trainedmonkey
hello kitty christmas
this is just a basic sugar cookie and frosting, with a little help from a cookie cutter in the shape of hello kitty.
truth be told, the cookies aren’t very good. i will have to use a different/better sugar cookie recipe next time. but these were all about the presentation.
merry christmas!
how open is drizzle?
one piece of jay’s advice to mysql got me thinking about something that bugs me about drizzle development. jay said:
Make all decisions open and transparent: For the non-maintenance team, make a policy that all decisions about the kernel design be done in an open forum, with the community able to participate in the discussion. Have stewards that are willing to negotiate the design decisions with the community and do everything in a transparent manner.
since jay is one of the key lieutenants in the drizzle effort, it only seems to fair to put them up against that standard. one thing i have noticed is that there is relatively little discussion on the drizzle mailing list about all the coding that is going on. the latest discussions mostly seem to be flypaper for standards wonkery and taking shots at mysql.
meanwhile, you have big refactorings of code like mark atwood’s plugin-ization of several features that seem to just go into the code without any discussion of the design or implementation.
maybe all the discussion is happening on the irc channel, but that is not a great way to get much of the potential community involved. how much of it is happening off-line? maybe more than the core drizzle developers realize, or would care to admit.
stuff that doesn’t control me
i had been using a plastic water bottle while at the store (refilled from our water dispenser in the back), but it started smelling a bit off. so i ordered a klean kanteen stainless steel water bottle. it isn’t insulated, so it can be a little cold when first filled, but it has a nice large opening and should be easy to clean if it starts to get funky.
i also got an all-ett wallet (the european) to replace my old thick wallet. the fabric it is made from is crinkly, but i hope that will mellow with usage. it is half as thin as my old wallet, at least.
we got a sprout coat tree from cb2 so we have someplace to hang our coats this “winter.” this is much better than our old system of draping the coats around on chairs. the packaging was annoying (crumbly styrofoam), but it is a nice solid coat rack that we should have for a while.
accumulated downtown
the holiday block party in the old bank district was a really great event. i didn ’t even get around the corner to 4th street (spending my time between the bank and our store), but what i saw was tremendous. based on the traffic at the store, i have to say i liked the crowd a lot more than the typical art walk crowd. there was just less tension in the air. there seemed to be a lot more people from the neighborhood around.
we went to an event at the new cole’s the other night, and also picked up some sandwiches at the grand opening. there was always a fear that something would just be wrong with the renovation, but they appear to have done it right. i have decided to withhold judgement on the food until having a proper meal there. it was really strange being at the bar again. if i seem less than enthusiastic, it is because that place means so much to us. it is hard to process.
the association, a new bar next door to cole’s was a real eye-opener, though. they managed to stay fairly far under the radar, so stepping inside was a real treat. it felt like a really comfortable, contemporary neighborhood bar. not my usual scene at all, but i could imagine spending some time there.
an observer of his own legacy
one of the questionable habits i picked up in the run-up to the election is reading andrew sullivan’s blog at the atlantic. his thoughts about the recent interview with lame-duck president bush and how president bush seemed unable to take any responsibility for his own role for the failings of his presidency reminded me of monty’s thoughts on 5.1 being declared “generally available.”
work work work
was it really almost a year ago that i mentioned that my focus would be shifting from connector/odbc to libmysql? time certainly flies.
after what now seems much too long, i can say that we have carved out libmysql from the server source code, rebuilt its build system (using cmake), and are gearing up for an alpha release. the code is on launchpad, and it builds on all the platforms that the mysql server does. we have a build system set up that runs what scant tests we have on all of the platforms, and the big thing to work one before release is making more tests.
because this source is derived from the 6.0 server code, it has at least one big flaw that needs to get addressed — if you try to use utf-8, it uses the new 4-byte utf-8 supported in 6.0 even when talking to pre-6.0 servers, which then fails and falls back to latin1.
besides fixing that problem, our plan is to not make any large changes in connector/c (libmysql) for its first solo release. so the time from the first alpha release to the first “generally available” release should be small.
yes we can
i voted!
i voted today. i had to wait in line for about 45 minutes (more or less — i forget to check when i was done).
don’t forget to vote, and don’t forget to vote no on 8.
vote no on prop 8
yesterday was write to marry day when many bloggers wrote about why you should vote no on proposition 8. there are many reasons to vote no, but the two that make voting yes pretty inconceivable to me are that it was only forty years ago that perez v. sharp was decided, which struck down california’s anti-miscegenation laws. those laws would have made my marriage impossible, and the idea that others in loving, committed relationships are still subject to the same bullshit makes my blood boil.
the other thing that makes my blood boil is that those at least some of the people supporting the initiative believe they are supporting family values of some sort. there are over 70,000 families in california where children have same-sex families. just read one story of the troubles they have because of their second-class status, and you will see how important it is that the parents in those families aren’t kept from being married.
screenwriter john august laid out his case for voting no on proposition 8 more eloquently than i ever could.
