cahill.net.au

The Coffee Alchemy order I put in yesterday afternoon turned up this morning…

Here is a photo of me, holding a cardboard box containing the award…

Surprisingly (to me, at least), I’ve had some requests for copies of my thesis, so here it is:

  cahill-thesis.pdf

Just remember that when I wrote it, I expected an audience of 4: my adviser plus three examiners…

If you want to check up on me, here are the code changes I made — this patch applies to a MySQL 5.1.26-rc tree with the InnoDB Plugin 1.0.1 unpacked:

  innodb-serializable-snapshot-isolation.diff.gz

As always, I’m happy to take comments or questions.

What’s with the persistent glass-half-full coverage of weather in the media (particularly when it comes to covering glass-filling rain)?

  http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/heavy-rain-eases–but-not-for-long-20100208-nl54.html

Sure, flooding and danger are important and newsworthy, but people, we’ve been in drought for years.  Sydney’s water storage was literally half-full last week.  This rain will mean we can drink, wash, keep gardens growing, and yes, flush.  Maybe for a year or two, until the next big downfall.

It’s really not a bad thing, and it would be nice if the news coverage at least mentioned that rather than accentuating the negative.

The University of Sydney announced that I was awarded the CORE dissertation award for my thesis:

Database doctorate provides breakthrough for multiple users

Also picked up by Computerworld and blogged by Alon Halevy, who I was lucky enough to catch up with briefly at ACSW:

Alon Halevy’s Blog: A Trip to Australia

This seems tempting:

  Rent-free smart home in NSW up for grabs

Rachel could almost walk to work (or ride a bike), next door to the Armoury, Bicentennial park around the corner, flying electric car included.  If only I could write…

I’ve finally added the ACM copyright disclaimer to my SIGMOD 2008 paper, so I can publish it here: real-serializable.pdf.  Please refer to this version rather than redistributing.

What a great 24 hours!  Votes were counted, exit poll (mostly) matched the polls leading up to the election, and most importantly, the American people voted decisively for change:

  Election Unleashes a Flood of Hope Worldwide

Now it’s going to be much harder to convince my American friends and colleagues to move to Australia, even if the world’s best bagels have emigrated down under.

Anyone who has looked inside a computer has probably noticed that PC motherboards have a battery plugged into them.  This battery is responsible for keeping alive the memory that holds the BIOS settings.  When the battery goes flat, those settings are lost, and the next time the computer boots, it has forgotten about things like what hard disks are connected, or the frequency at which the clock should run.

In most of the PCs I have worked with over the years, that’s about all that happens — it’s annoying, but each time the computer boots it has lost its settings.  In servers, which don’t reboot often, a flat battery could go unnoticed for months.

Yesterday, I discovered that some PCs are far less predictable when the motherboard battery is flat.  I have four ~5-year-old Shuttle PCs, and some of them haven’t been turned on for a year or so.  What *they* do is not start at all once the battery is flat.  But if you leave the mains power connected for a while, eventually something gets enough charge that the motherboard decides it can boot after all.

In addition, with a battery on the way out, the PCs would get part way through booting and then freeze in random places.  This took some time to discover — I was initially suspicious of a recent operating system upgrade, and then that a disk might be on the way out.

To keep a long story from getting any longer, the lesson learned was that it’s worth spending $1.75 every 2-3 years to keep a charge in that battery.  Once it goes flat, odd things can happen.

I have nothing against Catholics: some of my closest family are Catholic. But I don’t see the need to override civil liberties in order for Sydney to host their event. What are the organisers afraid of?

Maybe this…