That isn’t to say End of Days is bad! Far from it. Overall, I found the narrative engaging, the loose plot unique, and the sub-threads interesting. Gleason writes well enough, and his social commentary is fairly accurate, so it can easily contribute to a misleading sense of prescience. Unfortunately it’s mostly empty and bizarre in a myriad of mutually conflicting ways.

Let’s begin with those sub-threads I mentioned. There are several of them, and they’re all essentially self-contained, though it’s clear they’ll eventually influence each other.

We have Sailor, a sentient rat who roams the world searching for relevance. Then there’s the Magruders, a relatively wealthy family whose matriarch, Lydia, is exceptionally paranoid and has constructed a massive Citadel out in the desert. There’s the John Stone, a reporter searching through the Middle East working on his groundbreaking exposé on the looming and basically inevitable nuclear war. We have the president and his cronies, most notably Jack Taylor, who gets to set the stage for most of the action as the curtain falls. There’s Cool Breeze, a former baseball legend turned prison inmate due to an unfortunate temper. Of course, “Mad” Vlad Malokov acts as a foil to whip everyone up into a frenzy. There’s Cassandra, a former nun turned infamous gospel diva, crusading in her own way to bring understanding. And we can’t forget Thucydides, a newly emergent AI set in a space station, the better to chronicle the downfall of society. Most notably are the figurative and literal barrage of personified nuclear weapons, given “life” because of the spark of the universe each contains.

Did I forget anyone? Probably. There’s the usual cast of supporting characters, of course, and other named elements that explore various facets of the emerging implications. But I hope the problem with this novel is obvious at this point. It’s not that the novel tries to do too much with too many characters. It’s that all of these things happen simultaneously, all of them have roughly equal weight, and any attachment to any of them is ephemeral at best. It’s that the plots are disparate and confused, a work of short stories loosely stitched together and called a novel. But why?

Cassandra’s songs are meant to inspire, but her admittedly tragic origins become washed out bellyaching. Yes, we know “Hiroshima’s gone.” Repeating this ad infinitum among her various scenes leaves her less of a touching inspiration, than an irritating emo teen. That Thucydides considers Cassandra humanity’s soul is understandable, if an odd fixation as the world collapses around it. I thought the idea of Cassandra and Thucydides were both completely wasted because they were marginalized. The true tragedy of Cassandra isn’t her horrifying past, but her flat characterization.

John’s interactions with the Sin Sisters starts out terrifying. What will they do to him next? Will they ever let him go? Why did they even kidnap him? But it just goes on, and on. Gleason seems to take a sick pleasure in narrating genital torture, since that seems to be the prevailing focus of their administrations. Oh, and one of the sisters is a doctor, so Stone becomes the proverbial Schrodinger’s Cat. This also becomes tiresome and overplayed. Oh, they’re torturing him again, and ranting crazily whilst doing so? Bummer.

But nobody does crazy ranting like Mad Vlad. He has a gleeful, almost suspicious knack for it. Gleason clearly did his homework, because he describes several mechanisms chemical, biological, and nuclear, which Vlad threatens to unleash, or justify the havoc he’s supposedly unleashing. There’s even a clever explanation for how incessant Vlad is about jerking Jack Taylor’s chain. This too, is overdone however. Vlad calls Taylor and yells at him. Taylor blanches! Vlad calls Taylor and berates him. Taylor flinches! Vlad calls Taylor and gibbers mindlessly like a baboon for an hour. Taylor becomes aghast! Vlad calls Taylor and describes the painfully intricate minutia of a prostate exam. Taylor cries. It got so ridiculous, I started skimming these sections, because they were all the same.

But nothing broke my suspension of disbelief like Sailor the rat and his adventures, or the sentient nuclear devices. This isn’t Redwall, so he’s supposed to be an actual rat. But he’s also much more. He’s a hero, a leader, a philosopher, a giant, an explorer, a visionary, a sous chef, a rodeo clown, and everything in between. This starts irritating, but becomes outright ridiculous. Is there anything Sailor can’t do? Nope. And I can say that because he basically survives several proximal nuclear strikes, in addition to outsmarting every human he encounters. Of course, his hopes and inspirations are equal to the various musings of the missiles and suitcase nukes as they yearn to fulfill their duty, and fretful anguish should they possibly fail. Oh, the trials and tribulations of spiritual WMDs, how I weep for their suffering.

All of these fragments are ultimately weakened by their reliance on the overriding narrative. I would have read a short story about Sailor. A sentient space station is a great concept. Cassandra would have been a much stronger character if she wasn’t forced to whine about the looming holocaust. It’s the little things like this that make the novel a weird read instead of a good one. Gleason seemingly tried to touch every genre simultaneously, and like any Jack of All Trades, he mastered none. This novel is good, but it absolutely does not live up to the hype. Keep that in mind, and you’ll feel a lot better about reading it.

With that out of the way, I’ve been enjoying my Sprint Galaxy S2 variant immensely. It feels orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than my old Android Eris. And really, the stats reflect about a 4x multiplier over every attribute of the Eris. It took some getting time to mentally transition from a 3.2″ screen to a 4.5″ screen, but I did it. Now when I look at my old phone, sitting idly on a nearby end table, it looks like a Chiclet in comparison.

But all good things must apparently come with a flaw or two. Unlike the international GSM version of the SGSII, the Sprint variant comes with its very own unstable radio. Pretty much at random, the signal bar will disappear and be replaced by a circle with a line through it, indicating the radio has no signal at all, and won’t even bother to try roaming. The only way to fix this is a reboot. But there’s also a more insidious problem! Sometimes this happens, but instead of a circle and a line, the last recorded signal bars remain displayed. This means the phone has no signal, but thinks everything is fine. This bug is accompanied by a 10-20% per hour battery drain, suggesting the radio has gotten stuck in a CPU select loop. Apparently Samsung still hasn’t figured out whichever CDMA radio they decided to wedge into the phone.

Whatever the case, I can’t very well use a phone that misses calls constantly because the radio crashes or hangs on a regular basis. So I headed over to the Epic 4G Touch XDA forums and lurked in the Android Development section for a while. Eventually, a dev that goes by -viperboy- came up with the crazy idea of using a shell script to use various Android debugging commands to diagnose and reboot the phone if service has been lost. He called his version LoSChecker.

I liked that idea. But I have a coding background, and am a professionally employed DBA. So I looked at how his script worked, and wrote my own Loss of Service Daemon. I added a ton of options, more checks, configurability, and some basic documentation, and stashed it all at github so people could look into the code if they wanted. Then I packaged it all up and made a recovery flash file, so anyone with a rooted Android phone could install it.

I’m hardly an Android app developer at this point, and I’m nowhere near able to build my own ROM, but it’s interesting seeing what goes into the phone hacking I’ve long utilized, but never taken part in creating. All because my phone is a better portable computer than a device for making phone calls. I’ve actually considered dusting off my Java hat and putting together an app, just to say I’ve done it. And doing so is admittedly easy in the Android universe, where API documentation, source code, and debugging utilities are erupting out of every corner of the internet.

So while I’ve been admittedly mute recently, I certainly haven’t been idle.

Until Tomorrow

In the end, I think my presentation, NVRam for Fun and Profit went over okay. Not a ton of people showed up, but I did get ambushed afterwards with questions after I got off the stage. Why those people didn’t ask while I was in Presentation Mode, I can’t quite understand. But Greg Smith was there, and he played the required heckler, so it wasn’t all bad.

I haven’t gotten any direct feedback yet, but Greg did say about the only comment he saw, was that attendees wished I’d gone into more depth. As to that, I totally agree. I also realize I completely mislabeled my talk. The issue of course, is that with dozens of talks available, reading all those abstracts is somewhat onerous. I certainly didn’t read them all, and really, what does NVRam have to do with PostgreSQL? It adequately described my talk, but wasn’t exciting enough to get someone to click and read the abstract and longer description. Apparently most of the conference planners immediately flagged it for acceptance, so my real problem is marketing. I should have called my talk: “Death at Ten Thousand Transactions per Second.”

The whole point, after all, was that our system takes about 250-million transactions on any given day, and that number is only going up as we garner clients for our platform. Knowing how to scale to that kind of IO is a critical need for a growing database community, so my talk went over our problem, methods to alleviate it without buying hardware, existing and bleeding edge tech that can help solve it, our ultimate choice, and the justifications therein. It’s good material, but now I realize I made a more fundamental error in judgment than merely misnaming my talk.

I like the theoretical approach, accumulation of techniques and information. I always have. Most things are academic to me. What I should have done for my talk however, is do the opposite of that. While I couldn’t provide a demonstration of our database, and pretty graphs tell part of the story, these people are hands-on bare-metal psychopaths. I should have showed a slide or two with raw iostat output. I should have put up a graph of our basic failover node architecture. I should have described our availability stack, and gone into all the gritty details of our XFS formatting and mount options, our LVM and DRBD support layer, our Pacemaker and Heartbeat controls, our bcfg2 cluster config model.

And then I should have explained why hate slony, and how it ultimately affects an extremely OLTP system. How we approached partial indexes to streamline our storage and lookup speeds. Our postgresql.conf settings both before and after the NVRAM upgrade and why those settings make sense for that kind of hardware. Then, and only then, should I have started laying out how PCIe cards help alleviate or even outright eliminate several potential and existing problems. There was some of that in my graphs and quoted RAID performance stats, but it was ultimately shallow because I was trying to cover too much material: our complete transition. But that took months of research, analysis, and testing.

But that’s what you learn from experience, right? So I’m not too broken up about it. There’s always a next time. I can even tweak this talk for future iterations, and include all of that nifty information. Knowing how to survive an extremely transactional environment is an important bit of information, and I’m not entirely convinced there’s adequate material out there that really describes functional approaches. So much stuff is home-brewed, that there’s quite a bit of experimentation and fiddling.

I can’t come up with a recipe, but I can at least provide a starting point for interested DBAs. FusionIO worked for us precisely because it integrated well with our IO needs, and now we’re migrating to a hybrid system so we can take advantage of more space while still getting the most of those random IOPS. Maybe next year I’ll be able to submit a talk on a horizontal partitioning strategy I’m examining, because we’re going to need it soon. Regardless of how capable one particular node may be, real high availability is won through zoning and shared-nothing data allocation bins. Facebook can bring down sections of its network without affecting the others; we can’t.

But we will. We’ll need to. The whole point of scaling is anticipating and engineering to promote robust application performance and uptime. We double our client count every year, and have done so consistently for the past four years. While that’s clearly not a sustainable growth curve, we’ll outgrow the capabilities of our current architecture in a couple years at most, and we better have an improvement in place by then. The PostgreSQL 9.x branch and my sharding system can give us that. Those are the kind of exciting scaling challenges and solutions I’d want to see presented at a conference!

Of course, I wouldn’t have to do all that if the PostgreSQL core hackers would just add auto-sharding and multi-master replication . . . lazy devs.

Of course, rumors suggest Verizon may be getting the semi-upgraded version of the GSII, dubbed the Droid Prime, with a faster processor, higher density screen, and a few other tweaks. Unfortunately, those same rumors claimed Verizon would carry the GSII. Worse, they won’t be getting it until October at the earliest. Is this because they’re pushing the Droid Bionic as their new flagship? The phone that was supposed to be released back in June?

With Samsung’s recent press conference announcing the US release, Verizon now has a problem. If the Bionic isn’t absolutely everything they claim, they may very well lose more than a few customers who favor the GSII. I happen to be one of them. I’ve waited patiently for four months for the US carries to get their acts together, and at least three of them have. Even if the rumors concerning the Droid Prime are true, the October release date is hardly set in stone. I already waited four months to be ultimately let down; adding another four without some kind of official statement is foolish.

And let’s face it, I’ve been getting fed up with Verizon anyway. They stopped their New Every Two, early upgrade, and the Verizon VIP programs within the last year. Gone are 1-year contracts. Introduced are tiered data plans. All of that on top of having the most expensive plans and phones of all the major US carriers. Oh, but they finally got the iPhone, so there’s that. Apparently Verizon believes customer incentives are passé.

I’d like to think you can judge a company by the incentives it retains even after they’re no longer necessary. It’s a level of respect for the same people that makes it successful. I could easily just run around foaming at the mouth and yelling about how much Verizon sucks, but I have concrete, substantial reasons to abandon them as my mobile provider. A lot of their current phones are minor upgrades to phones that were old on other carriers months ago. They add more unnecessary unremovable applications than other vendors, giving people a bad impression of Android’s performance and stability. And my company is implementing Good for Enterprise for our enterprise email, and Verizon is the only carrier that requires a special code to enable it. A code which only works on their more expensive corporate data plans. No, corporate plans add no other functionality, data limits, or perks… they just cost more.

So, no. No, Verizon. I don’t support your policies, decisions, or lack of respect for your customers. Maybe Sprint or AT&T are worse in that regard, but I can’t know that yet. What I do know is that you suck. Please die in a fire.

Until Tomorrow

Can someone be haunted by a house? I’m a little freaked out, here…

When I was six or seven, we moved into a house near the railroad tracks. My brother and I shared a room on the second floor, and it was our parents’ plan to renovate the second, larger room to be a big game room for us.

It never worked out. From TVs to old pinball machines to mechanical toys, nothing really worked right, so we gave up on making it a gaming room. Instead, we just stashed our toys there for storage. What’s especially odd though, is that we never played in that room, and spent as little time in it as possible.

Which didn’t make sense! It was easily the largest, best naturally lit room in the house. We just never used it. Even the fact my brother and I shared a room didn’t make sense, and my parents agreed. As the oldest, the largest room was apparently mine. In I moved, taking with me a mild sense of disquiet about the whole affair. I still never played with any of my toys in there, but I had to sleep in the room, didn’t I? No matter; I could leave the lights on.

One particular night, I was just about to fall asleep when a disembodied head started forming on the ceiling. Any weariness remaining in my body fled that instant, and I was just about to scream when it started laughing. A big, greenish head the size of my bed is on the ceiling laughing at me, and I can’t get out of bed fast enough. By the time I get to the door, the laugh is starting to fade, but my frantic fumbling is thwarting my attempts to turn the doorknob. It didn’t matter, because I was long gone before it could take a second breath for more laughter.

I swear I could still hear it as I ran down the stairs screaming for my parents. Of course nothing was there when they checked, and oddly, nothing ever happened after that even though we lived there for several more months before my dad was transferred to another city.

I believed it was a ghost for years until I learned about sleep paralysis. I’ll admit I accidentally watched Poltergeist once in the downstairs living-room while we lived there, so the theory was very plausible. At least, until my wife and I moved into our most recent home. I didn’t notice the similarities right away—a six-year-old’s memory isn’t exactly the most reliable thing in the world. But after a couple weeks, it dawned on me that we lived in the a house from my childhood. Our master bedroom was the same that always unnerved my entire family.

But there’s just one problem: I’ve moved across the country since then. The more I think about it and look around, the more obvious the similarities. Oh, there have been some upgrades in the intervening years, and maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize it at first, but there’s no mistake. I know that, because the water heater is in a small closet between the two upstairs bedrooms, just like the yellow house.

One year, my grandparents had hidden Christmas presents in that closet, vastly underestimating our curiosity. We didn’t open any after we found them, but we thought ourselves co-conspirators, lauding the secret over our little brother. I remember that vividly, because we also fiddled with the faucet on the water heater, wondering what would come out. It turns out we were too scared to turn it on much, but the small trickle of rusty water was enough to sate us.

That closet was probably the last piece of the puzzle. Of course, I couldn’t turn down a perfectly good storage closet. As I was cleaning it out, I found a wrapped present behind the water heater. I smiled at the memory, knowing that some family had lived here and left something behind. I figured it was a coincidence, at most. Families use closets to store presents, right? But then I read the name tag…

It was my name. My exact name. The inscription probably terrified me the most.

To: Fullofbones
For all the Christmases we missed.
May we never part again.

I still don’t know what to tell my wife.