cahill.net.au

Dear Prime Minister Gillard

mjc — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:34:51 +0000

My name is Patrick. I am eight years old and I have an opinion on the asylum seeker policy.

I am angry and very upset because it is wrong to put people escaping war or fighting or even anything that is bad in detention. Why does this happen? Don’t you care for refugees? Australia needs to help them. Do not bring them to East Timor or Christmas Island, let them be a part of our country.

Patrick Cahill

Patrick’s awesome games

mjc — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:56:53 +0000

Here are some games that Patrick thinks are great for kids from 6-10:

Hope you enjoy playing them!

The re-digested read

mjc — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:22:13 +0000

My nearly eight year old son’s summary of my summary of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: “Honesty is writing true history”.

Good beans

mjc — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:34:02 +0000

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

Award photo

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:13:03 +0000

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

Thesis

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:38:52 +0000

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.

Rain == “bad weather”

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:20:15 +0000

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.

Prize in the Press

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:05:07 +0000

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

Rent-free smart home in NSW up for grabs

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:03:46 +0000

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…

SIGMOD 2008 paper, personal edition

mjc — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:26:04 +0000

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.