The Treachery of Words

5:28PM - Fast Forward

27 weeks with no posts, and no excuses for that, so I'll just recap:  I'm still at rPath, living in a rented house on the northeast side of downtown Raleigh (Mordecai for you locals) with friend and coworker stefw .  Life has changed a bit since my move across the country.  I haven't been traveling as much in this job, but I'm starting to take more personal trips.  So far, my travels have included:

- WV in December to see family for Christmas
- Baltimore in March to see Allan, Jill, & LIlly
- Charleston, SC three weeks ago with Sara to run the 2008 Cooper River Bridge Run  (I finished,  really I did !! )
- Southport, NC to scope out summer vacation spots with my parents
- Punta Cana, Dominican Republic last week for the Ingres Engineering Summit

This weekend Sara and I are going to Indianapolis for the 500 Festival Mini Marathon (apparently "mini" means "half" in Indy).  I'm not setting my sights too high, just hoping to finish under 2:30:00.  We ran 9 miles in about 1:45:00 a couple of weeks ago without any trouble, so I think this goal is pretty reasonable.  We'll see in a few days.

I still plan to fly back out to San Francisco soon, but my definition of "soon" keeps changing.

Other than work and running, I've been playing a lot of Euchre , Cribbage , and other card games.  I don't play as much Scrabble as I used to, but I might get back into that one of these days.

At the beginning of the year, I was informed that I'd been selected as Yelp Elite for 2008, and they sent me a cool hoodie and other random stuff.  Unfortunately, I've not been a good representative lately, as I've written practically no reviews this year.  I have a backlog of restaurants to write about, so maybe on a weekend sometime soon I'll try to do a dozen reviews to catch up.

Now you're all caught up on my life.  I think my next entry is going to be related to rPath and the cool things happening here.  Stay tuned...

9:52AM - Fun with pam_console

I finally got most my computer cables and parts that I shipped from San Francisco in the mail yesterday, so I was able to boot up my desktop for the first time in two weeks.   I donated my monitor to a community computer lab so I wouldn't have to move it, and I have not bought a replacement yet, so I can only log into my desktop with ssh and vnc.  This makes things interesting, because neither login general acts as a "console" login (i.e., they don't give the user access to devices like the sound card).  I could have changed that in the pam configuration, but I figured there was a more interesting solution.  So, I checked out the manpage for pam_console_apply, and sure enough:

  "If /var/run/console.lock exists, pam_console_apply will  grant  permis-
   sions  to  the  user  listed therein.  If the lock file does not exist,
   permissions are reset according to defaults set in console.perms files,
   normally  configured  to  set  permissions on devices so that root owns
   them."

Actually, on my system, it was /var/run/console/console.lock, so the manpage might be outdated, but I basically just did this (as root):

  # echo -n arg > /var/run/console/console.lock
  # pam_console_apply

and presto, my user had access to all the devices I needed.  Pam is cool...

11:06AM - Bicoastalness

As usual, I have a lot to write here and not much time to write it.  Since my last entry six weeks ago, I (in chronological order):

• flew to Raleigh, NC to interview for a job at rPath
• spent two days on Jury Duty in San Francisco (I wasn't selected for the case, but had to sit through the selection process)
• accepted the job at rPath and gave my two weeks notice at Ingres
• drove the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles
• attended a cousin's wedding in LA
• sold or gave away all of my furniture an many other belongings
• flew to Pittsburgh to attend my class reunion in West Virginia
• shipped most of my belongings across the country
• drove 3000 miles between Thursday at noon PDT and Sunday at  4:30 EDT to get to my new apartment ( with a short stop in Dayton in Saturday night to visit friends)
  
• started work at rPath

I'll elaborate on some of this insanity later, but now those of you who didn't know where I had disappeared to are informed.  :-)

10:40PM - so, sometimes I cook ...

The saga of my apartment goes on. I decided to cook dinner tonight, which I clearly don't do very often if you define "cooking" as something that requires heating food by means other than a microwave.    I was going to make some pasta, so I filled a pot with water, put it on the stove, attempted to light the burner ... and nothing.  Somebody decided that it really wasn't important to hook my gas line back up to the stove.  I could probably do it myself in 10 minutes, but dealing with something potentially explosive on an empty stomach isn't something I'm inclined to do, so dinner was going to have to happen another way. 

I found some Lucca frozen ravioli in my freezer, which actually included microwave instructions.  I ignored the contents of the instructions; the fact that the packaging said they were microwavable was enough information.  Now, I actually don't buy fancy jars of pre-made tomato sauce, because it's more expensive than it should be and tends to have extra sugar and other random ingredients in it.  Yes, I know the ravioli has some strange ingredients, too, but I can't make ravioli yet.  So, this is my 7-minute dinner:

1. Pour frozen ravioli into a CorningWare  dish
2. Add one 14.5-oz can of petite-diced tomatoes (not drained)
3. Add healthy portions of oregano and garlic (I don't measure this stuff)
4. Microwave for 6 minutes, covered, stirring every two minutes
5. Add a healthy portion of Parmesan cheese.
6. Eat.

It's a pretty nutritious meal, and best of all, there is only a single dish to wash at the end.  :-)

10:12PM - Mortal Games

I just finished reading Mortal Games (by Pierre Salinger and Leonard Gross).  It's a CIA / KGB novel from the early 80s, and I've never really read any Cold War fiction like this before.  It wasn't an amazing book, but it was good, and it really gave me some interesting perspective on that time in US and world history.  I wanted to capture a few of my favorite quotes from the book here:

"What does a man who has everything want?  Only one thing.  He wants to be well remembered, to create a memorial to himself .... How does a deal-maker get remembered?  By making deals that change the world.  What kind of deals are those?  The kinds where you turn adversaries into allies."

"We all have the same motives, don't we?  We all want to defend our country from its enemies.  The real distinction is in the perception of the enemy."

"There's nothing sacred about the law ... when it's nothing more than the projection of lawmakers who don't understand the problem."

and last but not least:

"People never change.  And these people are evil.  That's something you liberals will never understand."
(spoken by the "bad guy", of course).

8:50PM - Adventures in Moving

August in San Francisco has been fun.  I just realized that it's the first month since last September (!) that I have not spent a day outside of California -- also the first month in that same span that I've not flown anywhere.  And what a great month for that to happen (August and September have some of the best weather of the year, for those of you reading from outside SF).  But the fact that I've been here all month doesn't mean the month was uneventful.  So, here's one story:

Last weekend, I helped hoyhoy and Rachel move, which didn't go exactly as planned (do moves ever go as planned, though?)  First, it took two hours to get a U-Haul.  Sure, it was Saturday morning, but having to wait two hours for a U-Haul behind some people with no reservations sort of defeats the purpose of making a reservation at all.  I had only told Tony that I'd help him get the truck and move his couch, but he supposedly had another friend, Bob, coming to help, so we took one truckload to the new place before we attempted the couch.  After the first load, Bob hadn't shown up yet, and we decided two people could probably move it.  Now, keep in mind that the professionals who moved the couch into the apartment gave up and had the front window taken out to get the couch in there.  So, given that, we figured it was going to take some engineering skill.  Somehow, it just worked, though, with a little prep work:

1. Remove the locking gate on the porch of the apartment
2. Remove the front door
3. Take the cushions off the couch
4. Unscrew the feet from the couch
5. Remove the light fixture and bulb from the porch
6. Stand the couch up on one side.
7. Tip the couch through the doorway
8. Move the lower end of couch out the door, standing it on the same end again on the porch.
9. Rest
10. Move it down the steps.
11. Put the cushions back on and sit on the couch at the curb waiting for Rachel to bring back lunch.

And silly me, I though this was going to be the hard part.  As it turns out, the hard part was attempting to move the couch into the new place with three people.  By the time we got to that point, though, I was tired and went home.

Two days later, I asked Tony how things turned out with the couch, and he informed that it was still on the porch at the new place.   Knowing the effort we'd expended getting it that far, I wasn't going to stand for that.  So I drove over to his place and surveyed the situation.  He said they'd taken the front door off and made several attempts, so we looked at the possibility of taking out the kitchen window, which looks onto the porch and was definitely big enough for the couch.  After 30 minutes of being foiled by a stripped screw in the frame, we decided the window was staying put.  So, I insisted on taking the front door off and giving that approach another try.  

It was somewhat obvious to me that the right start was the reverse of the moving-out process, so this time we led with the bottom end of the couch from it's standing-on-one-side position.  It just barely squeezed through the doorway, and the entry wasn't quite big enough to get the top end through.  We laid the couch down, and for a moment we didn't think there was any room to pivot it into the living room.  Finally, it occurred to us that we could tip it a little, because, thinking of the side view of the couch as a right triangle, the altitude from the right angle to the diagonal is obviously shorter than both legs of the triangle (the height and depth of the couch). Duh.  Suddenly the couch pivoted nicely through the doorway and into the living room.

In retrospect, I don't think the geometry I just rambled through above even consciously entered our minds.  We were simply out of other options.  For future reference, though, that's a pretty useful bit of Euclidean (and maybe Pythagorean) logic for anyone moving a couch.

So what are the morals of the story?

1. U-Haul is evil.  Well, okay, maybe they aren't all evil, but the one on Bayshore is on Saturday morning.  I've since heard other people say they intentionally tell people to rent U-Haul trucks from Daly City or another suburb.
   
2. Architects are evil.  Well, okay, maybe not evil, but at least a bit sneaky about how they plan entries and stairways.  I'll bet there are guidelines somewhere for exactly what angles and clearances are needed to move standard couches, over-sized couches, etc., and some guys out there are designing and building right at the minimum specs just to mess with people.
   
3. Even given moral #2, the couch will almost always fit through the door, even if you think it won't.  Just tilt it.
4. Don't ever ask me and Tony to move your stuff, because you will have to repaint your door frames and touch up some furniture afterward.

:-)

2:38AM - Autosave

So, I just spent an hour writing a gigantic post about everything I've been doing over the past two months, including a couple of pictures an about 20 links.  And then I was tagging my post but didn't know whether to use commas (which I'd consider normal) or spaces (like Flickr), so I hit the question mark beside the "Tags" field, and POOF! There goes my post. Apparently since I had a previous autosaved draft that I never turned into a post, it went back to that one.  Ugh.  So, since I'm not about to rewrite the whole thing, here are the shorthand notes:

-- Went to Vegas.  Good times.
-- Went camping in Big Basin.   More good times.
-- Lost a contact.  Bad times.
-- Lasik is expensive (more bad times), so getting disposable contacts.
-- Yelp Happy Hours.  Good times.
-- Portland / Ubuntu Live / OSCON.  Really good times.
-- LinuxWorld -- Weird times.
-- Open Solutions Alliance ... hmmm, need input here.

If you're interested, I just uploaded a bunch of pics to Flickr:
My Flickr Stream

Specifically, the destruction of my apartment (which is almost completely repaired now, but not quite).

And most importantly, me beating Tom at Bungee Run

That's all for now...

6:58PM - apartment living ... deja vu

I got home this evening and there was a letter waiting for me from my apartment manager.   Apparently they have to do some plumbing work in the kitchen and the bathroom by order of the city of san francisco.  this may or may not be related to some inspections that happened last month while I was out of town.  On the surface, this sounds like a good thing -- the city finds that my apartment isn't up to code, and the landlord is on the hook to fix it; that's the way apartment living is supposed to work.  But let me remind everyone about my first experience with "replacing a couple of cracked shower tiles" in my subleased apartment last year... I came home to THIS:



So, needless to say I'm just a wee bit panicked about what this upcoming plumbing work might turn out to be.  And this time they're even tell me the work will take 2+ weeks, which means it might really be a month.  I don't ask for much in life, but proper indoor plumbing is one of those things that should just be automatic with a 4-figure monthly rent.  Sigh.

6:27PM - a weekend in the sun

On Saturday, I went with hoyhoy, his wife, and their friend Elizabeth to hike at Black Diamond Mine  in Antioch.  The landscape was a bit barren, but it was still cool to get out to an unpopulated area like this for a while.

 

We hiked around for a few miles, grabbed a late lunch, and then we went on to Redwood Regional Park, where hoyhoy tried to startle a cow.



It was a really peaceful day; I definitely need to get out and do this sort of thing more often.  We're in a great area to get out and hike, but it's also really easy to just find things to do in the city all weekend, and I find that inertia causes me to accept the latter option most of the time.

Today, I came across this sketch on xkcd.com, and I thought it was appropriate.
 

6:41PM - spanning desktop goodness

In the past, I have always run into issues with getting a dual-monitor setup to work reliably under Linux.  It always frustrated me because I knew some geeks out there were making it work and I was just missing something.  Today, I have finally started making full use of my LCD real estate with NVidia's latest display config tools and Fedora 7.  I'm using a Dell D620 with a "Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300" chipset, connected to a 19" Dell monitor.  The video card is now driving 1440x900 on the laptop LCD and 1280x1024 on the external monitor, and seems to work well. 

It appears that the only special thing in xorg.conf at this point is the need to specify the same BusID but a different Screen for each Video device:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro NVS 110M"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          0
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard1"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro NVS 110M"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          1
EndSection

It's really all very straightforward at that point, just a matter of choosing a screen layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" RightOf "Screen1"
    Screen      1  "Screen1" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

I still have to run some tests on things like docking and undocking, suspend and resume, etc. to see if the setup is really robust, but I'm at least a step or two ahead of where I was last time I tried this a year ago.  Now I'm really tempted to get an extra video card for my desktop at home...

11:20PM - Take THAT, Stallman!

This just made me laugh.  I was reading this article about the oncoming Microsoft patent war against open source software:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm

and they started talking about RMS.  They tried to write this article for someone who has absolutely no knowledge of the history of FOSS, but clearly the person writing has some opinions that he couldn't hold back:

"By 1991, Stallman and his collaborators had conjured an entire free operating system, which is today known as Linux. Though large portions were created by Stallman's GNU developers, the kernel was the work of an independent project led by the then 20-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds, after whom the system is now named. (Stallman insists that "GNU/Linux" is the proper name, and he refuses to give interviews to reporters unless they promise to call it that in every reference. In part for that reason, he was not interviewed for this article.)"

Seriously, you didn't interview him because you're taking a stand against saying "GNU/Linux"?  You're CNN, and you're taking sides in the petty "Linux" versus "GNU/Linux" debate? Come on...

3:07PM - it's a living

For a long time, I have restrained myself from writing anything significant about Ingres for a variety of reasons.  I'm ready to change that now.  I have spent three of the past seven weeks on the road with coworkers.  At the end of March, our engineering team, support team, and several other people from throughout the company got together for a "Developer Summit".  It was the first time I'd met many of the people from our Islandia and Slough offices face-to-face, and it was a really positive experience.  There was a lot of healthy debate about engineering processes, release management, and some serious brainstorming about our feature/function priorities.  Oh, and some of us talked about licensing, too. :-)  It completely reshaped some of my impressions about the company in a positive way.

The next trip was to CA World in Las Vegas.  I wasn't really excited about that one based on the guest list, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, and I had a chance to hear directly from customers about the success they've had with our database over the years.  It was also one of the first times I had a chance to talk to Roger Burkhardt, our COO, face-to-face for any length of time, which was a great opportunity to exchange some ideas.

Shortly after the CA World trip, I was officially given a new role.   I'll now be working full-time on community-related projects, including our source code release and contribution processes, university research partnerships, starting projects to verify which open source applications work well with Ingres and fix some that don't, etc.  I had been drifting toward this sort of work already with my work on http://community.ingres.com and http://docs.ingres.com, but now it's a more formally designated role (although still awaiting an official title).  I'm really excited about the change, because I think it represents a more fundamental change in how we act as an open source company, and I'll be sharing a lot more about it here and on the community site.

This week, I've been at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, which I'll talk about in another blog over the weekend.   Now it's time to fly home...

10:19PM - reading and meta-reading

I've done a lot of reading in the past year, and it occurred to me that I should actually start keeping track of what I read, since I often read things borrowed from the library or from friends. I don't expect that I'll have profound things to say here about everything that I read, but it's a good place to keep a list. So, here are my most recent adventures:

- Hannibal, by Thomas Harris - Yep, it's pretty creepy stuff, a little more graphic than most things I read, but I really enjoy Harris' work. And since I hadn't seen the movie, the ending was a bit of a shock to me. If you can stomach it, I highly recommend it.

- Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen - This was a fun book and a quick read. I've heard that a couple of his other books are far better, so I'm adding a couple to my reading list.

- Beach Music, by Pat Conroy - This is the third or fourth Conroy book I read, and while some parts of it were painful to read (pages and pages about child abuse, the horrors of the holocaust, etc.), the story hit home for me in several places, and some well-placed humor balanced out the painful parts.

- Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer, by Warren St. John. - A light read about the college football RV / tailgating subculture. It kept me entertained for a few hours on a flight home from Baltimore, but it wasn't a great book. It really got a bit off track, and became more about a couple of specific people and the fact that Alabama had a good season than about the RV culture in general.

Right now I'm doing some "meta-reading", easing through Nick Hornby's "Housekeeping vs. the Dirt", in which he chronicles his own reading choices over a 14-month stretch. So, I guess if you read this blog, you are meta-meta-reading. :-)

Next up on my bookshelf, all from the library:

The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov.(I read the first book last summer, and thought I should try the next two while I still remember something about the story)

About a Boy, by Nick Hornby - I like his style, and stumbled on this one at the library while looking for Hiaasen. I haven't seen the movie, so the book isn't ruined for me yet.

Paradox of Plenty, by Harvey Levenstein - Another book I stumbled on, this one while seeking out The Omnivore's Dilemma, which, as it turned out, was marked MISSING in the library's online catalog.

The SF library appears to have quite a number of books marked MISSING, which is disappointing. The whole point of a public library is to give people free access to literature and other media, and people are either losing things or stealing from the collection; it's terrible.

That's all for now. I'd like to know what other folks are reading, too. recommendations are appreciated.

11:55AM - the crest conspiracy

I remember listening to a Lewis black rant a few years ago about the ridiculousness of post-9/11 airport security. I've always just quietly gone along with all of the policies, and in fact had become a bit numb to it during all my travels in 2006. If me taking off my shoes for all to smell makes the world more secure, then so be it. For some reason today, though, the whole liquid/gel thing finally put me over the edge.

I very rarely travel with only a carry-on, but since my cross-country trip to baltimore is only for 2 days, I tried to travel light. The problem these days is that you can't carry on liquids, gels, etc. exceeding a certain quantity, so if you only have a carry-on, you have to have small sizes (which are expensive) of toothpaste, deoderant, etc. This had slipped my mind, but I was sure that my contact solution, deoderant, toothpaste and face soap would fit in the one-quart bag, and no single thing was a huge quantity (my contact solution was a 4 oz bottle, but only half full), so I wasn't concerned.

As I filled a one-quart bag outside the checkpoint, a TSA information desk guy says that the deoderant is okay, but the other things are not. I looked back at him bewilderedly, because the deoderant is the largest of all of them. I walked away from the security checkpoint and into the privacy of the pay phone area. I put my face soap (the most expensive thing to replace) in my pocket - Spot has mentioned this working for him in the past - and I rolled up the tube of toothpaste, which was about half empty and clearly less than 3 fluid ounces.

I headed back to the gate, sent everything except my hidden soap through the xray machine, and sure enough the toothpaste gets flagged. My intent is not to make a scene, but I'm utterly confused. Why was that being flagged, when it was clearly a smaller volume of stuff than the deoderant?

"We go by what it says on the label," they tell me.

"What it says on the label, ma'am, is that it weighed 8 oz when it was full. It's clearly not 3 oz of volume, and maybe not weight either," I say.

"Well, we can't weigh it here, so we have to go by the label."

Okay, first of all, if weight is what their going for, which is NOT what the sign says, then spend $5 on a kitchen scale, for goodness sake. That's nothing in comparison to the value of everything you throw away. Second, OUNCES OF WEIGHT ARE NOT FLUID OUNCES.

I spent about 30 more seconds trying to explain things to her and one other employees and then decided to cut my losses. I only lost the toothpaste, while keeping two other things that should have been confiscated as per their wacky standards. The contact solution, was somehow never mentioned, and I wasn't about to bring it up. The logic train left this station years ago.

6:36PM - Dilbert, as relevant as ever

I just had to make sure that everyone sees this, so you'll understand when I steal a phrase from it in a later blog:

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2007916360215.gif

9:17AM - FUDCon Boston: Even Mooninites couldn't keep us away

FUDCon was yesterday. The new format (bar-camp style) was good, though too many sessions I wanted to attend were blocked into conflicting time slots. During the sessions, I spent most of the time just listening to all of the ideas and the debates. I'm staying over for the HackFest, which for me should be very educational. Among other things, I'm trying to learn about the Fedora documentation processes.

The main reason for this entry is that I promised I would post pictures from FUDPub last night. The album is here. It's just a few pics, but a couple of them are gems.

10:25PM - late-night pondering on mail service

So, I've realized that I have a love-hate relationship with gmail. I really do like the ease-of-use of their mobile client; other than that, I really am not a fan of webmail at all. Why? It simple:

- I almost always have my laptop with me (if not, I have my blackberry), so checking from multiple PCs is a non-issue

- I like to GPG-sign messages as much as possible (I was out of the habit for a while, but it's so darned easy that it's stupid not to)

- having webmail makes it too easy to trust someone else to take care of backups. there are several apps and libraries out there to let me back up my gmail, and I'll probably do that for now, but how often is often enough? also, if I use googles tagging functions to sort my mail, can I really duplicate that on my backup copy (maybe if I use zimbra?)

- gmail gets blacklisted more often than I'd like. that sucks, and I don't even know what they can do about it. they had a great idea early on with the invite-only thing, but then they gave away far too many invites, and it bit them.

Anyway, I've had several thoughts about my other options. I could make a Xen image at home an MX, but I'd need a backup to queue mail. My desktop is probably only good for two 9's, maybe three in a good year. Another option is getting some low-end rackspace, but anything reasonably priced will probably not have any better uptime than my home machine; maybe more redundancy on the power & network, but that's probably the only advantage.

Thoughts?

8:25PM - one for the road

I am guessing that I won't take the time to post while I'm in Boston at FUDCon, so I thought I'd give a quick update. Work is keeping me way busy right now, and I'll probably be working overtime through the end of the month. I think it will eventually pay off, though. And I'm still finding time to do fun things. This past weekend I spent three night in a row in bars listening to great local bands. The one most deserving of mention is Blue Turtle Seduction. They are a bluegrass band, heavy on the fiddle & harmonica, and I liked them enough to buy their CD at the end of the show. They have a live set available on archive.org, too, but I haven't listened to that yet.

I also got out to the beach this weekend and just walked around for an hour. I may start running on the beach once a week; seems a lot better than running on a treadmill in the gym.

I mentioned the DCBC birthday party plan in my last post; on Friday, I got the contact info for the person who organizes the "Brew on Premise" program, so that plan is rolling along.

That's all for now. More news after Boston.

11:25PM - Life update, as promised

Life keeps rushing by, and I don't know where all the time is going. The holidays were great; for a glimpse of my travels, check out the photos. The site isn't anything fancy, but I'm super-lazy, and gThumb just made it so darn easy to make those web albums that I went along with it. I'll make it stylish later.

I started back to work on January 3rd, and I've been extremely busy. I'm still doing my 7:30 to 7:30 routine as I was before the holidays, but I'm trying to cut that back a little, and do more work on the train instead of reading the newspaper. Didn't I say I wasn't going to talk about work anymore? Right. One last thing: I get to go to Boston in two weeks for work, and I'm excited. Now, other stuff...

I'm starting to get to the gym more often, and this month is officially going to be my last month of PT. I'm planning to run Bay to Breakers again this May with a group of people, and then later I'm going to run at least half of the SF Marathon. That first race is only 12K, but considering that I can't run for more than about 2 minutes at a time on the treadmill right now, I have a long road ahead.

I'm going to Tahoe with some friends at the end of February; a few of them have shares in a ski house there, which is one of those things I've seen on TV (That 70's Show, for example), but never in person. Of course, I can't actually ski right now, but I can drink spiked hot cocoa with the best of them.

Perhaps what I'm most excited about so far this year, though, is the joint birthday celebration some of us are planning for June. Sometime in May, we are going to Devil's Canyon Brewery to brew our own beer for the party. Then in June, we'll throw the party in the same location, and I think our friend Caroline (who sounds like Chrissie Hynde) and her band are going to entertain. Rock!

So, overall, life is good. Sleep is good, too, so that's what I'm going to do now...

3:20PM - the sounds of tapping

In my recent work at Ingres, I have been reminded of an old joke: The most shrewd businessman in town is having trouble with his furnace, and calls the local repairman. The guy comes over, spends 15 minutes looking over the furnace, and tells the businessman, "I can fix that for $1000." The businessman reluctant okays the estimate, at which point the repairman takes out a hammer, taps a few times on the side of the furnace, and voila, it's back to normal. The businessman is outraged, and demands an itemized bill to justify the repair cost. The repairman jots down on a slip of paper - "Tapping furnace w/ hammer -- $5. Knowing where to tap -- $995."

I've spent a good bit of the past couple of weeks "learning where to tap," and gaining great respect for the coworkers from whom I'm learning. In this case, "tapping" is finding the right if statement to change within thousands of lines of code to make something work properly. It's one line of code, but the accumulated knowledge required to understand the significance of that line is astounding. I'm starting to dive pretty deep into the nuances of SQL constructs, and it's very interesting (and sometimes painfully frustrating). I think that at some point I'm going to have to study our parser code, now that I see how amazingly complex a SQL query can be. For now, I'm sticking to things like adding the proper dialect considerations to Mondrian so our database passes all the regression tests, which is a bit simpler, and feels more immediately productive.

In my spare time, I've also been working on writing RPM and DEB packages for Ingres. I had never written a DEB package, and starting with something as large as our DBMS, which installs as a dozen separate packages (each with their own preinstall & postinstall scripts) is a bit daunting. Luckily, I have friends who read this blog who will be able to critique these packages when I release them. You know who you are. :-)

I don't have much else to talk about right now. I'm really looking forward to my trip home in a week, though I don't feel nearly as "burned out" as I have in past holiday seasons. I think I'm finally starting to feel a real passion for my work, something I've been searching for for a long time.

Happy holidays, everyone.