Related link: http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/606/

“The victory did not come, however, without a measure of controversy.” Do they ever?

Sound like anyone you know? And how ’bout them Hogs?

Related link: http://www.mysqluc.com/pub/w/35/grid.html

At last summmer’s OSCON, I attended John Paul Ashenfelter’s Data Warehousing with MySQL and OSS Tools tutorial and Roger Magoulas’ Building the Open Warehouse session. Go on, click on those links, and–surprise! They don’t go to the OSCON 2004 archives, do they? And those sessions have new names–weird!

Newer versions of both those presentations are coming up at the MySQL Users Conference. That’s where those links go–and if you have the chance, perhaps you should go there, too.

Here are some of the highlights from my copious notes on both these presentations. I expect this week’s versions will be similar but different. I’m guessing Ashenfelter will focus less on the various open source tools available to surround the MySQL database and more on specifics of using MySQL in data warehousing–and I’d attend a second time to get that. Magoulas was only six months into O’Reilly’s open warehouse, so I know he’ll have new things to report.

John Paul Ashenfelter’s tutorial, “Building a Data Warehouse with MySQL and OSS Tools”, laid out a straightforward implementation of data marts with MySQL as the RDBMS and other open source tools providing various services around it. (If Ashenfelter discussed his choice of operating system, it’s not in my notes, nor is it in the tutorial handouts.)

In the process, he made a convincing case that a dubious piece of Ralph Kimball’s advice–”Plan a data warehouse, but build a data mart”–can be a good plan for a mid-sized business. In a mid-sized business, the first data mart may be all the data warehouse that company needs (at least at that time), and can provide a sufficiently large chunk of the eventual warehouse that the warehouse can actually be built without completely reworking the data mart.

(It’s bad advice for very large enterprises, but it’s no longer current advice. Most large companies have now discovered the consequences of this path and coped in one of two ways: Integrated their systems painfully into a single warehouse, or glued their systems together precariously into a somewhat consistent set of marts.)

The first half of Ashenfelter’s tutorial was a primer on data warehousing for open source programmers–a good summary, for this audience, particularly in detailing ways in which decision support systems are different from OLTP systems. (Not enough emphasis can ever be placed on this difference. These two major uses of the RDBMS are as different as night and day. Training is always application-specific, and thus tends to cover either transactional processing or analytic processing. Education tends toward the transactional model–it’s more interesting as a CS topic.)

The second half began with a small data mart building case, then went into some detail on open source tools available for data warehousing.

Roger Magoulis’ talk, “Building the Open Warehouse”, went through the implementation of an open source data warehouse, built at O’Reilly from third-party book sales information.

This was an inspiring presentation. At the time (and since), I’ve been about ready to leave data warehousing. Hearing from Magoulas about the speed and agility with which he and the rest of the O’Reilly people put together their warehouse was a wonderful tonic.

Like Ashenfelter’s tutorial, Magoulas’ presentation focused on whst data warehousing could accomplish in a medium-sized business. Accordingly, certain items in Magoulas’ presentation which wouldn’t fly in a large enterprise made perfect sense in his context. (I had to work at making this mental adjustment–my last gig was working with a 10 TB warehouse, which struck me as a little small, comparatively speaking.)

Here’s an example. Magoulas said that the data warehouse is a perfect open source project, because the warehouse isn’t required to be up 24 x 7, and because you could restore it by simply reloading it. My first reaction to this was, “Where did you come from and who let you up there?” My second reaction was, “You came from an underserved market in data warehousing, and in that context, you are absolutely right.” (Yes, I know there are open source applications which do run 24 x 7–I think Magoulas’ point was aimed at deflecting a management objection to a specific open source implementation rather than advocating open source generally, and that’s a tactically wise move in many cases.)

I’ll write more about Magoulas’s presentation later, but since Ashenfelter’s tutorial starts in–dang! Where did the time go?–four hours, I’ll post this now, so you can get what value there is out of my recommendation.

If you attend one of these presentations, tell me: Was it good for you, too?

My beautiful and brilliant wife is sitting across the dinner table right now, proofing an upcoming book.

She’s a much better proofreader and copyeditor than I am–though I used to work at it and did a pretty good job, and have some specialized knowledge which can be useful–so she handed me a sheet of paper with an author bio.

(Note: All dialogue guaranteed to be close but no cigar.)

“Shouldn’t this be italicized?” she asks me, pointing to the name of a popular interactive on-line game.

“I think you treat it like a title, but I don’t really know. You don’t italicize Monopoly, do you?”

“No,” she said. At this point, we were both working off what she calls ‘editorial hunch’–a combination of induction from what we’d seen in print and deduction from what we knew about development in usage and style. She did what a professional editor does at this point–she spent a few minutes researching the question–while I did what a writer who lives with a professional editor does–I went back to typing.

A few minutes later, she said, “You italicize composition titles. These games are considered to be compositions.” Not every style guide agreed, but given the work in question, we agreed this was the right choice.

This got me to thinking. I would not italicize Robotron 2084 or Time Pilot or any of the arcade games I played, and I’ve never seen Pong or Asteroids italicized. But interactive games, like Grand Theft Auto, are usually italicized. Would I italicize Pong or Monopoly if they were on my computer? No, I wouldn’t. We also don’t italicize titles of software. I might italicize Dungeons and Dragons, played anywhere, but it’s a book, too.

What we’ve got here is the language demonstrating that composed computer games are a new genre. People understand them to be more akin to a book or a movie, and treat game titles like movie titles or book titles.

There’s a serious effort to rate, restrict, and censor games. Part of that effort is to define games as not being worthy of first amendment protection. What this use of language and typography shows is that community standards find composed computer games to be similar to books and movies. Like it or not, that means Myst has a lot more in common with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than it does with Ms. Pac-Man.

Does Pong need more violence in order to be entitled to the same robust first amendment protections as Grand Theft Auto? Discuss.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/technology/18moore.html?ex=1271476800&en=453d1…

It turns out that, well before Gordon Moore’s careful plotting of data points into the future resulted in Moore’s Law, Doug Engelbart made a similar, qualitative observation, and that Gordon Moore heard him make it.

Some places, that’d be fuel for an amazing flame-fest. But these two gentlemen are behaving in a civilized (if less entertaining manner). Engelbart isn’t claiming he should be given credit for Moore’s Law or that there’s any sort of plagarism involved. Moore says he heard Englebart make this observation:

“The thing that I remember from it is his question if we would notice anything different if everything in the room was suddenly 10 times as large,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “He answered it by suggesting that the chandelier might fall.”

It’s a small matter, perhaps, but it cheers me to see two people who could be fighting doing something sensible instead.

They made separate observations: Engelbart, around 1960, got a qualitative grasp on the speed of chip development. Moore, in 1965, studied the question, plotted data, and quantified the rate of increase. Both valuable, both important.

Oh, yes–and both a good example for the rest of us.

Nothing to see here, move along. Nothing to see.

With any luck, I’ll be either on a new contract or in a new job shortly, and I’ve been thinking about those horrible first few weeks, when you can’t be productive ’cause you don’t know nuthin’ (and you’re still getting yourself set up).

The next thing I do, I’ll stick with beyond the 4-5 years per assignment I’ve averaged, and I’d like to make this one count.

So: Does anyone have advice for how to get a good start on a new position? Book and article recommendations welcome.

It’s taken me as long as three days on a new assignment to do useful work. Don’t you hate that period where you can’t be productive?

Related link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1783493,00.asp

I’ve been following Chris Nolan’s Politics from Left to Right for a few months now. She’s one of the most consistently reasonable (a quality for which weblogging is not well-known) and well-informed (at which weblogging does somewhat better) writers on technology and politics I’ve found. That URL up there is for her EWeek column wrapping up the San Francisco weblogging regulation story.

Shouldn’t webloggers be proud they have enough political influence that the regulations which apply to big-league political campaigning are now seen as needing to apply to political weblogs?

Related link: http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001293.html

Update:Eric Borchert at Salon has a nice story and summary: “Citizen journalists”? Try partisan hacks (subscription required, or watch a short video for a day pass). Here’s a sample:

Nonetheless, dealt a weak hand in the Schiavo case, bloggers all went in on a bluff. And now they refuse to pay up. In fact, they’re actually congratulating themselves for helping “get to the bottom” of the story. But the meltdown has exposed their often mindless naiveté.

Elsewhere in O’Reilly Weblogs, François Joseph de Kermadec says “Another article on how blogging will change society as we know it just was too much for poor little FJ to bear.” Me, too, as my comments on that item show.
For example, over at the excellent Max Speak, You Listen!, Max Sawicky points to a well-known weblog which specializes in media criticism. Turns out that the weblog might itself need some media criticism brought to bear on itself.
Listen up, people:
Partisan hacks with weblogs are still partisan hacks. A statesman with a weblog is still a statesman. Ethical journalists with weblogs are still ethical journalists. Gossipmongers with weblogs are still, well, Matt Drudge.
Most importantly, a liar with a weblog is another damned liar. The mystique and hype around weblogging just makes that liar more credible, the partisan hack more effective, the gossipmonger more venomous. Is that a net gain?
Until it’s seen as just another tool for communication, weblogging will be used as (among other things) cover for every slimy aspect of human nature. Weblogging will still be used as a way of disguising vice as virtue after weblogging is seen in more perspective, but it’ll be less effective in doing so. A more realistic view of weblogging will make it a more powerful tool for advancing virtue and shining a light on vice.
P.S. I’m all for technical partisan hacks, and I’m not really against political partisan hacks (the traditional sense of the word). I just understand political partisan hackery to be what it is, not what I might wish it were.

Do I condemn myself? Very well, then, I condemn myself. I am vast–I contradict multitudes. (Okay, maybe I’m half-vast, and only contradict a bunch of folks.)

Related link: http://yagoohoogle.com

Yes, it’s cute and funny, but it’s also a quick way to visually inspect the difference in results.

What’s next? LiveBlogJourGerNal? FreeLinBUSXD? WinMacDows OSXPX?