Lists made during a short lunch with myself

Taking stock of where I am working and living.

Things I like about living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area

• The bridges.
• The adrenalin rush after an earthquake.
• My wife is happy.
• Working in an office with my San Franciscan colleagues.
• Knowing that people are less likely to break the law.
• My son loves his school. Both of his mothers love his school.
• Walking at night.
• Gadget and technology gluttony.
• Amazon Prime.
• Live music.
• Ice Cream.
• Possibility.
• Access.
• I can talk to my boss every day.

Things I do not like about living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area

• The inevitability of a major earthquake.
• Fear for my children.
• Lagging behind most of the world in time. By the time I wake up, most world events of the day are past tense.
• Sorrow for my country.

Things I miss about South Africa

• Boerewors.
• Coals.
• Velt.
• Hadidahs.
• Seeing and feeling Table Mountain.
• Working in an office with my Cape Town engineers.
• My fruit trees.
• The part of me that is still there.
• Black people.
• Decent 3G.
• Opportunity.
• Being able to show my sons part of who I am.
• Depriving my sons of feeling South African. And feeling South Africa.
• Ubiquitous Rugby and Cricket.

Things I do not miss about South Africa

• Fear for my children.
• My wife not being so happy all of the time.
• Knowing that people are more likely to break the law.
• Feeling that something is missing at my son's school.
• Feeling personally responsible for more people than my immediate family. A nanny, a domestic worker. Even an old fired gardener.
• Sorrow for my country.

I have a new passion

This will surprise many of you who know me as the techno geek, or software engineer and manager. I am still all those things you know me as, and I still love being those things.

But I am also becoming something else.

I have been growing vegetables. Lots of them, organically. I started back in March.

What has happened while I have been doing this, is that I have been drawn into a whole new thing. I don't even know how to keep up with all the stuff I want to learn and know.

Some random examples:

1. Where does the food I eat come from?


2. How much of the food my family needs can I produce at home?


3. How do we make healthy food cost less than a McDonalds Burger?


4. How can I catch rain water and use it?


5. Is there a way to make five star hotels that don't kill the world?

So I made a place on the web to talk about this stuff, or at least my experience.

Update: Life became a little hectic. Things like the birth of my second child, a move to a different continent and so forth. I have retired the aforementioned project, but not the thoughts, which I plan to continue cultivating.

Are we finally going to get rid of the relational database?

Well, not anytime soon. But for those of us working and thinking outside the parameters of conventional enterprise software, LAMP stacks and so forth, some alternatives are emerging. I am only beginning to take a look at these. In particular I am interested in high availability in the cloud. Now that comes with its own unique set of challenges, not least of all coming to grips with losing the 'C' in ACID. Dare Obasanjo has captured this challenge in his post When Databases Lie. More challenges and opportunities are documented by Charles Ying in What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB.

Way back in 1999 I tried to shed relational database by using quite a few good object relational databases. It was a liberating experience, and I grew and learned by making some bad mistakes, including making the data unsearchable. I think that is a lesson I can carry forward when looking at the new breed of high availability, on-demand scalable candidates. You do have to build your own indexes for text search.

Today we have more reason to look beyond relational databases. They just don't work that well in the cloud.

At SynthaSite, we will be building prototypes around some of the candidates out there. These include Mnesia, SimpleDB, CouchDB as well as abstractions like Elastra. We will also be taking a long hard look at using data store alternatives if the requirements are simple enough. MogileFS is a candidate in this regard.

I am working with a great team, which helps when grappling with these things. In particular I am enjoying working with Neil for whom I have had great respect over the years, but until now I have not had the opportunity to work closely with.

Neil is also the one who gave me shove to start blogging again.

Linux powers Boeing entertainment

On a Boeing 777 flight across the Atlantic, Nathan Zeldes noticed during a 'reboot' of the video entertainment system that it was being powered by Linux.  He posted this discovery on an Intel blog.  He thinks it was a Red Hat distro.

Is 'Better Gmail' really better?

I have been using the Better Gmail Firefox extension for the last month since reading about it on Lifehacker. It is an amalgamation of various Greasemonkey scripts that scratch Gmail itches. I like it, and you are able to turn the different functions on/off as well as customise them.

Is it better than the real thing? I think so - let me know if you agree.