Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

*whew* I did a bunch of things yesterday. We took our kindergärtner to her first Friday at her new school (and were about 10 minutes tardy. oops). We then took our toddler to a nearby playground with swings and slides and let her expend some energy. After she had been sufficiently exercised, we walked back home, stopping at a coffee shop on the way. The baristo (you call male baristas “baristos,” right? :) ) recognized my MC Frontalot shirt and asked whether I had caught him the previous weekend at PAX. Unfortunately, I have not attended PAX since 2006, but I *did* purchase the tee directly from The Front himself ;)

When we got home, I worked a bit on an English Language parser implementation and then went to the University of Washington to meet with Emily Bender about getting in to the Professional Master’s program in Computational Linguistics. It all looks good, and I even got the good news that the GRE is no longer required!

After the meeting, I headed home and poked at the parser for a little while longer. I then picked Scarlet up from after-school care and brought her home. I then hopped in the car and drove toward Bellevue to meet up with Monty while he’s in town. I over-estimated the amount of time traffic would steal on my way to Bellevue, and had an extra hour to blow. So I dropped by building 41 and shot the IronPython bull with Dino. It turns out he’s got an android phone, too. I told him it was possible to put a debian chroot on it and that he should even be able to ‘apt-get install ironpython’ to his phone soon ;) We talked briefly about the CodePlex Foundation and Sam Ramji’s departure from The Evil Empire. Dino seems skeptical about the project. I don’t have enough information to have much of an opinion. However, it sounds like some folks I trust are involved, so I’m hopeful.

I left MS just in time to make it to the wrong address at the specified time. My phone had just enough juice to call Monty to get the right address and then use the navigation system to find my way there. I wasn’t able to make reservations at the place we intended to go for dinner until 8:15, so we went to the Barnes & Noble for a bit. They only had one NLP book in stock and the examples are all in Python. I should learn that language one of these days… As we were leaving the Pacific Place, Monty mentioned to me that he is on the advisory board for the CodePlex Foundation, and that they have been responsive enough to his input that they changed the Mission statement, at his recommendation, just one day before the Foundation was publicized. He feels that this is a very good direction for Microsoft to be heading.

My brother Chris was kind enough to watch the kids while we went out to dinner. Quick note: he recently graduated from UW with a BA in Electrical Engineering and is looking for work using his acquired knowledge, in case anyone needs one of those ;)

We met up with my wife, Hannah and our friends, Mike & Cynthia at our place. Monty graciously avoided mentioning the terrible state in which our apartment has recently found itself. The kids were super cute and polite and said hi/bye.

Over dinner we discussed building an android app (Monty has one, too ;) ) to automate the process of creating bounties for apps and getting folks to implement them. We also talked about MySQL and MariaDB, of course. Hannah and I recalled my time working for MySQL, Inc. on the MaxDB project and some subtle cultural differences we noticed while traveling. It was interesting getting the inside scoop about the Sun acquisition and some of the recent goings-on in the MySQL/Sun/Oracle world. I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the EU is balking on the merger because of monopoly concerns.

Tags: android, autotools, c.j. insider, dlr, family, free software, friends, frontalot, git, ironpython, language, mariadb, maxdb, microsoft, mono, mysql, politics, python, social networking, sun, telephony

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

The FLOSS Weekly folks (including my homie, Randal) just published this week’s interview. It is with Michael Foord, who I just met a couple weeks ago. He published a book about IronPython. He mentions Mono, the DLR and IronRuby, too ;)

Tags: c#, cli, compiler, dlr, free software, friends, ironpython, ironruby, linux, microsoft, mono, perl, podcast, python, software

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

I sent an email to the Fedora Legal list asking whether they will accept software released under the MS-PL license. My friend and former colleague, Brett Lentz mentioned that he was concerned that the Fedora folks might not accept software released under the MS-PL. So I asked. I also bcc’d a certain troll on said mail so as to get lots of flame mail. I’m practicing to become a master twitterbaiter.

14:43 < cj> wakko666: so… we are building ironruby/ironpython debian packages over on OFTC/#debian-cli
14:43 < wakko666> k
14:43 < cj> meebey just packaged up mono 2.4.2.3 in .deb
14:44 < cj> with some backported patches required to get the DLR language engines running correctly
14:44 < wakko666> k
14:44 < cj> we’re using xbuild to perform the build, thanks to ankit’s recent patches.
14:44 < cj> alarm went off. need to address food.
14:44 < wakko666> i know that mono is already in Fedora.
14:45 < cj> great. any idea what version?
14:45 < wakko666> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=30
14:45 < cj> we’ll need 2.4.2.3 + some patches. This is pretty bleeding edge, but I expect the fedora packagers are as ‘on it’ as the debian folks
14:46 < wakko666> fedora tends to be a bit further ahead of the curve than the debian folks
14:46 < cj> we can supply them the patches required. they are also being merged into the 2.4 branch, so should be in the next official release
14:46 < wakko666> k.. shouldn’t be a problem.
14:47 < cj> here is the tarball we’re using to build the .deb
14:47 < cj> http://github.com/mletterle/ironruby/tarball/20090805+git.e6b28d27
14:49 < cj> most of the stuff you’ll need as far as build commands go are in debian/rules:
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-cli-libs/packages/dlr-languages.git;a=tree;f=debian;h=8e4c0abc01ba2db27fe66d508317cef3b574fd3a;hb=f3c10b84cf5f12cb670d14232263ac81662ff714
14:49 < cj> I’ve got to finish making lunch for kids ;)
14:49 < cj> back shortly.
14:55 < wakko666> cj: my main concern about packaging ironruby is licensing. Fedora will accept packages under the MS-Shared-Source license [ed: this is not at all true.], but the MS-PL isn’t on their list of acceptable license. [ed: it is now.]
14:58 < cj> wakko666: alrighty. jschementi is the guy to talk with about licensing issues. He’ll be back some time soon, I’m sure
14:58 < wakko666> of course, i can always write the spec file and you guys can host your own rpms, but it would be nice to actually get it into Fedora proper.
14:59 < cj> also, MS-PL is dfsg compliant and OSL-approved. Is it a decision to deny MS-PL or that it just hasn’t been reviewed yet?
14:59 < wakko666> not sure. we’d need to ask on the fedora-legal-list mailing list
14:59 < wakko666> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#SoftwareLicenses
15:00 < cj> alright. at another time. it’s nap time for scarlet and zelda. ;)
15:01 < wakko666> sure thing. if you ping the fedora-legal list, let me know what they have to say.
19:49 < cj> wakko666: firestorm initiated.

Tags: c#, cli, colliertech, dlr, feds, free software, freenode, friends, git, humor, irc, ironpython, ironruby, language, linux, microsoft, mono, security, social networking, software, xbuild

A Declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers,
against all plotters and fighters in the world, for the removing the ground of
jealousy and suspicion from both magistrates and people in the kingdom,
concerning wars and fightings. And also something in answer to that clause of
the King's late proclamation which mentions the Quakers, to clear them from the
plot and fighting which therein is mentioned, and for the clearing their
innocency.

 

( Read More )

http://www.quaker.org/minnfm/peace/A%20Declaration%20to%20Charles%20II%201660.htm

Tags: friends, pacifism

We had pipandtom_rss2 and revfry_rss2 over for scarletwilde's 2nd birthday last night. Scarlet had a party a little while ago, so we just had a cozy quiet evening with kids and chaos. It was good seeing the four of you, and we look forward to hanging out more.

The evening also marked the first meeting of the Snohomish Wireless Network members, the Snohomish Mono Users' Group and the Committee for Appreciation of Scarlet, Snohomish chapter.

Ha. I'm going to work from Seattle today, so I'm going to head out the door now.

Tags: friends, sno-mug, snohomish, snohomish mono users' group, snohomish wireless network

I had dinner last night with krow and a bunch of our co-workers. We went to a place on Capitol Hill in Seattle called Galeria's. I'd wandered by quite a few times but had not, until last night, eaten there.

Hey, look! Pictures!

Prior to dinner, we worked on fixing some of the last remaining 5.0 bugs (my father once - or more - told me that "watching is helping"). I met a couple of folks I had not met before and learned a few new things about MySQL's query optimizer and how execution plans are developed. It turns out that, like MaxDB, MySQL has a cost-based optimizer.

When we returned to Brian's place after dinner, everyone settled back in to work. Before long, I had to get back on the road. The trip from Capitol Hill to Silverdale takes quite a long time. It's comparable to commuting most of the way to Portland. Whee.

Alright. Back to Emacs land I go...

Tags: dinner, friends, mysql, work