Safe as Milk

MySQL acquisition by Sun

First, congratulations to Sun and MySQL on this surprising marriage! I hope that you live happily ever after.

One comment – I’ve been reading some of the press and interviews around the takeover news – you know the kind of thing, “What does this mean for MySQL?” There’s a lot of “we’re delighted, this will allow MySQL to continue to grow, synergy, reinforce our enterprise offering, etc, etc”.

One thing I’m missing is the joyous bouncing around of the founders & shareholders saying “Yippee! We’re rich! We’re rich! Filthy stinking rich!” Or maybe it would be just me…

But then, they’re not really, compared to the YouTube guys, or the Facebook guy… they’ve only spent 15 years building up a business for a $1bn valuation, compared to working 18 months on a web-app for a $6bn valuation…

Facebook spam

Twice this morning…

OMG this is amazing…. ever wanted to know who looks at your profile the most? to find out all you have to do is re post this to everyone on your friends list then press alt+f4 together then it should re-direct you to a status screen where it shows

For those who don’t know what Alt-F4 does, don’t do it. I think this has clinched it – the Funwall has to go, and it’s another nail in Facebook’s coffin.

Clinton ’08 = Muskie ’72?

History is repeating itself: Democratic candidates leading early polls have had a history of blowing up in the primaries – Dean in ’04, Gary Hart in ’88, Ted Kennedy, then Ed Muskie in ’72 (coincidentally, the Dolphins were undefeated that season, like the Patriots this year).

Hillary is heading towards being one more in a long line of early front runners, burning bright and then fading away at the polling booth.

Update: Sen. Clinton just won New Hampshire 39-37 (vs Sen. Obama), upsetting all the pollsters. I haven’t looked at the poll breakdown yet, but I heard that Hillary won conclusively with women (the tears worked?) and I wonder if many independents, considering the dem race was done & dusted, chose to vote in the republican primary instead? In any case, it’s a little early for me to eat my words… Muskie also won New Hampshire in ’72.

Buying running shoes

J5 had a good experience buying runners which has prompted me to pimp my own favourite running store with the story of how I bought my last pair.

I arrived in Spode after having a relatively bad experience buying runners that weren’t suitable for my feet & gait. They sponsor lots of the local races around Lyon, so I knew that they were well suited to suggest shoes for running.

On arrival, I was taken in, was asked to show my old shoes, which were examined closely, and then a couple of pairs were produced.

What happened next was the big surprise for me. The shop assistant asked me if I’d brought socks. Bemused, I said that I hadn’t, and he offered me a pair. I thanked him and said that I had running socks at home.

“You don’t want to try them out?” he asked. And suddenly I understood. Putting them on in the shop and walking around just wasn’t going to give me an idea of what it was like to run in them. So I put on a loaner pair of socks, and headed off out of the store with the new runners on my feet for a 5 minute run. Repeat with the second pair. Both excellent choices, I went with the Vomero 2 from Nike, which had excellent ankle support and really great spring in its step.

So like John, great service, expertise and products, with a surprising touch, means that I’ll be getting sports shoes there until I can’t run any more – and I’ve been telling everyone about the store that lets you test drive your runners ever since.

links for 2007-12-19

• Therac-25 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  When software goes wrong: A decent case study in why it’s unsafe to trust software for machines which can be fatal
  (tags: software design therac-25 quality)

What is Spock?

The “X has requested your trust” mails started a couple of weeks ago, and so far I’ve collected about a dozen.

I’m not sure what Spock is, or how they’ve been roping people into signing up, but this is the latest in a series of sites where friends are inviting me (presumably in full knowledge) to join Yet Another Social Network where I get to invite all *my* friends to (connect with|friend|link up with|trust) me. Again.

So – wat is Spock? Anyone care to do the sales pitch? What does it bring over LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Plaxo, last.fm, and all the other sites where I’ve been asked to link all my friends and invite them to join to prove that they “trust” me?

GNOME at SCALE 6x?

Last year, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor manned a GNOME stand during SCALE, and it was grand. We were just opposite KDE, and showed off the N800 doing a video call to Celeste Paul from KDE (almost converted her, I swear).

This year, SCALE is on from the 8th to the 10th of February, and Eitan’s not available to take the lead again, so I’m looking for a volunteer in the LA area who’s willing to be the point man for the stand – which means requesting and taking care of the GNOME event box, setting up the stand & taking it down, and making sure that there’s someone there all the time. Also helping recruit others 🙂 You’ll need at least 2 people to man a stand, and the more the merrier.

Traditionally, we have not had many activists in California – so if you are a GNOME enthusiast in California, now would be a nice time to introduce yourself 🙂 Send me a mail, or mail marketing-list@gnome.org, and we’ll sort you out. If you’re not available yourself, but know someone living in the region who might be able to help, please send me a mail introducing me.

Poll: best speaker ever

I’m making up an aspirational list of people I would like to invite to keynote at GUADEC, and I’m interested in hearing about past experiences.

Who is the best speaker you have ever seen at a technical conference (not necessarily a technical presentation, mind), and what was the subject?

Answers in comments please, the winner gets a big sloppy kiss next GUADEC from someone of my choosing. Maybe Aq.

Shell puzzle 2

Following on from this shell script puzzle here’s another.

Why does the following script give this error?

sh: Illegal option –

(Credit to Kevin Lyda of ILUG for the puzzle and its truly twisted answer).

#! /bin/sh -e -x

true

Note that #! /bin/sh -e, #! /bin/sh -x and #! /bin/sh -ex run without error.

Election candidates

I agree completely with Luis: there is a lot of truth to what Murray says (like Luis, I have had my share of conflict with Jeff, perhaps more than my share), but the tone of the blog post was far beyond what was required to make the point. The aggression of the post surprised me, even though I have known for some time about the problems that Murray has had with Jeff.

And that, as Forrest Gump says, is all I have to say about that.

However, as many have pointed out, it’s election season here at GNOME, and it is indeed a time to compare your candidates on objective grounds. I have not gathered statistics, but here are some ideas.

For candidates who have never been on the board, we have their personal records – groups they have been involved in, mailing lists they post on, modules they’ve maintained, etc. How do they deal with people? Will they be able to bring useful skills to the board? How about delegation? For module maintainers, do they do everything, or encourage new collaborators?

For outgoing board members, we have valuable information in the board minutes – attendance at board meetings is the easiest to measure, but also in the past 3 years we have lists of action items which people have taken on – how many have gone on to completion? How quickly? If there are incomplete or unfinished actions, how did the assigned person deal with the blockages they encountered?

This is a time when candidates should defend their track record, justify their claim to a spot on the board, and be held accountable for their past records. An election campaign in other words. What you say at the moment of an election is only part of your platform. The majority of your platform is who you are, what you can do, and how you’ve done at it in the past.