Anson the Gnome

James Gosling comments:



We'll see what happens, but it seems reasonable to assume the character of major Sun technologies like Java and MySQL will change. How exactly is hard to say, although I suspect in Java's case, Oracle is even less inclined to support standardization and open source than Sun was. MySQL is harder to predict, but some change seems inescapable.

I expect Oracle to exert relatively little influence on MySQL's ongoing development, because several core MySQL developers left Sun prior to the merger and have the community support, skills, and funding to seriously threaten a fork. I also don't expect Oracle to make much money on (new) MySQL support contracts, due to a combination of lack of trust and expertise that has (or will) leave the building. Hopefully PostgreSQL will see an uptick in usage as well.

I've had my vanity domain, idempot.net, for a pretty long time (I know plenty of people who have had vanity domains for longer, but 2002 was about when I realized I needed an email address that lasted longer than any single employer). I don't remember how exactly it started, except with the observation that you could make some puns with '.net' and words like 'omnipotent.' Of course omnipot.net was taken, and I didn't really want impot.net... but I was familiar with another 'potent' - 'idempotent' - from both the pure mathematical meaning, and the C programming idiom.

Since idempotency is a form of uniqueness, it inspired the further pun of notunique@mac.com - the only .Mac user who is notunique. Then Apple started charging for mac.com addresses, and I was unemployed around the time a renewal fee was due, so I gave up on that pun, and started using idempot.net consistently. I liked it better anyway: it is unique, it's punny, and it's geeky.

On the downside, t's hard to pronounce. Not as bad as some, but not as thoroughly in the zeitgeist, either. Personal business cards have helped, but it's still a pain some of the time: if I'm giving my email address over the phone, if I've run out of cards (as happens late in the night at conferences), or if someone simply transcribes it incorrectly.

So now, to fix those problems in the future, I've registered easytopronounce.com. I don't know what, exactly, I'm going to do with the domain, but in the short term it'll just point here.

Happy New Year, everyone. No prognostication from me at present, I'm still figuring out what kinds of things I can talk about since I work for a publicly traded company.

Last night marked the end of Dungeon Runners; it is gone. I haven't been involved in the project, or really the community, since I left NCsoft a year and a half ago, but I am still very sad to see it go. There was something really special there, and there isn't even a hollow shell left to remind us.

Clearly I haven't done a very good job of blogging lately. I'll chalk that up to putting a lot of effort into finding another project to work on.

Today, I started a new job at BioWare, as an Infrastructure Engineer. It's not a glamorous job - I'm working on the tools and systems that keep the more game-specific teams agile - but as I've said a few times, there's a lot to get right when you're making, launching, and operating a successful MMOG.

That's pretty much what I want to do right now, with Dungeon Runners about to close and my last project never seeing the light of day. I'm in this industry to make people happy, and I'm working on MMOGs in particular because they can reach such a broad audience for so long. I've had some trouble actually making that happen, but I think BioWare can do it - that's a horse I want to hitch my wagon to.

For the last year, I've been working on an unannounced strategy MMO based on an IP I can't talk about.

But, that project ended today. Maybe I'll have time to finish more blog posts now ;-)

edited for... clarity.