The Salar de Uyuni is so bizarre that I have always found it difficult to explain well to others. Ethan Todras-Whitehill does a really nice job of capturing the essence of the Salar, though. It’s a bit overwhelming to stand on a 4,000 square mile plain of crunchy salt, with tall mountains barely visible on the horizon in most directions. The mountains look deceptively small, because the terrain is so flat and unchanging for so far that you can’t quite tell how far away they really are.

The slideshow accompanying the article has a photo of a room in one of the hotels made from salt blocks, but I prefer my photo of the dining room at Palacio de Sal.

Ethan also writes about doing a downhill bike ride on the Death Road, which a friend of a co-worker is also doing soon, though on a motorcycle. I can hardly wait to hear about her experience after she returns. I was shocked at first to hear about the ride, but then I learned that a new road for cars and trucks opened in March 2007, so the dangerous, narrow road is now shared only with a small amount of local traffic. During our trips in 1993 and 1999 on that road, the risk of collision with another car or truck was very high. I doubt my heart rate dropped much below 120 during those drives. I’m sure that it’s still a white-knuckle descent, though. Even if you’re not on a ridiculously narrow gravel road (which supported two-way car and truck traffic when we did it!), winding around hairpin turns, driving through waterfalls that wash across the road, and staring over the edge down multi-thousand feet sheer cliffs, a 12 thousand foot drop over 40 miles is pretty steep.

This photo shows the view from Coroico back to the road. The part of the road you see is probably the safest, least scary, segment. The road twists around the corner and then hugs the mountainside as it twists up and around into the clouds.

However, a group of some of the most prominent technical employees at MySQL have been joined by community members to create a fork of MySQL Server called Drizzle. Drizzle is “being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture”, partially by stripping away some of the enterprise database features, e.g., stored procedures, triggers, etc., that are much less important for highly scalable web applications.

Since Drizzle doesn’t have to satisfy paying enterprise customers, the team working on the project is better able, at least for now, to take on enhancements like the EBay and Google patches. Currently, the MySQL community edition is very similar to the enterprise edition. However, it seems that it is not common for features to appear in the community edition before appearing in the enterprise edition. In fact, there have been some proposals that it work in the opposite direction.

This is very unlike the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a much more experimental OS than RHEL, in that new features tend to show up sooner in Fedora. Also, just because Fedora adopts or drops a feature doesn’t mean that RHEL will do the same. Fedora is not a beta version of the next release of RHEL.

While Drizzle may range even farther afield of the MySQL community and server editions than does Fedora from RHEL, I think this relationship will greatly benefit MySQL in the long run. Many of the likely users of Drizzle are probably the least likely to be paying customers of MySQL. However, if they need a more traditional enterprise database server for another project, they are more likely to turn to MySQL Server. While not the same feature set, the transition would obviously be a lot less disruptive than going to a totally different database server. Also, Drizzle should provide the kind of testing ground for new features that it seems like MySQL community edition has yet to become.

Although being able to go there on any Friday was great, I had been wondering how long they could keep it up. I usually made it only once a month anyway due to other plans, so I’ll just have to plan farther in advance.

While I am thrilled they have finished brewing a batch of Black Bottom Lager, I’m even more excited that the city will be inspecting their equipment very soon, possibly this coming week. Hopefully, that will lead to PG&E hooking them up with gas to run the brewery.

mysql> help replace;
Name: 'REPLACE'
Description:
Syntax:
REPLACE(str,from_str,to_str)

Returns the string str with all occurrences of the string from_str
replaced by the string to_str. REPLACE() performs a case-sensitive
match when searching for from_str.

URL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-functions.html

Examples:
mysql> SELECT REPLACE('www.mysql.com', 'w', 'Ww');
        -> 'WwWwWw.mysql.com'

The UPDATE query below is pretty similar to what I needed to do, i.e., remove some characters from the end of a varchar column. The LIKE clause I’ve used in the query ensures that “cruft” is replaced only if it appears at the end of the string.

mysql> CREATE TABLE tbl (col varchar(20));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.41 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO tbl VALUES ('cruft_front'), ('some_cruft_in_middle'), ('end_cruft');
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 3  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> UPDATE tbl SET col = REPLACE(col_name, 'cruft', '') WHERE col LIKE '%cruft';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from tbl;
+----------------------+
| col                  |
+----------------------+
| cruft_front          |
| some_cruft_in_middle |
| end_                 |
+----------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Apparently, the US Census team was so uncertain of the post Katrina population in Bay St. Louis they used a “Z” in place of a number for 2006 and 2007. They did the same for Pass Christian, Long Beach and Waveland. So then I decided to look at their estimates for nearby cities.

The population decrease in New Orleans has been written about quite a bit, but it is still startling to see the numbers next to each other. I don’t remember seeing population data for the Mississippi coastal cities.

I had been looking for an excuse to play around with the Google Charts API. Here’s a graph of the population decreases for some of the cities.

I did see the aftermath of two accidents just after the rest stop at West Side school. The road there was in especially bad shape. One person crashed on the descent and got some minor cuts and bruises. While the EMTs were treating that person, someone else crashed in almost the same spot. She looked very stunned while sitting by the side of the road being treated. The EMT said her injuries were fairly minor, too. I hope they both were okay, since that is a sucky way to end a ride, which I know from experience.

The food at the rest stops was extensive and tasty (melon, oranges, grapes, bananas, pretzels, cookies, Odwalla energy bars, PB&Js on wheat, etc.). Lunch included delicious veggie pizza, pasta salad, black bean salad, sparkling juice drinks from Sonoma Sparkler, ice cream sundaes from Clover, and lots more. At first, I thought I must have put on weight due to all the food I ate, but I ended up breaking even.

Love this cartoon by Ben Sargent on the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch. Over the last few months I’ve turned on quite a few friends to the rich and varied aroma and flavors of Belgian beers. Although it’s just a cartoon, I agree with William that you obviously shouldn’t stereotype the palette of a person based on their appearance. I’ve met plenty of people whose appearance belies their appreciation for food and drink of complex flavors. And, of course, many highly sophisticated people who are content with rarely straying from the bland likes of fast food, Coke, Pepsi, Bud and Corona.

Via William Brand’s blog via Jay Brook’s blog.

The Best of the East Bay party blew me away. It’s estimated that over 4,000 people attended. There were four stages with live bands playing all night. Lots of delicious foods and drinks (I enjoyed a very nice macchiato from Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden) were available. The whole museum, except the parts they are refurbishing, was open. There was a mini skateboard park with ramps just below the sculpture gardens. Splash Circus was there with a roughly 35-feet tall tripod from which girls were performing acrobatics on ropes and fabric, a la Cirque du Soleil. Kid’s band performances, a guy typing out poems on an old typewriter, film screenings, bands like The Uptones and Flipper, and much more.

And most amazingly, we didn’t see a single security guard or policeman the entire time, and we also didn’t see a single sign of trouble anywhere. Everyone was in a great mood. So forget what you think you know about Oakland.

Saturday night we opened up a 1993 Boony Doon Le Cigare Volant. Lately I have had bad luck with some of my older wines being corked, but this wine was in great shape. It was very smooth and had a delicate cherry taste.

As the trunk continues to deteriorate rapidly, I’ve had to prune the limbs back severely to keep the tree from leaning over too much. Maybe I unknowingly did a great pruning job last fall. If so, it was complete luck.

The July issue of Wired has a review of a couple of cyclo-cross bikes. The review was written by a member of Team Oakland, which I’m also a member of, and the reviewers were racers from the racing team part of our club, Kaiser Permanente/Team Oakland, including one of my friends. I think the $6,000 Moots Psychlo-X is way more bike than I need, though I do love the name.