that says something along the lines of “contrary to popular beleif, I don’t speak Swedish”. I find that some people will switch to Swedish when speaking to me…Â Although I do pick up a bit…. not quite a local though :)
i need a t-shirt….
1
Category Archives: Stockholm Syndrome
Off to Stockholm (well, on Monday)
Having just moved apartments, it’s obviously time to get on a plane again.
On Monday I fly off to Stockholm again to attend the MySQL Cluster team meeting. Somehow we’re going to squeeze everybody into the Stockholm office (I’ll post humorous cramped photos, I promise).
Of course the thing to do now is to prepare for the meeting… packing can be done on sunday night or something.
Of course, if you’re in the area, come for food/beer!
Bus Drivers
(as of the other day) Stockholm is now the only city where I’ve boarded a bus to see what I can only describe as a stunningly gorgeous bus driver.
The good news is she also passed the test for bus drivers – being able to drive. Seems to be a quality often found here. Back home, when regularly taking a bus (uni) it was inevitably a bit hit and miss.
mgmapi timeouts and resurrecting the online add node
The other day I managed to send off what’s nearly the final patches for adding proper timeout support to the MySQL Cluster management API. Jonas has had a bit of a look, found one thing I’ve missed, but it’ll probably get in somewhere soon (probably the carrier grade edition first, then others… 5.1 makes sense IMHO if only for the amount of management server testing that my patches add).
Unfortunately in what we laughingly call the past the management server – for whatever hysterical raisins – never really received much direct testing. Sure, if the data nodes couldn’t get configuration, autotest couldn’t control the daemons or something then things were obviously broken. But, say, a subtle (or not so much) change in API or behaviour would certainly not be picked up.
Although the real “feature of the year” (not my words) is fault injection for the management server that we can use in testing. The MySQL Cluster kernel (data nodes) already have extensive fault injection that is regularly tested by ATRT (storage/ndb/test in the source tree).
I’ve also started to resurrect my online add node patch that I’ve had sitting around in various states for over a year (actually… about 14 months… i just haven’t touched it in 12) and port it to the latest 5.1 tree (as not sure where it’ll end up, start at the lowest common denominator – possible that it’ll end up in Carrier Grade first too). Now comes the problem of testing the sucker. Previously i’ve had a shockingly bad shell script and hard coded files to make this go.
Obviously, hard coded stuff is not the way to go. The real way is to be able to do everything neatly and programmatically so we can run it as part of the regular autotest.
hej hej
Great things:
- I get to see snow. I haven’t seen snow anywhere else in the world yet, just in Stockholm (apart from flying over places… but that doesn’t really count)
- The language is cool, a lot of people speak English (to varying degrees) and it’s not that hard to pick up enough to get by (especially since TV programs as subtitled… so watching Buffy on Swedish TV will educate you in enough Swedish to save the world from unspeakable demons)
- We have MySQLers here (including a good number of Cluster developers)
- They have the Internet here. Not like Australia, stuck on the arse end of the internet – oh no, 5Mbit is considered slow here.
- Stockholm really is a beutiful city.
- public transport is frequent and close by (at least for the Stockholm area… which is where I am). Further into the center it’s even better, but here it’s good (where here is about 15-20mins via bus and subway to Liljeholmen, where the office is)
- R&D is (again, unlike Australia) valued highly here, with a good amonut of high tech industry and a seeming respect for academia.
- There’s a chemist in Gamla Stan that’s been there for about 400 years. I haven’t bought anything from there, but I feel I should – to go with that beer from that pub that first got it’s license nearly 400 years ago that I had while in London.
And not so great…
- The only way to buy beer stronger than 3.5% is to go to the government run System Bolaget – which is closed at about any time you’d consider buying alcohol. Aparrently the locals get around this by going there and just buying heaps at once – so completely defeating the attempt to get people to buy less. Oh, and if you like any decent liquor – it’s probably cheaper to drive/fly to another country and bring it back. Aparrently that’s what people do… with vans. Lucky for me I picked up some Laphroigh on the way through London
- Some things are expensive… and there are relatively high tax rates… although you seem to actually get something for that, so it’s not all bad (unlike in .au… where you seem to get nothing).
- It’s a long way from Melbourne, especially in economy seats… urggh. Not exactly a company policy I agree with for such long trips.
for now, hej då