I’m notorious for not updating OS X (macOS) too quickly, preferring to wait months on end for Apple to iron out bugs. I just hope that in 2017 they don’t make a major release and something sensible, i.e. that fixes usability and makes the OS much more stable.

However when you buy a new Mac, you’re more or less forced into the new OS. I did pickup a MacBook Pro 15″ with the new TouchBar, and at some stage I’ll talk about my usage (its been about 3 months of daily usage).

One thing that has annoyed me about the new macOS Sierra is that I don’t get to use GPGTools – it will not work on macOS Sierra. There is now however a beta you could try to ensure you’re signing and encrypting email just as well.

Another thing that I hit almost immediately? Some of my SSH hosts just stopped working. I’ve seen various sites talk about how ssh-agent does not automatically load pass phrases to keychain during startup to Upgrading to macOS Sierra will break your SSH keys and lock you out of your own servers.

My ~/.ssh/config now has:

Host *

UseKeychain yes

AddKeysToAgent yes

to fix things.

Everything else more or less works. I did Time Machine restore. I’m not too happy that they removed the Time Remaining from the Battery icon, and I’m not getting the battery life that I expect, but maybe when the new Mac Mini’s come out, I’ll do another Time Machine restore to that, and a clean install to the MacBook Pro.

My strategy for photos is to place them in my Dropbox folder, and sync them to one box in particular but they also live on the Dropbox cloud (it also used to be that they end up on Flickr as they sometimes still do; Google Photos does backup in regular resolution stuff from my iPhone). All this gets backed up via various backup services (Backblaze, CrashPlan).

Lately, I’ve been wondering if that makes sense since Dropbox applies compression to my JPGs. I missed the announcement of Dropbox using Lepton image compression, but did read with great interest that Flickr is using it too – A Year Without a Byte.

Lepton “provides lossless, bit-exact storage for any type of photo, whether it be for archival purposes, or for serving live.” It is open source.

I understand it saves Dropbox countless petabytes. I just don’t like the idea that my images are being re-compressed without me knowing about it. It may be that other services do this too. But one thing is for sure – the moment its in my Dropbox folder, they reduce in size, and my backups are also getting said reduction. Sure it’s lossless, bit-exact storage. But I’m thinking about archival forever!

P/S: I’m going to guess this is why Dropbox doesn’t support Live Photos in Camera Uploads yet. They haven’t figured out how to save space…

This year we are spending New Year’s Eve in Lisbon, Portugal, and I’m glad to report its much warmer than Vienna last year.

TripIt says I did 25 trips, 252 days on the road, 463,491km travelled, 47 cities, and 20 countries in 2016. So less travel in terms of distance than 2015 (528,151km) but more than 2014 (435,271km). As for travelling overall, only 252 days spent overseas (with this current trip not being counted), compared to 281 days in 2015, and 264 days in 2014 (so this overall trend suggests more time at home!). Or it was just a “down year”, since I did spend 223 days on the road in 2013.

Anyway, back to enjoying Lisbon. I say I’ll write here more, but that just doesn’t seem to pan out as well as I’d like it to. I do write a “log” in a Hobonichi Techo, and still very much enjoy long form writing with pen and paper…

Happy New Year, remember Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” and let’s enjoy 2017 (we know it’s going to be interesting from a geopolitical standpoint).

When we do upgrades, we have to do them family wide which is four devices at any given time. This time we all settled on the iPhone 7 in varying colours. Naturally, I got the jet black variant. I also realised that I didn’t need the form factor of the Plus sized phones – quite simply, my jeans pockets aren’t that deep, and I end up fraying the earphone 3.5mm connector quite regularly (I’m on my third one now and its almost giving way in a span of about 2 years). Smaller phone might also allow me to spend less time looking at it, and if I wanted to consume, more time on the iPad.

Anyway… one phone migrated in a jiffy. Sure, after an iTunes encrypted backup, it wouldn’t restore automatically since the iOS version of the phones were too old. A bit of a tedious un-Apple like process, but the correct document to read and follow is: Restoring from an iTunes or iCloud backup when a later version of iOS is required.

Another phone had an encrypted iTunes password that just could not be remembered. So the arduous task of turning on iCloud Backup and then doing a restore (so while no fault of Apple, this I’m sure is a common scenario).

My phone had quite a few apps that required me to login again. Google Authenticator did not have all the two-factor logins migrated for some reason, so I had to manually add a bunch back. Maybe this should have been the key to move to a 1Password vault? I’ll leave that for next time.

Most of the social apps I use required some form of verification. WhatsApp had an easy process. WeChat was by far the most complicated. LINE had a password I didn’t know anything about.

Apps you would think would just automatically restore from the iTunes backup? But no, a lot of them end up downloading again. In addition some user hostility from apps like Audible and Overcast – imagine having to re-download all your content!?!

I had to also remember about my Apple Watch, fortunately again, another good guide: Switch your Apple Watch to a new iPhone.

Why isn’t this process more seamless? Android gets this done really well – enter your Google login details, and you’re good to go. Why is this not the case with Apple? Am I forced to then use an iCloud Backup to make magic happen?

Do I care that I’m not having a dual-lens camera with some “software” bokeh effects? No.

Why don’t more apps support 3D Touch? Its been quite sometime and most don’t seem to care to support it, which I find quite odd.

I don’t consider myself an “app-holic”, but spending about two hours of time to switch things over seems rather ridiculous. There has got to be a better way.

(What about the fourth iPhone? I’ll find out tomorrow if it has any surprises for me; here’s hoping things “just work”.)

Tab housekeeping but I also realise that people seem to have missed announcements, developments, etc. that have happened in the last couple of months (and boy have they been exciting). I think we definitely need something like the now-defunct MySQL Newsletter (and no, DB Weekly or NoSQL Weekly just don’t seem to cut it for me!).

MyRocks

During @scale (August 31), Yoshinori Matsunobu mentioned that MyRocks has been deployed in one region for 5% of its production workload at Facebook.

By October 4 at the Percona Live Amsterdam 2016 event, Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev said that MyRocks is coming to Percona Server (blog). On October 6, it was also announced that MyRocks is coming to MariaDB Server 10.2 (note I created MDEV-9658 back in February 2016, and that’s a great place to follow Sergei Petrunia’s progress!).

Rick Pizzi talks about MyRocks: migrating a large MySQL dataset from InnoDB to RocksDB to reduce footprint. His blog also has other thoughts on MyRocks and InnoDB.

Of course, checkout the new site for all things MyRocks! It has a getting started guide amongst other things.

Proxies: MariaDB MaxScale, ProxySQL

With MariaDB MaxScale 2.0 being relicensed under the Business Source License (from GPLv2), almost immediately there was a GPLScale fork; however I think the more interesting/sustainable fork comes in the form of AirBnB MaxScale (GPLv2 licensed). You can read more about it at their introductory post, Unlocking Horizontal Scalability in Our Web Serving Tier.

ProxySQL has a new webpage, a pretty active mailing list, and its the GPLv2 solution by DBAs for DBAs.

Vitess

Vitess 2.0 has been out for a bit, and a good guide is the talk at Percona Live Amsterdam 2016, Launching Vitess: How to run YouTube’s MySQL sharding engine. It is still insanely easy to get going (if you have a credit card), at their vitess.io site.

I neglected to mention my November appearances but I’ll just write trip reports for all this. December appearances are:

• ACMUG MySQL Special Event – Beijing, China – 10 December 2016 – come learn about Percona Server, MyRocks and lots more!
• A bit of a Japan tour, we will be in Osaka on the 17th, Sapporo on the 19th, and Tokyo on the 21st. A bit of talk of the various proxies as well as the various servers that exist in the MySQL ecosystem.

Looking forward to discussing MySQL and its ecosystem this December!