Geert JM Vanderkelen

It's coming back that is hard
Back to where one grew up
had his first kiss and beer

That going back is heavy on the heart
heavy like a stone you once got up
you threw and happy it was just near

Memories are haunting
or revive what you have done
I have the images, the feelings,
that I have to overcome.

Today I received a call from a nice, young lady asking me if I wanted a ticket for the concert tonight. I'm not sure she actually asked me out, but I like to believe that because it makes me a bit happy! The reason I said 'no' was actually pretty lame: tomorrow I travel to Belgium and I'd like to stay home and try to tuck myself in early.

Sometimes I would like to hit myself with a big clue bat. I always manage to screw up a chapter of my life before it starts.

I'll work a bit on my homepage and marvel at my crappy skills instead.

Sometime I keep on making up conversations in my head. Here is one, tagged as 'abstract':

I'm entering an office for a job interview; the lady offers me a seat.

"So, Mr. Vanderkelen, why did you pick the red chair, and not the blue one?"

"Oh, I like blue more."

Surprised, the lady asks again, "But, why did you sit on the red one then?"

"Well, if I go sit on the blue chair, I just see the empty red one, which I don't like. So now sitting on the red one, I can enjoy the blue one even more. Functionally, they are both equal anyway."

Past weeks I've been helping friends moving their stuff to new places. The 'weirdest' object I carried out of an apartment in the suburbs of Aschaffenburg was a flail. Quite amazing how you legally trespass and look into ones past..
Anyway, carrying out lots and lots of boxes, couches, old toys, arrows, .. it made me realize that I should take my simplistic lifestyle even further.

At home, last week, I already started in sorting my old clothes (i.g. now to big) and store them in plastic boxes in the basement. Why not giving them away you might say? Well, they can still be handy, and all are pretty new. The main idea is that everything I don't need in my apartment will be stored in non-paper boxes so everything can be carried out easily.
Paulo Coelho, who I discovered yesterday (thanks Julia!), writes some of my ideas down in his book 'Like the Flowing River'. He mentions that books should live their own life and not gather dust on a shelve. Similar concept, last week I stowed all books in, indeed, another big, plastic container! (BTW, I once tried to give away my books to a public library in Belgium, but they only buy books through official channels..)

The main reasons why I do all this is: 1) less stuff to dust, more space; 2) I don't want to burden anyone extra when I would die. Yes, eventually we all die, tomorrow or yesterday, in a decade, some in a century, but it's no taboo: I will eventually die.
I live alone in Germany, my relatives are all in Belgium. Imagine the problems my parents might get into getting my apartment emptied, etc etc..
Be sure I don't want to be a pain in the back, literally, when I'm burned to ashes.

Next year I will make a will, check with laws in Germany as what would happen, etc.. What with my car, for example. Checking things out postmortem is a bit.. difficult.

As a programmer, that is one deadline I will keep!

I've been working on our Freiwild Shop website today making it compatible with Django 1.0.2 (final(ly)!). Basically, what I've done is try to run it and fix where it errors following the direction documented in the manual. I think that the next days I'll see how I can optimize the MySQL usage a bit.

The shop I've build has little models and doesn't use to much fancy tricks. Among the changes:

• Templates: extends should be on the first line


• Models: should not contain anything Admin-related. This is actually very nice, seperating models.py and admin.py.


• Model Fields: maxlength changed to max_length, oldforms/newforms options disappeared, small stuff like this.


• Members like get__url() are gone, now replaced by imagefield.url

.. And more little stuff which kept me busy for almost 3 hours today. Add to that that last week I looked at moving to Satchmo Project, but it's to much work to convert. Hopefully I can release the shop application I made later on, now Django has a 'final' release.

Oh, yes, and it's using my MySQL Connector/Python (all Python implementation of MySQL protocol), which I will hopefully release soon! Comes with Django support, indeed!

OK, I cheated and read my 'work' email! Today my talk proposal got accepted and I'm off to the MySQL Conference & Expo, held in Santa Clara (CA, USA), end April 2009. My talk will be about the MySQL Support Team: how it started, the transformation it went through and how it scales today (and much more!).

This is my first talk overseas! I'm quite excited!

What does a MySQL Support Engineer do during his first hours of vacation? Yes, napping. After that, he goes on the web and tries out something new. Today: SugarCRM .. and struggeling a little with the installation.

The problem? The installation (on MacOS 10.5) was successful, no errors, but:
Sugar CRM 5.1.0c Files May Only Be Used With A Sugar CRM 5.1.0 Database

Logging didn't reveal anything, but the general query log did! All DML statements were send to MySQL, but apparently not .. committed? After looking in the code I noticed a lack of commit statements.. Putting an explicit commit it worked, for the `config` table.

What was the real problem?

[mysqld]
init_connect='SET AUTOCOMMIT=0'

Don't ask me why that was there, sometimes I do crazy stuff testing things, but this setup should work! Each transaction in applications should be committed. Disabling the AUTOCOMMIT shows that SugarCRM is not doing that.

Actually, I filed a bug for it at bugs on the sweet.. euh, SugarCRM website.

It's getting more and more annoying. Google (also Blogger, etc) and other website switch me to German content, based on my IP and disregard the Firefox settings or demands that I want English.

Wherever the problem is: It totally freaks me out!

Grrrrr

I've been working on some new options for ndb_restore which allows to include and exclude databases and/or tables while restoring. The current solution doesn't really work as documented, or isn't flexible enough.

Not really my job, but lots of us in MySQL Support are developers. Doing some coding from time to time keeps one sharp!

How it works? Let me show it with some (simplified) examples:

# only restore db1
ndb_restore --include-database="db1" /dir/.../
 
# only restore db2.t2 (1 table)
ndb_restore --include-tables="db2.t2" /dir/.../
 
# restore the rest of db2
ndb_restore --include-databases="db2" --exclude-tables="db2.t2" /dir/.../
 
# restore db3 excluding db1 and db2
ndb_restore --exclude-databases="db1,db2" /dir/.../

This isn't pushed yet, but if anyone has some comments or wants something more, just comment on the bug report.

Now I have to figure out how to make test cases and push it to MySQL Cluster 6.3 or 6.4.