Paul’s Journal

• Upgraded our trunk with libevent 1.3b.
• Sent a patch in for libevent, to set the event_base context for the evhttp server and client APIs.
• Figuring out how to structure a shared context for both an HTTP server and HTTP client for our next generation network protocols.
• I like HTTP. I wish I could use it for more stuff.
• 1 for 2 in foosball.
• ApacheCon EU is next week, and I’m not gonna be there. I should be at ApacheCon US in Atlanta this Fall however.
• Gotta drive up to Oakland tomorrow morning. Bleh.

Metrics:

• 2 work meetings.
• 3 work emails sent.
• 8 work svn commits.
• 4 non-work emails sent.
• 0 non-work svn commits.

• Feisty Fawn installed. Kernel.org mirror was giving me 38 mb/s over http.
• Ripping Aeon Flux (not the sucky movie).
• Watching Life of Brian.
• Ate the Salmon we caught yesterday at the Ask.com quarterly All Hands / BBQ in Campbell. Even with 30 people, we still had Salmon left over. It was a big fish.
• Feeling pretty tired. Been a long week.

Metrics:

• 1 work meetings.
• 8 work emails sent.
• 0 work svn commits.
• 2 non-work emails sent.
• 0 non-work svn commits.

• early morning (3:30am)
• sea sick. Never really been sea sick before.
• Will caught a 32lb Salmon:
  
  
  
  • Ben has way more details.
  • Largest Salmon caught in California so far this season.
  • I’m way too tired to describe it more, but it was fun, and I’m definitely going to do it again.
• We saw whales too:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Though, the pictures don’t do them justice.
• Didn’t get to bed until 3:00am.
  • MySQL-Cluster decided to shirt itself at 10:45pm.
  • NDB Cluster debugging sucks
  • ndb_restore at least works correctly.
    • Although, we had to tweak NoOfFragmentLogFiles to get restore working.
  • I wish we had went with a home built proprietary system, built on top of BerkeleyDB and our existing clustering tech, rather than trying to use MySQL-Cluster. Hindsight is 20/20 of course.
  • Will try to get all of our trace and debug info into a MySQL Bug report or at least a post on the mysql-clsuter list next week.

Metrics:

• 0 work meetings.
  • 1 offsite. (fishing)
• 5 work emails.
• 0 work svn commits.
• 3 non-work emails sent.
• 0 non-work svn commits

• MySQL HTTP Engine: Crazy Crazy Crazy.
  • But, this is an indication to me, that you really shouldn’t be writing SQL. SQL has its places, but I’m starting to believe that place is not the web application.
• Lunch: Left at Albuquerque. Margarita=Yum. Not as good as El Buro last night, but still good.
  • “Marigage isn’t forever, its just until its done.”
• Going to use libevent for an HTTP Client and Server. Its definitely missing features, but shouldn’t be too hard to get it where we want it.
• Dinner: Outback. Steak. Yum.
  • Discussed Eve Online. And Housing.
  • My new plan is to get 5 million dollars, and a Pony.
    • 5 Million for the House, to have a place to put the $1000 Pony.
• Need to get up at oh-shirt-early in the morning tomorrow, to go Salmon Fishing. Woooo.

Metrics:

• 0 work meetings.
• 6 work emails sent.
• 0 work svn commits.
• 0 non-work emails sent.
• 0 non-work svn commits.

• Condos in downtown Spokane. Cheap compared to San Jose, not really cheap though.
• I want to go to outer space.
• Installed BDB 4.5 utilities on a couple hundred machines. yay psh+pfor.
  • I still want to try PCP sometime though.
• 2 wins out of 5 games in foosball. (bad day).
• comcast is not comcastic.
• 100mbit ethernet is too slow inside a data center. GigE is cheap. Get it.
• the internet is not fast enough. transfering data from boston to oakland is too slow.
• found some old code that isn’t endian safe. ack. Geoff is still on a PPC mac, and ran into some problems….
• wrote a tool to count users and their subscriptions, and then graph the distribution of subs counts.
• Tested BDB 4.5 with large existing databases. Seems to work great so far. Yay.

Metrics:

• 0 work meetings.
• 7 work emails sent.
• 4 work svn commits.
• 0 non-work emails sent.
• 0 non-work svn commits.

Trying something new here. I want something between Twitter and a month long complete absence.

• Geoff started his first day at $work.
• Ben and Rob are in town this week for $work stuff.
• Lots of talk about running EMCAScript from inside a flash 9 VM, to generate HTML for things like the Feed Tree.
  • Really, we just need to figure out what the cost of copying data is
• Discussed why not having to write an wireshark plugin, and re-using HTTP as a transport protocol is good thing.
• Okay, so for those who don’t know, back at Cyan, Rob and I wrote an Ethereal (since-renamed to wireshark) plugin, which code decoded the Uru Online network packets. But the unique thing is that it actually ran the real _network layer_ and de-serialization routines, used by the actual engine, inside ethereal, meaning you could easily introspect objects, as they were packed over the wire. It is still one of the coolest things I have worked on, at least from being in an oh-shit-something-is-broken situation. To be able to know exactly what is going on with complex network applications is priceless.
• Rob merged Berkeley DB 4.5 to trunk. Woot.
• Researched various embedded HTTP Server Libraries:
  • shttpd - Looks like the best. Actively maintained, good license.

  Overall, I was quite disappointed by the overall quality and quantity of embeddable servers. If you are writing a client, there is curl or serf; But if you want a self contained server, and don’t want to make an apache module for various reasons, there just aren’t many good options.

• Re-inventing SOAP and object serialzation system without the sucky parts with a staticly typed language like C++ sucks. I wish I had Python.
• Cookies from the Pacific Cookie Company are good. And they ship them, extremely quickly.
• I went to Fry’s twice today. Once I came back with a 320GB Firewire Drive, the second time with Firewire 400 cables. It turns out, it only came with a 9-pin Firewire 800 cable, which doesn’t work so well in an original MacBookPro. Guess this means I need a new computer.
• Dinner at the Brewery:
  • DHH and Mark are both crazy. But, Mark is way funnier.
    • PS: I wish my scaling problems were about storing only 255 bytes per post.
  • More on running EMCAScript inside Flash VMs to do ‘heavy’ client side work.
• Started ripping Dead Like Me, Season 1 DVDs. Handbarke FTW. (DVD Ripping software for the Mac)

Metrics:

• 1 work meeting
• 3 work emails.
• 3 work svn commits
• 1 non-work email.
• 0 non-work svn commits

edit, more:

• I banned 200+ Casino Spammers from Bloglines this morning. I hate spammers.
• Is typo’ing ’shirt’ for ’shit’, a feature or a bug?