Colin Charles Agenda

Today’s been interesting. Its labour day here in Melbourne, so I believe a lot of people are enjoying the long weekend. I on the other hand, have been labouring over the long weekend, and we have stuff to show for it. Via the Forge Wiki:

• Google Summer of Code 2007 – we’ve applied, we’ve identified mentors, and we’ve also identified some project ideas. Last week was rather busy sorting all this out. My boss, Kaj explains it a lot better in his post, Global Warming & Google Summer of Code. Students, do apply to come code with us!
  Keep the March 14 – 24, 2007 dates (Cupertino, California time) in your mind students… Thats when the Google SoC opens up. Of course, come March 14 we also certainly hope to be a mentoring organization, with the sole purpose of making MySQL rock! With regards to the wiki page, there’s information on a lot of bugs – we’re doing this so we open the board up a little, as well. We try to be specific, but we also try to be really open about the whole thing so students can cherry pick what interests them.
• Thanks to Stefan Hinz, our Documentation lead, we have now opened up MySQL University. This is the Engineering Training Program, so why not come learn with us?
  This is still a work in progress, and we’re migrating content (there’s not much yet, so thats a good thing). In the near future, since we’re working out the kinks, this should all be run on freenode as well. In the meantime, go learn about the mysys library & algorithms. Those times are probably when MySQL University will be held, so keep them free in your relevant timezone :P

Technorati Tags: mysql university, google summer of code, gsoc, summer of code, learn, code

WordPress Matt writes that your WordPress.com blog URL is now usable as an OpenID login. I’m thrilled about that, but what happens when you’ve got an ID, sitting at MyOpenID? Does OpenID support merging of profiles, so you only maintain your OpenID at one location?

I now have two OpenID accounts – one at WordPress.com and one at MyOpenID. How does this help my overall problem of only wanting to have one OpenID to login to all my services? When I login to Zooomr or Livejournal, am I doing so with the ID listed at MyOpenID or WordPress.com? Alas, I tried it, and there is confusion. The onus is now on me to remember which OpenID registra I’ve used on which site.

Beginning to think that OpenID in itself isn’t terribly useful, if all its going to create are a lot of registras, and a lot of fragmentation. If they wanted a good model to base this on, why not look at plain Jane DNS? You can have many different registras, but the bottom line is, bytebot.net is always going to be me.

Technorati Tags: openid, authentication, online identity, identity management, registras

Today I booked (well, I did that a couple of days ago) and paid for my flight ticket to the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo. As always, its the last day for staff to get their stuff together, so I did :-)

Now, all you folk out there, might find that if you register by March 14 (I believe thats in the US timezone), you’ll save $200, so thats a total cost of only $1,295! Its at the Santa Clara Convention Center, so stay at the Hyatt if you’re wanting to hang out with MySQL’ers even after hours. Alternatively, if you’re looking for other (cheaper?) accomodation, there’s the Hilton across the road.

I’d recommend the tutorial day, especially if you’re interested in Cluster, as my friend and colleague Stewart Smith is doing the MySQL Cluster: The Complete Tutorial, in two parts, so thats one whole day of cluster related goodness. Everyone’s talking about scaling cheaply, and I think this is well worth attending if you don’t know much about Cluster.

When time permits, I’ll take a further look at the schedule, and give you my picks of what I think is going to be hot. Till then…

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference & expo, mysqlconf, mysqlconference

I just built mysql-5.0-community, on my T7200 with 2GB of RAM (on Fedora Core 6), and it only took a mere:

real    7m51.127s

user    3m13.836s

sys     2m19.803s

The obligatory make test was run, and that was also pretty quick:

All 455 tests were successful.

The servers were restarted 109 times

Spent 1134.052 seconds actually executing testcases

Maybe we could have a competition to see how fast MySQL builds (under 8 minutes) and tests (under 19 minutes), something similar to the 7-second Linux kernel compile. With that it looks like 5.0.37 might make its way to the surface really soon now, since 5.0.35 was pending a release, before we canned that.

Why is MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 significant? Because it contains Jeremy Cole’s SHOW PROFILE feature. Notice how thats not just a patch any longer, its a feature, from the community, that’s been implemented in the MySQL Community Server release. Chad Miller (in Community Engineering) also extended the then patch further, and now you can also get said information via the INFORMATION_SCHEMA (look at the PROFILING table in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA).

Profiling isn’t enabled by default (check via: show variables like 'profiling';), so you’d do well to set profiling='on';. Once that is done, you can just execute SHOW PROFILE; to be greeted by the feature. Using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, and something like: select duration,source_function,source_file from profiling; I can see how much time MySQL takes to execute a function like the mysql_select or how long it takes to do open_tables – best of all, I can see which source file I might want to edit if need be.

I’m told this does not work on Windows, or Solaris (?), because they don’t have the getrusage() syscall, but it should probably work just fine on OS X based MySQL servers.

Technorati Tags: mysql, SHOW PROFILE, profiling, mysql community, mysql 5.0.37, timing builds

Today I saw an interesting opinion posted on a mailing list. I’ll quote from the fedora-list post:

What folks say here cant be taken as Fedora toting anything. It is just some user opinions.

Some of those "user opinions" came from @redhat.com addresses, I actually don't take any notice of @anydomain.blah posters, as they are just like I, posting a personal opinion, but when you post with @redhat.com, it is next best thing to an official comment.

And I’m wondering, is this true with all users? Does it matter if the post comes from @projectname.com or not? Are your opinions more valued if you’re employed by an open source company or the project in question?

I personally think its silly. If I make a post to mysql-list, with my @mysql.com address, I don’t expect that to be an official comment or a reflection of our excellent (albeit, paid for) support. Are my opinions on fedora-devel-list any lesser, when I don’t have an @redhat.com address (or maybe, don’t use my @fedoraproject.org alias?). If anyone has any thoughts from the @canonical.com vs. @ubuntu.com in the Ubuntu Community, I’d love to hear about it.

Got to tread carefully if this is what goes on in minds. User opinions becoming the gospel? Tsk tsk.

Technorati Tags: community, alias, domain name, opinions, official comments

Its the end of another month, maybe I’m entitled to be a little peeved?

Thunderbird. In Linux, its Edit -> Account Settings. On Windows and OS X, its Tools -> Account Settings. On OS X, its Thunderbird -> Preferences, on Linux is Edit -> Preferences. Yes, I see the importance of making local users a lot happier about where to find things, but I’d very much like it if it was made easier to support (so no matter what OS I use, I know if said application is to be used, I can guide someone over the air, on what to do).

Ekiga of late, thinks I have a non-full-duplex sound card. Yes, I know, laughable, in the 21st century. Look at this in amazement:

Could not open audio channel for audio reception

An error occured while trying to play audio to the soundcard for the audio reception. Please check that your soundcard is not busy and that your driver supports full-duplex.
The audio reception has been disabled.

Yes, that’s right. I can’t have Rhythmbox playing, and Ekiga working, at the same time. I can however have Rhythmbox playing, and make/receive a Skype call just fine. How ironic.

However, I’m still a big fan of Ekiga. Its not proprietary like Skype. In fact, if more had Ekiga accounts, it would rock (I’m colincharles at ekiga, just like skype). Skype on Linux looks like arse when you’ve used Skype on OS X (or Windows). Not only does it look bad, it actually has so much less features, than the other Skype platforms. Is Skype 1.3 ever going to die, so we can see at least Skype 2 on Linux?

One of the reasons I registered a Gizmoproject account was so I could make SIP calls and GizmoOut calls via my N770. Seemed viable then, but the service quality is pretty bad (sadly, Skype’s actually better in that respect). Skype mentioned that video calling was coming for Linux on the Nokia N800 – is it? On that tangent, I’m glad I still don’t own one, as people seem to be having failures – reboots and window problems.

Technorati Tags: skype, ekiga, sound cards, drivers, sound drivers, full duplex, thunderbird, software