First day in NYC for #pgeast

I’m here in NYC today, and looking over the schedule. I also posted the wifi keys below for the conference if you’re looking!

It’s not easy to link to individual talks, but here’s my short list of talks and people I’m going to try to connect with over the next three days:

  • True serializable transactions are here! – Kevin Grittner
  • Building your first mongodb application – Brendan W McAdams
  • Defense against the dark arts: protecting your data from orms – Vanessa Hurst
  • pgbouncer: A practical implementation of a multiserver database farm behind the firewall – Lou Picciano
  • Range Types – Jeff Davis
  • The Write STuff – Greg Smith
  • Getting started with PL/Proxy – Peter Eisentraut
  • Streaming databases: stepping outside of Postgres – Theo Schlossnagle
  • Data-driven cache invalidation – Magnus Hagander
  • Creating and Using Foreign Data Wrappers – Andrew Dunstan
  • PostgreSQL Performance Pitfalls – Greg Smith
  • View Triggers – David Fetter
  • Introduction to Write Ahead Logging – Robert Haas
  • Experiences with MongoDb as a queue and dict server – Tejaswi Nadahalli
  • Monitoring and Managing MongoDB and Postgres Applications with ClearStone – Tim Sneed
  • Comparing the Apache Cassandra Architecture to PostgreSQL – Jake Luciani

And if you’re searching for the wifi keys for the conference:

SkyTop: conf181pa
PennTopSouth: conf182pa
PennTopNorth: conf183pa
Madison: conf184pa
6th floor (Executive6fl): conf060pa

Also, I’m here to talk to folks about working at Emma. We’re hiring! Find me if you want to chat. ๐Ÿ™‚

Reading more this year: Just Kids, The Monster Within, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Drive

I got one of those book-reading devices for my birthday this year and have already read four books in the last month.

Here’s what I’ve read (amazon affiliate links):

_Drive_ is pretty interesting.. Lots of research has said for more than 50 years that carrot/stick approaches to business management don’t work, but businesses continue to do it anyway. It includes some great summaries of chapters, further books to read about specific topics, and lists of things individuals, teachers, business owners and managers can do to improve the way they motivate people.

The other books were pleasure reading… I read a book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called _Mother Nature_ a long time ago, and Scott remembered and recommended _The Monster Within_. Great insights into the psychology of motherhood and the pressures American women face.

_Just Kids_ is a poetic remembrance of Patti Smith’s life in NYC and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Much of the early book reads like a fairy tale, while later parts detailed the rough, sloppy lives of artists carving out a living in NYC in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t enjoy the later chapters as much – which often had laundry lists of artists and celebrities meeting and partying. But the poetry came back toward the end.

_Between a Rock and a Hard Place_ is terrifying. I read it in anticipation of seeing “127 Hours”. Now I don’t know if I can stomach the movie. Jury’s out. ๐Ÿ™‚

Learning python the hard way: print vs sys.write, and python -u

I knew before that print in Python had some weird properties. Like:

>>> for i in [1, 2, 3, 4]:
... print "blah"
...
blah
blah
blah
blah
>>> for i in [1, 2, 3, 4]:
... print "blah",
...
blah blah blah blah

One thing you’ll notice is that there’s a space between each of the blahs. If you don’t want those spaces, you need to use sys.write. Here’s an example of using sys.write along with a progress bar indicator. Which is exactly what I wanted this for.

Finally, you can indicate to python on the command-line that you want unbuffered stdin and stdout with python -u.

Weekly tweet digest for 2011-03-20

GSoC 2011, accepting submissions starting March 28!

The PostgreSQL project has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2011.

Students may begin submitting proposals starting March 28, concluding
on April 8.

Development work runs from May 23 through August 15. For students,
suggested projects, ideas and details are at:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2011
Our GSoC landing page is at:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/postgresql

We encourage students to contact project admins – me, Josh Berkus and
Robert Treat this year – if they have questions. Once students have a
proposal in mind, we will encourage them to engage with pgsql-hackers
to flesh out their proposals and get feedback the same way that all
contributors do. For those of you who have been around for previous
GSoCs, this should be familiar to you. ๐Ÿ™‚

Many thanks to the 15 volunteer mentors and admins this year (in no
particular order):

  • Dave Page – Past mentor – pgAdmin, Windows, Packaging, Infrastructure
  • Heikki Linnakangas – Postgres Committer
  • Magnus Hagander – Postgres Committer, pgAdmin
  • Guillaume Lelarge – pgAdmin
  • Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais – phpPgAdmin
  • Joe Abbate – Python-related, catalog-related projects
  • David E. Wheeler – Perl-related, extensions, PGXN
  • Mark Wong – benchmarking, monitoring, performance
  • Tatsuo Ishii – Postgres Committer, pgpool-II
  • Stephen Frost – Postgres contributor
  • Devrim Gรผndรผz – Administration related software (dashboard)
  • Josh Berkus – auto-configuration, performance testing
  • Selena Deckelmann – configuration, testing
  • Andreas Scherbaum – performance, configuration, testing
  • Robert Treat – Past mentor 2x, co-admin, Mentor Summit attendee.

We can always accept more mentors! Actual assignment to projects
depends greatly on the proposals from students. Please contact me if
you are interested.