If you’re a fan of Nine Inch Nails, listen up. You can download the latest album, The Slip, for free. In fact Trent Reznor has released it under the Creative Commons License. This means, download, share, and best of all REMIX! I’m totally blown away. I’ll probably buy a CD version when it comes out, just to support them, but this is totally cool. I hope the community comes up with some neat remixes.

Now, what do I think of the album? So far three songs in, I won’t say it’s grabbing me by the balls just yet, but then it takes a couple of listens to get me into a new album anyway. Let’s just say it doesn’t suck And it is definitely Nine Inch Nails. So go download it and give it a spin.

Thanks to Dave McG for getting me the link and letting me know. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch them in concert this year!

If you’re a loyal reader of this blog (all three of you), you’d know that I organize the annual St. Patrick’s Day Drunk Dial. The first prize traditionally has been a bottle of Newfoundland Screech Rum and this is where the 2008 Drunk Dial hit a small snag. This year’s winner, Dan from Hawaii has been an absolute sport because I have discovered much to my dismay, that Québec faces a Screech Drought. Dan now waits patiently forlornly staring at the palm trees dying of thirst.

Well, it’s off to the land of Upper Canada where Screech apparently flows from taps and people dance on the streets while bathing in it.

However, I thought, how many times in my life am I going to have to drive across to another province to buy booze to send as a prize to someone in another country? So into my head popped yet another crazy idea: The Official Drunk Dial Screech Relay.

After all, the Olympic Torch is winding its way around the world, why can’t I do this with some Screech. So Dan, here’s the plan, this weekend or next weekend, I will be going on a weekend drive to bring you the Screech. I will devise a baton with a shot glass attached to it. I will buy two bottles of Screech, one will be used in the relay. From Ottawa the capital of Canada I will carry the Screech Relay to Quebec City, back to Montreal, then cross the border to Burlington, VT where I will send you the bottle of Rum all packaged nicely.

You’ll also hopefully get pictures of the Screech outside the Houses of Parliament, outside Old Quebec and somewhere in Montreal.

I’m hoping you won’t get pictures of me being arrested in any of those places!

Roll up, roll up for the magical tour, the magical Newfoundland Screech tour is dying to take you away…

A friend of mine (thanks Hilary) saw my posting on Air Canada’s new charges and sent me the following MadTV skit, which funny as it is sadly seems to be where we are headed. And while we’re at it, check out this skit from the Carol Burnett Show… a classic and not all too unlike Flying Air Canada

One of the things about the Grand Canyon is that it just does not photograph well. Yes, yes, I know you’ve seen amazing photos of the Grand Canyon, beautiful ones taken at sunset or sunrise as the light bounces on clouds and red rock. But let me tell you, no photo can ever capture the sense of awe and just plain “hugeness” of the place.

Doesn’t mean I didn’t try!

Now, here’s a small experiment. Does colour in a photo enhance the scale and grandeur of the canyon? So in this photo taken with a Tokina 12-24mm on a Nikon D300, I’m standing above the Grand Canyon looking down from Lookout Cabin near Bright Angel Lodge on the South Rim. The people on the ledge below are focused and as you look farther into the distance the depth of field gives you a sense of perspective. The people give you a sense of scale and the lines and shadows of the canyon walls are meant to focus your eyes.

My question to you: which photo gives you the greatest sense of grandeur? My answer of what I believe is below both photos.

So here’s one (click to view the original full size JPEG – 3MB) and it’s in colour.

Now here’s the second (click to view the original full size JPEG – 2.5MB) and it’s in black and white.

In my mind the black and white focuses you on to the things I mentioned, the things I wanted the photo to focus on. The colour is an added distraction and actually makes the Grand Canyon seem smaller and the canyon lines softer and gentler.

Okay, I know I’m rabidly anti-Air Canada. I admit it. I no longer fly with them if I have to spend a dime of my own money; points and work money are excluded. The only other reason to fly AC would be because there is no road, timely rail or the ability to parachute into a community or be sent by way of a giant human cannon.

So Air Canada now announces today that starting in May they will charge $25 for you to have an extra bag in the luggage compartment. So, fine, other airlines have done it and Air Canada wants to be the “me too!” airline when it comes to finding role-models who stiff their customers. But that leads me to the question, what is it that I actually pay for when I pay a fare to fly with Air Canada? Let’s see…

• Cost of carrying my luggage, well I guess from now on if you say an extra bag is $25 then my other bag must be the $25 cost hidden in the ticket price.
• Cost of peanuts and a soft drink. That must run Air Canada about $10 at the very most.
• Cost of carrying my pet. Oh wait Air Canada doesn’t allow that anymore.
• Cost of the Airport Tax… no that’s always added as a service charge.
• Cost of the meals… right, they charge for that extra in economy.
• Cost of them to help me out when winter weather screws up my travel plans… right they now want you to pay an “insurance” fee to get good customer service.
• Cost of manning call centres for lost baggage (and they sure have a lot)… oh right they route your calls to India for cents an hour…
• Cost of the fuel you say? Then why do we pay extra fuel surcharges?
• Cost of the NavCanada? No that’s also a surcharge.

So tell me where do all my hundreds of dollars go? Bad customer service and annoying stewards and stewardesses? Look, I would understand if I received friendly and helpful service and maybe even a nice airline to boot. The entertainment system crashes, the people are unfriendly, the seats are cramped, food you have to buy… Maybe Air Canada needs to find the proper way to be “competitive”, like maybe making me want to fly with them again.

So, I am basically paying let’s say $400 (minus taxes etc) to board a vehicle, be prodded by security, wait in umpteen lines, have Air Canada people be rude to me, buy my own food, sit cramped for hours and then let out at my destination and have my baggage lost? Great. I love air travel with Air Canada.

Okay, I admit it, I like Star Wars. Somewhere on my hard drive is the horrendously bad Star Wars Christmas Special (yes the one with the Wookies). Now I’m not a complete Star Wars geek. I’ve never dressed like Luke or Leia (shudder, a brown man dressed as Leia, now that would likely be someone’s fetish or someone’s nightmare… if it’s your fetish, please don’t let me know, I like blissful ignorance).

However, there is now a complete replica of R2D2 available and it is the gadget of gadgets. It is a projector, an iPod dock and a web camera… and it acts and controls like the R2 unit. Woah. I want one! If some kind millionaire is reading this, feel free to send me one for Christmas!

I have seen enough pictures and video of the Grand Canyon that I had figured there was really not that much to see. I knew the geological story of the tiny Colorado River eating through thousands of feet of rock to create this massive entity. I had learned all that when I was a kid in high-school. What magic could await for me there?

Nevertheless, I rented the car from Las Vegas’ monolithic rental complex designed solely to soullessly churn you through the rental process as fast as humanly decent and was on my way down the Nevada highways with Arizona in my sights. It had taken me a long time to decide that perhaps with just three days I would see the Grand Canyon and perhaps Zion National Park in Utah. At least then, I figured, I would have at least done the cheese factor of seeing this “Grand” Canyon that I had already seen on TV a million times. Woo hoo.

So much was my feeling on this that by the time I had finished the drive in the late afternoon, the flu that someone had given me on the last days of the MySQL Users Conference had spawned a fever and instead of driving to the edge of the canyon I headed straight to my campsite and to bed. The Grand Canyon could wait.

Next morning however, feeling only moderately awful, I packed my camera and gear and headed over to “The Rim”.

And there it was. I will never be able to describe in words what the Grand Canyon looked like. Even the words “Grand” and “Canyon” don’t really describe it. It’s the kind of vista that keeps drawing your eyes. Walk along the path and you find yourself silently and automatically turning your head towards it. My first look was so jarring that I just had to sit down and take a picture; my personal addition to the billions of photos that really don’t do the thing any justice what-so-ever.

Yup, I’m sitting in San Jose Airport poaching some internet access of the “Admiral’s Club” and getting ready to board a flight to Las Vegas. The MySQL Users Conference is over and I’m using the trip to see a bit of the Southwestern US.

However, first it will be to celebrate my friend Sue’s birthday in the city that money built: Las Vegas, the home of CSI and one of my favourite movies and books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. From there, I’ll rent a car and drive to the world-famous Grand Canyon for some photography and some camping. I might even head around to Zion National Park. I meant to make reservations but didn’t so who knows what will happen.

Maybe, just maybe I’ll hit a lucky streak in Vegas… probably not though!

Okay, so Markus and I did actually give the presentation yesterday  at the MySQL Users Conference and no, we weren’t booed off stage, and neither pro or anti-framework people came by to bludgeon us. Mind you, it could be that the hundred people or so were being extremely kind.

For those giving talks, remember, no matter how much you prepare, things still go wrong… In our case, when we plugged Markus’ laptop in we discovered that the projection produced an eye-watering flicker. Yay. And then, I forgot that Markus’ laptop has a German keyboard. Sigh. Despite that the presentation went well and we had some interesting post-discussion.

Couple of interesting notes though:  Only one person in the entire room had run xdebug and profiled their site. Do so immediately. Stop reading, forget about our basic presentation, just go do that. I’ll have to blog about how and what you can learn later.

Okay, so here are two slide decks, one which we showed and the other which has more written content which might be better for those that didn’t attend. There is also the sample application that we presented during the presentation it’ll get you started on all this.

• The slide deck as shown
• The slide deck with a bit more information
• The Constellation Phoenix Sample Application

Again thanks to all who attended, and thanks to those who already gave feedback. Any feedback, positive and negative will be considered. Beer and other gifts will be even more appreciated.

I certainly hope all the keynotes from this year’s MySQL User Conference are posted somewhere (I suspect you probably want to have a look at the conference web site). Looking at the printed presentations will not come to the spoken presentations, especially the keynote delivered by Dick Hardt the CEO of Sxip Idenity in British Columbia on Identity 2.0

Very briefly and nowhere near as smoothly, the keynote focused on the movement of digital identity systems away from each site or “silo” controlling the identity management and closing access to your profile/role/persona data we need to move away into a much more user centric model where you control your identity. The model would focus on “issuers” which give you “the agent” your data which you then choose to relay to others. The idea being that you can do things like  finally be able to have your e-bay reputation available in craigslist and more.

Naturally there are things like OpenID out there, something I’ll be pushing to implement in our MySQL web sites, and certainly Sun is a big supporter of OpenID. However, OpenID is, as Dick Hardt pointed out, still a bit annoying.

The second keynote was from Jeff Rothschild the CTO of Facebook, and let’s face it, the most interesting tech keynote I’ve seen in a while. Usually I’m expecting a lot of description and not a lot of substance. This was quite the opposite.

Rothschild went over the challenges of the “Social Graph” and the impact to the database. I’m not going to type any numbers as I’ll just get them wrong, but the numbers for access in Facebook due to the distributed nature of the social graph was staggering. They implement, as many do, including us, a Memcache/MySQL situation. They’ve actually optimized and written enhancements to thread Memcache and even the ethernet drivers on their linux boxes.

To scale Memcache over data centres, they’ve written a Memcache Proxy (which they announced would be released to the community). To integrate Memcache with MySQL more, they are writing their queries in MySQL to trigger marking dirty keys in Memcache so that data from widespread data locations which are taking replicated data in MySQL will not end up in a race condition when you proxy the Memcache data as well.

Rothschild then proceeded to issue a challenge: The key to solving these problems will be to get MySQL running as fast as Memcache. Well? Let’s get at it!