tech ramblings

I am delighted and excited to announce the launch of OmniTI Labs, a repository of Open Source software generated by OmniTI staff in the course of their work.

This is a project we’ve been talking about internally for a long time.  In the course of our work we produce a lot of bespoke code for various clients, or for internal use, or as part of our products. Some of this code consists of things that can be generalized for re-use by ourselves and others.  Given we have so many open source type people here, it seemed obvious that we should have a place to put all of those things for people to use.

The site is a launchpad to access the various Subversion repositories and Trac wikis for the various projects.  Some of the projects are things that have been around for a long while and are not new, but have a new home.  Some of the pieces are brand new code that has never seen the light of day outside the Omniplex before.  Some of the pieces are mature, and some in eXtreme alpha.

We’ll be adding more and more to this repository over the coming months, so keep your eyes open.  There’s an RSS feed of project announcements available on the site home page.

Enjoy.

This week myself, Chris Shiflett, and Alex Mikitik from OmniTI will be at PHP Quebec.  We are Silver Sponsors this time around.  Chris will speak on Thursday on The Truth About Sessions, and I’ll speak on Friday on Writing Maintainable PHP.  I’m looking forward to it - I haven’t been to one of Damian’s conferences before.  Hope to see some readers of this blog there.

We’ll be announcing some really exciting news at the conference, that I’ve hinted at before…I’m looking forward to the end of the week.

Andrew Van Der Stock announced tonight at the first PHP Meetup at OmniTI in Columbia that OWASP have $100,000 available for security improvements in Open Source projects.  You heard it here first folks

Apply at http://owasp.org (when they put it up )

I notice that when Chris announced the Columbia PHP Meetup, at least one of the commenters thought we were in South America.  Actually, the meetup is at the OmniTI office in Columbia, Maryland - about 20-25 minutes from Baltimore and about 45 or so from Washington D.C.  Please come if you will be in the vicinity, talk to other PHPers, eat pizza, and hopefully we can twist your arm to give a lightning talk.

We’ve been planning this for a long time so I’m pleased that it’s finally coming to fruition.  We have several big things afoot in the office at present.  Watch this space for something I’m really excited about shortly.

He was born 17th October 1984, like all future racehorses with hopes and dreams riding on his back.    He came to race named Safari Boy, by Chamozzle out of Chantana.    He raced six times, winning the second, at Albury, in 1988.  He never did so well again, and retired to become a dressage horse, when he was renamed Chamozzled, or RJ to his friends, after the brand on his left shoulder.  He had two dressage homes, and when we came to see him had been in one place for nine years.  His owner had a baby and no time.

I knew as soon as Luke got on that we would take this horse home.  I remember their first show.  Luke said, "I don’t think I’m going to like showing" and after RJ carried him to three championships and a reserve that first day changed his mind.  They learned to jump together and we went to many dressage days, jumping days, shows, and on long trail rides in the rain.  When my horse hurt his leg I rode RJ for a while, sharing him with Luke, and he always took good care of me and tried hard.  Oddly, some of the things I remember best are the times when he wasn’t well - I always seem to end up playing nursemaid to them then.  He had azoturia once and I remember the freezing night where we walked slowly round his field for four hours until the vet rang back to say he couldn’t come.  RJ kept leaning his head upon my shoulder.

He had almost three years to the day of retirement.  We first realized he wasn’t quite right at Barastoc Horse of the Year show, and soon after he headed down to Julie’s farm, turned out in the middle of dairy country, in ten acres of lush grass with a couple of girlfriends for company.

This is another drought year, after all the other drought years, and on Saturday he could barely move, brought to this by Australian stringhalt.  He ended his life there in the paddock.  Good night old fella.  Rest in peace, it’s well deserved.

May the road rise up to meet
you,
may the wind be ever at your back.
may the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields.
and until we meet
again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

Warning: This post contains many occurrences of the word "arse".  ("ass" if you are American)  If you’ll be offended, you should stop reading now.

So, in my talk at kiwifoo I talked about hiring and keeping good staff.  I had a slide that read:
1.  Don’t be an arseclown.
2.  Don’t hire arseclowns.

I was really stealing from George, who said once that the best thing about OmniTI was that we didn’t employ any asshats.  I have always preferred the term arseclown myself, from first having heard it in Office Space to Roy and HG’s telephone poll on The Dream ("Is Arseclown A Real Word?  Vote Yes or No") and their then nomination of the Arseclown of the Day.

I wandered into Borders and what should I see but this: "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving one that isn’t." by Bob Sutton.  You can even take the Am I an Asshole? quiz online via Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

P.S. Don’t worry, one of the first things in the book is a note that different cultures use different words: asshole == arsehole == arseclown. 

Today I am at Kiwi Foo Camp, also known as Baa Camp.

It’s entertaining and educational.  I’ve met a bunch of people I have not met before - I’ve kind of gotten used to knowing lots of people at conferences that I go to.  This one has a large quotient of New Zealanders and hence I’m meeting tons of new people.

I gave a talk this afternoon called From Startup to Google:  How do I grow?  where I looked at a bunch of issues to do with growing companies: how to start, how to fund yourself, how to hire good people, and how to implement a basic software process.  One of the issues I talked about is something I feel really strongly about, and that is developing your company to have a good culture, making it a place where you and other people want to work, and where people can be passionate about what they want to do.  I have noticed that this often falls by the wayside as companies grow large, and a friend of mine commented that it seems to happen somewhere around the 100-200 employee mark.  I’m interested to know what other people think.

I’ve been to some great talks today: a free flowing discussion on user experience and another on email security, and a talk by Robert O’Brien on Atom, another on agile web dev tools, but the real humdinger of the day for me was Quinn Norton on body modification and enhancement.  The concept of a drug that allows you to control your sleep, implanted rare earth magnets that let you feel your hard drive spinning in your fingertips, or another drug that makes you tanned, thin, and increases your libido…well, who wouldn’t be interested? It’s like ShadowRun made real.

Just as a follow up on the topic of MySQL: next week I’ll be at linux.conf.au in Sydney. I’m going to give a talk on MySQL Troubleshooting in the MySQL miniconf on Monday, and will also attend the PostgreSQL miniconf (Tuesday) and one day of the main conference (Wednesday).   It looks like a great conference - I haven’t been to an LCA before and people keep telling me how much I am missing out on.

I saw this today in Ilia’s blog.  In a nutshell, Kaj’s announcement explains that this is the first source-only release of MySQL Community Edition, version 5.0.33.  He points out "I expect the next Community release, 5.0.35, to be available as source
and binaries for the same platforms as MySQL Enterprise Server and as
the previous MySQL Community Server binary release 5.0.27. Until that
point in time, the 5.0.27 binaries will be the ones listed on the
normal MySQL 5.0 download pages at dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html."  That is, this won’t be the last of Windows binaries (for now at least).

Knowing the MySQL community and new MySQL users pretty well, this is a step in an interesting direction.  Last time I heard some numbers from a MySQL staffer, roughly half of the MySQL downloads were for Windows.  On the other hand, there are not many enterprise customers running MySQL on Windows.  So who are these people who are downloading MySQL for Windows?

I know who a lot of them are: they are the same people that buy our book.  People who are learning about MySQL.  These guys are never going to a) buy the Enterprise edition, or b) compile it themselves.  What they do do is swell the userbase.  If many developers know how to use your product, more companies will adopt it.

Some may say that it doesn’t matter that these people are a few versions behind and that’s fairly much true.  I am mostly commenting here because these seems like a step in a particular direction, just as splitting the licenses into Community and Enterprise was another step in this direction.  If things continue in this direction, we may one day look back and say "That was where they started to go wrong."  I hope I’m wrong.

In the style of everybody else I know I thought I’d post my year in review.  2006 was a crazy, crazy year for me.

January:

• Rode my first decent EFA dressage test
• Said goodbye to family and friends
• Moved to Columbia MD for three months to work at OmniTI.

February:

• Began work in MD, working on Ecelerity webconsole
• Made new friends, found a place to ride, met lots of new horsy people
• Fell over on the ice a lot
• Fell in love with working at OmniTI

March:

• Finished work on Ecelerity 2.1
• Got disgustingly homesick
• Got promoted to Director of Web Development, and made tentative plans to stay in MD

April:

• Tore the cartilage in my knee and began eight miserable weeks on crutches and doped up on painkillers
• Thanked the powers that be for my friends who helped me in this crisis when I was on the opposite site of the planet from my husband and support system
• Was visited by Luke
• Spoke at MySQL UC, on crutches

May:

• Chris became a Principal
• Finally had knee surgery and could walk again
• Started riding again

June:

• Spoke at NYPHP
• Babysat the office while everybody else was out of town
• Spoke at ApacheCon in Dublin

July:

• Went home for the first time since January
• Went to OSCON and gave a tute and a talk

August:

• Returned to MD, further homesickness ensued.
• Went to Germany for long awaited vacation with Luke

September:

• Travelled to Microsoft for the Web Dev summit
• Moved to our new, bigger office in Columbia, started hiring a few more staff to fill it

October:

• Spoke at ApacheCon in Austin and DCPHP
• Rode in my first US horse trials (and was 5th)
• Had a hideous car accident

November:

• Appointed Principal and took a trip home to celebrate

December:

• Moved into my own house in MD at last
• Divisional Champion at a jumper show
• Trip home, Christmas, need I say more?

It’s been a year of amazing ups and downs.  Here’s hoping 2007 has just as many ups and less downs.

I took a photo as a marker of where I am right now:

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. 
-Benjamin Franklin

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy