Colin Charles Agenda

I’m not a big fan of the polls, but I do think this one’s fairly significant: What is your primary programming language for developing MySQL applications?

Why? Because this means we know what connectors to give more love to. What kind of articles to write for the DevZone. While we might think Ruby is the next big thing since sliced bread, you folk might tell us that Delphi is probably larger than Ruby and we should be applying appropriate love there (I’m sure this statement is untrue, but for arguments sake, mmmkay?).

To vote, you actually have to click the Community link, to get to the DevZone, scroll down a bit, and get to the MySQL Quickpoll. Why can’t I link directly to the quickpoll? Why can’t you vote on the results page? That is left as an exercise to the reader…

Technorati Tags: languages, mysql, primary, quickpoll, poll, website rants

Use MySQL? Fancy meeting other database geeks? In Melbourne? Free on Wednesday evening? Then come to the MySQL Meetup on Wednesday, October 17, from 7:00PM onwards. Its at Building 10, Level 8, Room 4, at RMIT University, so there’s easy access for all.

The agenda this month is simple:

• Using MySQL and JDBC, presented by Minh Van Nguyen
• A quiz of what not to do in MySQL, presented by Arjen Lentz (guest, from Brisbane)

There’s a trip to the pub later that night. There might even be dinner before-hand. If you have suggestions, make sure its vegan-friendly (hi Stewart!).

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

There didn’t seem like a clear way to make a copy (or clone) of a virtual machine with VMWare Server. Not with the 1.0.3 build-44356 which comes standard with the Ubuntu Commercial repository (one of the good virtues of Ubuntu).

So, I fired up the console, and did:
cp -ax Centos\ 5/ Centos\ 5-new

It took 4m5.643s to copy this on my laptop hard disk (only 1.5GB). I loaded it into VMWare, via their Open a virtual machine option, renamed it in the inventory, powered my new virtual machine on and was asked if I’d like to create a new UUID for it. I’d advise you to create one, and once that was done, my virtual machine is ready to go.

Create a new UUID, and you’re set

Exactly what I like. Not re-installing CentOS everytime. Just create a “golden” image and start cloning from there. Maybe with some slack/puppet integration in the future, if I end up using a lot of VMs.

Technorati Tags: linux, virtualization, vmware, vmware server, cloning an image, image, clone, testing, testbed, test environment

Dear Yahoo!,

Things on the Internet die way too quickly. I was just going through my Liferea feeds list today, and noticed about half a dozen blogs that had died. Domains don’t resolve any longer, they’ve decided to stop blogging (and remove their blog posts), and so on. Highly annoying, seeing that I have bookmarked some of these sites in del.icio.us.

I’d pay a reasonable sum for del.icio.us (say, like how I pay for my Flickr Pro account) to take snapshots of the page when I add it to my del.icio.us feed. Something like a cache (like one from your competitor in search, Google Cache; heck even your search engine caches pages!). If I visit the link again via del.icio.us, it will ideally update (via a smart diff) the snapshot, if there’s new content. However, if the content is gone, I’ll always have the original snapshot to refer to.

I know I can muck around with Google Cache or even the Internet Archive, but its just added work. Worse, sometimes blog entries aren’t cached in either :(

Hope you implement something like this in the very near future.

    Kind Regards,
    Colin, long-time del.icio.us user

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, yahoo!, suggestion, cached pages, snapshot, del.icio.us pro

of all the hullabaloo of sending the first malaysian into space, only to find that the great sheikh muszaphar shukor is just a spaceflight participant (link). not an astronaut, but a space tourist. one that the government used tax payer dollars (okay, ringgit) to push him into. thats rm100 million to play children’s games and make teh tarik (pulled tea).

someone like mark shuttleworth, forked out his own cash, between USD$15 to USD$20 million to see space. this was an out-of-pocket expense, and now he’s the first south african in space. why are the malaysian tax-payers funding a space tourist?

malaysian spin-doctors better not make sheikh a laughing stock. now they’re talking about him praying more than 80 times a day, as the first muslim to go to space during ramadhan. was this one large joke?

p/s: rm100 million roughly equates to around USD$30 million. why was mark’s independent trip cheaper than this tax-payer-funded instance?

Update: Read Ditesh’s take titled The Angkasawan Programme is a political sham.

Technorati Tags: politics, tax payer, spaceflight participant, malaysian in space, first malaysian in space, sheikh muszaphar shukor, corruption, laughing stock, malaysia

so, the national union of malaysian muslim students are a bunch of morons. first they make gwen stefani dress up, because she’s got a past record of (get this!) “indecent dressing and obscenity”. these same jokers have made beyonce cop out on having a concert in malaysia. and they were the same jokers that got the authorities to fine the pussycat dolls rm10,000 for indecent exposure.

the idiotic student group says that the artists “need to understand our culture”. bloody tools don’t seem to understand that there’s more culture elsewhere, than their stolen culture. oh, and did i mention more cultures besides the muslim culture? its ironic that indonesia probably has more muslims than malaysia, only to find out that beyonce can dress up the way she wants there.

wong chun wai, in the star, has told them to pick on a worthy issue. claims that they have 10,000 dumb members, who’s Abdul Muntaqim to say gwen’s performance and attire is not suitable for malaysian culture? what is malaysian culture? is it not a copy, mix and merge from all the cultures that landed in malaysia? portuguese, british, indian, chinese, etc. and whats wrong with youths “emulating the Western lifestyle”? watching tv alone will get you that far.

these students, bums, who are provided for by the corrupt regime running malaysia, have nothing else to do. they don’t need to study, they don’t need to pay their fees, heck, they even get a huge allowance. hence, they spend their time on trivial issues. if you don’t like gwen, beyonce, etc. don’t bloody go to their concerts! no one is holding a gun to their heads and saying that they must go. or their puny-minded friends must go.

all i can say is, i’m disgusted. 50 years of nationhood, and malaysia is taking further steps back, on a daily basis.

Technorati Tags: politics, concert, gwen stefani, beyonce, malaysia, malaysian muslim students, national union of malaysian muslim students, culture, lifestyle

So others know how I check out a fresh tree, here are instructions to building MySQL from mysql.bkbits.net, using the free bkf tool.

• in ~/code, do bkf clone bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community to clone to community tree down to your disk
• wait patiently, while bitkeeper attempts to suck some of your bandwidth
• now, do BUILD/compile-dist, and wait while MySQL builds
• you might find it handy to now get the test suite on your build, via make test
• run make dist, and you’ll have nice dandy source tarballs to go with your build for easy installation/distribution/etc.
• if you encounter problems, say with ndb (and you’re not testing against it), you can run make dist –ignore ndb for instance

If for some reason you don’t want the latest development tree, and say, are more interested in a tag, all you need to do is find the appropriate tree under the Repository section on bkbits, click on it, head over to tags, find an appropriate tag, and execute a bkf clone -rTAG bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community-TAG. You now have a mysql version that matches a certain tag. Build as per above.

To keep up-to-date, just run bkf pull.

If you actually need to install supporting packages (or bkf itself!), etc. on say Ubuntu or Fedora, read Installing from the Development Source Tree, part of the excellent MySQL manual. Also, executing bkf –help is pretty easy. The tool itself is pretty brain-dead, quite unlike its older (commercial) brother, BitKeeper (bk).

Update: I should clarify that make dist alone, only gives you a pristine source tarball for distribution, etc. What I normally do is hook it into the package management system of the platform of my choice (usually RPM or DEB), and build binaries that way. However, if you want a binary tarball, there’s an additional step in that you need to run scripts/make_binary_distribution (generally, after running tests!). This will be a tarball that contains a binary for distribution. Heads up to Giuseppe for dropping me a line.

Technorati Tags: mysql, bkf, bkbits, tarballs, source

I must be moving to another shard, having outgrown my current one. Its a manual operation.

Flickr tells me they’re moving my stuff around

Incidentally, I can’t sign out. Or view the main page. Or any of the groups I’m subscribed to. Its completely locked. But it does take under-15 minutes… (at least for the load I have - ~11,500 images).

Update: Read John Allspaw’s comments at the HighScalability link to this blog post. He’s in-charge of operations, and an all round nice guy, and great presenter.

Technorati Tags: flickr, shard, moving