not waving but drowning

Just got from lulu.com

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

Kanban standups are a lot different than scrum standups. Trying to
learn more. I really like that you can order books with a tiny
potential audience from lulu. Decent quality too.

–
Elliot Murphy

Repeating the meme from Kees:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

“Now, while doing this, draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.” - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt.

I was really lucky on this one - I have so many boring books, this one happened to be on the top of the pile next to me.

Looks like drizzle is announced now. I’ve spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I’m excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I’m running the test suite first. Yes, I’m getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and more in a matter of minutes, and it has been amazing to see how fast the code is coming in from all over the world. There was truly a pent-up demand for somewhere to be able to freely work on ideas.

If you haven’t read Ian’s paper about the community-agile process, you should. You can see many of the ideas there in how the drizzle project is run. There is lots of work to do, and I think it’s going to be great fun to see how far we can push drizzle. And the code is safely in a FLOSS distributed version control system that I have mirrors of, so nobody can put the code behind a corporate firewall and seal it off - it’s alive and growing and unstoppable. If anyone wants to mirror the code, that is fine and I’ll help you do it.

Sometimes people look at databases as boring, as a solved problem. I’m here to tell you that building interesting applications that have any kind of persistent state is not a solved problem, there are a lot more fantastic ideas to try, and some ideas that have only recently become practical. Check out the code and put up a branch with some ideas of your own!

We don’t have packages for ubuntu yet, but we will be putting up a PPA soon. As you can imagine, there is still a fair amount of work involved in finishing the renaming and making packages that don’t conflict with existing mysql installs.

Cool chair

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

–
Elliot Murphy

I’m looking for some more unstoppable hackers to work with at Canonical, and doing the usual thing of going through CV/resume submissions. What’s different from when I was doing this last year? YouTube! In the past I’ve been impressed when someone not only had a resume but links to a personal site or profile that highlighted their professional activities in much more detail than a plain resume would - perhaps links to open source contributions that they are proud of, or designs that they’ve done, etc. One resume I just got links to a YouTube video showing a demo of a robot that the applicant built and programmed in C and Python. This definitely got my attention.

Found or rediscovered a bunch of nice software this week

• Spreed.com web-based meetings, with shared whiteboarding, application sharing, video, and soon mindmaps.  Why is it noteworthy? They explicitly support linux, even for whiteboarding and app sharing. The whiteboard is geared toward making notes on top of a presentation, and participants can easily generate a PDF of any page. The linux screen sharing client is written in python, and the mind maps (coming soon) promise to be compatible with FreeMind.
• Coccinella instant messaging client with shared whiteboards. What I really want is OmniGraffle for Linux, with the ability to share drawings with someone on the other side of the world and both edit in realtime. Inkscape’s Inkboard feature would be even better, if it worked, but it doesn’t, and I haven’t had time to get in and try and fix it. Coccinella doesn’t have a good way to save the drawings for later though, it’s more useful for scribbling on existing drawings. It does have a very nice way to screen grab anything and then draw on it.
• Monitoring software - I need to start doing some serious monitoring soon, and here’s what I’m looking at
  • Graphite enterprise scalable realtime graphing. in django. with a custom storage engine.
  • Collectdthe system statistics collection daemon
  • Reconnoiter - when Theo says he’s writing a better version of something, I listen. Goals are to support monitoring thousands of machines.
• Satchmo a couple of different projects that I’m working on are going to need to handle credit cards soon, and Satchmo integrates with a lot of different payment gateways, and with Django.

And then there’s the background rumblings of new database projects - innovation in this space is far from dead, and ideas want to be published! New code coming out almost every day, which is great to see.

I’ve started a new project at Canonical, and am *really* excited about it - going to be building some nice things that even my non-technical friends will want to use, and thats going to be a lot of fun. I really need to find some talented Gnome hackers and also some engineers to work on very scalable web service systems - if you are interested please contact me.

podcasting

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

my podcast rig

There is some very big news going around that internet thing today: MySQL has switched from Bitkeeper to Bazaar. I wrote up a quick post on the Canonical blog about the same thing, and Giussepe Maxia has a nice technical post about how to get started working with the new system.

Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:

Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our children and grandchildren to study and improve on. Thank you for letting me be part of a project I will be proud to tell my kids about.

The best feeling in the world is to know that you have a small role in contributing to that body of public knowledge, in building tools that the whole world can use to make things better. It’s so critical that really important software projects like MySQL are preserved in an open system - even though I’m proud of Bazaar it doesn’t really matter so much whether the choice is Bazaar or some other open system, as it does that the history be available in a fully functional free VCS. Bjarne Stroustrup said that “technological civilization depends on software”, and both when I was working at MySQL and now working at Canonical, it’s inspiring that the people in charge (hi Monty, hi Mark), have such a strong commitment to paying the bills in a socially responsible way and trying to create tools, fundamental building blocks that can benefit society as a whole at the same time.

There is plenty more work to do - go contribute to your favorite bit of open source software today! Maybe grab a branch of MySQL and make something interesting.

As Paul points out, this new erlrc project is very exciting news. One of the most interesting features of Erlang is how you can do hot code updating, and getting integrated into the package manager is absolutely wonderful. Anyone working on getting this into Ubuntu yet? There is a very nice howto written about how to set up your Erlang app with this. I’m looking forward to setting this up on my mini-cluster of slicehost nodes.