Coffee|Code : Dan Scott, Caffeinated Librarian Geek

Last week at the WWdN#15 I exceeded my original goals, but failed to make it to the cash after a couple of my hammer bluffs were called (to ruinous effect) by evilwise, astute players.

This week, I have a new goal: I want a piece of that money, baby, that sweet sweet WWdN cash. Dare to dream. I'm going to rub it all over my chest, slide it around between my thighs, and lick it from end to end. Oh yeah... Mmm, that got me going, so I've kind of made a mess of this week's entry fee. You don't mind, do you? Oh? Hmm. Sorry. The reason for my new focus on cash is that I had a bit of a nasty weekend, you see, where I dropped about $150 in a continuous string of bad beats in SNGs. Overall, I'm still up about $350 since starting this whole sordid affair in October... but $500 is such a nice, round number, I would like to get back to it.

I learned last week that Tactix is brother to Joane1111, and also that elcee (not bluegillchow, what was I thinking) is Joanne1111's father. In the interest of full disclosure and honesty, I have to reveal that dsheep is my brother and NHL 200X is my cousin. Interestingly, both of them have been, are now, and will once again be my lovers. So, for all of you people wandering through my blog for the first time shaking your head at my little poker addiction--it's nothing compared to good clean incestuous fun. Whooo!

The live-blogging didn't seem to hurt my game too much last week, so I'll give it a shot again this time around. While you might not get live blogs, you can probably get a much better post-game account from the far more interesting blogs of SirFWALGman and slimeface.

A final note for you slack-jawed cretins who fail to enter the tournament until mere moments before the tourney starts: you can register a few hours ahead of time, turn off your Pokerstars client, and join the game at any time. This leaves you free to have a relaxing dinner with your spouse, teach your nephew some new and obscure profanity, and get half-way through a house repair job before you have to join the game. If you don't register in advance, and you're late, then you miss out on all the fun, period.

So, in your Pokerstars client, go to Tourney -> Private -> WWdN #16 and enter the password monkey. It's a shot at fame, glory, and sweet sweet cash (albeit cash smeared against my body). And it's the best damn fun on the whole dang Intuhnaht!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm leaving IBM for a new opportunity at Laurentian University. Over the past year and a half a lot of my personal and professional effort has gone into the PHP community: contributing documentation, acting as the release lead for the ibm_db2 and PDO_INFORMIX extensions, giving conference sessions, and writing the occasional article.

When I made the decision to leave IBM, I also had to back down from some related commitments that I had made (formally and informally) to a few different people and groups. I want to apologize publically for letting you down, and hope that you'll forgive me:

• Open Source Content Management Summit (OSCMS): I was going to give a nice update on my database portability talk, focusing on the experiences I've had in trying to port Serendipity to run on DB2. Unfortunately, once I decided to leave IBM I couldn't justify sticking Big Blue with the travel and accomodations costs for flying out to Vancouver, so I had to back out of OSCMS with just a few weeks' notice. I felt really, really bad about that.
• Speaking of Serendipity, I still owe Gavin that patch for enabling DB2... I'll find the time one of these evenings!
• PHP Quebec: I was going to give a couple of talks at PHP Quebec in March, and was really looking forward to the conference given the trip reports and pictorial evidence from the last couple of years. However, it falls in the middle of the week. Worse, for me, it will be the third week at my new job, and while I expect Laurentian University to be a very understanding employer, my focus for the first few months has to be on learning the culture and challenges of my new position.
• An article here or there on DB2 and PHP: it made more sense to help get other IBMers involved and visible in the community, which meant handing off plans for an article to a different writer (and consequently blowing at least one publication schedule). I apologized in private for this at the time, but want to apologize publically as well. You know who you are...

Now, a few of you have wondered on IRC whether this means the end of my contributions to the PHP community... the answer is an emphatic *heck no*! First of all, my new position will give me some latitude in deciding upon the technologies we use to solve the problems we face, and the Library is already using PHP... so we're likely to continue to use it. And on a personal level, there are a number of projects that I want to continue to be involved with:

• PHP Data Objects (PDO): the basic documentation is in decent shape, but I have some catching up to do on new features, some examples to add, and some driver-specific documentation to add. I'll actually be in a better position to document it in my new role.
• PDO_ODBC: I noticed some significant regressions in the PDO_ODBC driver between the 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 releases that the 5.1.2 release did not address. Given that the ibm_db2 driver is written in DB2 CLI, a very close cousin to ODBC, I'm sure that with a few hours of investigation I can submit some patches for PDO_ODBC that will get the 5.1.3 release back on track. Oh yeah, and I have motivation to make sure this works because that book I co-authored contains a chapter on PDO_ODBC...
• Documentation in general: I still need some outlets for technical writing, so I plan to keep an eye on the phpdoc project and contribute to the tools and docs where it makes the most sense.

So I'll still be around; you just won't see me at the conferences this year, and I'll probably be even less productive over the next few months than normal as I adjust to the new role at the University. Oh, not to mention my new role as a father, which I am also expected to take on in a few months. But over time, I'm sure you'll hear more from me, and you'll start seeing submissions for conferences and articles grounded in my experiences at the library.

After almost eight years, today is my penultimate day at IBM.

I've done a lot of interesting work for IBM in that time. From learning about Linux back in 1998 by testing the pre-release DB2 Version 5.2 beta for Linux, to writing the original DB2 for Linux HOWTO for the Linux Documentation Project, to helping realize the DB2 Information Center (setting the standard for the entire IBM corporation along the way), to helping give PHP solid support for DB2... it's a pretty amazing set of accomplishments for a person whose previous jobs include such well-respected positions as an inventory clerk and a night clerk at a convenience store.

The funny thing is, my real professional training is as an information professional. Ahem. More specifically, I have a Master's of Information Studies from the University of Toronto. Still doesn't mean anything to you? Okay... I'm a professionally accredited librarian.

No, not this:

More like this...

After our move to the frozen wastelands of the North, I was given the opportunity to exercise those long-neglected information professional muscles in an academic environment. I hemmed and hawed over it for a very long time, but on Wednesday, I'll be starting my new career as the Systems Librarian for Laurentian University. It is very difficult to leave IBM behind, as the people I have worked with have been pretty amazing, and much of the personal and professional growth that I have undergone has been due to the nurturing environment of Big Blue... but Laurentian is giving me a fabulous opportunity that I don't want to miss.

So -- farewell to IBM, and hello Laurentian! Between the new home, the new job, and the new baby on the way, it is going to be a very interesting year

Last time I tried this live-blogging thing, I reached my goal of placing in the top 100. Of course, there were only 99 registered players, and I placed 99th, so that was the wrong kind of outstanding finish.

This time, I'm aiming a bit higher:

• Not be the first person knocked out of the tournament (hee-haw!)
• Make it to the break.

I had a great Sunday of poker, ringing up $150 net, so this means that the poker gods will probably send in a golden shower for me. Ah well, stay tuned for the exciting story of the WWdN#15: KentAllard Invitational...

Last weekend I was assigned the task of priming and painting our bedrooms. The previous owners had decided to use bold, garish colours, which meant that I was doomed to prime and reprime before I would even have the chance of adding some of our own "style" to the house. Somewhere between coats one and three I ran out of primer and had to go to the nearby Canadian Tire to pick up a fourth gallon of the stuff. i decided to treat myself to a mental break and picked up a bird feeder for our backyard.

Now, here's where my foolish notions kicked in: I thought it would be a delightful surprise for Lynn, because we've only been living in this house for a couple of months and so far we haven't even looked at the backyard. It's just a pile of snow, with a stand of birch trees off in the distance. Not much to look at, and certainly no wildlife. I imagined sitting at the dining room table, drinking freshly brewed coffee, and watching the birds (chickadees, finches, cardinals, and jays) gratefully cluster around the feeder.

I also imagined Lynn holding our yet-to-arrive baby by the patio doors, pointing out the birds and beaming as s/he gurgles in response. And of course our poor neglected cat Spook would find some comfort in pressing himself against the window, switching his tail as each tantalizing feathered treat flits past. Yes, this bird feeder was going to be an excellent addition to our family, one of the touchstones of our day-to-day experience.

After hanging the feeder in a relatively safe and visible location, I scattered some seeds on the ground to attract the birds' notice and waited with great anticipation.

And waited some more.

By the time Lynn returned, three days later, not one bird had shown up. Not a single seed had been taken. My offerings had been spurned; my surprise for Lynn was not the hub of winged life, but simply a hunk of plastic and metal swinging in the wind. Spook noticed nothing. I turned my mind to other things, ignoring the slight disappointment and accepting that any birds that had survived the winter so far had probably already located sufficient food supplies.

Fast forward to this weekend; I'm painting once again (albeit with actual coloured paint, not merely primer), and casting a defeated eye upon our bird feeder when... lo -- in the birch trees in the background I see birds darting from tree to tree. Can they see this source of sustenance only 75 feet away? Yes! A black-capped chickadee flits by and lands on the feeder! My heart leaps, and I hope that this is not a secretive bird, but one that will sing his song of found food to all his brethren. After taking a single seed, he departs, and I am left to wonder whether this is just a chance visit. Will the seed be to his liking? Will he return?

For the rest of the day, every time I wander past the window I look hopefully at the feeder. To my delight, two and sometimes three birds visit at a time; all chickadees, but all welcome. I try to show Spook, but he seems more interested in the window frame; he does not develop an awareness of life on this side of the house.

Not until this morning, when, sitting at the breakfast table with a fresh cup of coffee, I spy a visiting bird at the feeder. Scooping up Spook, I hold him towards the window -- and as the chickadee flits from stem to stem, his body stiffens and he moves smoothly onto the sill. His tail twitches, and the picture in my mind acquires a little more colour. Now, all that it needs for completion is the return of Lynn and the arrival of our baby. I can't wait.

February 14th, 2006

It's 6:15 am on a Tuesday morning. I am sleep deprived and half hung-over from the paint fumes I have filtered through my lungs in preparing the baby's room this weekend. Despite this, I'm anxiously awaiting your arrival at the bus station. It has been days since I last saw you, and although the phone has brought our voices together, I want to wrap my arms around you, feel you bury your head into my chest, and look into your eyes before giving you a kiss. We're home again, in Sudbury, on a snowy day, after nine years of romance and fourteen years of friendship. Everything is right.

April 1, 2002

We wander through our house. 80 years have passed since this house was built, and many families have made it a home. Now it is our home. Our baby cat runs from room to room, up and down the stairs that he has never before experienced. Our voices mix with Jason and Kelly's and echo through the emptiness -- the emptiness that we will displace with love. Jason opens a bottle of wine and we drink a toast to a new home and old friends.

February, 1997

I call your number and say hello. It has been years since we last talked. Everything has changed, and everything soon changes for the better.

September, 1992

You walk into the room, and amidst the madness of university residence during the first day of frosh week, we are introduced to each other. Something primal in each of us recognizes that we are meant to be. The wait is well worth it.

Hmm... for a good break from my drivel about poker and databases (and, somewhere in the distance, my coffee -- oh my coffee!), try Distant Ramblings. For one thing, the writer is talented. For another, she lives in an extremely interesting place in an extremely interesting time: try Israel, now. She's a Brit, living in Israel, sharing her observations about what's really going on at ground level. For some reason I think of Tom Robbins novels when I'm readying Distant Ramblings. That's a good thing.

I sent the following email to my beloved cousin Jason, and thought that it might be interesting fare for anyone checking out my poker action. By way of explanation, I've cashed out from Pokerstars a couple of times now; once after I cleared my last deposit bonus, and once recently after, in a fit of madness, I entered an $11/45-player sit-and-go (SNG) and (to my disbelief) ended up taking second place (worth $104).

After playing in a couple of the WWdN invitation tourneys ($10+1 entry fees) and flaming out brilliantly, my account was sitting pretty low (at least, lower than my liking: around $70). So I resolved to go back to playing the $1.50+0.25/18-player SNGs that I had used to learn the game of online poker in the first place: players tend to be less capable at that level, and it was good therapy for me to take it slow in the midst of questionable madness all around me. I promptly took second place in the next three tourneys I played, which meant that I was slowly crawling back towards the psychologically important $100 mark.

After diving back into the $6/18-player game with Jason (and losing before the final table: my QQ ran into AA), I played another $6/45-player SNG and got knocked out in 10th place when my top pair ran into a full house created by the original caller's decision to limp in with 2c-6c; urgh!

These unfortunate losses put a dent in my account, of course, but I was quite happy with my play and was confident that sticking to my guns would pay off... well, here's the tale of the tape:

Played two $6/45-player SNGs today.

Came in fifth in the first one, basically holding on for dear life and hoping for fools to go out before I crashed and burned -- that was good for $24.

Then came in first in the second one, playing a tight/aggressive game that was well-complemented by some timely pockets. I became the chip leader relatively early and stayed there until the last three players... That was good for $80. Yeah!

Interesting stat: I had a total of 13 showdowns in the entire tournament. I established respect fairly early on by only playing very solid hands, and busted out a few people. Then I just concentrated on taking the short stacks' money. It seemed to work quite nicely.

Outstanding suckout moment: I'm chip leader with $8700, dealt A9o in late position. BB is at $600, somebody before me with 2600 in chips raises to 1200, I reraise him to 2400, and to my surprise the BB goes all-in with his $2700. The initial raiser calls, I call, and the cards are flipped to reveal that the initial caller has pocket 10s and the BB has Qc-Jc. I'm praying for an ace, but I catch a 9 on the flop, and another 9 on the river to make my set and wipe out both players. That put me in an extremely solid position for the end game.

Best trap (heads-up):

About halfway through our heads-up action, I looked down to see pocket aces. I had been playing quite aggressively, raising all-in to force the big stack to commit to either risking a large chunk of his chips, or to let me nibble on his blinds, and the big stack had been content (or timid) enough to fold pretty consistently. On occasion he reciprocated, and I happily folded, because he was doing it infrequently enough that I was making headway. But with aces, I wanted more than just his blinds, so I tried feigning weakness; I knew that limping in would be so out of character that my opponent would suspect something fishy was going on, so I settled for a raise to 2XBB. If worst came to worst, he would fold and I would pick up the blinds; in the best scenario, he would have a decent hand and immediately raise me all-in preflop. Instead, he called -- which told me that he had a hand with some potential. I checked on the flop (rainbow 8KJ), hoping that he would interpret that as a sign that I had A-something and had failed to hit my hoped-for ace. He bit, raising me all-in... and while I was nervous that he just might be holding onto something like pocket J's (making his set), I figured that he would have reraised me pre-flop if that were the case. I called, he flipped over 98o, and he never improved beyond his pair of 8s.

So now, since Wil convinced me to play online poker in October (no, he didn't sit me down and talk to me one-on-one; I read about his Katrina charity tournament and it sounded like a fun way to contribute to a cause), my return on online poker has been approximately $230. Given that my goal has been simply to bankroll this poker hobby without causing Lynn to frown too deeply, I'm quite happy about the results. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, indeed!

The stable release of the ibm_db2 PECL extension for IBM DB2, Cloudscape, and Apache Derby brought a high performing, highly functional database connectivity alternative to Unified ODBC for PHP 4 and 5 users. However, in and of itself a database extension does not enable you to use the many PHP applications that you might want to use. You either have to add a specific driver for each application that implements its own portability layer (such as phpMyFAQ), or if the application relies on one of the standard database abstraction layers (PEAR DB, MDB2, or ADOdb), then a driver needs to be added to the corresponding database abstraction layer.

To date, the standard database abstraction layers have offered support for DB2 only through the Unified ODBC extension (and despite substantial overlap in names, MDB2 does not offer support for DB2 at all). Due to some limitations of the Unified ODBC extension, access to DB2 would seem slow and buggy -- and access to Apache Derby or Cloudscape would be frought with minefields, as Unified ODBC does not provide a way of differentiating between the databases to which you are connected and their corresponding features. The ibm_db2 extension offers the db2_server_info() function which can tell you whether you are connected to DB2 on Linux, DB2 on a zSeries machine, or an Apache Derby database, and let your application or database abstraction layer perform the appropriate workarounds.

Now, however, as part of Larry Menard's efforts to enable Gallery 2, an ADOdb driver built on top of the ibm_db2 extension will, in all probability, be made available as part of a future ADOdb release. Undoubtedly there will be further testing to do, and tweaks and performance optimizations in the future code--for example, differentiating between the capabilities of Apache Derby and DB2--but this is a huge first step! Thanks to Larry and the Gallery 2 team for making this contribution.

Wil's hosting his usual Tuesday night game tonight at 8:30 PM EST: I got knocked out 53rd out of 118 players last week... this time around I'm hoping to get closer to the bubble. But how the hell am I going to concentrate on my game if I'm live blogging? I dunno, but lots of other respectable players manage to do it, so I'm giving it a shot.

Watch this space, ladies and gentleman, for some hot poker action later tonight. SSSSSsssss....

8:29 PM EST: I'm seated at a table with CawtBluffin, KayoteGuy, penner42, Chaswell, L0K1, LenardCole, and DavidK. I quickly fold my Q6s. Let's hope this isn't setting the tone for the match...

Poor Steph -- the author of the Zend Weekly Summaries of the action on the php-internals mailing lists hardly ever hears praise for her efforts, but suffers a barrage of weeklies! cries on IRC if she happens to be a few weeks behind. Suffice to say that her weeklies don' t just gather together the threads, but weave together a fabric that binds the PHP development community together around a common narrative. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of the weeklies... Steph must have mixed feelings of wrath and impishness when she wrote:

Roman Ivanov suggested that there should be some kind of design digest to explain why things are as they are and how or why they will change; 'right now the only way to get such information is to read everything on the internals list'. He felt that having the information presented in this kind of way would prevent repeat questions and discussions. (Note: it doesn't.)

Now, for a superb example of her writing skill and wit, check out her deft treatment of the PHP 5.1.0 Date controversy as Greek tragedy in weekly# 264. Bravo! Nothing like a little catharsis (and humour) to salve the wounds of what was a fairly dramatic altercation for PHP. Writing the ongoing history of PHP development with unflinching honesty is hard enough when you are a part of that community on a day-to-day basis and work directly with the subjects of your stories; making that history entertaining at the same time elevates you to a very special tier. We're lucky to have Steph.