Archive for March 2014

Social events at Percona Live Santa Clara

MySQLers tour a breweryOne good thing about going to the MySQL UC is the fact that you will interact with many people and you benefit from social events in the evenings. In its heyday, I recall you get no more than 4 hours of sleep a night, because you’re busy with people for up to 20 hours a day. Meetings, drinks, the hallway track are also all very interesting. That’s the added value of going to an event besides just the learning.

Monday is open source appreciation day and I know there will be drinks planned on Monday evening (31.03) at least from the CentOS Dojo crew. Tuesday (01.04) brings on the welcome reception (4.30-6.30pm), while Wednesday is the community dinner at Pedro’s (7-10pm). MariaDB.com (SkySQL) has graciously offered to pay the first $500 of the bar bill, and as a Pedro’s regular I can tell you the martinis are pretty good.

Thursday (03.04) is the Community Network Reception (5.30-8.30pm) with the awards and lightning talks, which is a must attend event. While not part of the conference, after the reception I’d personally head over to Taste restaurant for more community bonding.

Friday is sadly the day many of us will leave (I am no exception). I expect to usually be all around the Hyatt as well as at the Evolution Cafe/Bar (hotel bar) which is where lots of conversation happen.

Bits of advice: drink plenty of water. It is costly in the hotel but I’m sure you can be creative with getting a bottle and filling it regularly. Bring some cash – split dinners are hard to do with a credit card, so cash goes a long way. For the non-Americans reading this, have some dollar bills – tipping is customary. Bring plenty of business cards, and carry a notebook + pen in your pocket at all times (you will have long action items post-conference week, I’m sure of it).

Apple laptops not made for enterprise use

Like my recent upgrade to 10.8, I was forced to upgrade to 10.9 because my 13” MacBook Air succumbed to an odd logic board error involving a heat sensor going kaput. Turns out that kernel_task would go up to 300%, ensuring that the load averages on my machine would be in excess of 40-60s. The only fix seems to be swapping logic boards, and that usually takes 2-3 weeks. Too long to live without a laptop.

For reference, the Apple Hardware Test revealed: 4SNS/1/C0000008: THSP–124.

So I had to order a new laptop, and chose the 11” MacBook Air. I was always conflicted between the 11” & 13”, and left the world of MacBook Pro’s for a 13” due to the same resolution. I travel a lot, so I think smaller is better now, and got the 11” – max specs. So far, I have no complaints. When home its docked to a much larger monitor. On the road, it seems just fine. In a span of a couple of years, I’ve gone from 15” -> 13” -> 11”. I can’t complain.

Apple hardware is just not made for enterprise use. Next day on-site warranties from Dell are amazing (I’ve experienced it plenty of times), but they just don’t exist in the world of Apple even with AppleCare. 

I’ve been locked into some software (I know, silly me but there are things I depend on in my workflow) which makes it hard to switch away from OSX. If I ran Linux, I know I could have bought another machine within a day, but because Apple is all-integrated, I had to order another MacBook Air (who would want a MacBook Air with an i5 processor, small storage (128-256GB) and 4GB of RAM?). I mean if Apple plans to integrate everything, sell top-end machines – picking stuff up retail is important in my opinion.

It took me 5 working days to get my custom-built Mac delivered. That’s just too long to be using hardware you’re not familiar with (I actually did a lot of “work” with a Chromebook – also known as answering a lot of email, but nothing more productive than that).

The upgrade from 10.8 to 10.9 was surprisingly easy with Time Machine again. The only problem was Mail was misbehaving (caching folders), so I had to upgrade to 10.9.2, and just wait it out. I’m not happy with Mail, but its about the only desktop client that handles multiple IMAP accounts and works in an offline fashion.

I read recently an article by David Sobotta about how he moved away from the Mac, and to me it felt like this was my path too. It is not going to happen anytime soon, but I’ve set aside 2 years to get things done. I want to live more in the browser, I want to be able to make use of OfflineStorage, and I want to be rid of depending on just one piece of hardware. It is likely that even after a move to the cloud I will buy Apple hardware, it just won’t mean I’m “locked in” to the wonderful application ecosystem that it has.

If anyone says the 11” MacBook Air is not good enough, I can attest that its got a small screen but in many of my use cases I have it docked to a 24” or 27” monitor, so for coding, comparative studies, etc, I find that to be a great environment. But walking to a cafe or working in a cramped airplane seat? You can’t beat the 11” Air (11.6” if you look closely).

Open Source Appreciation Day at Percona Live

I wrote previously about Percona Live Santa Clara 2014, and I want to bring to your attention something Percona has done that is very nice to open source communities: have an open source appreciation day.

Its before the conference (so on Monday), and you get a choice between the CentOS Dojo (great lineup there including many from Red Hat, Monty from MariaDB, and PeterZ from Percona) or the OpenStack Today (another great lineup there). I’d split my time between both the events if time permitted, except I’m flying in on that day.

I can highly recommend going to either as registration (Free) gets you access to the expo hall & keynotes as well. That’s a saving of $75!!!

Remember to register for the conference where the discount code is still SeeMeSpeak. As a bonus, Serg and I have additional talks now, so there will be more MariaDB goodness at the conference. See you next week!

Destination Anywhere

I loved the Destination Anywhere album by Jon Bon Jovi back in 1997. It was an interesting time in my growth. It was only recently that I learned of the film (yes, it was an original soundtrack). I managed to watch it today, and its very interesting – a highly recommended watch, especially if you’ve listened to the album. 

It’s a 45-minute movie, and was apparently created to promote the film. It is a dark and very emotional film. Plenty of references to the Hotel Chelsea (which I’ve seen from the outside, read a lot about and has a vivid history). I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. I highly recommend it.

A bubble or are things different?

Strongbow bubblyI just read this in Bloomberg Businessweek: Silicon Valley Hears Echoes of 1999. Key takeaway:

IPOs were priced at a median of 30 times sales in 2000, compared with 5.2 times last year, the data show. MarketWatch traded at 46 times 1999 sales on its first day, while Rocket Fuel’s valuation was 7.6 times 2013 revenue.

The average age of companies also went up for IPOs – from 6 years to 12 years. That said, the valuation’s have become saner.

For further reading, how do you value a business by Fred Wilson: 

I learned in business school that the multiple of earnings one should pay for a business is roughly the inverse of interest rates. The reason for that is if you buy a business that makes $10mm a year and pay $100mm for it, then you are effectively getting a yield on your investment of 10% (annual earnings/purchase price). This math is terribly simplistic but fine for the purposes of this post. If interest rates are 5% instead of 10%, then you would pay $200mm for the business ($10mm/$200mm = 5%). So the math here is interest rates = annual earnings/purchase price. Again this is very simplistic because it does not deal with the important questions of what interest rate you use, how you deal with earnings that are growing or declining, and a host of other issues. But at the end of the day, this math [annual earnings/purchase price = yield] is fundamental and everything about asset values, capital markets, and valuations stems from it.

I think things are different now. That said, downturns are cyclical. 

2-factor authentication and time

Flinders Street StationI use Google Authenticator for 2-factor authentication for some of the services I access. I had trouble accessing some of my sites due to getting an invalid token, and I was wondering what was going on.

Turns out, the time on my phone was off. You need to let the network set the time, and you will suddenly be generating sensible codes again. This is documented for Android (you can do this within the app), but on iOS it is a system-wide setting.


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