Gavin's blog

Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud is a great examine of '50s French film noir. It's available now on DVD and is a great introduction to the style. The sound track, by Miles Davis, is a classic. Perhaps one of the best sound tracks to any film I've seen.

The title translates as Lift to the Gallows. It's a strange title and the film itself plays with it as the male lead finds himself trapped in a lift, between two murders.

That said, it is not an overly serious film (by French standards) and has a lot for all audiences to enjoy. Seeing the beautiful Jeanne Moreau walk the streets of Paris at midnight, to the sounds of Miles Davis ... c'est tres bon.

That sounds about right.

You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 100% Angry Atheist 67% Apathetic Atheist 58% Militant Atheist 50% Spiritual Atheist 42% Agnostic 25% Theist 0% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Strange quiz.

I've been to Zilver in haymarket a few times now. This place has amazingly good yum cha. Check out the line up.





So, get there early.

Yesterday, there were a lot of celebrations making the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's a pretty remarkable bridge: the sheer size, the understated simplicity of its design and the fact that it was built during the Great Depression. It was looking great last night.

This week has been fairly exhausting. I'm in San Mateo at Greenplum, as I noted in an earliar post. Today, we worked further on the internals of window functions -- representational issues and the like. Seems like we didn't get much done but it will pay off in the future -- that is, next Monday when I'll start hacking for real. A lot of the parser is stitched up already. This is usually trivial but the grammar for window specifications is impressively complex. The parallelism is going to be hairy, as well.

Lots of the new Greenplum guys are enamoured of ZFS. Now that it's open source, I'm kind of tempted to start hacking on it. The thing is, it seems to implement semantics interesting to database kernel hackers: reliable writes through checksums, non-overwriting storage and I think the kind of atomicity which might make implementing snapshot isolation through the file system possible. Hard core. The thing is, it seems to have been specifically designed to make life hard for databases -- particularly PostgreSQL's non-overwriting MVCC layer and its use of hint bits.

This is a bad thing about being in Australia: the ZFS guys are just down the road and Greenplum's tight relationship with Sun would make it very easy to meet up with the ZFS core developers, who are just down the road, and talk to them about some low level changes which may help massive databases -- like granular control of caching and readahead policy, contiguous allocate of files in ways that help Postgres's fairly brain dead file extension mechanism and even physical data replication and the like. Unfortunately, I am heading home tomorrow. C'est la vie.

Despite being tired, I impressed myself by actually cooking dinner in the hotel room this evening.



It looks better than it tasted. Sigh. I'm drinking wine and eating cheese instead! Such an unhealthy lifestyle.

Being in San Francisco to visit Greenplum to work through the integration of window functions into Postgres and MPP, I decided to give a talk at SFPUG. It's just an introductory talk but if you haven't looked at them before it might be interesting.

As many in the database industry will already know, the pioneering computer science researcher Jim Gray did not return home Sunday from what should have been a straight forward solo sailing trip.

I have long been inspired, influenced and excited by Gray's research. His influence on the industry has been immeasurable. Just now, it has been announced that the coast guard have ended the air and sea search for him. This is very sad news. I am hoping that somehow, Jim is okay; that this is a mistake; that he is somewhere safe...

No doubt this is some handy work by Newtown youths late at night. It's been like this for a while, though.





The photo isn't great quality. It was taken on a phone... while I was (meant to be) driving.

I've been buying unground Campos Superior from Campos in Newtown, Sydney for 10 or 11 years. I figure I've bought well over 120 kgs in that time.

Campos has changed a lot over the years. When I first started visiting Campos it was a sleepy store which sold only beans and coffee accoutrement. The original owner was, I believe, bought off the owner by some of the baristas. Campos still sells great freshly roasted coffee beans but seems to make a killing converting coffee beans into espresso.





Notice that there are two espresso machines and lots of cups. Behind me were 20 odd people sipping flat whites amongst roasting equipment. Campos seems just as busy as my other two prefered cafes in Sydney: Bertoni Casalinga and Mecca. The ristretto at Campos is very good, with excellent richness and length. Huge flavour profile. Mecca is probably slightly better. With the departure of my favourite barista, Laura, from Bertoni they've sadly slipped behind in the espresso quality stakes.

I recently learnt of some perigord truffles being imported into Australia. I ordered about 350 grams -- more than $1000 worth! -- and started making plans.

There were some problems for the importers and the shipment was delayed. The fragility of the truffle means it has to be handled with extreme care. If one was to be quarantined by customs, it would be ruined. Despite the problems and an arduous trip from France by plane, these truffles are even better than those I've had in Europe.

When I received them, I inspected them, cleaned them and removed a small amount of mould on one. Luckily, it didn't not affect the truffle. In fact, that truffle has proved the most flavoursome!

I have cooked many dishes over the last few days with them. Truffles bring out complex flavours in rich foods. They seem to go best with eggs and poultry. I've cooked scrambled eggs, omlettes, fried eggs, chicken and duck. I've used them to make sauces. I've infused cheeses with them. By far the best dish was a home made pasta with truffle shavings and truffled eggs.





The flavour was very fine, complex and wholesome. The thing I love most about truffles is that they elevate well made but otherwise humble food to amazing heights.

Last night I had nine enthusiasts for dinner. We consumed over $500 worth of truffles in about 10 dishes. Naturally, we consumed then with some fine wine. Read more about that here.

I just finished reading The Immoralist by André Gide. This book has a peculiar pace and feel -- something I am attracted to. Michel's attraction to naughty boys, to his new wife's expense, is not so much sinister as sad. One couldn't write this kind of book today.

Michel is an interesting character. There is a blinding effect when he moves amongst these boys. The only time he indicates pleasure in relation to them is when they steal or misbehave. All of this runs in contradiction to his (former) scholarly life. Of course, he is the immoral one, rather than the boys.

The book reminds me very much of The Conformist by Moravia which has the same slow, contemplative feel. In both books, the protagonist conveys a confused and disturbed mental state but doesn't try to come to terms with it. In The Conformist, pederism leads to an emotional detachment. The protagonist also has a confusing relationship with his wife.

I also recently read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. (I notice, to my dismay, a film in pre-production. A very long book like this rarely translates well to film, I think. Johnny Depp is cast as Lindays, he will do well but is too comical.)

The book itself is interesting for its insight into cosmopolitan India. Though an easy and face paced read, it could have been a lot shorter. Roberts had a lot to say but should have left some things for future novels. Shantaram read more like a series of short stories, derived from his time in India. Regardless, if did communicate to me an exciting quality about life in India, something I hadn't understood before.

I recently hosted the PostgreSQL miniconf at linux.conf.au. I think it went very well.

The opening talk of the day, Getting Started With PostgtreSQL, was very well attended. Many people had to sit on the floor and about 5 or 10 people stood at the door. I was very impressed with such a large turn out.

Following this, Finlay Thompson from Catalyst IT New Zealand, presented a case study on his project managing the New Zealand electoral roll. 50GB database, lots of redundancy and a pretty good pace of development. ComputerWorld wrote it up.

After a break we moved upstairs. The organisers realised, I guess, that the PostgreSQL miniconf was quite popular and we got a much larger room. The more advanced talks, The PostgreSQL Professional and Getting More Out of PostgreSQL seemed generally well received and was pleased particularly with the latter, as it presented some SQL people seemed not to have considered before.

The day finished off with an Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL -- the third time I've given this talk now. It went very smoothly, I think. I'm looking forward to delivering an improved talk with a different patch at PG Con 2007.

All the slides for the talks can be found here.

As an aside, the thing I am most unhappy about with this talk is the presentation of the source code. If you've attended it, you'll recall that I distribute relevant source code on print outs and display some on the screen. This is confusing for most people, surely. Also, being familiar with the code I can move through it very quickly. The subtleties -- surely one of the key points of the talk -- are missed. I've thought of experimenting with walking through a diff chunk by chunk but that adds an extra prerequiste for attendees. I've thought of highlighting changes with a shading on the hand out. This, however, wouldn't show code that has changed. Let me know if you have ideas.

Finally, thanks to all those who attended the miniconf.