I’m getting responses of people wanting to come to the next meeting. This is all good. Looks like we’ll have more people than last time (which is good). So growing it is.
Considering that a lot of people got information on the last one less than a week before the event, and this time it’s about two weeks – I feel good about it.
Full details at: http://mysql.meetup.com/93/
(I did matching versions [5.x] don’t know how diff versions will work)
Setting up a slave with a newer version of MySQL is quite a common setup. It has a couple of advantages:
– it lests you test a new version before deploying on the master (to test that everything goes smoothly)
– it lets you test new major versions (e.g. 5.0) before they are released GA (helps find bugs that may affect your setup).
I know at least one customer generally has a slave runnin the latest BK tree – just to be sure that nothing is going to even potentially break for them. Kudos to them :)
Having a slave that you use for backups is a great idea. No extra load on the master (i.e. you can safely stop the db on the slave and back things up quickly – without having locks held on your master!).
Also, if your master suffers a meltdown, you have a recent live backup system ready to take its place!
Microsoft loses in Eolas patent ruling | CNET News.com
Come on Microsoft – join us in the fight against software patents. This clearly hurts the entire industry – be it big vendors like yourself or small ones.
Let’s not all get royally screwed.
Aparrently Linus himself is a NFS client.
(I’d report the bug to MS, but it seems impossible to do so).
MacOS X 10.2 doesn’t have poll(2).
Why they don’t, who knows. It’s not as if it’s new or anything. At least they do in future versions. I think I recall reading somewher that the OS X 10.1 implementation was buggy, so I think they pulled it out of 10.2 – for some people….
oh fun.
Since I’ve just upgraded to Ubuntu Breezy (the next release of Ubuntu, currently a preview release) I’ve installed tomboy. It’s like a Wiki for your desktop. Awesome. Seems to be pretty useful. Even more useful than the stickynotes applet. In fact, i think I’ll remove sticky notes.
The storage format for tomboy is a lot more resiliant as well. A file-per-note instead of one large XML file.
One day I’ll go through a bunch of GNOME apps and fix their file system code so that it becomes near impossible to loose data with unexpected reboots.
When:
Tuesday September 13th 7:00pm
Where:
Miro International Pty Ltd
Level 18, 31 Queen Street
Melbourne 3000, Australia
Thanks to Miro for offering their offices for the meeting.
What’s happening?
Stewart Smith will talk about:
– What’s new in MySQL land
– Introduction to MySQL AB the company
– what it does
– what it offers
– Graphical tools for MySQL
– MySQL Administrator
– MySQL Query Browser
RSVP
Please RSVP via our meetup.com site:
http://mysql.meetup.com/93/
After
We can head to a pub or out for curry.
all the best to the Waugh household having hit (as jdub describes it) crisis mode.
All the best with whatever the big badness is.
Alli’s Blog
asks the question “Where does jet fuel go when it’s dumped?”
The answer is, downwards as gravity takes it. There’s fairly well documented cases of this landing in non-ideal places. Best efforts are (supposed) to be made to not to do this in non-ideal places (i.e. over where people are) but it does happen.
The idea is that fuel needs to be dumped in an emergency before a safe landing can be made. (see something like the Aircraft Incidents section on San Francisco airport wikipedia page)
The F-111 is nice as it dumps fuel at the rear of the aircraft between two jets. This has the rather spectacular effect of a “dump and burn”. Arguably a much better thing than spraying fuel onto (land|people|ocean).
I should also point out that yes, it’s a known carcinogen
Instead of writing my own entry, i’m just going to link to somebody elses. yes, that’s right kids, I’m lazy.
$ aptitude install regionset
(and then run it)
also,
$ rm -rf ~/.dvdcss
now it all works. Without doing regionset, I was getting read errors from the drive.
Rik van Riel calls for a boycott of Lexmark – I’m joining him on this call. The behaviour of Lexmark with this is just crack-smoking crazy talk.
I have never bought a Lexmark and never will. I will also strongly recommend against anyone I know every buying one.
Screw you Lexmark – you suck.
(insert disclaimer about this being my own views – no that of MySQL AB)
Slashdot | MySQL and SCO Join Forces
Some people seem to think that porting your application to a newer version of an OS, having a trial version of your subscribtion-based support shipping with every copy of that OS and access through that OS vendors reseller channel is a bad thing.
Granted, a lot of people think that certain actions of said OS vendor are just plain retarded. Myself included – it would be much better if they actually focused on products. That being said, there’s more than one OS vendor that does just plain dumb stuff – or, to use the more emotive “evil” word.
Of course, there’s part of the /. crowd that seem to think we must be evil for porting to a SCO platform – but by their silence (and sometimes “screw you guys, I’m going to X RDBMS”) it must be okay for others to do it (note that X RDBMS already supports SCO platforms)?
Besides, anybody who’s really used MySQL will know how easy it is to move your database from one platform to another – really empowering you to make sure you OS vendor gives you the best deal possible – because you can easily move to where the grass is greener.
spent a while looking for this on friday/saturday – I knew I had one. Guess what? Couldn’t find it. Anywhere.
Moved some things on my desk today, it was hiding.
Teaches me for expecting myself to keep cables in the same place.
So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V – nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).
Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – which was very good).
Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.
The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.
The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 command” error too often – so abandoned that and futzed around with a private net and NFS to xfsrestore /home.
Go to bed, awake later to find /home on new laptop (with an extra 23GB of free space!). I had to, of course – rebuild those essential packages for x86 instead of ppc – namely wesnoth.
oh, and cleaning out the ppc binaries from my mysql bk trees and doing a x86 build (I also had to change my CC from ‘ccache distcc powerpc-linux-gcc’ to ‘ccache distcc i386-linux-gcc’). One thing is for certain, it’s quicker at building things – even if the fan ramps up a bit when doing so :)
MySQL builds pretty quickly when you have a 2.8Ghz P4 and a 2.13Ghz Pentium M building it.
Anyway, set up all the apache foo for hacking on the LA website and MemberDB today. A load of the elections-result page on digital (the LA server – dual PIII 1.133Ghz) takes about fourteen or fifteen seconds using PostgreSQL as the database.
I previously reported that using MySQL (InnoDB tables) I got about twice the performance on my old laptop (1Ghz G4).
Well, on this one (2.13Ghz Pentium M) I’m getting the page loading in under three seconds. Sweet. Maybe I won’t go ahead and try to optimise some of the queries :)
(the query cache is probably coming into this – but i did do the query several times – so it’s not as if there’s any unfair advantage anywhere).
I’m using the 5.0.12-max-beta gcc dynamic build as downloaded from mysql.com for these runs. All other packages (apache2, php) are as shipped in Ubuntu. The my.ini file is as-shipped (err.. i think so: no query log, no binlog, slow query log enabled and some paths changed)
davyd: request for help asks what other university computer clubs there are out there. I know there is the Monash IT Society (formerly the CSSE Student Club – where CSSE is Computer Science and Software Engineering).
hey, if we’re lucky – Monash will still actually have a Computer Science degree in a few years. If we’re even luckier, we’ll have people left to teach it.
I sincerely hope that actual Computer Science (and the staff who teach it) are treated better elsewhere in Australia.
Hey, if UCC is going to maintain this list, it’s probably worth having a relatively prominent pointer to it on the LA website.
stillhq.com – Let the Apple service ranting continue
(with link to APC mag)
These seem to be more extreme than what I’ve experienced.
I should say, that when I have had service done (when there’s not parts coming from sydney or general slowness) it’s been a seemless 1-day affair with the service people not panicing when I say “It doesn’t run MacOS X” when they ask for a password.
Although why anybody would hand over their password to joe-random is beyond me.
There’s these great things called Boot CDs – it seems as if most apple service technicians know how to use them at least.
I would much prefer it though if the HD was easy to pop out so I didn’t have to wipe important data before taking it into service (luckily I’ve never had a totally dead machine with important confidential data stuck on it).
stillhq.com – Did I mention that Apple service sucks?
I totally empathise with Mikal on this one. My adventures with Apple service has been interesting. Although I’ve usually gotten better result out of being persistent and a giant pain in the arse (I honestly feel sorry for anyone who gets me on the other end of the phone or across the desk at a service center).
I refuse to buy a Dell due to the general crappiness of their laptop hardware – although their service seems to be pretty good, which almost makes up for it…. almost…
The problem I have with the IBMs is that it seems difficult to get a high resolution screen while staying afordable and not weighing a ton (this goes for most PC laptop manufacturers).
At the moment I’m looking at an Asus. I just want to find somewhere that’ll sell it to me with enough (1.5GB+) RAM without me having to dispose of a 512MB stick that I didn’t want in the first place. Ideally, it’d come with a 1GB stick and a free slot (and take the same memory as my current PowerBook so i could swap my existing 1GB stick in).
Oh, and avoiding the MS tax would be nice.
Anyone have any experience with Asus service?
Oh, and Mikal – ring them every day (at least) to check out how it’s going and complain at them. Be annoying. Make them hate you – point out that the easy way to make you happy is to swap it for a functioning one. Ring Apple as well. Oh, and only ever talk to the manager – or the highest person available at the time.
good luck.
Trent has been blogging quite often about Avahi. It does look like a good project to watch. Promises ease of use (for the coder who really doesn’t care about Rendezvous/Bonjour/ZeroConf/whatever-they-call-it-this-week internals and just wants Cool Functionality(tm) in their app).
Maybe integrating this would be cool for mysqld and the gui tools. (i’ve toyed with the thoughts of using it in cluster… but do we relaly want another thing that can possibly fail in a HA environment… probably not – considering using DNS is usually a bad idea).
Sandra Mansell talks about the (not so joy) of ant bites but the real joy of cheap icey poles.
They are good – like, really. Why is it that the ones you buy in a huge box for next to nothing are the best ones? Maybe it’s because they are just sugar and water – a winning combination by any standards.
Now I can’t wait for summer, where there’s an excuse to have icey poles. Melbourne winter (still winter in my book – it’s cold) just doesn’t put you in the icey pole mood.