The Ji Village News

季庄新闻–Haidong Ji’s Blog

小学春假，今天儿子在朋友家睡觉。我和老婆有了点闲空。

就和老婆一起看《天下无贼》，很好的一部电影。我想起1990至1994去厦大做火车的时候，俺娘都是把那六七百块钱（我记得应当不到一千）缝在我内裤里带着。这四五十个小时的火车，葛优和刘德华就不要打这笔钱的主意了，李冰冰还可能有点戏。在那绿皮车里，我睡过行李架上和车椅下面，在厕所、过道、车缝间一站就是几个小时。有一次幸运有了个靠窗的座，但那竟成了乘客上下车的通道。1990年是第一次出远门儿，还记得第一次在火车上说普通话的窘迫，虽然晨读时普通话自我感觉良好。

完了一起看CCTV的改革开放30年来的百首金曲，第一集。那些老歌，《年轻的朋友来相会》，《我们的生活充满阳光》，等等等等，勾起了那么多的回忆。谢谢老婆，这些节目她看不太懂，但知道这些歌对我的意义，所以和我一起欣赏。我跟着歌手哼唱，不时给她翻译一些。她看字幕看哪个字认得。我记得我爸那时候喜欢在家里唱那些当时的流行歌曲。想起我爸的哼唱，就觉得特亲切。

岁月流逝，人生短暂。回头看我们这三十多年走过的路，有那么多的欣慰和感触。有时我会跟老婆说，谁能知道那个季庄农村里的光腚猴现在有了这样的家庭和生活？老婆就会说，你应当感谢你的父母，他们在困难的情况下给了你很好的教育，你才能有机会看看外面的世界。她说得当然有道理，这也是我支持海外中国教育基金和中华捐书会的原因。我感觉那个多背一公斤也挺不错的。

Once again this year, I will make a trip to Silicon Valley for MySQL related activities. I will arrive on April 19th and fly back on the 24th. Both the MySQL Camp and Percona conference have some impressive lineup of sessions. I will also be at the Drizzle Developer Day. Once again, like the previous year, my main objective is to learn, learn, and learn. Meeting people and networking are other objectives.

I am not too sure how many people actually follow my blog. Google feedburner says around 75 subscribers, but I think my blog is also consolidated by at least two feeds aggregrators, and I have no idea how many people they reach. Anyway, if you happen to read my humble blog and also attend the conference, I’d love to meet you.

PS. Just a few days ago, I happened to open my site in Internet Explorer, and realized the layout is all messed up, in that the right-hand menu is at the bottom of the page. It does display properly in Firefox. Any ideas on how to fix that for IE, dear reader? I don’t use IE unless I have to, hence the late discovery of this issue. 这下子臭大了, 汗.

Note: I am looking at some of older draft posts in my blog. I removed a few that just had a title there but no content. I saw this one, which looks half-done and was written close to 2 years ago, but I have no idea what I intended to write for the rest of the post. So here it is. In any event, a 32 ounce medium-sized drink bottle is something to behold! Large size drink holds around 42 ounces, which should be slightly more than 30% bigger than the one pictured below.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a rush and ordered a spicy grilled chicken sandwich from Wendy’s. I was thirsty too, so I requested a medium drink. I normally don’t go to fast food stores like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and such. When I do, I normally just ask for a cup of tap water. I was really surprised when the guy from the drive-thru window passed me this cup of drink:

He must have seen the expression on my face. Before I said anything, he smiled and said: “Yup, that is a MEDIUM drink”

The gigantic bottle actually wouldn’t fit inside the cup holder of my Neon. This experience reminded me that when I was in Xiamen University in the early 90′s, we were all excited when McDonald’s opened its first store on ZhongShan Lu. In fact, well-educated university students worked fairly hard to get a part-time job there. I flipped burgers and mopped floors there for a couple of weeks, and even got brave enough to court a nice looking McDonald’s colleague, before she scared me away with some strange stories.

Sql Server 2008 is here, and Microsoft is busy working on the next release. But let me tell you, there are still tons of Sql Server 2000 out there. So far this year, I spent well over 2/3 of my time working on Sql Server 2000 projects. Clients know they need to move to the next version, reluctantly. One of the major roadblock is SSIS. Companies have made huge investment in that technology and there are DTS packages all over the place. Sure, there is DTS Runtime, but upgrading the packages is a huge undertaking with a steep learning curve. Many people love DTS, because it really hits the sweet spot of simplicity and yet still being powerful enough to get things done.

Anyhow, since I work with Sql Server 2000 quite a bit, and may have to review or even code some Visual Basic 6 programs, I figured it was a good time to take a trip down memory lane: I started reading Ken Henderson’s The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals. I read it from cover to cover, with the exception of Notification Services, ODSOLE, and a few XML chapters. I’ve also compiled and ran many of his C Win32 API programs to get a better understanding of Windows internals. In addition, I had fun poking under the hood with WinDbg by following his exercises. (Earlier this year I did some exercise with the Linux debugger gdb, figuring out some simple problems with MySQL program written in C. In many ways, they are similar, based on my limited experience.) A hint for you if you decide to follow exercises in his book, for Chapter 3, 4, and 5, where he talked about processes and threads, memory, and I/O system, be sure to change the project to Debug mode. The code files from the CD put you in Release mode in Visual C++ 6.0.

Ken’s book got me interested in the impact of Solid State Disk on Sql Server. In Sql Server, UMS, or SQLOS, tries to keep things running as much as possible in user mode, as opposed to kernel mode, adopting a co-operative as opposed to preemptive model. And it uses mostly asynchronous I/O and scatter-gather I/O. With the emergence of Solid State Disk, I wonder what kind of impact, if any, there is for such an I/O intensive application as Sql Server.

Anyway, I really learned a lot from the book. Ken knew Sql Server inside out. Unfortunately, he passed away this year, and I wrote a tribute here.

I’ve learned from various sources on the web that Ken’s last book is more or less done before he passed away. I don’t know about you, I would love to read it. However, not wanting to be preposterous or disrespectful to his immediate families and friends, I’ve been quiet on it for a while. I did, however, sent an email to Addison-Wesley, asking the possibility of putting the book as Rough Cuts on Safari Books Online, but got no response from them.

In any event, with the PASS conference going on in Seattle now, I thought it is appropriate to honor Ken in some way during the event. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the conference due to schedule conflict. Like I said, Ken is such a wonderful, generous, kind-hearted human being who contributed so much to the community. He certainly earned my gratitude and utmost respect. I wonder if it would be a wonderful tribute to Ken, who is beloved by so many of his colleagues and Sql Server professionals who’ve read his Sql Server books, for PASS to somehow make Ken’s last book available.

刚结束一个客户的业务，修整了两个星期，就开始了另一个客户的工作。

总结这一年多来的自由职业者路程，随便写写。

1. 做得越多越感到自己的无知。感觉打好基本功最重要，要用一些时间把基本东西重温一下。不光是读书，更要动手。先从数据库方面的东西做起；
2. 一开始到华盛顿、纽约、波士顿和其它城市搞培训，会有新鲜感，可飞多了也就那么回事儿。可能在五六十岁时做培训会好一些，现在孩子小，经常飞来飞去不是办法。如果没其它生意那当然要另当别论:独立职业者，不干就没钱。不像打工者，时不早晚地可以混天聊日偷懒一下。不过时间安排允许的话，倒挺想到泛华语区做培训，开会演讲，或其它项目，因为那样会有机会到我眷恋的故国看看，慰籍一下思乡之情；
4. 有本地的、本人感兴趣的、稳定的中长期项目是目前看来最好的选择。和本地的业界人士及本地的咨询公司甚至猎头公司拉好关系很重要；
5. 做生产数据库管理员真得很辛苦，对生活的影响还是很大的。呼机、大哥大不离手会很烦，当然钱可能会比做研发好一些。生产数据库出问题时，优化，函数调试和比较，索引和统计的分析，数据的分化，并行处理，等等等等，有那么多的方方面面要考虑和协调，大家都会很紧张。墨菲定律，出问题都是晚上、周末，搞得人精疲力竭。遇上通情达理的客户和经理还好说，遇到脑残的很可能会有麻烦。话又说回来，要吃饭，想买房子，照顾家人，不工作挣钱怎么行？什么事情，都是利弊的权衡；
6. 现在帮客户做研发挺好的，因为有一段时间没鼓捣过了，兴致盎然。本身就有兴趣，再加上.Net开发和Sql Server的关联又大，岂不是一箭双雕？Linux，MySQL，Oracle等还是要搞一搞的，那玩意儿也有意思呀！
7. 看来有买无线游动上网服务的必要。大部分的客户把网上电邮封掉，但现在的手机合约到明年四月左右才到期：要自由，不交一些钱是不行地。有点儿舍不得，和老婆商量商量再说；
8. 要给家人写信和寄照片。

In my previous post, Fareed Zakaria and Wen Jiabao talked about the financial crisis and the fact that China holds so much of US Treasury Bills, and Wen’s belief that the United States is a credible country, and that this crisis could have global impact and major countries should work together. That’s all good, fine and dandy.

With this 700 billion dollars bailout plan, however, my personal opinion is that the American public and other major world economic players like China, Japan, the UK, Germany, and such, should know more before deciding to go along with it. I am glad that the first version was rejected at the House of Representatives. And if I could cast a vote, the second version should be rejected also, because I don’t think I have a good understanding of all the important details.

I am not saying that the situation is not serious and we should not do anything, but I believe we have been hoodwinked too many times by the fear-mongering tactics in the last eight years to give Bush, Cheney, and the people they are in bed with another easy pass. I certainly don’t want them to screw us up badly, with repercussions for decades to come, one more time before they go out of office in January. Yes, something needs to be done, and fairly quickly, but it needs to be done in a transparent manner, explaining pros and cons so people understand.

I thought Glenn Greenwald laid it out very nicely in these posts here:

Wash Post’s Pearlstein: Anyone opposing the bailout is ignorant
Bailout follows the 10 normal principles for how our government functions

Finally, after more than 2 years behind the latest release, I did the WordPress upgrade today. Let me know if there are any issues.

I’ve been using FeedBurner for RSS and ATOM feeds, and I know FeedBurner has been harmonized inside China. I thought about getting rid of FeedBurner and let people get the feed directly from my site, but I don’t know if that will generate additional load for me. The site has not been stable lately, due to issues at the hosting company.

本网站因用FeedBurner，所以RSS和ATOM输出被和谐了。据我所知，网站本身没被封。我现在考虑让FeedBurner下课，阅读器可以直接到这个网站来拿输出。但又怕因此给网站带来压力，因为我用的网络服务公司最近很差劲，要么奇慢，要么干脆不工作，把寡人气得不轻。不知各位看官意下如何，搞掉FeedBurner有无帮助？

My son

Party after the parents/children T-ball game. Parents team lost.

Showing off my athletic prowess during the parents/children and coaches game, my first-ever baseball game.

My son made it to the first base, where I was at.

My son’s beautiful birthday cake, baked by Mom!

My son’s birthday party with friends.

Bunny

Watching a baseball game

Running

I’ve been self-employed for more than one year now, and feel that there are a few things I need to adjust.

Part of the motivation of self-employment is to spend more time with the family, but that didn’t happen in the last year. In fact, I actually spent less time with my son than before I quit the job. And I’ve neglected his Chinese a little bit. That needs to be changed.

I’ve also struggled with how to best manage my time and routine. During my last full-time job, I had a stack of A4 printout that was no longer being used, and planned my day on the blank side of the paper. I would write down the date on top, scribble down tasks I needed to do that day, as detailed as possible, then prioritize the list by writing a number in front of each task, from 1 to 9, with 1 having the highest priority. I would go through my day based on that list and cross tasks off as I finish them. If tasks didn’t get completed during the day, I would copy that off to the next day. It worked really well for me.

For whatever reason, I’ve fallen off that wagon. I will start doing it again. I also need to discipline myself to go to bed earlier.

Managing schedule is another challenge. Sometimes clients call around the same time. I suppose how to balance that is an issue many of us (independents and/or small business owners) face.

We are also tidying up our condo, and hopefully will sell it soon. A little plug here: it is in a great location, walking distance to Metra, EL, downtown library, cinema, bookstores, restaurants, parks, all that good stuff. Dear reader, if you or somebody you know are interested, send me a note.

I’ve also volunteered for a few things. Accept my apologies here, my friends, for I truly didn’t have time to finish them at the moment. Some got started, but I need more time.

Maybe this is all part of the mid-age thing, being busy and having many things to take care of.

Begin rant

Riffing off on the recent reports of merchants starting charging for plastic bags in China and gas price increase all over the world: These days, 9 out of 10 times, I tell the cashier that I don’t need a bag while shopping here in the US. Plastic and paper bags are free here (the common question of “Paper or Plastic” when you check out). I do ask for one when I need it, nothing wrong with that. A close and reliable source has informed me that the Swedes have been charging for plastic bags for a while. Good for them, I say.

IMHO, the general population in the US are living an EXTREMELY wasteful lifestyle: the gas-guzzling SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicle, Hummer, anyone?); the aluminum and plastic cans and bottles; papers and junk mail; stupid and over-the-top product packaging; fast food packaging, disposable plates, chopsticks, forks, and knives; gadgets, laptops, and phones that use different power adapters; batteries; computer waste, the list goes on and on. It baffles me to no end why we behave in such a bone-headed way. In the last year or so, I’ve worked at a client in a western Chicago suburb, a training center in New York City, a financial firm in downtown Chicago. Of all the places, and I’ve looked for them, not a single one has paper/plastic/aluminum recycling receptacles.

There are efforts to curb that waste, but we need to do much more, such as: encouraging the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles via tax credit or other incentives, remove the subsidy to oil companies and tax their record-breaking revenue for energy research and development, define sensible regulations for less wasteful yet still tasteful packaging, encourage and make it easy to recycle, etc..

So there you have it, my solution to solve environmental issues in the US. When I have time, I will propose solutions to totally resolve China’s pollution problem! In the meantime, go listen to what Chris Waugh has to say on this important subject.

End rant