the water. I didn’t try it myself, but I’ve certainly had good coffee at other places in New Zealand.

Seattle coffee in Auckland, New Zealand

Streets at night:

Auckland@dusk

And if I haven’t already convinced you that Auckland would be a great place to be, here’s a crappy cell-phone snapshot of a variety of New Zealand beers – a tiny, tiny fraction of beer you can get in New Zealand (the microbrewery scene is amazing)

A selection of NZ beer

Go register for OSDC 2013 right now: http://osdc.org.nz/tickets/

Adventures with Velvia 50

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a bunch of photos I’ve had sitting around for quite a while now. Recently I finally got around to shooting some Velvia 50, after now several years of meaning to. This is all 35mm with a Nikon F80 and likely all with the 50mm lens. I’m quite pleased with some of the results, slightly more so for the ones not in full direct bright sunlight, but they were much better light for photos anyway. The downside of Velvia 50? Not a portrait film at all.

Manly Lizard

Rocks, waves, Manly

Coffee at the lighthouse

Cape Otway Lighthouse

linux.conf.au 2014: Perth!

perth from kings parkIt’s been over ten years since the last linux.conf.au in Perth but don’t worry, this upcoming January, we’re back in Perth for linux.conf.au 2014. I’m really looking forward to getting back to Perth as I’ve only been there very, very briefly since 2003 and would love to explore the city a bit more.

DSCN0493.JPG
Perth 2003 was the first linux.conf.au I ever went to and I’ve been to every single one since (2004 in Adelaide, 2005 in Canberra, 2006 in Dunedin, 2007 in Sydney, 2008 in Melbourne, 2009 in Hobart, 2010 in Wellington, 2011 in Brisbane, 2012 in Ballarat and 2013 in Canberra – each one of them absolutely brilliant). A few things were different back then, for example, there was a terminal room with actual terminals where you could use cutting edge technologies such as telnet.

DSCN0594.JPG
As a surprise to many, 2003 was the first year that Linus came to an LCA, arriving in the fashion of the time (a penguin suit).

I have many fond memories of LCA back in 2003 and with the list of speakers and miniconfs for this year mostly up already, it’s looking to be an excellent conference in January 2014 – just a few short months away.

Early bird registrations finish soon so head on over to https://lca2014.linux.org.au/registration/new to register now.

A better set of Boost m4 macros

I just replaced the old Pandora boost m4 macros in a project with boost.m4 from https://github.com/tsuna/boost.m4 and it basically just solved all my problems with Boost and the whole set of distributions that I build for (everything from CentOS/RHEL 5 to Debian unstable).

I like things that other people maintain.

Speaking at OSDC 2013 in Auckland!

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming OSDC conference in Auckland, New Zealand! It’s on October 21st-23rd and you should go here right now and register. I’m giving two talks at OSDC this year:

  • MySQL in the cloud, As A Service (Monday 21st, 12:00pm)
    There is no one magic solution to having MySQL As A Service work well, it’s a lot of small moving parts and options that need to be set, monitored and configured. We may wish it was different, or look at other database technologies, but there is a lot of legacy code that talks to MySQL, with all it’s idiosyncrasies – and we need to be able to support this code. In this talk, we’ll cover many of the problem areas and what you can do to avoid them.
  • The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration (Wednesday 23rd, 2:30pm)
    This a tale of the introduction of continuous integration testing into a well established development team. It covers both the highs and lows and discusses strategies to deal with both the positives and negatives and in turn improve your own software engineering practices.

In case you need to quickly justify to your boss why you should go to OSDC, the conference organisers have helpfully provided a page of hints on just that subject.

The end of Bazaar

I’ve used the Bazaar (bzr) version control system since roughly 2005. The focus on usability was fantastic and the team at Canonical managed to get the entire MySQL BitKeeper history into Bazaar – facilitating the switch from BitKeeper to Bazaar.

There were some things that weren’t so great. Early on when we were looking at Bazaar for MySQL it was certainly not the fastest thing when it came to dealing with a repository as large as MySQL. Doing an initial branch over the internet was painful and a much worse experience than BitKeeper was. The work-around that we all ended up using was downloading a tarball of a recent Bazaar repository and then “bzr pull” to get the latest. This was much quicker than letting bzr just do it. Performance for initial branch improved a lot since then, but even today it’s still not great – but at least it isn’t terrible like it once was.
The integration with Launchpad was brilliant. We never really used it for MySQL but for Drizzle the combination was crucial and helped us get releases out the door, track tasks and bugs and do code review. Parts of launchpad saw great development (stability and performance improved immensely) and others did not (has anything at all changed in blueprints in the past 5+ years?). Not running your own bugs db was always a win and I’m really sad to say that I still think Launchpad is the best bug tracker out there.
For both Drizzle and Percona, Bazaar was the right option as it was what MySQL was using, so people in the community already knew the tools. These days however… Git is the tool that there’s large familiarity with – even to the extent that Twitter maintains their MySQL branch in Git rather than in bzr.Is Bazaar really no longer being developed? Here are graphs (from github actually) on the activity on Bazaar itself over the years:Screenshot from 2013-10-02 10:32:19Screenshot from 2013-10-02 10:33:41You can easily see the drop off in commits and code changes. The last commit to trunk was 2 months ago and although there was the 2.6.0 release in August, in my opinion it wasn’t a very strong one (the first one I’ve had problems with in years).So… git is the obvious successor and with such a strong community around GitHub, it kinda makes sense. I’m not saying that GitHub has caught up to Launchpad in terms of features or anything – it’s just that with Bazaar clearly no longer really being developed…. it may be the only option.In fact, in my experiment of putting a mirror of Percona Server on GitHub, we already have a pull request mere days after I blogged about it. Migrating all of Percona development over to Git and Github may take some time, but it’s certainly time that we kicked the tyres on it and worked out how we’d do it without interrupting releases or development.I’ve also thrown up a Drizzle tree and although it required some munging to get the conversion to happen, I’m kind of optimistic about it and I think that after a round of merging things, I’m tempted to very strongly advocate for us switching (which I don’t think there’ll be any opposition to).When will Oracle move over their MySQL development? This I cannot say (as I don’t know and don’t make that call for them). There is a lot of renewed interest in code contribution by Oracle and moving to Git and GitHub may well be a very good way to encourage people.
The downside of git? Well… With BZR you could get away with not understanding pretty much every single bit of the internals. With git, I wish I was so lucky.

An Experimental GIT mirror of Drizzle

I’ve been mirroring a bunch of projects that have their source control in BZR up onto github recently. This turns out to be a bit harder than it sounds for a bunch of reasons that aren’t particularly interesting (although having a commit in the bzr repo where the name of the committer has a newline in it is among the more interesting).

Run on over to https://github.com/stewartsmith/drizzle to check it out. I’ve put up Drizzle 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 branches.

Awesome grilled tofu marinade

The other night I made this marinade with some tofu (pressed in a TofuXpress to get more water out).

The recipe for the marinade is:

  • 1/3 cup soy sauce
  • 1/3 cup maple syrup
  • 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
  • 1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil

I marinated the tofu (I used a really firm tofu – which is also really high in protein) and fried it in a really hot skillet (which gave it a lovely colour). It was delicious. I served it with some broccoli (quickly fried with garlic and ginger and a tablespoon or two of the marinade) and some cous cous.

Actually… I think I’ll have to make this again soon. Really simple to do (although pressing the tofu and marinating takes time, but time you can do other things) and really tasty.

Misadventures in internet access

So, around the time one would reasonably expect an extra tap to have been put on our ADSL line, we started getting relatively frequent drop outs. This was somewhat resolved for a while until a few months ago… when ADSL dropouts started occuring several times a day.

Internode then informed me that “frequent dropouts” actually meant something like 5 or 7 per day rather than “more than once a day” and “this just started happening recently”. Colour me not impressed already. Anyway, it got a bit worse and I managed to convince them there was an actual fault. There were some tests done (which all failed somehow) and it ended with a technician coming out and checking things, then heading to the telephone exchange to do further tests before calling me (they didn’t… and after a few hours I gave up waiting and went for lunch).

So.. things mysteriously got a little bit better for a little while (a week maybe?) and then I went on vacation for a few weeks so didn’t really care what state my home ADSL connection was in.

Now, back from vacation and there were still dropouts. Then, on Friday things just went dead. I called Internode as I have done before, hoping for some actual action this time (it’s now months into this). They would not even log a fault without me listening for a dialtone. There is one problem with this, I don’t have a landline phone and haven’t wanted one for at least seven years. Yes, for seven years I have been paying at least $20/month for a service I did not want (that’s at least $1680 for those playing at home).

I explained that I did not have a phone, but still, no fault would be logged without listening for a dialtone. I asked what would happen if I had Naked DSL (as this is what I have wanted for SEVEN FUCKING YEARS but have been unable to get) and got some rather weird answer about it just being “more difficult to diagnose problems”. In a previous call with Internode before I went on vacation, I was informed that there would be a downtime of 7-10 days if I were to switch to Naked DSL and it wouldn’t be any cheaper than what I pay now (so I opted forgo that as it seems silly to pay the same amount of money for just an added long outage).

So, I expressed my dissatisfaction at having to go out and buy a landline phone that I didn’t fucking want… but $25 later I could ring back and say “there’s no dial tone” and then they had the balls to ask if I had another phone I could plug in and test. Seriously.

Finally though, a fault could be logged – and it was only a few hours out of my Friday and a further $25 out of my pocket for something I don’t want. Then there was the “good” news of when the problem would be fixed. In 24-48 hours there’d be an update – not a resolution. Then, it may take a couple of business days to have the phone line work again. Grr. Luckily we’re not old and in risk of having a heart attack and needing to call an ambulance as the prospect of 4 days without a dial tone would then be terrifying.

Luckily I have a 3g dongle for backup! Also, the Billion router I have has a USB port that will fail over from ADSL to 3g! Fantastic! For the lowly sum of $15/month Internode will give you 1GB of 3G data. It’s kinda useful (cheaper than hotel internet too) and useful to have a backup. You can also purchase extra data blocks if 1GB isn’t enough. It turns out that 1GB doesn’t last very long in our house while I’m working (even when being frugal with bandwidth). The price of a 1GB data block is now $39.90. This is a tad exorbitant even for 3G data prices… so I started to search elsewhere.

Amaysim looked like a good deal: $99.90 for 10GB of data to use within a year. A much better deal, in fact, a quarter of the price of internode! So, knowing that the USB dongle I bought from Internode a few years ago now is just a generic one that’s unlocked, I went and bought a Amaysim SIM card and loaded it up. It worked on my laptop (Fedora) just fine. It did not work in the Billion router. It just didn’t get an IP address.

An hour of fiddling with things, convinced I had something wrong, I rang Amaysim. I was on hold. They said I could “chat now” with someone on their web site. I tried that, it said 25 minute wait… so I figured that staying on hold couldn’t possibly be that long. Once I reached 45 minutes on hold, I also started the website “live chat” thing – it said 29 minutes. After an hour on hold, the phone went silent. It stayed silent. About that time I got through on the web site and the person was rather useless in helping debug the problem. The best I got was “with routers things get more complicated”. I don’t care about complicated, but at least they could refund the money (in 3-5 business days though) and close the account. The explanation offered: provider not compatible with device. This I’d never heard of.

Also, the Billion router has sweet fuck all diagnostics as to why something may not be working. I am convinced that what I really want is an actual linux box where I can run debian and say, look at the PPP logs.

I then tried Virgin Mobile. Exact same thing, except that the guy at the Virgin Mobile store said that if it didn’t work I could just bring it back and when I called their tech support I was on hold for maybe 3 seconds. Even though it didn’t work, at least I can go back and return it tomorrow. I heartily recommend them as my experience has been rather positive and I kinda wish it had worked.

So, five hours out of my Saturday and I still didn’t have a working solution, and have ended up paying crazy amounts of money for data as at least the Internode SIM works when the dongle is connected to both the router and my laptop and not just my laptop.

Maybe, sometime next week, I’ll have a proper internet connection that works… and hey, with luck, perhaps we’ll have this NBN thing at some point that actually delivers more bandwidth to my house than we get to Mars.

Oh, and if anybody knows of an ISP that is like how Internode used to be, let me know.

Who is working on MySQL 5.7?

First I find out the first commit that is in 5.7 that isn’t in 5.6 (using bzr missing) and then look at the authors of all of those commits. Measuring the number of commits is a really poor metric as it does not measure the complexity of the code committed, and if your workflow is to revise a patchset before committing, you get much fewer commits than if you commit 10 times a day.

There are a good number of people who are committing a lot of code to the latest MySQL development tree. (Sorry for the annoying layout of “count. number-of-commits name”)

  1. 1022 Magnus Blaudd
  2. 723 Jonas Oreland
  3. 329 Marko Mäkelä
  4. 286 Krunal Bauskar
  5. 230 Tor Didriksen
  6. 218 John David Duncan
  7. 205 Vasil Dimov
  8. 197 Sunny Bains
  9. 166 Ole John Aske
  10. 141 Marc Alff
  11. 141 Frazer Clement
  12. 140 Jimmy Yang
  13. 131 Joerg Bruehe
  14. 129 Jon Olav Hauglid
  15. 125 Annamalai Gurusami
  16. 106 Martin Skold
  17. 104 Nuno Carvalho
  18. 103 Georgi Kodinov
  19. 102 Pekka Nousiainen

There’s also a good number who have 50-100 commits:

  1. 99 Mauritz Sundell
  2. 97 Bjorn Munch
  3. 92 Craig L Russell
  4. 85 Andrei Elkin
  5. 81 Mattias Jonsson
  6. 73 Nirbhay Choubey
  7. 71 Roy Lyseng
  8. 68 Kevin Lewis
  9. 66 Rohit Kalhans
  10. 65 Guilhem Bichot
  11. 61 Sayantan Dutta
  12. 59 Akhila Maddukuri
  13. 58 Jorgen Loland
  14. 57 Martin Zaun
  15. 56 Harin Vadodaria
  16. 55 Inaam Rana
  17. 53 Venkatesh Duggirala
  18. 53 Venkata Sidagam
  19. 52 Gleb Shchepa
  20. 51 Norvald H. Ryeng
  21. 51 Jan Wedvik
  22. 50 Tatjana Azundris Nuernberg

And there’s even more with less than 50:

  1. 49 Manish Kumar
  2. 49 Alexander Barkov
  3. 48 Shivji Kumar Jha
  4. 48 Martin Hansson
  5. 42 Maitrayi Sabaratnam
  6. 40 Satya Bodapati
  7. 39 Horst Hunger
  8. 38 Neeraj Bisht
  9. 34 Yasufumi Kinoshita
  10. 34 prabakaran thirumalai
  11. 34 Kristofer Pettersson
  12. 33 Evgeny Potemkin
  13. 33 Dmitry Lenev
  14. 33 Chaithra Gopalareddy
  15. 33 Alexander Nozdrin
  16. 31 Hemant Kumar
  17. 31 Allen lai
  18. 31 Aditya A
  19. 30 Nisha Gopalakrishnan
  20. 30 Anirudh Mangipudi
  21. 29 Tanjot Uppal
  22. 28 Christopher Powers
  23. 27 Sujatha Sivakumar
  24. 27 Ashish Agarwal
  25. 25 Olav Sandstaa
  26. 25 Mayank Prasad
  27. 24 Anitha Gopi
  28. 24 Ahmad Abdullateef
  29. 23 Hery Ramilison
  30. 22 Vamsikrishna Bhagi
  31. 22 Praveenkumar Hulakund
  32. 22 Pedro Gomes
  33. 20 Sergey Glukhov
  34. 20 Libing Song
  35. 19 Vinay Fisrekar
  36. 19 Harin Vadodaria
  37. 18 Raghav Kapoor
  38. 18 Luis Soares
  39. 18 Gopal Shankar
  40. 18 Astha Pareek
  41. 17 viswanatham gudipati
  42. 17 Thayumanavar
  43. 17 Ramil Kalimullin
  44. 16 Oystein Grovlen
  45. 15 Dmitry Shulga
  46. 15 Amit Bhattacharya
  47. 15 Akhil Mohan
  48. 14 Ravinder Thakur
  49. 14 Kent Boortz
  50. 13 Bernd Ocklin
  51. 12 Bill Qu
  52. 11 Shaohua Wang
  53. 10 Sven Sandberg

There’s also a good number with fewer than 10 (31 names actually), which is encouraging as it means that this means it’s likely people who are not involved every day in development of new code (maybe QA, build etc) which probably means that (at least internally) contributing code isn’t really a big problem (and as I’ve shown previously, the barriers to external contributions between Oracle MySQL and MariaDB appear to result in roughly the same amount of code from people outside those companies).

There are 125 names here in total, with 19 having over 100 commits, 22 with 50-100 commits, another 53 with 10-50 commits and 31 with <10. So it’s possible to say that there are at least 125 people at Oracle working on MySQL – and I know there are awesome people who are missing from this list as their work doesn’t result in committing code directly to the tree.

Who is working on MariaDB 10.0?

There was some suggestion after my previous post (Who works on MariaDB and MySQL?) that I look at MariaDB 10.0 – so I have. My working was very simple, in a current MariaDB 10.0 BZR tree (somewhat beyond 10.0.3), I ran the following command:

bzr log -n0 -rtag:mariadb-10.0.0..|egrep '(author|committer): '| \
  sed -e 's/^\s*//; s/committer: //; s/author: //'| \
  sort -u|grep -iv oracle

 

MariaDB foundation/MontyProgram/SkySQL:

  1. Alexander Barkov
  2. Alexey Botchkov
  3. Daniel Bartholomew
  4. Elena Stepanova
  5. Igor Babaev
  6. Jani Tolonen
  7. knielsen
  8. Michael Widenius
  9. sanja
  10. Sergei Golubchik
  11. Sergey Petrunya
  12. Sergey Vojtovich
  13. timour
  14. Vladislav Vaintroub

Elsewhere:

  1. Kentoku SHIBA (4 commits)
  2. Lixun Peng (1 commit)
  3. Olivier Bertrand (212 commits)

From Oracle (i.e. revisions merged from Oracle MySQL):

  • 81 names (which I won’t list here as 81 is a lot)

The results are no different if you go back to the first revision that is different between MariaDB 5.5 and 10.0 (found using bzr missing). Even when grepping through the bzr log for things such as “patch by”, “contribution” or “originally” I can only find 1 or two more names as original authors for patches (about the same as I can for patches going into the Oracle tree).

Please point me to revisions (revid is best way) that come from outside contributors as then I really can update this to show that there’s a larger developer community.

The current development version of Drizzle (7.2) has just as many contributors as the MariaDB development version (10.0) – although Drizzle does have fewer commits.

nanomysql – tiny MySQL client lib

I recently got pointed towards https://github.com/shodanium/nanomysql/ which is a tiny (less than 400 lines of C++) MySQL client library which is GPL licensed.

If you need to link into non-GPL compatible code, there is the (slightly larger and full featured) libdrizzle library. But if you want something *tiny* and are okay with GPL, then nanomysql may be something to look at.

Who works on MariaDB and MySQL?

Looking at the committers/authors of patches in the bzr tree for MariaDB 5.5.31.

Non Oracle Contributors:

  1. Alexander Barkov
  2. Alexey Botchkov
  3. Elena Stepanova
  4. Igor Babaev
  5. knielsen
  6. Michael Widenius
  7. sanja
  8. Sergei Golubchik
  9. Sergey Petrunya
  10. timour
  11. Vladislav Vaintroub

Oracle (as they pull Oracle changes):

  1. Aditya A
  2. Akhila Maddukuri
  3. Alexander Nozdrin
  4. Anirudh Mangipudi
  5. Annamalai Gurusami
  6. Astha Pareek
  7. Balasubramanian Kandasamy
  8. Chaithra Gopalareddy
  9. Daniel Fischer
  10. Gleb Shchepa
  11. Harin Vadodaria
  12. Hery Ramilison
  13. Igor Solodovnikov
  14. Inaam Rana
  15. Jon Olav Hauglid
  16. kevin.lewis
  17. Krunal Bauskar
  18. Marc Alff
  19. Marko Mäkelä
  20. Mattias Jonsson
  21. Murthy Narkedimilli
  22. Neeraj Bisht
  23. Nisha Gopalakrishnan
  24. Nuno Carvalho
  25. Olav Sandstaa
  26. Pedro Gomes
  27. prabakaran thirumalai
  28. Praveenkumar Hulakund
  29. Ravinder Thakur
  30. Satya Bodapati
  31. sayantan.dutta
  32. Shivji Kumar Jha
  33. Sujatha Sivakumar
  34. Sunanda Menon
  35. Sunny Bains
  36. Thayumanavar
  37. Tor Didriksen
  38. Venkata Sidagam
  39. Venkatesh Duggirala
  40. Yasufumi Kinoshita

Observations:

  1. All the non-Oracle contributors work for SkySQL (and worked for Monty Program before that)
  2. Even when you go back to MariaDB 5.5.23 I can only find evidence for a maximum of 2-3 external contributions of code to MariaDB since then.
  3. In the same time frame (5.5.23-5.5.32) I see 1 or 2 going into Oracle trees, so it’s roughly the same.
  4. If you look at the contributors from Oracle over 5.5.23 to 5.5.32 there are closer to twice as many as the 40 listed above.

Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong here… perhaps MariaDB guys are just really bad at clearly marking commits that come from elsewhere? I’ve looked for “patch.*by”, “original” and “ontributed” and only turned up the above.

Are MariaDB tests adding anything extra over Oracle MySQL tests?

I grabbed all the tests introduced in MariaDB 5.5.32 (i.e. “bzr diff -rtag:mariadb-5.5.31..mariadb-5.5.32 mysql-test/” and some foo) and threw them in their own test file. I only kept tests for crashing bugs and ignored those that required plugins (there were two or three, but nothing major). So now I have a test file that should crash MariaDB 5.5.31 and probably before. But, the question is: does this crash Percona Server or MySQL?

While it is excellent to see the MariaDB guys including tests for their crashing bugs, are these MariaDB specific or do they affect other MySQL flavours?

I built a release build of top of trunk Percona Server and ran the test against it. I got no crashes. In a debug build, I got two. One was to do with REPAIR on an ARCHIVE table and the other was “SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(STR_TO_DATE(‘2020′,’%Y’));”. I found the same thing for a debug build of top of tree MySQL.

All the other tests for crashing bugs, of which there were 14 – were MariaDB specific. So, out of 16 total, only 2 applied to Percona Server and MySQL.

Why do some foods taste absolutely AWESOME on playa? (a theory)

(I originally posted this to our camp mailing list, but I figured that the wider population of the internet may also be interested)

A couple of things prompted me thinking about this, and I shared my thoughts with Leah tonight and she’s been thinking the same kind of things.

We’ve observed that some food on playa is absolutely THE BEST THING EVER to enter our mouth holes while some things are a bit more meh than they should be. Basically,  we’re theorising that human taste buds change at Burning Man when compared to the default world.

A while ago we saw Heston Blumenthal trying to fix airline food, where he conducted an experiment where at sea level and then in a compartment that was pressurized to the altitude of a plane he had different concentrations of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami to taste.

So, let’s look at the differences in altitude and humidity between home,
playa and an airplane:

Altitude

Home: within a few hundred ft of sealevel.
Black Rock Desert: 3,907ft (from wikipedia)
Airplane cabin: 6,000ft (Boeing 787) to 6,900ft (Boeing 767) (or much closer to sea level if you’ve got a private jet)

Humidity

Home: 40-80% (inside/outside my house right now)
Airplane: 12-15%
Burning Man: 24% (average for August), low teens during the day (10-15% midday to midnight)

The result of the altitude and humidity for airplanes was:

  • threshold for tasting sweet is increased
    (i.e. need more sweetness to taste it)
  • threshold for tasting sour decreased
    (i.e. more sensitive to sour)
  • threshold for tasting bitter decreased
    (i.e. more sensitive to bitter)
  • threshold for tasting salt is increased
    (i.e. you need more salt)
  • umami was unchanged

This would explain why I always add salt to airplane food, why at one
point corn chips with vegemite was the best thing ever on playa and why
there’s this odd bacon obsession amongst so many.

This also explains why there may be a preference for less hoppy beers on
playa (or, if you’re me, a desire to try some insanely hopped ones to
see if I can notice an intensity increase).

Also, it’s one of the few places I can stomach US sodas (HFCS being
instant diabetes, but ginger ale on playa/in a plane is kinda nice).

One suggestion (and Heston tried this on flights) is nasal
douching… and I’m actually pretty keen to clean out the nose before
eating on playa because as we all know, playa up your nose is a fact of
life.

I’d be pretty interested to conduct some experiments both in normal
conditions and on playa with various concentrations of sweet, sour,
bitter, salty and umami and note down at what concentrations the flavor
is noticed.

I’m thinking:

  • sweet – sugar
  • sour – lemon juice? (store bought so it should be consistent)
  • bitter – not sure here, all i can think of is hops or Bitters
  • salty – salt :)
  • umami – liquid smoke?

Although it may require some experimentation to find what the minimum
concentrations are. Once we’ve worked these out, should be able to do
tasting and take notes when not on playa and then recreate it all on
playa and compare results.

Thoughts?

HOWTO: Build a Monorail

At linux.conf.au 2012 I gave a lightning talk on our Burning man 2010 art installation the Nowhere2Nowhere monorail. I finally extracted the video of just my lightning talk and threw it up on youtube for easy viewing: