Life Pattern

Category: Misc

Ръзни

  • Two months without blogging

    Wow, It’s been more than two months without me blogging. But what months… 🙂

    We’ve been to the marvellous Spain. Three weeks was enough time to completely forget my “ordinary” life and all the incomplete things fighting for my attention. While in Spain I’ve deliberately chosen to stay away from computers and then when we returned I still kept away from computers for a while driven by the inertia. I mean Internet connected PCs – you can’t easily avoid computers cause they are everywhere these days – in the camera, in the GPS, in the car, in the phone…

    We travelled around Andalusia and some of Madrid and Valencia regions. We’ve been to Valencia, Mojacar, Granada, Tarifa, Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Segovia, Avila, Toledo to name few. Overall we traveled about 4000 kilometres. It sounds like great distance but that’s only 10% of the Earth’s circumference. And still it’s quite a lot for three weeks 🙂

    Spain is a big and diverse country. It meant lots of broken stereotypes for me. It’s organized into several autonomous communities and some of them even have their own local languages. For example at the Valencia’s airport there were signs in English, Castellano and Valenciano. Different landscapes, different cultures… We’ve seen wild flamingos, deer, wild boars, great sand dunes, countless beautiful beaches, white villages, castles, the big and modern Madrid. And I can’t find words to describe how delicious the food was.

    From the local news – the 6th annual OpenFest conference – was held on 1st and 2nd of November. I liked only three of the lectures: “WordPress.com – 40 million pages a day” by Nikolay Bachiyski, “28 Months Scalability” by Slavi Nikolov and “Free Hardware” by Radoslav Kolev. In my opinion the main problem was the weak presentational skills of the other lecturers. I know it’s easy to sit aside and criticise, so I’d be better take part and make a presentation for the next year’s OpenFest.

    We used the opportunity to exchange PGP keys on the key signing party kindly organised by Peter Pentchev. There was a pleasant “unofficial after-party” as well, so overall I’d call this OpenFest a success.

    At work I’m currently having fun with things like DRBD, Hearbeat, OpenVZ… My impressions from DRBD so far are that it’s a very complete product. Decent documentation, predictable behaviour. I wonder whether it has something to do with it’s commercial backing? OpenVZ looks quite complete as well.

    I started to use my Facebook account a little bit more because some of my friends use it and it’s rather convenient way to show your pictures 🙂 And Niki invited people to his birthday party via Facebook. Niiice party 😀

    I spend some time learning the Kohana framework + jquery + CSS. I don’t use it for something specific at the moment – just trying to figure out what is it like to create websites with modern tools like these. Most of the time I’m quite busy with system administration and I started to feel too far behind the web technologies 🙂 So far it looks very powerful – nothing to do with the way things were done 5-6 years ago. I’ve tried to make a collapsed tree (ul/li) in which branches are dynamically populated on expansion by ajax – it fit in less than 10 lines of Kohana/Jquery. And it work’s on each browser I’ve tried so far. Impressive!

    И те така те.

    Maybe I’ll write in more details on the aforementioned topics. Or maybe won’t – only time will tell :-P. If you happen to know Bulgarian you can read more about our journey through Spain at Antonia’s blog:

    By the way I’m looking for a book called Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management by Edwin Bliss but I’m left with the impression that this book is out of print. Any ideas where to find it? Especially if there’s PDF or other open format version because I hate to wait for the dead-tree books to arrive. Moreover they are bulky and inconvenient to carry around.

  • MySQL Usage Accounting

    Those of you who use MySQL in a multi-user environment are probably disappointed by it’s lack of per user usage statistics. For example in Linux there are BSD process accounting for CPU usage and IO accounting for disk usage tracking. Most applications like apache, ftp servers and mail servers provide some sort of usage statistics as well. But MySQL is the great anonymizer.

    Not anymore, thanks to the people at Percona for their microslow patch and Google for the UserTableMonitoring patch.

    Latest version of the patches can be found here but at the time of this writing they are against MySQL 5.0.62 and the current MySQL version is 5.0.67. So I tweaked the patches to apply cleanly to MySQL 5.0.67 and placed them for download: microslow, userstats, microslow+userstats.

  • Going DSLR

    We (me and Antonia) have finally decided to go the DSLR way. We were considering the switch for some time but only recently the pros of the current DSLR technology started to outweigh the cons for us.

    We are proud owners of a Canon Powershot A95 compact digital camera for about 3 years and are generally very satisfied with it. Some of the main advantages of the compact digital cameras include:

    • Lightweight – A95 is not the lightest one at about 330 g but still only a half of the 2005’s lightest DSLRs.
    • Compact – you can carry it in your pocket.
    • Automatic shooting modes and various scene modes for point-and-shoot simplicity.
    • Live preview on a tilt LCD – none of the 2005’s DSLRs provided live preview and even though the current models do provide live preview it’s not nearly as useful as A95’s is.
    • Much cheaper than DSLR.

    In November 2007 we were on a business trip to the USA and a friend of ours asked us if we could buy a Nikon 40D for her. You know – electronics are much cheaper in the US than in Europe. So we bought it and used it for few weeks while we were staying in Boston. It turned out DSLRs got cheaper, lighter and even my wife, who don’t want to know too much technical details about photography and prefers point-and-click interfaces, liked it. And the main selling points for us were:

    • Excellent low light/high ISO performance. This one is quite annoying with A95 and we have lots of blurry and noisy low light pictures.
    • No shutter lag. It’s instant. No more “oh, could you please stand still one more second please” or shots that include only the cat’s tail.

    There are more SLR advantages that come as a bonus to the two above:

    • High degree of manual control.
    • Wide range of interchangeable lenses. Some are very expensive though.
    • Lenses are often high quality and produce images that are sharp and have a wide dynamic range.
    • Precise focus.
    • Higher frame rate.
    • More control over depth of field.

    And some of the biggest disadvantages that were there in 2005 have improved significantly. For example Canon EOS 450D, aka Digital Rebel XSi, weights only 475 g (body only). A DSLR with comparable specifications weighted at least 700 g back in 2005.

    So we decided to buy a Canon EOS 450D aka Digital Rebel XSi. It’s the latest incarnation of the Canon’s Digital Rebel line and some of the more notable improvements in comparison to 400D are:

    • Larger 3.0″ LCD monitor.
    • Live View.
    • Spot metering
    • Improved auto-focus.
    • 3.5 fps continuous shooting.
    • Larger viewfinder.
    • Display of the ISO sensitivity on the viewfinder status line.

    We are waiting for our shiny new Digital Rebel to arrive from the US. Without any lenses so far because we are going to test first what kind of lenses will suit us best. Thanks to my brother Dave who has a rather extensive collection of Canon compatible lenses and is willing to borrow us some of them for test ride.