Colin Charles Agenda

Dear Interweb,

Is there a way for me to install an instance of OS X inside of Parallels or VMWare Fusion? I currently use VMs for QA work, and when I want to QA packages on OS X, I don’t want to always reinstall clean environments on a test Mac. And yes, you can find problems in clean room environments – like MyODBC.

Has PearPC improved, in terms of speed? Or is it dead?

(no, I don’t care if Apple’s licensing is still retarded. This is to make my life easier.)

Technorati Tags: macosx, virtualization, parallels, vmware, qa

I found the recent interview with Bruce Momjian (founder, lead architect, PostgreSQL) rather interesting. From it I took away:

• PostgreSQL has stringent quality assurance. This is because there isn’t the “luxury of putting out a bad release”. He mentions that in the world of open source, there is zero tolerance for things that don’t work; I however can find many examples contradicting this line of thinking. Release engineering is largely dependent on humans and they do make mistakes.
• “People are more confident with us that some of the commercial databases.” I believe this largely is how your company is run – tech-oriented or suit-oriented. Worse if you’re suit-oriented and largely public. Investors and upper management need to blame someone when things go wrong, and thats why support services are so great in the open source world. Accountability is key. The ability to fix customers problems is key. Going off on a tangent, Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell and OpenOffice.org hacker extraordinaire basically said:
  

  Ubuntu, claiming to ship and support OpenOffice.org, it’s a total joke – they have a part-time packager. At Mandriva, for example, the OpenOffice.org packager is a self-described ‘not a C++ programmer’. So how you can then go and say ‘we’ll support you’… Novell, at least, has people across the board working on the codebase, with a good understanding of lots of issues.

• Bruce mentions evolution – from stopping PostgreSQL crashing, to performance tuning, to enterprise features. He reckons that 8.2 is Enterprise Ready, and 8.3 and forward is going to include “revolutionary features that go beyond things you can’t do with other databases”.
• My favourite quote:
  

  “If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period,” he said. “There is not really another database that’s enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say.”

• Pretty bold statement, eh? No roadmaps, like most open source projects. I actually think that’s a plus point, because roadmaps suit suits, but are completely inaccurate most of the time.

Technorati Tags: postgresql, interview, bruce momjian, michael meeks, accountability, database

I decided to actually get backups going. I know, laugh. But I bet that when you snicker, you may also not have a great backup system in place.

Picked up a 160GB 2.5″ disk and an external casing. After careful calculation, it seems like maybe I could have saved money buying a pre-packaged solution. Weird.

Anyways, the tool of choice – rdiff-backup. Its simply dead easy to use. Just do: rdiff-backup <current> <backup-path>. My initial backup of about 56GB of my home directory, it took just under 2 hours for the first ever backup image.

Restore is something a lot of folk seem to forget. They make great backups, but never test restores. I went cold turkey – moved from Fedora to Ubuntu after a backup. It worked.

Only real problem is that in Fedora, I had uid/gid 500, but in Ubuntu, I was uid/gid 1000. That’s easily fixable, I restored (rdiff-backup -r), and I have my environment exactly as per before the format (and distribution switch).

I probably should try to do these backups daily, and maybe have even more that one drive for backups, but this is me being very appreciative of rdiff-backup. Today I ran it again after over a week.

time rdiff-backup /home/byte/ /media/disk/byte/

real    288m40.943s

user    52m1.951s

sys     12m57.641s

rdiff-backup also works over the network. Those dreamhost accounts are now starting to look very interesting for off-site storage. Read the documentation and examples if you’re wanting to get up to speed really quickly. Its also OS X compatible. Now if only I found a sensible Windows backup system…

Technorati Tags: backup, rdiff-backup, restore, unix, linux, macosx

I figured it was time to redesign, what was essentially 2004, on bytebot.net. Its 2007, so with the power of “badges”, I’ve made the site feel a lot more updated. I’m feeding photos from my Flickr account, last played music via last.fm (I’m not really big on their widget, but I’m trying hard to not have to parse rss myself), bookmarking via del.icio.us (with comments, so its also occasionally blog-like), and micro-blogging via Twitter.

The fact that I can still do all this entirely in HTML (with great help from JavaScript and some help from CSS), still amazes me – who needs PHP! For constantly static text, Apache does server side includes, something I’ll be using in due time, when I fix/template all the local content. I have to update the talks page (so many Impress files sitting all around).

Anyways, if you’ve got a Twitter account, I’m bytebot there. Who else is twittering?

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