Eric Bergen

….caps lock key. today is international caps lock day. i’m not going to link anywhere because i don’t want this disease to continue to spread. continuing the recent negative-nancy theme of my blog i’m voting to put a stop to this shit too. as part of my protest this blog entry will be in lower case. i’m very happy today to say that i don’t have a caps lock key. the designers of my keyboard of champions ditched that useless annoyance and replaced it with control. yes folks, my keyboard may be small and cute but control is where it won’t torque my wrist out of it’s socket just to change desktops.

talk like a pirate day is bad enough. now not only are people declaring bullshit months but they are declaring bullshit days as well. at least talk like a pirate day is somewhat creative. this is just stupid.

If you can remember back to mid ’05 when MySQL 5.0 was being released there was something missing. I have been thinking about writing about MySQL 5.0 being released too soon but I don’t think that was the case. Was 5.1 released too late? Maybe. Was something wrong with the 5.0 -> 5.1 schedule and feature set? Oh yeah.

Looking back at the change logs for 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1 I noticed something that I hadn’t though about before. I knew there was a difference in the release dates for 5.0->5.1 from 4.1->5.0 but I didn’t realize how drastic the difference was until I drew it out (on paper, sorry) today. Here is a summary of the major milestones from 4.1 Alpha to today:

• Apr 03 – 4.1 Alpha
• Dec 03 – 5.0 Alpha
• Jul 04 – 4.1 Beta
• Aug 04 – 4.1 Gamma
• Oct 04 – 4.1 Release
• Mar 05 – 5.0 Beta (Where is 5.1 Alpha?)
• Sep 05 – 5.0 Gamma.
• Nov 05 – 5.1 Alpha (Oh! Here it is!)

There is a 6 month period where 4.1 and 5.0 are simultaneously in alpha. 4.1 was in beta for 2 months and gamma for 2 months. 5.0 was in beta for 6 months and gamma for 1 month. 5.0 was in beta for 4 months longer than 4.1 but was in gamma for only a month. Does this mean that 5.0 was in beta too long or wasn’t in gamma for long enough. I think it was the latter and Jeremy seems to agree.

Why am I writing about this now? This post has been braincrack for quite a while. What brought it back to the surface is Kaj’s blog entry about MySQL Community/Enterprise, “This way, contributors don’t have to wait until the next major release for their improvements to get into use, and enterprise users can continue using 5.0 without seeing any destabilisation of the code base due to new functionality being introduced.” I think we have to wait because 5.1 wasn’t developed in parallel with 5.0 like 4.1 and 5.0 were. I can’t think of a valid reason for 5.1 not to follow the same pattern as 5.0.

I think the short gamma period for 5.0 was caused by Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase. 5.0 was in beta for 4 months longer than 4.1 and yet only in gamma for 1 month. It was released a few weeks after the announcement. On a side note, I’m happy that Oracle presented a few new features at the user conference showing that they aren’t going to kill innodb and are continuing development of it.

Declaring a month is when a group of people/company whatever says that it’s national something month. Some are non profit ‘poetry month’, ‘violence awareness month’, and ‘breast cancer awareness month’. Others are purely profit driven. Domino’s national pizza month is a great example of this. Way to try to ride the coat tails of black history month on that one Domino’s, you pricks. I’m ok with black history month and cancer awareness month (not breast cancer but all kinds of cancer). I think we’re almost to the point where black history month can be taken back to a week or two but it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is all the others. The copy cats that are trying to gain more awareness of themselves by declaring a month. These people can die in fire.

If you own a company and your marketing team tries to declare a month for your product, fire them. Then kill yourself for hiring such a shitty marketing team. Having a worthy cause does not mean you get to declare a month for it. Months are limited we can’t be declaring them for random crap. Besides this whole month thing could backfire. Is violence awareness month about being aware of violence? What should I do when that’s over with? I know! I’ll beat the shit out of people that declare months! Better yet let’s all make the people declaring new months aware of violence by kicking the shit out of them!

Using the word ‘national’ doesn’t make it any more official. It’s not endorsed by the government, nobody cares, die in fire.

Now I’ve got myself so worked up that I can’t keep what I want to rant about straight in my brain. I should have been nicer to ‘violence awareness month’ but it just happend to be the first one that came up. This issue isn’t worth that kind of anger built up. I’m done.