Colin Charles Agenda

At the MySQL Conference the closing keynote was on Yahoo! Pipes, by Pasha Sadri, a Principal Software Engineer, Advanced Development Division, Yahoo!. I wanted to try it, but I was on Firefox 1.5 on Fedora Core 6 and there was no way I was going to build a pipe during the talk.

Fast forward a week or so later, and a boring Friday night ensued. What better thing to do, than to play with Pipes. In under fifteen minutes, I created the Edwin Pipe. What is it? Its a pipe that is all things MySQL – comprehensive source of news, whats cool, and so forth. There are some limitations – regular expression support is supposedly like Perl’s, but is not quite complete. The Unique operator is pretty cool, filtering is good (can be improved with better regex support), and maybe some sort of fuzzyness in the way data is displayed (I don’t only want all Digg mysql related items popping up at the top, or I don’t only want all mysql job forum details at the bottom, etc.). Language conversion via a Babelfish operator exists, but not language filtering (maybe I only want all English text displayed in my final pipe output).

That aside, the forums are pretty active. Pipes are ridiculously easy to create. Its simply great stuff. Oh, shorter URLs – the URLs are so long and not feasible, in my opinion. Impressive is the support to then get RSS output, and also JSON (so all processing is done on the server side). Happy I am with sites that provide JSON feeds.

Now, for some notes I took during the closing keynote.

• A while ago, he wanted to find an apartment near a park. Go to Craigslist and find apartment lists, then click the map link, and also check distance to a park on the map… This is tedious, and not automated.
• Craigslist apartment RSS feed. Yahoo! Local API to find Parks. Why not tie this in together? It started with about 50 lines of Perl code, and it combined feeds + web services (this is your Web 2.0 mashup).
• Pipes: free online service that lets you remix data and create mashups using a visual editor.
• Pipes treats the web as a big database, as they do joins across different ‘tables’.
• Design principles came from the Unix Pipes. They’re like pipes for the Web. Build useful applications from simple primitives.
• The more open Pipes is, the more useful it will be (so Google goodness will also work).
• Output available in JSON, so it can be used as another application. Get email or SMS from output, even. RSS is obviously available.
• App Examples: Last.fm + Flickr, Babbler (Second Life, language translation) by Max Case.
• Must enable users to solve ad-hoc problems. User generated “features” and disposable applications -> the future.
• Pipes uses MySQL, squid for caching, PHP & Perl (lots of CPAN modules) for serving and back-end processing of the pipes.

Edwin 2.0 is already in the works. It will have more cool feeds, and probably work out all the language issues with more separated regexes. More fuzzy organizing of data, if possible. If you want to see a MySQL Blogger Photo Gallery, bman_seattle created a pipe too.

Technorati Tags: mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, yahoo, pipes, edwin pipe, json, visual editing, mashup

Last week, Dell was getting in bed with Ubuntu, this week there’s a Microsoft/Novell deal. The terms are interesting: Dell purchasing SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) certificates from Microsoft. Then, there’s the existing Dell Linux customer base – this deal is meant to market and offer services to migrate them to SLES!

Two platforms of the future – Microsoft Windows and Linux. These are also the two platforms for today. Dell will focus on interoperability workshops, migration proof of concepts, and provide migration services. I wonder how much of these will hit Dell or Novell partners, offering similar services. Watch the video-blog on Dell’s blog.

Questions that remain to be answered, and will be interesting to see unfold:

• Where does this leave Red Hat? Is something interesting going to be announced at the Red Hat Summit happening May 9-11?
• HP is a big supporter of Linux, with Debian. Where is the synergy with them to move the Ubuntu or even the Novell way?

A lot of folk have predicted many years in the past were the year of desktop Linux adoption. I think 2007 is the year of desktop Linux adoption. More importantly, I think I’m right.

Technorati Tags: dell, novell, microsoft, sles, pre-loaded, migration, ubuntu, windows

Most of the software I use is open source software. However, some software I use is just plain free software that has no source associated with it (like Skype and Gizmo Project). I took the challenge of wanting to run a 64-bit desktop, and I guess there are problems, but thats the beauty of Linux – you’ll want to fix said problems.

Google is always helpful – I found the Cedega wiki on how to setup a clean 32-bit chroot with debbootstrap. I improvised a little. I now have Skype running.

Setting up a 32-bit chroot on your 64-bit Ubuntu

• sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
• sudo mkdir /chroot (/chroot is arbitrary. You can call it /feisty32 or /hoary32 or whatever you please depending on your requirements.)
• echo "feisty /chroot" > /etc/dchroot.conf
• sudo debootstrap --arch i386 feisty /chroot http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
• sudo chroot /chroot
• dpkg-reconfigure locales (I chose en_AU, you probably want to chose whatever else you use)
• Edit /chroot/etc/apt/sources.list and make it so that its:

  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse
  deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse

• Now, perform the apt-get update; apt-get upgrade routine
• Out of the chroot, there are some interesting files to copy into the chroot:

• sudo cp /etc/passwd /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/shadow /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etcgroup /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/sudoers /chroot/etc/
• sudo cp /etc/hosts /chroot/etc/

/home   /chroot/home    none    bind 0 0

/tmp    /chroot/tmp     none    bind 0 0

/dev    /chroot/dev     none    bind 0 0

/proc   /chroot/proc    none    bind 0 0

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/dchroot -d "`echo $0 | sed 's|^.*/||'` $*"

That’s it. You’ve now got a 32-bit chroot environment, and can install any 32-bit apps you please.

Installing Skype
First up, go download the .deb file from Skype. Then:

• dchroot -d
• dpkg -i skype.deb (Now, it will complain about missing debs. Then, I ran sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 libqt3-m. It will complain, so just do a sudo apt-get -f install.)
• Excellent, Skype is now installed. Exit the chroot.
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/do_dchroot /usr/local/bin/skype
• Now, run Skype!

I did this similarly for Gizmo Project. Sound works a charm (thanks to /dev being mounted). The applications seem to run just fine.

Technorati Tags: skype, 64bit, 32bit, chroot, gizmo, debian, ubuntu