I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

I could have internet access if I wanted to right now. All I would
need to do is go up to the wireless icon on my Mac, select the
airplane's wireless network, and fork over some cash. Presto, I am
surfing the web.

The point of this is lost on me since all I currently have is just
two batteries. I could be hacking MySQL right about now, aka ssh'ing
into my cluster and firing up builds but all I have is two batteries.
There are four boxes just a simple ssh away which could be spinning
up their disks right now solving problems for me.

That is unless I go recharge my laptop off the outlet in the bathroom.

Don't knock the bathroom on a plane. I'm not the only person out
there that has discovered this, and its not like this is the first
flight this has come to mind (I believe I was first inspired on a
flight to New York about six years …

I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup.
Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"

Later today I will be heading off to the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.

See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.

You can flip a coin on any trip that I am making and based on the result you have an answer to the question of "did Brian pack more weight in books then clothes and laptop put together?". Its even worse when friends loan me books at every port of call along the trip. While in Kentucky I borrowed two books in Asimov's Robot series which I have been enjoying, though the constant "Eurekea" moments found in Asmov's writing are getting a bit predictable. This morning I started reading "The Robots of Dawn", and have just finished the chapter where the detective has had another character explain the positronic brain, and how it can reach a locked state.

So what does this have to do with anything? All I can think about is why didn't Asimov didn't consider a transactional design for his brain? His robot's have zero crash recovery. The positronic brain operates entirely under the assumption that problems are entirely deterministic and that by …