Colin Charles Agenda

Arjen and Stewart are on stage, and there’s an introduction session going on now. We’re now, introducing the ex-MySQLers (Arjen), and MySQLers (Stewart, Giuseppe, me). Trent has just walked in, so that makes all the MySQLers that are around at linux.conf.au.

Highlights of some of the attendees:

• A user from LG, who has been using MySQL for about 3 years now
• An technology manager in defense, interested in MySQL as an education exercise
• A MySQL user for over 8 years
• Systems administrator who’s been heavily using MySQL for 5 years, however with a total of about 8 years of use
• Systems administrator at IBM, using MySQL for a long time
• Travel startup in the Gold Coast, doing lots of MySQL, replication, proxy use
• A software engineer at HP, in China, and they use MySQL for benchmarking on HP hardware
• A Connector/J user
• realestate.com.au, is a Perl+Apache+MySQL shop
• A IBM guy who works in performance tuning
• Canon Research Labs in Sydney, but now working in a new small-ish firm, using a lot of MySQL
• MySQL for a VoIP company. They’ve tried mcluster, and it sucked ;) (and now, they want Cluster)
• Bolt on’s, to old accounting packages. Using MySQL with Delphi; fiddling with Mondrian, Pentaho now and also looking at JBOSS
• PHP developer using MySQL for CMS systems, using it for about 6+ years
• m5 Networks, VoIP company, using MySQL, needs to scale, looking at Cluster
• Lonely Planet, MySQL DBA, who needs more tips on scalability and high availability
• Moodle host, also interested in high availability
• Stronghold CMS, they’d like MySQL to support sequences on a transaction, and they don’t want it in a stored procedure. They work for the government, to some extent (afaik).
• Using MySQL in education for research/study
• Asterisk, and MySQL
• Drupal, and optimising MySQL, so it can scale
• vquence, who need to store over 100 million videos, and they’d like MySQL to scale for them

The trend is there are a lot of VoIP companies, and a lot of folk wanting high availability, and scaling to amazing lengths. Very interesting. OK, Stewart is going to tell us what’s new in MySQL now… He’s got a bottle of liquor available, in traditional Monty tradition :)

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql miniconf, linux.conf.au, lca08

I wanted to have an RSS feed be returned, for a specific tag or search item in WordPress. Hopping on to IRC, and speaking with Dossy, we realised that there was no plugin to do this. However, after a short amount of poking around (circa under 2 minutes?), the way was clear:

?feed=rss2&s=STRING

Now I can have a specific lca08 feed. Or one for the eeepc. And the list can go on…

FWIW, feed= can be rss, atom; basically anything WordPress supports.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, rss, search

I bit the bullet, and picked up an Asus Eee PC today, while I failed at an attempt to get a rack. Its a 4GB model, with the webcam, and its on its 3rd run, i.e. I’ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing – really, silly of them (can you actually save that much money, on a connector?). This batch arrived at OfficeWorks around 27/12/2007 from what I can tell (that’s whats written on the box), and its a 7C model (basically, the only model you get the mini-PCIe connector was the 7A one).

For what it’s worth, OfficeWorks and The Good Guys are price-matched for the Eee PC, while JB-HiFi comes next, with Myer holding the top retail price. Of course, all this is pending you actually getting to a store with stock of the item – I picked mine up from OfficeWorks, in Prahan (South Melbourne for instance, was out of stock).

Now, on to the machine.

Pros:

• You pop the battery in, and the boot-up process is near instantaneous, because its booting from a SSD.
• Standard applications ship with it: Pidgin for IM, Skype for
  video-chat, OpenOffice.org for all your office needs, Acrobat Reader
  for PDFs (why not just evince?) and a whole bunch more.
• The trackpad works perfectly, and even though
  there is only “one” mouse button, it provides a 2-button interface.
• Its nice to have a laptop where suspend and resume work out of
  the box.
• The external display, just works (adjusting to the size
  of the external display, as opposed to mirroring for instance).
• The power supply is very smart. You can remove the Australian plug, and
  see a US-based plug beneath. Either way, it can be used on most modern
  airlines now, even in economy (if you’re on a quality airline, like
  Singapore Airlines, for instance).
• There’s a carrying case that comes in the box, which I’m sure will be handy when I’m about to throw it into my backpack.

Cons:

• The child-like interface, that is almost comparable to, if not worse, than what Sugar will offer you.
• You might be tempted to then say, “Computer Web”, to then hear the voice of a lady then say “Web” fairly softly, and launch Firefox. Not too impressive – for example, I had the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing in the background, and in my limited use of voice control, I managed to even open up the Clock when I wanted the web browser.
• I tried the dictionary. Its nice to know there actually is an offline dictionary, but its really not too usable. The Longman dictionary is probably ideal if you were speaking/reading/writing Chinese, but I’d have taken an Oxford, or even a Webster’s anyday.
• The keyboard itself, is a tad small, but one will be able to get used
  to it. The positioning of the right Shift key, is not optimal, and I’ve
  seen hacks of people replacing the keys (physically!) and then making
  use of Xmodmap to fix it.
• 800×480 is a tough resolution to get used to. Sure, you’ve got a 7″ screen, but its an odd resolution, and some websites tend not to render properly at this resolution any longer (which is sad).

I wanted a lot more than Xandros could offer me. About the only time I felt at home, was when I hit Ctrl+Alt+T (for the Terminal). At this point, I thought of either installing Ubuntu or Fedora; naturally, I went with the latter, something called Eeedora. More about this, in another post.

What do I think of the machine? Overall, I like it. Its a great sub-notebook. Haven’t tried the battery out yet, but I hear I’ll get about 3 hours of juice from it.

I definitely need to upgrade the RAM – 512MB just doesn’t cut it in this modern world, and a 2GB chip is pretty affordable these days. While I’m there, I might as well get a nice big USB thumb drive, as well as a huge SD card (the slot does SDHC, so maybe some 8GB will be nice?).

Happy to have supported yet another vendor, doing good things with Linux. Go Asus! (similarly, go Nokia for all your beta-quality tablet devices, Dell for Linux laptops [that still haven’t reached the APAC region], and I’m sure I’m missing some vendors, but I’ve not purchased from them.)

Technorati Tags: asus, eeepc, eee, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux

When buying my Dell Inspiron 640m, I wanted to ensure I was getting a good warranty. It turns out, I finally had to use it, and all I can say is that its been a pretty great experience!

The left mouse button on my touchpad decided to give up the ghost, and just stayed depressed all the time. It worked fine, but not getting tactile feedback was annoying. So I submitted a problem report at 4.20am on the 23/01/2008. I got a phone call back at about 6pm, on the 23rd, asking me when would be a good time for Dell to come over. I stated Friday, and made a note that the LCD hinge on the right hand side felt loose, and maybe it deserved a replacement. They made a note of that.

On the 24th, I was called, to confirm that I’d be available on the 25th, and it would be great to choose a booking time. I chose 11am-2pm. On the 25th, at about 12.10pm, I get a call saying the technician will be around soon, and he’ll call when he’s about a half hour away. I say thats great, and head out for some lunch at Soda Rock.

Back by 1pm, the technician comes at 1.30pm, and starts working. He’s done by 2.15pm, having basically taken out my laptop to bits, and reassembling it. I got the palmrest changed, seeing that the entire thing had to be replaced to fix the mouse. The LCD hinge alone can’t be replaced, so the whole casing itself got replaced (save for the LCD, of course). This meant that all my stickers disappeared!

The laptop looks like new now. It even got a clean (all the dust inside, removed). Surprisingly, the keyboard hasn’t given up the ghost or anything, but the technician told me that it probably will give way in time, and they’ll be around to fix it ;)

How do I feel? Thrilled with Dell, I am. No regrets with their warranty service, and I probably will now only buy Dell hardware for machines that I care about.

Technorati Tags: dell, warranty, inspiron 640m

Doing a bit of procrastinating while packing, I found some notes from an old MODM talk that I thought I’d transcribe. Its the differences between a manager or a leader…

• Manager… responds to change, is reactive. Leader… creates and shapes change, is proactive
• Manager… future-taker, path-taker. Leader… future-maker, path-maker
• Manager… cautious about risk. Leader… careful about risk
• Manager… does the thing right. Leader… does the right thing
• Manager… guided by fate. Leader… guided by destiny
• Manager… controls actions and events. Leader… facilitates actions and events
• Manager… works in the organisation. Leader… works on the organisation
• Manager… prophet: informed and motivated by understanding and predicting trends; asking why? Leader… visionary: informed and motivated by imagining the future and the future self; asking why not?
• Manager… probable-futurist: asks what will the future be like? Leader… preferred-futurist: asks what should/could the future be like
• Manager… problem-centered strategist. Leader… mission-directed strategist

The above is worth mulling over. What do you want 2008 to be for you?

I for one, don’t normally spend time writing goals for the year. Today morning, I found myself doing just that. Now, its time to get off my butt, and get things done.

Peter posted that CentOS comes with a build of MySQL Enterprise. It should really be clarified that CentOS itself, comes with MySQL Community, as does Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On RHEL5/CentOS5, you’ll see:

mysql-5.0.22-2.2.el5_1.1
mysql-server-5.0.22-2.2.el5_1.1

The above are the default packages that CentOS provides. However, what Peter really is referring to is the CentOSPlus Repository, which by their own admittance is “not part of the upstream distribution and extend CentOS’s functionality at the expense of upstream compatibility. Enabling this repository makes CentOS different from upstream.”

The idea behind providing Enterprise builds, largely came from RHBZ#230412: No src.rpm available for mysql. Red Hat provides something called the Web Application Stacks product (RHWAS), in where they include MySQL Enterprise, amongst other software packages, and they charge for support (that differs from buying just a RHEL license). Max Spevack answers it pretty well, as this is the response he came to, after talking to folk at MySQL.

Its worth noting that CentOSPlus does not use Enterprise tarballs/SRPMS, but use sources from the BitKeeper tree. Its worth noting, that at the time of this writing, CentOSPlus does not include Enterprise RPMs for CentOS 5, just CentOS 4. Its also worth noting that patches are being applied, that are out of tree, to the RPMs. A snippet from the RPM changelog (rpm -q --changelog <packagename> if you must):

* Mon Dec 24 2007 Johnny Hughes <johnny@centos.org> 5.0.54-1.el4.centos
- upgraded to the 5.0.54 Enterprise BK tree. Removed patches that are
already incorporated into 5.0.54.

- added mysql-5.0.52-mysqldump-hang-33057.patch for mysql bug #33057

- added mysql-5.0.50-openssl-handshake-33050.patch fo mysql bug #33050

* Sun Dec 23 2007 Johnny Hughes <johnny@centos.org> 5.0.48-3.el4.centos
- modified the process of obtaining the Enterprise Sources to using bkf and
downloading directly from the MySQL Enterprise BitKeeper tree.

So, definitely interesting times. If you hit a bug, you might be wondering if its an upstream bug, or something that was provided by your packager. Of course, this is what is so great about the MySQL community – the ability to do just this! Currently, against 5.0.54, CentOSPlus is shipping 2 patches, with a few extra source packages that don’t come with regular tarballs. Will this number grow? Just remember, the “Enterprise” version you get in CentOSPlus is not “MySQL Enterprise”.

Technorati Tags: centos, mysql, distributions shipping mysql, patches