As I announced in my last blog post, I’m starting to publish all of my fiction through Patreon.
There are two books I’m actively publishing right now:
In case you’ve already missed the previous instalments:
NAPE
Kings Courier
Of course, you can head to Patreon and sign up for the regular updates over there.
As I announced in my last blog post, I’m starting to publish all of my fiction through Patreon.
There are two books I’m actively publishing right now:
In case you’ve already missed the previous instalments:
NAPE
Kings Courier
Of course, you can head to Patreon and sign up for the regular updates over there.
The last year has been something of a change in direction in my life. Not only was it a year of a large number of ‘firsts’ for me, in all sorts of ways, I also changed a lot of what I was doing to better suit me. Actually that’s really important.
2015 turned out to be a really significant year for me, not because of any huge life changes, but because so many different and interesting things happened to me
‘Official’ Studying – I have for many years been doing a degree in Psychology with the Open University. I was actually on my last year – well, 20 months as it was part time. I had my final two modules to go, and although I was hugely enjoying the course, it was a major sap on my personal time; what little I have of it after work and other obligations (see below). I also reached a crunch point; due to the way the course worked, changes in the rules, and the duration of the work (I started studying back in 2007), I had to finish the course by June 2016, and that meant there were no opportunities for retakes or doing the entire course all over again. I either had to get it right, first time, for each remaining course, or I would have to start again. That kept the pressure on me to get good marks massive when I have a very busy day job, and it got harder to dedicate the required time. In the end I decided that having the piece of paper was less important than having the personal interest in the topic. And that was the other of problem. I’d already stopped reading, I stopped playing games, I stopped going out, all to complete a course. I realised that my interest in Psychology wont disappear just because I stop studying. I can still read the books, magazines, articles that interest me without feeling pressured to do so.
Book/Article Writing – Given the above, the lack of activity on here, it wont surprise you that writing books and articles was something else I stopped. I deliberately changed my focus to the Psychology degree. But I also stopped doing anything outside work in any of the areas I’m interested in, despite some offers. I was working on a book, actually two books, but ultimately dropped them due to other pressures. Hopefully I’ll be converting some of that material into posts here over the course of the year.
Working Hours – I have very strange sleep patterns; I sleep very little, and have done since the day I was born. As such that means I normally get up very early (2am is not unusual) having gone to bed at 10 or 11pm the previous night. However, last I spent even more time up late on the phone with meetings and phone calls to people in California. That would make for a long day, so I switched my day entirely so that I now start working later and finish later, doing most of my personal stuff in the early morning. It’s nice and quiet then to.
I’m starting to publish my fictional work on Patreon with the express intention of getting book content that I’ve been working on for many many years out there in front of other people. I’ve got detailed notes and outlines on about nine different fictional titles, crossing a range of different genres. I’ve started with two of my larger ‘worlds’ – NAPE and Kings Courier and will be following up with regular chapters and content over the coming months.
I’ve also created a new blog to capture all of my travel. Not the work stuff, but things like the Scotland tour and the Norwegian Cruise, plus whatever else comes up this year and beyond. Current thoughts are Antartica, Alaska or Iceland, work and personal commitments permitting. Plus I’m in Spain in August with my family and friends.
Converting my unfinished technical books to blog posts. I’ve worked on a number of books, some of which contain fresh, brand new material I’d like to share with other people, including the book content I was working on last year. I’m still trying to reformat it for the blog so that it looks good, but I will get there.
The last year has been something of a change in direction in my life. Not only was it a year of a large number of ‘firsts’ for me, in all sorts of ways, I also changed a lot of what I was doing to better suit me. Actually that’s really important.
2015 turned out to be a really significant year for me, not because of any huge life changes, but because so many different and interesting things happened to me
‘Official’ Studying – I have for many years been doing a degree in Psychology with the Open University. I was actually on my last year – well, 20 months as it was part time. I had my final two modules to go, and although I was hugely enjoying the course, it was a major sap on my personal time; what little I have of it after work and other obligations (see below). I also reached a crunch point; due to the way the course worked, changes in the rules, and the duration of the work (I started studying back in 2007), I had to finish the course by June 2016, and that meant there were no opportunities for retakes or doing the entire course all over again. I either had to get it right, first time, for each remaining course, or I would have to start again. That kept the pressure on me to get good marks massive when I have a very busy day job, and it got harder to dedicate the required time. In the end I decided that having the piece of paper was less important than having the personal interest in the topic. And that was the other of problem. I’d already stopped reading, I stopped playing games, I stopped going out, all to complete a course. I realised that my interest in Psychology wont disappear just because I stop studying. I can still read the books, magazines, articles that interest me without feeling pressured to do so.
Book/Article Writing – Given the above, the lack of activity on here, it wont surprise you that writing books and articles was something else I stopped. I deliberately changed my focus to the Psychology degree. But I also stopped doing anything outside work in any of the areas I’m interested in, despite some offers. I was working on a book, actually two books, but ultimately dropped them due to other pressures. Hopefully I’ll be converting some of that material into posts here over the course of the year.
Working Hours – I have very strange sleep patterns; I sleep very little, and have done since the day I was born. As such that means I normally get up very early (2am is not unusual) having gone to bed at 10 or 11pm the previous night. However, last I spent even more time up late on the phone with meetings and phone calls to people in California. That would make for a long day, so I switched my day entirely so that I now start working later and finish later, doing most of my personal stuff in the early morning. It’s nice and quiet then to.
I’m starting to publish my fictional work on Patreon with the express intention of getting book content that I’ve been working on for many many years out there in front of other people. I’ve got detailed notes and outlines on about nine different fictional titles, crossing a range of different genres. I’ve started with two of my larger ‘worlds’ – NAPE and Kings Courier and will be following up with regular chapters and content over the coming months.
I’ve also created a new blog to capture all of my travel. Not the work stuff, but things like the Scotland tour and the Norwegian Cruise, plus whatever else comes up this year and beyond. Current thoughts are Antartica, Alaska or Iceland, work and personal commitments permitting. Plus I’m in Spain in August with my family and friends.
Converting my unfinished technical books to blog posts. I’ve worked on a number of books, some of which contain fresh, brand new material I’d like to share with other people, including the book content I was working on last year. I’m still trying to reformat it for the blog so that it looks good, but I will get there.
I have a great guest blog on the basics of data mining over at SciTech Connect:
5 Steps to Start Data Mining – SciTech Connect | SciTech Connect.
The next few weeks will be busy, and if you happen to be at any of the following events, let me know!
I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL.
The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.
For many people this will be old news, but I guess It thought I should put up something official.
At the end of September, I left MySQL/Sun/Oracle – that wasn’t an easy decision, mostly because I loved my job. It’s difficult to stop doing something that you enjoy so thoroughly and, over the years, have been so involved in. I did more than just get involved in the docs, I helped out with advice for different departments, worked on areas like DTrace, and of course helped write the documentation and enhanced many of the tools that enabled us to build such brilliant documentation. I managed to work with some amazing people, most of all the rest of my team who worked so hard to produce the manuals and content.
The impetus to leave came from an opportunity to work with another excellent team on a different database, namely CouchDB. CouchDB reminds me of my early database work working on freeform text databases, with a nice open and easy structure, but with ways of getting standardized information out.
I’ve joined CouchOne as Vice President of Documentation. The core of that is building an entirely new suite of documentation, starting from the ground up with everything from the build environment for the docs, to the content itself. Longer term there are lots of other things we are working on, but it will hang off that core reference documentation.
Those of you that know the documentation well will be aware of the old page we used to have for the MySQL documentation. It was huge, and over the years we’d done a number of things to try and improve the layout and make it easier to find what you wanted. We had in-age links to jump to the different documentation types, and the old topic table that allowed you to jump to specific parts of the documentation.
The problem was that the more documentation that we produced (and there are over a thousand docs in various formats now), the bigger the page got. When we added the individual topic guides, for example, we trebled the size of the page by adding the links for each individual topic guide.
Ultimately that makes it increasingly difficult for you guys to find what you are looking for, despite the quick links and other elements.
We’ve now changed all this and split the single, big, monolithic page of *every* piece of documentation that we create, and instead spread the documentation out over a number of pages. The actual documentation itself remains the same, and we still have the same range of documentation (in fact, it’s increased slightly as I’ve been able to squeeze in a few more formats and topic guide docs), but everything is still there.
The key is the new sub-navigation bar that the Web team have provided us with:
The pages have been split out as follows:
We are aware of a few issues with some of the links to some documentation, and I’m working right now to address those problems, but all the documentation should be there and available. If it isn’t, please report a Bug.
We have lots of things on the go right now (over and above the normal process of keeping things up to date), and one of the main projects for me is to do a complete rebuild of the installation chapter (Installing and Upgrading MySQL). I’ll be starting with the 5.1 manual, then the 5.4 manual. Any future manuals should be based on these so we should be up to date for future generations.
What I’m doing:
In practice that means for at least the next month or so you will see a number of improvements and restructuring in the installation chapter for 5.1 and later manuals.
I already have a list of about 35 items that need to be addressed, over and above the list above, but feel free to provide any additional suggestions and I’ll see what I can do to fit them in.