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Here’s a trip down memory lane. I was just cleaning out some stuff and I found some notes I took from a hilarious MySQL seminar a few years back. I won’t say when or where, to protect the guilty.[1]

I found it so absurd that I had to write down what I was witnessing. Enough time has passed that we can probably all laugh about this now. Times and people have changed.

The seminar was a sales pitch in disguise, of course. The speakers were singing Powerpoint Karaoke to slides real tech people had written. Every now and then, when they advanced a slide, they must have had a panicked moment. “I don’t remember this slide at all!” they must have been thinking. So they’d mumble something really funny and trying-too-hard-to-be-casual about “oh, yeah, [insert topic here] but you all already know this, I won’t bore you with the details [advance slide hastily].” It’s strange how transparent that is to the audience.

Here are some of the things the sales “engineers” said during this seminar, in response to audience questions:

• Q. How does auto-increment work in replication? A: On slaves, you have to ALTER TABLE to remove auto-increment because only one table in a cluster can be auto-increment. When you switch replication to a different master you have to ALTER TABLE on all servers in the whole cluster to add/remove auto-increment. (This lie was told early in the day. Each successive person who took a turn presenting built upon it instead of correcting it. I’m not sure whether this was admirable teamwork or cowardly face-saving.)
• Q. Does InnoDB’s log grow forever? A: Yes. You have to back up, delete, and restore your database if you want to shrink it.
• Q. What size sort buffer should I have? A: 128MB is the suggested starting point. You want this sucker to be BIG.

There was more, but that’s enough for a chuckle. Note to sales engineers everywhere: beware the guy in the front row scribbling notes and grinning.

What are your best memories of worst sales engineer moments?

1. For the avoidance of doubt, it was NOT any of the trainers, support staff, consultants, or otherwise anyone prominently visible to the community. Nor was it anyone else whose name I’ve mentioned before. I doubt any readers of this blog, except for former MySQL AB employees (pre-Sun), would have ever heard of these people. I had to think hard to remember who those names belonged to.

Phone Keypad

I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key?

Stewart Bishop

We can answer that question with the following headache-inducing shell command, which finds all words in a given list which use the same key a bunch of times in a row:

cat wordlist.txt | perl -pe 's/^(.*)\$/\L\$& \U\$&/g' | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' '2223334445556667777888999' | grep -P "(.)\1\1\1\1\1"

The winner, according to this script, is nonmonogamous, which requires you to type seven consecutive letters (nonmono) with the "6" key.[1]It's actually tied with nonmonotonic. These no doubt both lose to more obscure words which weren't in the wordlists I used.

Phone Keyboard Sentences

It's rare for a word to have all its letters on the same key; the longest common ones are only a few letters.[2]Like "tutu". Nevertheless, using only these words, we can write a high def MMO on TV, a phrase whose words use only one number key each.

There are plenty of other phrases like this, although some of them are a bit of a stretch:

Typing issues like this aren't limited to old phone keyboards. For any text input system, you can find phrases which are weird to type.

QWERTY Keyboards

It's a well-known piece of trivia among word geeks that "stewardesses" is the longest common word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand.

In fact, it's possible to write entire sentences with just the left hand. For example, try typing the words We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest. Weird, huh?

Let's take a look at a few more sentences—written with the help of some even messier shell commands and Python scripts[3]I constructed these sentences by searching text logs for sentence fragments that fit a particular constraint, then randomly connecting those groups together using a technique called Markov chaining. You can see the code I used here.—which follow various constraints:

Left hand only

Right hand only

Home row only

Top row only

And lastly, if anyone wants to know why you're not more active on social media, you only need the top row to explain that you're ...

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Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck has posted a bombshell report that uncovers editorial interference at Bell with Bell Media President Kevin Crull issuing directives to CTV and company-owned local television and radio channels to provide favourable coverage of the wireless issue just as the incumbent campaign against Verizon was ramping up in early July. Winseck posts details on internal company emails that indicate Crull sent the message to provide coverage on the CRTC-sponsored Wall Report:

Kevin Crull our President wants us to give this report some coverage….” and “Kevin is asking if this report can get some coverage today on Talk Radio. National news is covering for TV”.

As I posted on the same day as the emails, the Wall Report actually found that Canada falls on the high side of wireless pricing among the countries surveyed. Yet Crull was looking for different talking points from Bell's media properties. As Winseck notes:

The emails begin by setting out a couple of definitional issues and then distill the two key talking points to be covered: (1) that cellphone rates in Canada have fallen in recent years and (2) that they are generally cheaper than in the US.


The editorial interference may not be particularly surprising, but it is enormously troubling. It highlights the danger of vertically integrated companies such as Bell that use their power to manipulate public discourse for corporate gain through their own media properties. This form of editorial interference by corporate interests raises serious questions about the independence of one of Canada's largest news organizations. As Winseck concludes:

Perhaps the fact that journalists and the news divisions of such TMI conglomerates will be deployed to protect dominant market positions and capitalization might not be all that surprising, but it should still be concerning to journalists and the rest of us who need them to offer views of the world unvarnished by their corporate overlords. That the execs at BCE and Bell Media news divisions went so cheerily along with Crull's memo serves neither journalism nor the public well.

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For the same customer I am exploring ZFS for backups, the twin server is using regular LVM and XFS. On this twin, I have setup mylvmbackup for a more conservative backup approach. I quickly found some odd behaviors, the backup was taking much longer than what I was expecting. It is not the first time I saw that, but here it was obvious. So I recorded some metrics, bi from vmstat and percent of cow space used from lvs during a backup. Cow space is the Copy On Write buffer used by LVM to record the modified pages like they were at the beginning of the snapshot. Upon reads, LVM must scan the list to verify that there’s no newer version. Here’s the other details about the backup:

• Filesystem: 2TB, xfs
• Snapsize: 60GB
• Amount to backup: ~600GB
• Backup tool: mylvmbackup
• Compressor: pbzip2

As you can see, the processing of the COW space has a huge impact on the read performance. For this database the backup time was 11h but if I stop the slave and let it calm down for 10 min. so that the insert buffer is cleared, the backup time is a bit less than 3h and could probably be less if I use a faster compressor since the bottleneck is now the CPU overhead of pbzip2, all cores at 100%.

So, for large filesystems, if you plan to use LVM snapshots, have in mind that read performance will degrade with COW space used and it might be a good idea to reduce the number of writes during the backup. You could also compress the backup in a second stage if you have the storage capacity.

The post LVM read performance during snapshots appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Minitube 2.1, the latest version of the popular desktop YouTube player, has been added to the Ubuntu Software Center in 13.04.

We touched upon a few of its new features last week, but now we have the package itself to play with here’s a better look at the most recent improvements.

Minitube 2.1 Features

For us the ability to ‘subscribe’ to a YouTube channel without the need for a YouTube account is the headline feature of this update. It’s a convenient way to stay up-to-date with videos from your favourite channels (including us, right? ;)) without needing to enter a login, or sign up for anything.

‘Subscribing’ to a channel is easy. When viewing a channel in the sidebar (either by searching for one directly or clicking on a channel name) you simply need to hit the ‘star’ button to add it to your favourites.

If you’re at your computer when a new video is uploaded you’ll even get a notification bubble to let you know there’s something new to watch!

On the flip side, those who would like to use their YouTube accounts to access their subs and faves will be disappointed, as with those who like to comment. But, honestly, this is part of MiniTube’s charm; the lack of feature bloat results in a lightweight little app that focuses on the important stuff.

Other Misc Changes

As highlighted in our original post on this release there are a number of additional improvements, including:

• VEVO video playback fixed
• Faster startup time
• Improved playlists
• Skipping to the next video now works on Linux

The Ambiance-themed toolbar introduced in the 2.0 release has been refined further, dropping the text labels for buttons.

Install MiniTube 2.1 in Ubuntu 12.04 & 13.04

Minitube is available to install straight from the Ubuntu Software Center in Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.04. If you’re in Ubuntu just the button below to begin installation, otherwise make a mental note to install it next time you are.

MiniTube 2.1 is free, but requires an Ubuntu One account to install.

Install Minitube 2.1 in Ubuntu

The post Desktop YouTube App Update Arrives in Ubuntu Software Centre first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.

When British Archbishop John Sentamu (pictured below) isn’t busy slamming gay rights or denouncing atheists, he likes to lecture people about fairness. Easy to do… I mean, who doesn’t like fairness, right?

Sentamu, the second-highest authority in the Church of England, confidently trained his sights on tax avoiders the other day:

Tax avoidance is “sinful” and tantamount to robbery, one of the UK’s most senior clerics has said as G8 leaders prepare to discuss the issue. Dr. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, told the BBC that individuals and companies needed to be held accountable for their actions when it came to tax. Tax avoidance was hindering efforts to tackle hunger and malnutrition in developing countries, he suggested.

The bishop is specifically talking about tax avoidance (which isn’t illegal), not tax evasion (which is). Basically, if you hire an expensive accountant to help you figure out how to pay not a penny more than you’re obligated to, that’s tax avoidance (a.k.a. tax planning); no problem. But if Amazon or Apple or Walmart do the same thing, that’s evasion, and it’s an outrage.

I kid (kind of). We’ll leave the political discussion for another time. Suffice it to say that Archbishop Sentamu simply wants everyone to pay their fair share, most especially big multinational entities. People and businesses who aggressively try to minimize their tax bite are criminals, the 64-year-old prelate thundered.

Those not paying their full tax liabilities are “not only robbing the poor of what they could be getting, they are actually robbing God, because God says ‘bring into my store house all the tithes’. So if God has told us to be just, to walk humbly and to be merciful and then we behave in a very strange way — God is being robbed, the world is being robbed, your neighbor is being robbed.”

Tax minimizers are also killing kids, he added:

“They (companies) should have a conscience which says that a child is dying tonight because of some of their actions,” he said.

You know what they say about how, when you point a finger, three of your digits are pointing back at you?

For each of those fingers, here’s a data point that His Excellence might like to contemplate:

1) The Church of England, which has yearly revenues of well over a billion pounds ($1,570,000,000), is given huge tax breaks on major repairs to its buildings. It also receives grants from the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (English Heritage), and proceeds from the National Lottery. The state Anglican Church is one of Britain’s biggest landowners, with 112,000 acres. Regional Church organizations own more land; the Diocese of Oxford, for instance, holds 6,000 acres in its portfolio. Donations to the Church, which account for roughly half of its income, are tax-deductible, despite an ultra-fat investment portfolio that the New York Times recently estimated to be worth some £8,000,000,000.

You’d think that church authorities would be pretty chuffed about the largesse they receive from the citizenry, but you’d be wrong. When, last year, they were asked by the U.K. Treasury to pretty please pay value-added tax (VAT) on alterations to churches and parish houses, spokesmen for the church were up in arms, blustering that their poor institution could ill afford it and that such a request was a dunderheaded affront.

I wonder why the archbishop wasn’t insisting then that “all must pay their fair share.”

2) His cousins in the Catholic Church enjoy lavish tax advantages all over the world, and they display the exact same sense of entitlement about it. No financial concession is ever enough, and every tax obligation is potentially an attack on God’s people. For instance, the Vatican took illegal tax exemptions on thousands of buildings from 2006 to 2011. When Italy’s fiscal authorities got ready to send a bill, indignant padres took their protest to the European Commission last year; and though no one seriously disputed that the Catholic Church did in fact owe billions of euros, the Commission members decided it would be too hard to arrive at an exact number… and forgave the entire debt.

If archbishop Sentamu condemned the Vatican’s tax-evasion chutzpah, I guess I missed it.

3) The Church of England fought an 18-year legal battle against the owners of a farm in Warwickshire, eventually extracting £230,000 from Gail and Andrew Wallbank in 2009. The Church’s case rested entirely on a 16th-century feudal law, long considered dead, which held that certain landowners, no matter their religious beliefs, must help pay for the upkeep of Anglican churches. After the matter was decided, at least a quarter of Anglican dioceses began looking for ways to screw private-property owners in the same manner.

No worries from the archbishop, apparently, despite his professed commitment to “financial fairness.”

If His Excellence is going to voice his concerns about numbers and morality, I’d like to suggest that he take these numbers to heart: 40, 1.6, and 19:21. Let me explain.

40:

Forty percent of those polled [in a survey commissioned by Britain's Sunday Times] said they did not trust priests, vicars and other clergy to tell the truth, and overall doctors, teachers and judges were rated as more trustworthy.

1.6:

That’s the percentage of Britons who attend an Anglican church on any given Sunday. Is it “fair” to give the so-called State Church massive benefits paid for by all taxpayers if only one in 63 citizens care enough to show up for Sunday service?

Matthew 19:21:

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

I wonder how many of those poor children archbishop Sentamu cares so much about could be saved by even just a fraction of the Church’s impressive wealth.