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

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/UnitedDrugs-UserReport-2006.pdf

Tags: dev zone, maxdb, mysql, synchronization manager, united drugs, work

Hello MaxDB users, administrators, hobbyists and community!

This, the third of our weekly articles on MaxDB, will cover the installation of the MaxDB server and associated tools. One of the features the team is most proud of is MaxDB's ease of installation and the speed with which it occurs. It's been estimated that a DBA with no prior knowledge of the system can complete a basic installation in less than 15 minutes. Please note that this does not include download time.

More here:
http://wiki.colliertech.org/index.php/MaxDB:Installation

Tags: installation, maxdb, mysql, work

I got a phone call the other day from someone asking about MaxDB MailDB. He said that he got my phone number from something he read online. I publish my phone number with a lot of my writings, as well as the url to *this page you're reading now*

So some people call me on it sometimes. I might have to put up an asterisk filter some time if I get too many calls.

He called me to tell me that MailDB is the new Jesus Christ and that I should *sell sell sell*!!!! (!!!)

He didn't put it quite that way, but that's the gist of the conversation.

Those of you who are interested in buying, please accept a license to the following code under the GNU GPL:

http://colliertech.org/svn/maildb/

I spoke with my manager about working on this code for MySQL during work hours. That means that any work I do on it belongs to MySQL, Inc., and would be licensed to the community under the GPL.

Tags: mail, maxdb, perl, work

I pushed live the new Wikipedia article on MaxDB.

The majority of the credit for this article goes to ulfw_rss, from the MaxDB group at MySQL

Tags: maxdb, mediawiki, mysql, wiki, wikipedia, work

Hey all,

Cross posting some work-related stuff here, since I haven't quite decided whether I like movable type or not...

http://www.sap.info/goto/en/go/29707/

And while I'm at it...

What does the community want to see out of MaxDB in 2006? What are the main areas we should focus on this year? What would make your experience of using MaxDB better? Easier? More enjoyable?

I don't know how well trackbacks work, so you may feel free to email your suggestions to maxdb@mysql.com if they seem to be broken :)

Tags: maxdb, mysql, sap, work

Hey all,

I hear that the collective "you" are annoyed by all of the technical bits on this blog. So I've decided to move non-personal blog entries to my movable type server at mt.colliertech.org. Specifically, work blog posts will be made to

http://colliertech.org/~cjcollier/mysql/

If this works well and I start making lots of posts, I will have the planet mysql aggregator point to the new atom feed:

http://mt.colliertech.org/mysql/atom.xml

good fun, that. For those of you who don't read this blog to get new and juicy bits of information about MaxDB and MySQL, rest assured that posts to this blog will now be easier to consume :)

Tags: blogs, maxdb, movable type, mysql, work

http://www.sap.info/INT/int/index/Category-28943c61b1e60d84b-int/0/articlesVersions-1062943bd0ec4c023c

Tags: maxdb, press, sap, work

My sound card wasn't working, so I installed ubuntu. now it works. I wiped my old testing version of maxdb and am now using the debian version.

I am going to see about making a synch manager debian package if one does not already exist.

Tags: debian, ibm, maxdb, mysql, t42, ubuntu, work

What do y'all think of the idea of a 3d printer? Aaron uses one at work. They call them "C&C machines." I don't recall what C&C stands for, but it basically takes a 3d model from a computer and cuts it into a piece of metal. I've been thinking about building such a beast.

Since there are a lot of data related to such a task, I figured I could get mysql and maxdb involved. Feedback?

Tags: 3d, 3d printer, maxdb, mysql, opengl, work