world gone mad

If, like me, your eyes were opened to the power of SQL by Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, or even if they weren't, Beat Vontobel is a great speaker to hear. I use SQL every day, and I think I could use a talk like this every 6 months to remind me of the power of SQL as a declarative programming language.

With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

I've heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, and finally had occasion to try to use it. This tutorial was very well laid out, and entirely true - maybe a half dozen commands and a couple dozen lines of code later, there was a nice set of "scaffolds" for browsing & editing my data model.

It didn't "guess" my data model, but I prefer to tell a framework how to handle relationships. Telling rails was as simple as adding a handfull of commands like "has_one :parent", "belongs_to :category". And then you get drop-downs for foreign key values and column sorting virtually free.

Restaurant week has been announced again - $21.12 for a meal for 2 at dozens of spots. Details here.

Hey - in other news, we apparently have 4 of the top 10 Irish bars in the country, despite having (AFAIK) about the smallest Irish population of the boroughs...

A few weeks ago there was an article in the New York Times (available through TimesSelect here) citing a study suggesting that children who grow up within a third of a mile of a highway may be sustaining permanent respiratory problems. I grew up in Morningside Heights, about a quarter mile from the West Side Highway, and am currently raising a child less than a quarter mile from the BQE. So this got me to thinking.

I'm a GNOME user, but on my brother's suggestion I tried Amarok a month or so ago, and never looked back. I've used most of the popular music players for linux as well as iTunes & WMP, and I'd actually call Amarok the best on any platform. It's not even close.

One really nice feature is the database integration. I think every application should have this option, and not just because I work for a database company. Amarok can keep all its information in a MySQL database, and that includes the song lyrics it pulls down from the web.

At last night's New York MySQL Meetup we had a great presentation on the new stuff in RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 from Goutham Kandiar (from RH's NY office down the block). The highlight was when he moved a running MySQL server from one laptop to another.

Now, I'm a Sales Engineer, so I can appreciate good dog & pony shows. I can really appreciate the difficulty of making a dog or pony of a database. So this was quite a treat.

It turns out all you need is some reasonably modern hardware (they had Lenovo T60s with on-chip virtualization) and xen. You can use older hardware, but you'll have to modify your kernel (which limits you to OSes where that is a possibility). Goutham had a gigabit switch, making the 256M image move over in ~4 seconds, but he told me that an ad-hoc 802.11g network would still do the trick in about half a minute.

The Treo 680* is an incremental enhancement to the older 650. It's a little smaller, and there are some great software updates in the OS and core applications as well as nice additions bundled in. I wonder if it could have been more of an upgrade, but overall it's got some really cool features if your current smartphone is getting long in the tooth.

Sad to say, my favorite features are by most counts minor: the 680 allows you to attach ringtones to a category in the contacts list (so all 300-some of my co-workers can identify themselves by "slow blues"), and it also can handle vCards (even those with 300-some entries).

* Highlight for photo, courtesy of Amazon

Born and raised here in NYC...I work out of my recording studio in soho where style I write, produce, arrange, record & teach different styles of American Roots Music.

Check out my downloadable guitar lessons on Truefire and my music production company www.blackermusic.com

I will be posting more on Blues and Roots guitar and music production in General.

I never thought I'd be happy to step out into a cold Brooklyn winter, but I have been the last few days. Maybe "relieved" is more like it. 70 degree days in early January just feels spooky these days, though I bet it felt heaven sent in '71.