One recurring theme I keep reading about when I read about the Olympics being held in China: China is taking this for serious. They banned cars to try to cut pollution. They hired 10,000 people (and are installing a fence) to fight an algae bloom. It's pretty awesome that an event like this can unite a country (although it breeds that nationalism I detest so much). I guess I never really cared about the Olympics, since we always ended up dominating them (my only memory of the Atlanta Olympics was checking out the newspaper and gleefully noting that we took more medals than any other country by a pretty large margin - oh, how young and foolish I was).

So how's the weather wherever you live?

By the way, if any of you missed the "Rico Suave" reference in my previous post, watch this video:

Check out this enlightening headline: "Dow Average's Drop Into Bear Market May Signal Losses." Wow, really?

I pulled my first all-night in a long, long time. (As in, the last time I was asleep was 11am on Sunday). I was feeling a tad overwhelmed with the work that awaited me on Monday, which kept me up until 4am. Eventually, I said "Screw it" and decided to at least work. So I worked until 1-ish, then split for home to pick up some packages that had been waiting for me since last week in the rental office at my loft (as well as a package at the post office). And you know what? It was a fairly productive day (albeit with a lot of low-hanging fruit, nothing too major).

I got my copy of the "Stuff White People Like" book, which I hope will help me make some friends. :^)

I also got some coins I ordered a while back - the American Silver Eagle is GORGEOUS! I was incredibly disappointed with the American Gold Eagle, though ... the thing is so tiny you can barely see the design! I also picked up a Hawaiian Silver Dollar from WWII (these were normal dollar bills that were marked as "HAWAII" so that if Hawaii fell to the Japanese, the US govt could quickly devalue the dollars).

I also managed to get my kitchen cabinet door (which fell off in April of 2007) fixed. So now I don't have a cabinet door lying around.

And then I went to the dentist for the first time in at least two years :) My teeth were in pretty good shape, so no worries there! I guess I'm just a small-town kid, because I was pretty impressed with the fact that each seat had a TV with cable! 65 channels! AWESOME! They also have a pretty cool website as far as dentists go (UrbanDentalSanDiego.com), and the dentist was telling me how the X-ray photo software they use is open-source! So I guess if you need a dentist downtown in San Diego, check 'em out.

So all-in-all, a pretty productive day. Now if I had only gotten my hair cut, I really would have accomplished all my "personal" goals for the second-half of 2008.

So now, can I make it 36 consecutive hours awake? We shall see....

gotta love alliteration.

so syntax-brillian filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. if you bought an Ölevia TV you're screwed (but hey, you got what you paid for).

anyways, here's what i don't understand. how does a company ever end up using "Ölevia" to brand anything, especially televisions?? every time i saw one of those televisions, i'd think of it as a supplement for a certain anal-leakage inducing fat substitute. ("Ölevia: relieve your anal leakage now") did nobody else at that company realize this? 

And just to be mean: I see a disproportionate number of companies that I track which are run by asians that end up sucking. I'm not going to include Yahoo on this list cause i think the perception that it's a sinking ship are largely overblown (people forget it's still a pretty kick-ass company) ... but stocks that I've tracked/owned which fall under this umbrella which have been under pressure over the past three years: Sigma Designs (SIGM), Cogent (COGT), and now Syntax-Brillian (BRLC). And really, I'm not sure if there's a single American-based company stock left that I track on a semi-occasional basis which has an Asian in an executive position.

 . . .

And the edits keep on coming... I've been feeling the pain that my coworker's has been feeling lately... thus the additional snark. I noticed my recent link collections page has some choice items (I've been keeping that page pretty active, but I doubt any of you care).

Some recent links I've read:

• Russia threatens military response to US missile defence deal - Times Online - "Russia threatened to retaliate by military means after a deal with the Czech Republic brought the US missile defence system in Europe a step closer. " I love how our foreign policy is dictated by the status quo - hey, Europe's never had problems with egotistical dictators or anything! (Ok, I got lazy with linking every word, but I guarantee there are at least four more examples if we go earlier on in the century) <sarcasm>Let's build these missile stations in countries which will almost assuredly always be our friends!</sarcasm>
  
• My Way News - Fed to curb shady home-lending practices - "Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke of the much-awaited rules in a broader speech Tuesday about the challenges confronting policymakers in trying to stabilize a shaky U.S. financial system." I propose the Fed just rebrand itself as the "Bank of America" (of course, they'd buy out the real company first). This would be a killer business model, because, hey, if your profits are a little low ... just print some more money! I can't believe somebody didn't think of this business model: printing money! Or maybe designing some trees to grow money. I'll propose these at the next MT meeting. (With as much gravitas as I can muster)
• Brit is banged up for boozed-up Dubai bunk up | The Sun |HomePage|News After a woman who lived in the UAE for three years was caught having sex with a man on a beach, she was given a warning. Then, when the policeman caught them a second time, she "is alleged to have called the cop a f****** Muslim **** and tried to hit him with her high-heeled shoe before being restrained." In a country she lived in for three years. One would assume that she figured out how to balance out the cultural differences of living in a conservative society. And somehow she's painted as the VICTIM?
  
• Congressional Approval Falls to Single Digits for First Time Ever - "This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job." And yet we keep re-electing them ... representative democracy at work, ladies and gentlemen! 
• The onion conundrum: no futures market, high volatility - Jun. 27, 2008 - "Onions have no futures market, yet their recent price volatility makes the swings in oil and corn look tame." I know there's a lot of people who (a) think speculators are the main reason behind the oil spikes and (b) we can do something about this ... but as someone with a strong free-market bias, articles like these reaffirm that the knee-jerk reactions usually never work.
  
• Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Any VMware experts reading this blog? - "Isn’t it the job of programmers to render worthless the accomplishments of hardware engineers?" Amen to that (with much apologies to hardware engineers for my liberal use of for loops)
  
• Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL - "Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication" Looks like Postgres finally woke up to the fact that mySQL kicked their ass even though Postgres had an (arguably) better product the whole way.
  
• Talking Business - On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble - NYTimes.com- "Having conquered the Internet, Google’s executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care." I don't know ... but seriously, if I ever get into a (perceived) position of success, please don't let this type of hubris consume me. 

Phew. Now you get an idea of what type of stuff I read on a daily basis.

As the glowing embers faded, the youthful exuberance of the night gave way to the rising gravitas of the day. A new dawn, so beautiful!

He knew it was the right moment. As he walked over to her, she could sense what was coming. She turned a shoulder, in hopes of deflecting the coming revolution. He blithely ignored her and spoke with an assertiveness that was rare for him.

"I can't stand this."

"What would that be?" she replied coyfully.

"This platonic relationship. This can't be it."

"Oh?" Like a cat pawing with a mouse.

"Look, this doesn't end well for me. I've felt something, and I can't sit around and hope these feelings go away, or that you'll wake up one day and see me standing here, waiting for you. The more we stay in this hazy zone, the more my feelings for you grow stronger. And I can't bear to think of losing you to some other guy... that would devastate me. I want to know that you stood here, on this morning," (the first cawing of the seagulls could be heard, what serendipitous timing!), "and decided I wasn't your second choice. I was your first. I want to know that you saw me, warts and all, and chose me. I can't be your fallback guy. That isn't me."

It was a rare moment for him, to speak with such singularity in unmuddled tones ... the clarity of his emotions for her unified his thoughts. What a beautiful dawn!

As I promise with my overly-technical posts, a picture of a beautiful woman to balance it out:

"Roy, I can't believe you stayed in on a Friday night to work on THIS!"

Long-time readers of Tabulas will have known that I've long been interested in pushing data across services - this is why crossposting was such a big deal for me. I believe that federating data is incredibly important (and one of the few good things that's come up from this Web 2.0 bubble).

Last week, I asked one of the MindTouch developers to look into the feasibility of MindTouch Deki / Wordpress integration after I got a little excited about the Universal Edit Button. He got back with a very rough prototype this week - it was enough of a proof of concept for me to waste my Friday night hacking out the proof-of-concept into a slightly better proof-of-concept. The stuff I hacked together tonight only accomplishes one task: A WordPress install can push content into MindTouch Deki and maintain the data association between the Deki page and the WordPress page. Obviously, the second part of this is MindTouch Deki pushing data back into Wordpress - unfortunately this type of functionality doesn't quite exist inside Deki yet, so that part will be harder to accomplish.

Why it's awesome

• It. Just. Works.
  
• No updates necessary for Deki - the APIs I used exist in very old versions of Deki ... which means it'll work on Wik.is!
  
• It adds wiki functionality to your blog - each blog edit gets stored in the wiki - you can always go there and revert changes and see what's happening! And all you need to do is install a friggin' WordPress plugin!
  
• Unless your wiki engine stores in XML (XHTML), you can't do this without writing a Wordpress XHTML -> Your-custom-markup-language ... Deki can. Sucks for you, MediaWiki! (Also, even if you managed to get it one way, once you add functionality to push from your wiki to your wiki, you're bound to end up with all sorts of formatting nightmares). Features like this which "just work" is exactly why creating your own markup language when XHTML exists is such a horrible, horrible idea. 
• It lets you point multiple WordPress installs into a single Deki install. Got 30 WordPress installs you want to oversee? Simple. Install the plugin, and point. Don't forget that once it's in Deki,  you can export it in all sorts of crazy formats using the API, and you can take advantage of our kick-ass search engine across all the sites at once (WordPress' search doesn't scale so well anyways).
  
• I wrote it.
  

How it works

• (Prerequisites: Install Wordpress plugin, create a MindTouch Deki account, enter information on plug-in to authenticate into MindTouch Deki account)
• Anytime a post is published (e.g. made public) in WordPress, it saves the page in a configurable location in your Deki ("Example: "Blog Posts/")
• It utilizes the Wordpress URL as the Deki page URL, and the WP title as the Deki display title (this lets the URL between Deki + WP remain consistent)
• All categories and tags that were set in the Wordpress entry are collapsed into a single tag list inside Deki
  1.  A few special tags are added to the Deki page: "wordpress-id:#", "wp-author: {name}", "from: {wordpress site url}"
     
• When a WordPress entry is updated, it will automatically update your Deki page by finding the "wordpress-id:#" tag, and then saving the update. If your WordPress entry URL changed, the page will also automatically move inside Deki (or if you decide to move it).
  
  1.  You can also take advantage of a special WordPress tag to target the entry's location inside your Deki; this lets you override the configurable path!
     
• When you delete your WordPress entry, it also deletes the Deki page.
  

This is pretty f'ing awesome, if I may say so myself.

It was really nice working on this, because I've been working on such shitty, boring projects lately (like integration with Sharepoint integration ... ugh). I've been leading a project lately for another demonstration of how awesome Deki's API is (a kick-ass mobile interface), but I've forced myself not to be too hands-on so others can learn the joys of creating a product that's their own ... it'll probably be one of the first projects where I have almost no direct code/UI contributions :)

P.S. Just to demonstrate this, I created a WordPress blog on my own domain (which I will eventually have my Tabulas account automatically crosspost to) to post this entry to the MindTouch Developer wiki. With luck my WordPress entry should show up on the MT developer wiki. (edit: yay it worked!)

A few weeks ago, the free bulletin board site, SpreeBB.com, went down ... taking down Tabulas' boards. Oops. The joys of the hosted models...

So anyways, being on a dev kick this weekend, I decided to install phpBB3 and do a tight account integration with Tabulas: signing up for Tabulas would give you a phpBB accounts; and updating your account information on Tabulas would also update phpBB. And guess what? A couple hours later: done.

One thing I've been loving in OS software are programmatic hooks. It's a very basic concept, but it's incredibly powerful when you're hooking up functionality across different pieces of software. I decided to add programmatic hooks for Tabulas to help facilitate the phpBB integration (Tabulas' codebase is rather large and unwieldy - moving more of my stuff to programmatic hooks can help keep the core light and simple.

The next step for Tabulas is to take these programmatic hooks and let them be URLs - there's no reason a programmatic hook has to be a local function - it could also POST to a URL - this is how "plugins" for hosted sites like Tabulas could work.

A big inspiration for my recent obsession with hooks comes from my recent WordPress plugin, as well as my initial inspection of the Drupal hooks (there's no reason you could layer Deki underneath all of Drupal). We desperately need hooks in Deki, both in the front-end as well as the API - we're awesome at pulling data in, but we suck at pushing data out.

Last week, stressing over my "work to do" on Sunday night kept me up for my first all-night since college (I think). Anyways, tonight I'll nip it pre-emptively in the bud by listing my work items this week at work:

• Driving the iPhone-specific user interface for interacting with content inside Deki, built on top of Deki's API
• Stabilizing the never-released Deuce skin (yay for UI work!)
• More dev work on our control panel for the Kilen Woods release
• Start the massive upgrade script to switch Deki's file schema and local storage (this is gonna be hairy)
  
• Releasing the WordPress plugin
• Pulling together a minor release for 8.05.2 which was the result of some idiotic checkins of mine (oops)
  
• Wik.is postmortem (we did a twelve-hour upgrade to the latest release of Deki, and it's becoming clear that our upgrade strategy needs to re-examined; but this will probably require more infrastructure changes)
• Cleaning up our internal technical wiki

My non-MindTouch project goals this week:

• Continue with the raeviews mockups and UI flow
• Change the crossposting to be hooks
• Add custom WordPress installs as a crossposting option
• Add Tabulas support for Deki federation :)
  

I showed up to work today and realized I left my laptop at home, so I had to immediately walk back out to retrieve my laptop. Corey, who was standing outside in the hallway, thought I came in, couldn't deal with work, and went back home. Hah.

Anyways, the day didn't get much better after that. Here's to tomorrow!

(I could really use a boost - things have been so blech-y lately.)

I really wanted a Cinnabon today, but I had no cash. And seeing as to how Cinnabon seemed like one of those places that wouldn't take a credit card for a $2.50 purchase, I also bought one of those boxes of minnbaons ($12.99) to take home with me.

Holy crap, this was a bad idea (for my waistline).

. . .

Following up from yesterday's post, today was a much better day; July has/will be a very busy month for MindTouch. I find that working at a startup is mostly about throwing up as many balls in the air as possible, and hoping you don't drop too many (or maybe that's just MindTouch, hah!). A lot of stuff has been falling into place lately with all our projects, which is coming as a huge relief to me (why does someone who has such minimal impact on said projects care so much anyways? ). 

. . .

Thought of the day: I used to think technology companies should have their engineers build cool shit, and then just release it. But man, that's so not the case. Lately, I've been obsessing over the message that MindTouch sends out. And I can understand why product releases would be delayed, or projects scrapped, for the sake of the message. For example, we've finally figured out the right message for our product at work, and everything we do has to build around that message. If it doesn't, it's relatively pointless. I had written up a meandering blog post about the evolution of the product for the upcoming releases, but ended up scrapping it cause it just didn't fit the message.

I have a small worry that we're pushing out too many things at once right now ... thus not giving people a chance to properly digest all the little cool things we do. Unfortunately, given our current engineering trajectory and the huge deal around OSCON, we're currently in a ship that's nearly impossible to right ;) (And honestly, you could really have worse problems than having too much stuff to announce).

I used to be blind to everything besides the product, but now I'm starting to see how all the little pieces play together: how engineering ultimately dictates the product's direction; how PR pulls together external events like conferences and links them with internal milestones to drive awareness; and how sales (I've been granted an account to our internal sales wiki and I've been reading through how sales work) ultimately plays up the strengths of the former two and monetizes.

And I'm starting to understand how the open-source model fits in to this whole equation. Open-source software, technical merits aside (of which there are many) is a great marketing and lead generation tool - OSS generates more adoption, which in turn raises the number of people who are acquainted with your software. If these people supply contact information, you have a fantastic spigot of leads. And not only that, but if you build an open-source component like Deki which is a fantastic development platform, you really do build up a base of loyal users who understand the product.

And these community members, who know the product, serve as a huge talent pool for hiring. Ramp-up time for engineering is always a difficult task ... to have somebody who knows the product who can come in on day one and kick ass is always a huge boon (plus it means we don't need to pay for recruiters).

Anyways, this post ended up being way longer than I intended - I just really wanted to write about my Cinnabons.

Will be flying up to Portland for OSCON next week - yay! (I love Portland)

. . .

This weekend, I finally switched out most of the substrate in my fish tank to a more plant-friendly substrate - took a few days, cause it had to be gradual (didn't want to overstress the fish out). I finally replanted the existing plants tonight, and the fish look healthy (none of them are crashed at the bottom).

. . .

Nothing much else is happening - I was gonna try to catch Dark Knight over the weekend, but got a bit busy running errands and cleaning the place up (as soon as I land Sunday from Portland, I have to drive up to LAX to pick up my mom, who is coming back from Korea).

. . .

Hope all is well with everybody!

still alive, in portland. finally wrappped up - so tired.

OSCON finally wrapped up last night - I (rather embarassingly) underestimated my alcohol consumption over a short period of time and got sick, thus being a huge downer on the night ... oops.

Anyways, I asked to extend my departure ticket in Portland a few days, because I really wanted to visit Cannon Beach. So after I dropped all my coworkers off at the airport, I did the hour and a half drive out to Cannon Beach ... and oh my goodness... how gorgeous the drive was! I've always missed the greenery of North Carolina, and this drive only reminded me of the absence of green in San Diego. I took a bunch of pictures, which I'll post once I get back.

Anyways, I'm back in Portland now - I really enjoy this city. People actually drive like decent people here... and the weather has been gorgeous (I love that breezy mid-50s feel with the smell of trees in the air!).

I'm pretty exhausted from the convention - I mostly did booth manning, which forced me to polish my verbal interpersonal skills and stick to our message ("MindTouch Deki is the best open-source wiki with awesome mashup ["integration'"] capabilities"). Let me tell you - conventions are exhausting. You wake up early, you leave later, and then you have to party (I guess the third day I finally broke down on my "no more drinking" rule ... great).

Anyways, I don't have any thoughts regarding work or Deki, which is odd to me, since you would think talking about it for 3 days straight would give me some new insights or conclusions. Weird.

I did have a couple of personal revelations ... I meditated on some lifestyle and personality changes that I need to work on.

mindtouch had a booth at oscon in portland. here are some pictures (not in any real chronological order).

guerric, pumped about being in portland!

after our target run to get some stuff for the booth ... later on that evening, the innocent looking plans would attack jessica.

me on the airplane (first time i flew southwest ... i love it!)

max and i being excited about something (not sure what)

our minivan driver, pete

aaron's ready to rumble!

but not so much in this picture...

max

damien

aaron, for some reason, tests his mic by saying "chaka khan" over and over again.

something is apparently happening behind me...

IT'S THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (pete got a little crunk)

... but not as crunk as damien, who somehow spilled the taco bell leftovers all over pete's bed (which pete discovered the following morning)

jessica ripped the tag off a pillow, and realized she just committed a federal crime.

cause you can't really beat the original....

soaring high...

cannon beach

icarus

the beautiful greenery i'm missing in SD

haystack rock, at cannon beach

I wish the world would slow down - my life has been deteriorating lately. A big part of it is my inner disappointment in my perceived acceptance of mediocrity - every month I watch the community of Tabulas slip away, a bigger part of me dies inside. Being so committed to one baby for over five years ... it's hard to watch it die a slow and horrid death. Why did I let it die? Why didn't I implement the v2 release faster? The inner perfectionist - the one that tried to make the real product look like the inner vision is mainly at fault, here. Too long did I dabble, fixing things of no real consequence ... sigh. So many lessons learned - if Tabulas hadn't been so successful at one point, this wouldn't hurt as much. To watch success flutter away, while you can do nothing ... the worst pain I've ever felt. This depresses me greatly.

Tabulas, to me, represented my independence and my hope for my future ... and it seems too far behind to catch up now. What did i sacrifice?

. . .

Work has been absolutely brutal lately, which has also been contributing to the re-emergence of the sad Roy. It's been getting to a real breaking point for me - I always felt I was good with handling pressure and juggling priorities, but things are just overwhelming now.

After returning last week from OSCON, I came back to an absolutely broken release process (the Deki 8.05.2 set of releases has been embarassingly bad) which I was mostly responsible for, and I'm still trying to put together a major miracle release at the end of July (Kilen Woods). Even with a stripped down feature set, I'm incredibly concerned it's just not going to happen. And I hate fucking up at my job. I've never missed let the quality of releases and I've never missed deadlines this bad.

I'm trying to hire people, but interviewing and vetting candidates is a long process. Managing people is a tough task in itself, especially when you're running multiple projects at the same time. I feel the worst for my PHP dev, who is a lone soldier - I was supposed to give him support, but I haven't had the time to cut code recently. And now, seeing what the future holds for Deki ... I just want to break down, throw my hands up, and say "fuck this." It doesn't help that the gains we make don't seem to be capitalized - every few months, I feel like there's some other component we need to build that takes us away from our core competency that means I'm stressed for another few months. God, will it just SLOW DOWN?

In the past, the business model aligned behind the product - build the best product, grow adoption rates, and we'll sell subscription plans. Pretty simple. Things were a breeze. I could handle dealing with pushing our a solid release. But now, we are adapting the product to do target horizontals and verticals, and we need to integrate with so many different applications ... the engineering team is a slave to too many masters, and our shortcomings are becoming to rear their gargoylic heads. It's hard enough to ship an OSS product (supported on many different platforms) ... to start shipping things around it is incredibly tough, especially with the small team we have. Furthermore, our pipeline of engineers are bare - bringing new hires up to speed will be tough.

I'm reaching a personal breaking point with what I can handle - I know my failures are starting to outweigh my successes (I can't even remember the last time I felt a "win" with Deki - I was hoping OSCON would grant some reprieve, but nothing) and I don't know how to deal with it mentally and emotionally. If I had friends, I would talk to them, but here I am, pathetically writing about it on a journal entry for the world.

It's even worse, because I feel I've been losing the support of a lot of people internally - I won't go into details here, but I feel I'm largely ignored by people above and disdained by people below. Nobody ever told me this job was so lonely. I keep saying to myself, "Christ, at the worst possible moment, this person decides to screw with me." 

Moving away from the product forces you to deal more with abstractions rather than absolute truths - when in debate, the people closer to the product can ream your absolute truths, and the people above can simply ignore your abstract arguments with their own.

I've tried to a nice guy, but it seems to not be very effective. People take advantage of niceness ... maybe this is why you read about so many horrible managers - maybe they just realized you end up taking shit from both sides, so why even care.

The stress of the job and the uncertainty of the future is positively taking a toll on me. But even worse, the optimism fades. And that is what distresses me the most.

Boy, that last entry is painful. One of the tricks I've maintained in keeping this personal site going for such a long time is to never re-read anything I write late at night - most of the time I ever re-read stuff, I end up taking it down. I started skimming that last entry and realized I sound like a huge negative nancy. Anyhoos.

Rest assured, things are not as bad as they seem - I only really write those posts when I'm at my absolute lows (this Tabulas is the most therapeutic remedy!). So really, if your only perception of me is through this journal, you are getting a pretty slanted view. In reality, I am all sorts of positivity and happiness. For example, I finally got around to setting up roycanhascheezburger.com tonight! How awesome and positive is that!

Anyways, I just wanted to write a post to thank everybody for their kind words. I am in a good place, and I should be fortunate enough to only have my job to complain about. I need to struggle through and get through this rough patch at work, and things will be fine.

To change the mood, here's an awesome photo: