My Hidden Room

The color of the finished wort

I use the name Studious Dwarf as my brewing name. And I do this because I feel like it does a fine job of capturing my thoughts and persona as it relates to brewing:  A brewer should be attentive to details, clean, organized, and precise.  I feel that this is well reflected in the modern mythology of dwarves.  So I use the name.  Today I made my 2nd ever batch of beer, which I am entitling Brown Barbazu Ale.  Barbazu is the name of a D&D monster, a bearded devil.  This is fun.   My previous beer (which came out really well) was called Red Kobold Hunting Ale, and is a red, light ale.  This current batch will be more bitter, with hoppy bites to it.

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Beer, Food and Drink, Things I made

I had a great night at SeaCompression 8 – Metropolis Now.  SeaComp is the local burner decompression party put on by Ignition Northwest that follows the yearly Burn.   This year’s theme is a bit of a play on what’s intended for BurningMan’s theme next year — Metropolis. 

At any rate, there were many wonderfully dressed people at SeaCompression, and I had a great time photographing them.  I also had a great time running into friends that I haven’t seen in too long.   My set of images from the event is up on flickr, here’s the link.

I volunteered to work a shift of Door for the event; this process consisted of taking people’s money/tickets, and giving them a wrist band.  That was fun, and it provided a great opportunity to say hello (which I did about a hundred and fifty times.)  The greeter shift passed quickly, and was greatly enjoyable. 

My wife attended the event for the first time, and she had a great time.  She dressed up as a punkish version of herself, complete with a crazy-wonderful purple and black wig, and silver goggles.  She met many people, and said she was glad to attend.  I was also glad she attended, because I love my burner community, and want her to enjoy it, too.   So that’s cool.  We’re going to be going to the playa this summer together, and that should be a blast.

The job done by Suspended Animation, a theme camp that ties people up and suspends them, was very nice.  They lit their subjects beautifully, and clearly showed great skill and concern during their performances.  I enjoyed their performances, and look forward to future events.

There were many other wonderful things to see:  The Black Rock City Cinemas, showing videos from participants of previous years of Burning Man; The dance stages were full and replete of Untz and the cacophony of chest-thumpingly loud dance techno music blaring across the room; and the fire spinners, doing what they love.

SeaCompression was a hell of a party, and I look forward to next time.   I heard it was better next year.

Burning Man, Photography

My work will be up for viewing and purchase at Full Throttle Bottle in Georgetown for Art Attack tonight.  In addition, it will be up through the end of October.

Photography

Today we had to do a very large alter table on some production data.  The table in question is big. 47 million rows big.  We have to make some changes to drop a column and change some indexing to support our application.  Fine, ALTER TABLE blah blah blah.  But how do we keep an eye on the progress of the alter?

There’s nothing in the documentation for MySQL that speaks to a method, nor does any google searching pull up anything (except for the one InnoDB file per table patch.)

So what’s a clever systems administrator to do?

I looked at the output of lots of status commands from MySQL, and finally I came across something useful in the InnoDB engine status output.  I noticed that there was an entry in the TRANSACTION section that speaks to the undo log entries.  I noticed that after several hours of our ALTER TABLE running that the undo log entries value was up around 33 million.  And then it occurred to me that since InnoDB does row-level operations, that this value might correspond to the number of rows that have been operated on throughout the process of the ALTER:

---TRANSACTION 0 2769988559, ACTIVE 53210 sec, process no 4115, OS thread id 1157654880 inserting, thread declared inside InnoDB 91
mysql tables in use 2, locked 2
111667 lock struct(s), heap size 13580272, undo log entries 33707735
MySQL thread id 948913367, query id 1662722204 localhost root copy to tmp table


So I wrote some bash.  And some awk.  And some perl, and I made a hacky little one-liner script to dump out the rate of change, the average rate of change, the % complete, and an estimate (based on average rate of change) as to when the query might be complete.

That script is below, and you are welcome to it.  I have yet to wrap it in more clever perl to dump out an actual status bar, but I’m happy with it, and hopeful that this is a meaningful way of keeping an eye on the rate of change, and the progress of ALTER statements.

The script:

#!/bin/bash
(while(true); do  \
(mysql -e 'show innodb status \G' | grep undo\ log\ entries ; sleep 1 ;  \
mysql -e 'show innodb status \G' | grep undo\ log\ entries ) |    \
egrep '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]' |awk '{print $10;}' ; done ) | \
perl -e '$t = ROWS_IN_TABLE; while(1) { \
$n ++; $nn; $a = <>; $b = <>; $nn += ($b-$a); \
printf "Rate: %d, avg: %d, %0.3f%% complete, done in %d sec\n", \
$b-$a, $nn/$n, ($b/$t)*100, ($t-$b)/($nn/$n); }';


I hope you find this tool useful.

It took a LONG time for the query we performed to run, and it was very helpful to have this to gauge the time it’d take.   The moving average is not the best for long-term accuracy; restart the script periodically for better views (and wait for ~100+ trips through the loop.)

It was within three minutes of accurate.  It look a little longer than the script indicated (log undo entries was greater than the # of rows, but not by more than a small percentage (less than 0.01%.)  The total query time was 22 hours, 9 minutes, and 33 seconds.  So it was off by only 1 hundredth of a percent.

This is only valid for ALTER TABLE, but appears VERY useful.

WOOHOO!

MySQL, Ramblings alter table, database administration, hacks, MySQL, spiffy new discoveries

So the opening for my show is this evening.  Wow, I’m excited.

Ramblings

So in June, I’m having my first art opening.  That’s exciting!   Over the last half-year I’ve been talking to the folks at Utilikilts about whether they’d be interested in seeing my works in their store for Art Walk.  They expressed interest that yes, indeed, they would like that.  So we talked, and figured things out, and now I’ve got an opening coming up.

This collection of works ranges over a few areas of interest for me: Burner Culture, People, and some other pieces.   Please come see my work next month, on June 4th for Art Walk at the Pioneer Square Utilikilts store.  There will be a live DJ and drinks to be had.

It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to it.  I hope to see everyone there.

Ramblings

I attended MySQL Conf, and it’s been an neat conference.  The most surprising thing was the news was the purchase of Sun by Oracle.  This sounds to me like a play for a solid vertically integrated market for Oracle.  I can appreciate that — they get Sun’s hardware and OS skills, they bring their own DB services to the table, and they get a lot of community with MySQL.

Lots of people have spoken about their fears that Oracle will suffocate MySQL, but I don’t think they’ll do that.  I think that Oracle realizes how centrally important to the web community that MySQL is.  I do think they’ll try to sell Oracle to high-volume MySQL sites, and that makes sense.  And I think they’ll continue MySQL to bring DB share under the Oracle roof.

MySQL is hugely popular, it wouldn’t make any sense to throw away that good will.

Other things from the conference have been that I’ve run into people I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m learning things.

One of the most interesting talks I went to was Rockyou’s talk about how they built their federated platform for supporting their Facebook applications.    Very neat to see their approach, especially since we’re buidling our own sort of Facebook applications, specifically Bejeweled Blitz.   Good times.

I met the photographer called Julian Cash, a very nice guy located in San Francisco.  He did a light painting portrait of me, which was fun.   We talked about various things for a while, and he talked to me about his project that he’s working on.  More to come later.

Today is the last day.  Things are winding down, and I’m preparing to go home.

MySQL, Photography, Ramblings, adventure MySQL

This past weekend was Norwescon, a sci-fi/fantasy convention.  It was awesome.   I put on a shoot for free out of my room, and I got a good turnout, and I had a lot of fun.  It was a good experience, and good practice.  Next year, I know some things I’ll do better.

I got a lot of good feedback, and pleased participants.  Woohoo.

I think it’s important to do things like this to give back to the community — to let people come if they want to have a photo made, and share in a creative process.  The best photos were those when the subject played along, and had ideas about what to do.  I like it when it’s a collaborative project.

Anyway, enjoy.  Click the image for the flickr.

-Gabriel

Photography, Ramblings

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this thing. Lots of changes, some photos. Good times.

Christmas has come and gone, thank goodness. The holidays aren’t for me. Winter is over, and I’m glad. But it’s been too long without updating. Without creating. Without feeling good about things. It’s time for that to stop, and for things to get back on track.

So, I’ve got some things cooking that’ll be good. I have a strong lead on a show in the summer (more to follow later), some leads on good ideas/concepts to push myself, and I’m biking to work now. 11 miles in the morning is good fun.

But where to go from here, that’s the thing. I have ideas, but to make them real…

Photography, Ramblings

I discovered today that a work of mine has been infringed upon.   Let me back up, and tell a story.  Long ago, months, maybe sometime last year, nowpublic.com (one of their interns, anyway) approached me about using a photograph in my flickr stream in one of their projects.   I told them no, and that they should never look to my photostream as a source of images.  I’m not interested in licensing them my photographs for merely attribution.  That’s why my flickr stream is set at “All rights reserved.“  Not some rights, all of them.

I understand that it can be a hard thing as a new media company to figure out what images online can be used, and the ones that can’t.  But I expect, and I demand that everyone who is going to do this operate as professionals. And being a professional means doing the work to figure out the source and the license terms of the images you want.

It’s very easy in the new web 2.0 world to hire an intern, and tell them, “Hey, go browse flickr for images that look like X, Y, and Z.”  Super easy, and you’d think, super effective at getting great content.  Given how many images that flickr has in their databases, you’d be right.

The image at right of the garlic is the one that NowPublic copied to their servers. I am an artist; my time and particular point of view are what make the things that I create have value.   I even have it available for licensing, but unless you speak to me *FIRST*, you’re stealing my work, and my effort, and my intellectual property.

Here’s what they did:  The copied my image, and put it on their server, in the hopes that I’ll either be overjoyed to have someone accept me, or at least that I’ll accept their use.   But that’s not the case.  My art is meaningful to me, and it’s not free for anyone to take and use.

Being new media means doing new things, creative things. But it also means respecting content creators and their rights.  NowPublic doesn’t appear to do this.  I’m really disappointed in them, and I know that I’m not going to think of them positively when asked about them.  How hard is it to ask first?

-Gabriel

Photography, Rants and Raves