In the series of shell one liners, today I wanted to stalk someone, so I came up with this one liner to show all diffs ever created by a specific user in a give bzr repository:

bzr log -n0 | grep -B 1 henrik | grep revno | grep -v merge | \
awk -F'revno: ' '{print $2}' | while read revno; do echo; \
echo '#####################################################################'; \
echo revno: $revno; bzr diff -c$revno; done 

bzr log -n0 prints out the full log history of your repo. It may look something like this:

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 2441.2.16 [merge]
    committer: Henrik Ingo 
    branch nick: drizzle-json_server-keyvalue

When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, then Release Candidate, then production release. As I blogged then, the progress has been documented on a daily basis on the askmonty.org wiki.

My collagues Anders and even Ivan sometimes blog about the grandeur of being a Sales Engineer. And I agree, it is a great job, probably the best I ever had, so far. But let me share a secret: It's not as technical as you'd think. Sure, they call me a "pre-sales consultant" alright, but I would be ashamed of comparing my own work with those of the real consultants. I sometimes jokingly say that the most amazing technical things in my job are airplanes (they fly in the air!) and how to make a nice slideshow. (OpenOffice Impress sucks btw, and I always envy my OS X + Keynote using friends on this one point.) What I mean is, I mostly meet with customers and talk about the technical stuff, and they think I know what I'm talking about.