Mike Kruckenberg

The Kruckenberg Ear Index

Some time ago we had a dinner discussion that got onto the topic of ear sizes. Heidi made some statement about ears being full size early on, or never stopping growing, or some interesting piece of ear trivia that got us talking about ears. This led to a cursory review of each family members ears, which quickly led to a more scientific approach to determining how each members ears measured up.

The scientific data gathering included taking a napkin around the table, holding the napkin up to each person's ear and marking the distance from the ear lobe to the top of the ear. The results were predictable, with one surprise in that Heidi had the longest ears of all. I find it interesting the relatively small difference between a 2-year old ear and that of an adult. 3/8" is all that 35 years will add to Saul's ears.

At the time we didn't consider measuring ear protrusion, or the distance an ear sticks out to the side of one's head. Based on informal research, Saul easily takes the cake, although it might be a proportional thing where at a young age the ear appears to stick out more.

Anyhow, supposing this to be interesting research history for us sometime down the road, and on the off chance our results might be interesting to someone else, I'm posting the visual results.

A Week in Puerto Rico

We're about halfway through a trip to Puerto Rico, somewhat aligning with a break in the kids school. It has been fantastic, we've had a chance to see a lot of different things on the island. We're enjoying the culture and weather, and wishing we knew more Spanish (although we're getting through with the bare essentials, like El baño).

A brief synopsis:

April 24: fly to San Juan in the morning, spend day in Old San Juan, drive to Mayaguez
April 25: sightseeing in Mayaguez, evening at beach in Rincon, late-night visit to Plaza Colon
April 26: drive to Ponce for lunch and sightseeing, continue on to Luqillo
April 27: relax at condo, play games, do a puzzle, go for leisurely walk
April 28: morning at Playa Azul (beach), afternoon at condo pool
April 29: morning at rain forest, afternoon at condo pool and Luquillo beach
April 30: fly back to Boston

We've put a few selected photos up in the gallery.

All the Reasons to Attend 2008 MySQL Conference

If there ever was a year to be at the MySQL conference, this seems to be it. The keynote lineup has always been excellent, and this year looks to be no exception. I'm guessing there will be quite a round of applause when Jonathan Schwartz takes the stage (slightly more vigorous from MySQL stockholders).

If that's not compelling enough, Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon) will talk about building the Amazon infrastructure, the scaling MySQL keynote panel (with representatives from Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and MySQL) is sure to provide some valuable notes, and Raj Cherabuddi will talk about the new Kickfire appliance with SQL-processing chip. And that's just a few of the keynotes. Other notable companies with speakers include Google, Digg, Twitter, New York Times, Ebay, Ticketmaster, Stumbleupon, Sxip, Six Apart, and a slew of others that probably deserve to get mentioned.

And there's no shortage of technical content. Personally, Monday's MySQL Proxy: The Complete Tutorial by Giuseppe and Jan looks fantastic. A great chance to get fully up to speed on something I think is going to become increaslingly important in building MySQL systems.

I won't be there this year, decided a few months back to sit out this year (yes, it is ironic given this post...I'm questioning that decision now that I look over the conference program). I'm hoping bloggers will be in full force.

R.E.M. Plays SXSW

The SXSW Conference seems to be coming up on my radar more this year than it ever has in the past. Came up again yesterday when R.E.M. did a show at Stubbs as a part of the conference, which was broadcast and archived on NPR.

What's impressive about this show is the range of their music catalog they touched. As a fan from the "early" days I was pleased to hear tunes from Reckoning (Second Guessing), Fables of the Reconstruction (Auctioneer), Life's Rich Pageant (Fall on Me). Looking forward to hearing the new stuff from Accelerate when I can get my hands on it.

Will have to see if I can swing seeing R.E.M. play in Boston this summer.

Inline Web Browser File Upload

I'm tackling a project where we're trying to simplify the way users add attachments to various parts of our site. This involves some reorganizing of workflow, but also could benefit from a more modern mechanism for uploading files.

Our art director (where this idea started) pointed me to SWFUpload, which seems like a very slick option using Flash. Initially I thought this was the right way to go.

However, after some asking around I was pointed to jqUploader, a jQuery plugin that also uses a bit of Flash. Since we already use jQuery I figured this might be a good option since we're versed in jQuery and already have some architecture in place to readily support jQuery plugins.

But then in discussions with other members on our engineering team I was encouraged to look at pure JavaScript methods for doing this, where a standard form is submitted and Ajax uploads the file with a second Ajax request going back to get progress indicators. I have been able to find a few articles about doing this, but not a drop-in solution like SWFUpload or jqUploader.

While digging around for pure JavaScript solution I stumbled into this over on ThinkingPHP, a note on the top of an older post about JavaScript/Ajax file uploading:

Important Warning: The code presented her was an experiment of mine that I did over a year ago. In the meantime flash based file uploaders have become a much better weapon of choice when it comes to unobtrusive upload experience enhancing. As of now I highly recommend you to checkout either jqUploader or SWFUpload as I am no longer able to provide support for this solution. Setting them up should be multiple times easier and will require no Perl or (Cake)PHP on the server side.

LightLoader is another pure Ajax uploader/file progress indicator. Runs PHP on the server side. Uber-uploader is another one, server side stuff available in a number of open source languages.

Now, for some digging around in our code to try some of these out...

jqUploader Notes

I've gotten the jQuery plugin working, but there are some things that I don't like. First, the Flash UI has some issues. There are a few settings that allow you to control presentation, but not enough. I can control the background color, and some portions of the text that is displayed for the user. The positioning of the input box and message area on the Flash are indented so they don't align with other elements on the page. I think it's annoying that an long empty rectangle sits in the widget at all times. When you upload a file you realize that it's the progress bar, but I don't think there's a need to show it unless you're actually uploading.

I also don't like the fact that you browse and then upload, independent of what is happening on the form. It seems to make more sense to "browse" and then "save" the page, with the upload happening as a part of the save.

Last complaint, there are a lot of reported issues that really make for uncertainty about using this solution. I'm digging around at the HTTPS issues that seems to cause an I/O error when trying to use a secure connection. These documents have some clues about what is going on. Oh, and here's a good article about how to debug Flash via a browser plugin. More info on the HTTPS problem. As far as HTTPS, I have confirmed the following snips from the comments on this document to be true in Flash 9:

!! Warning for Mac player !! When you use the FileReference.upload(), the class add the port 80 to the request! For example, with the url http://www.nectil.com/upload.php the real query will be sent at http://www.nectil.com:80/upload.php. Please, Flash player team, remove the :80 !!! It's impossible to send it over HTTPS for mac users!
...
I have had a similar situation using HTTPS on both Mac and Windows Flash Players. I can get .upload to work correctly on Mac Safari and Windows IE through HTTPS if I put the fully-qualified path, including the SSL port 443, in the url parameter like so:
file.upload("https://www.somesite.com:443/cgi-bin/someScript.sh");

My final tests demonstrate that with Flash file uploads, HTTPS is not reliable. With the workaround you can get it to work in some browsers, but not all.

This all being said, it is really simple to put jqUploader on the page and get inline uploads going in just a few steps, so long as you're using HTTP.

SWFUpload Notes

I got SWFUpload working, and really like the way it fits right into our form using standard HTML elements. However, there is the same issue with HTTPS. SWFUpload mentions it in the documentation's Known Issues:

There have been some reports that the Flash Player cannot upload through SSL. The issue has not been pinned down but uploading over SSL may be unreliable.

I can get the upload to work just fine using standard HTTP, but HTTPS fails with an I/O error. We run strictly in HTTPS on our production site.

Pure Ajax Notes

I was hoping that one of the Flash "drop-in" solutions would do the trick, but it seems like the pure Ajax method is going to get some attention. These two articles were send to me as other sources of documentation.

Mini Cooper Coming Soon...

Saturday we went and paid for this little guy, picking it up on Wednesday.

Macworld 2008 Comes to a Close

It has been a good week here in San Francisco at Macworld 2008. The Moscone West was once bustling with folks but is now very quiet with only a few folks lingering. Looking down to the street there are still a lot of folks walking between the two expo halls on the ground floor of Moscone South and West.

I haven't blogged much this week. I attended some great sessions, but was also working which meant there was not a lot of time for leisure.

I'm interested to see how my thoughts about attending Macworld settle over the next few months. Was definitely worth it, but wonder if it's a one-time experience or if I'll feel compelled to come back again. The most obvious highlight was getting to see Steve Jobs deliver one of his famous Macworld keynotes in person. Another was meeting some people who I've known on email and phone but never met in person. Finally, there were a bunch of good things I learned in sessions and wandering around the showroom floor (which was quite packed with good hardware, software, and more). I guess seeing the MacBook Air in person just a few minutes after it was released was pretty cool too. If I traveled a lot I would totally sign up for one of those.

A little sad that it is coming to an end. But it is good to be headed home and back to the regular routine for a little while.

p.s. - I rented two movies from iTunes for the flight home, synced to my iPhone this afternoon

The Designers Role in Sustainable Practice

Listening to Nathan Shedroff at Macworld 2008 talking about sustainability as it pertains to designers. Some designers have direct impact on sustainability due to product manufacturing, packaging etc. But designers also have an impact on sustainability in how they deliver a message. There are lots of social issues to consider in design, and how the design impacts behavior.

Sustainability is defined as "use and development that meets today's needs without preventing those needs from being met by future generations."

Very interesting presentation about tradeoffs between different issues. Compares Prius to Hummer, paper bag to plastic bag, and paper cup to ceramic mug. Uses some different methodologies for comparing how sustainable different products are.

Fantastic News for MySQL and Sun

A lot is being said about Sun's acquisition of MySQL. I think it is great news. Congratulations to the MySQL folks.

I have a lot of respect for Sun from using their systems for many years. In recent years they have moved in a good direction with respect to open source. Having MySQL under their umbrella is excellent news for them. For MySQL, being tied to Sun seems like a great place to move.

Will be very interesting to see where this goes over the next few years and how MySQL benefits from being part of Sun.

At Macworld 2008 Keynote

I will not be providing ongoing updates like macrumors and many other sites, but I am sitting in my seat waiting for the Macworld 2008 keynote to start. Got to Moscone West this morning about 7:30 and got in almost immediately. Then waited outside the keynote room in the hall for ~45 minutes before they let us into the room.

Should be starting any minute now.

And there he is...

Professional Photoshop (Macworld 2008)

First day of MacWorld 2008 is sitting in a Photoshop tutorial with Michael Ninness (Adobe Systems). Back in the days of Photoshop 3 and 4 I knew everything there was to know about Photoshop. As I transitioned from graphics and design into software engineering I've tried to keep up, but definitely not like I used to. I have used Photoshop over the years for work when the expertise was needed and for all kinds of personal/family things. Looking forward to getting a crash course to get more up to speed. I'm doing more with Photoshop at work these days as the lead of a UI upgrade project.

Michael is using Photoshop CS3 (me too!).

First section of the two-day tutorial is an hour and a half of power shortcuts, including Photoshop configuration, settings, keys.

Someone asks about Lightroom/Aperture vs Photoshop. Michael only uses Photoshop when specific pixels need to be touched, for photo management Photoshop isn't necessary.

Michael starts by giving a nice overview of the CS3 UI changes and ways to organize the workspace. Very helpful. I waste a lot of time because I don't have panels I use most exposed and the stuff I never use hidden.

Goes through all of the keyboard shortcut to change the tools (move, clone, text, brush), and some used for control:

[ makes a brush smaller, ] makes a brush larger
x swaps the foreground/background color on the pallete
any number sets the opacity
cmd-option-J duplicates layer and prompts for new layer name
ctrl click on image shows list of layers to activate
option key always makes a shortcut better
ctrl-tab cycles through images
cmd-option-shift-e creates a layer that is a collapsed version of all visible layers (for preserving the image as-is as a place to revert to)

I know a handful of these that I use all the time and I can't imagine having to use the GUI for, I really need to know more shortcuts.

Also, CS3 has a new brush cursor option, lets you see the entire area affected by the brush and the cursor shows the gradient/fade at the edge of the brush. Definitely switching to that.

Michael talks about some practical jokes to play with Photoshop. Since each menu command is scriptable you can do things like when a file is opened run a script to rotate it 180 degrees, or whenever a user creates a new file close the application.

Two new features in CS3 that are awesome for merging/tiling photos. Auto align layers lets you get multiple photos lined up exactly. Useful for taking multiple photos of the same thing and then getting them aligned correctly. Auto blend magically removes seams on photos that are tiled on top of each other.

Another awesome command is the lens correction filter, lets you adjust the image in all kinds of ways. Michael shows an example of fixing a problem with camera angle.

The tutorial included a DVD with 90% of what Michael went over.

Made it to San Francisco for MacWorld

Late afternoon flight from Boston puts me in San Francisco tonight to get ready for MacWorld starting tomorrow. I am staying somewhere near Nob Hill for the week, will be getting plenty of exercise walking to and from the convention center.

iPhone is my camera for the week, so there won't be anything fancy.

Remove Mirror Effect on Leopard Dock (Cleaner Look)

While the new 3D dock that comes with Apple's OS X Leopard is flashy, I find it hard to quickly understand what the dock is supposed to tell me. The two problem areas are (1) that it reflects things that are near it on the desktop and (2) the indicator that an application is running got changed from the simple triangle icon to a white dot which is hard to see on the white dock surface.

Here's my dock:

The reflections of my application windows make the dock look cluttered. And it isn't immediately obvious which programs are running because the white indicators get lost.

So I've poked around and discovered that you can easily shut off the reflectiveness of the dock, with a simple command-line option:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Doesn't this look much better?

Definitely not as slick, but so much easier to quickly see what is there and active.

Fixing Broken MySQL Database Replication

And just as I was saying I rarely get to fiddle with databases at work, this morning I resolved an issue with replication.

One of our database machines got rebooted yesterday without properly shutting down replication. The slave server had no idea this was happening. After looking around a bit it seems clear that MySQL on the master has moved to recording changes in a new log file, but the slave is still attempting to read from the old.

Which results in something like:
Slave_IO_Running: No Slave_SQL_Running: Yes

After verifying the log positions in master and slave binary log files to confirm exactly where things stopped, I shut down the slave processes altogether and issue a command to point the slave to the new log file and reset the log position:

mysql> CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_LOG_FILE='data15-bin.000030', MASTER_LOG_POS=4;

Start replication back up, the slave scrambles a bit to get caught up, and we're back to another period of not having to do anything to keep MySQL running.

Where's Mike and MySQL?

Have been thinking about my lack of postings . . . there are two reasons why posting about MySQL (and in general) has become rare in recent months.

First, and primarily, it is because of life changes. Where I used to have a moment here and there to write what was happening or on my mind, I'm barely able to post about anything these days. The whole time and season thing seems to be at play here.

Second, I just don't spend that much time fiddling with MySQL. It used to be that my work brought up lots of interesting things related to the database. I'm still the resident MySQL guy at my current job, but it's rare that something comes up that requires database expertise. And it's not that we're lightweights. We have a very high-volume system with a farm of database servers doing some pretty intense business/enterprise-level querying. We just don't find many issues that require attention down at the database level.

Some folks might wonder if I've run off in a different direction because of these concerns. Not true.