Colin Charles Agenda

Never having had a problem downloading Skype before, I’m faced with an unusual problem, and have no solution. With getting my MacBook Air, I’ve been trying for weeks to download Skype (usually via mobile broadband, or via Wifi hotspots) and I’ve been failing. I get the usual “mounting failed” error. Annoying.

I filed a bug with Skype, and I have no idea if they’ll look into fixing it. My other option is to search thru my backups from my other Macs and look for a .dmg. All in all, pain

Mounting failed

OS X can’t recognise it at all. For reference, the md5sum is: MD5 (Skype_2.7.0.330.dmg) = dfe1cb2286eccc906d642fca1325fef2.

Red Hat releases Spacewalk. It is described as: “the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived“. Congratulations to all whom have worked on it, especially my friends who tired endlessly over it in the past.

Red Hat, is sticking true to its promise, of open sourcing everything they make. Best of all, they recognise Fedora (they always did, since say, Fedora Core 2 or 3), CentOS (a direct “competitor”/rebuild of RHEL), and Scientific Linux (I know of a certain university’s sysadmin who will be blessing Spacewalk, as her life will now be a lot easier).

There have been a few blogs about it… Matt Asay asks about a community (Red Hat traditionally wasn’t good at this, but with Fedora, I believe they’ve learned, and I’m happy to say I think, I helped in the education process). No one however, focused on the technical aspects around Spacewalk/RHN.

Case in point: Oracle is at the heart of it. RHN was designed almost seven years ago, and I’ve heard amazing stories from Gafton, Greg, and Peter. How Gafton found hidden “secrets” inside Oracle to boost performance, and a whole bunch of interesting things, best to talk about over a beer (the irony? When I first met these folk, I couldn’t even legally drink a beer in the US…)

Read the Developer Documentation, note that they use Perl, Python and Java in the current code base (but only Perl and Java is the way forward). There’s a DB Schema available… and I wonder when someone will port this to MySQL?

The Spacewalk FAQ mentions the lack of resources in the past to add an open source database, but would want to do so soon. There’s even help on getting Oracle XE running. The glimmer that there is to be an open source database behind Spacewalk, is what tells me that the MySQL community, that benefit from such a tool (so you’re a DBA and a sysadmin at a fairly largeish installation), should port this to run on MySQL.

What else can we take away from Spacewalk? The excellent positioning. A community project from which the RHN product is derived. This is similar to what Fedora is positioned as: Another striking difference of Fedora is our goal to empower others to pursue their vision of what a free operating system should be like. Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux , the One Laptop Per Child XO and Creative Commons’ Live Content DVDs.

Distinctive naming. Helps create a lack of confusion (at the price of an ubiquitous name? Sure, you just have two ubiquitous names now). MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community. They’re both MySQL (don’t even get started on the odd/even numbering scheme…). I dream the day, when we have MySQL Enterprise and Sakila (formerly known as MySQL Community).

I haven’t written much BASH of late, so was a bit rusty. The goal? A script that would go through a directory of JPGs, find those that are portrait shots, and place them in an appropriate folder. Do so similarly for landscapes.

Use cases? Those new digital photo frames. Buy two, and have many images scroll by, eh?

What’s been done?
Making use of ImageMagick’s identify is what needs to be done. You’ll be using the -format option, which normally takes a type or string. A full list of what options are available for -format are available.

The choice is to use -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘. The output of identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ is either:

• 1 - portrait
• 6 - landscape
• 8 - portrait (the way I normally shoot, with the battery grip)

I’ve not seen much documentation about the above, so it seems like these values come from trial and error… They apply for Canon cameras that have EXIF orientation details. I’d be interested to hear from others what values they’re getting (or getting pointed to some documentation).

The shell script?

#!/bin/sh

mkdir portrait
mkdir landscape

for i in *.jpg;
	do
	type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' $i)
case $type in
	1)
	mv $i portrait;;
	6)
	mv $i landscape;;
	8)
	mv $i portrait;;
esac
done

Other bits of BASH?
If you do: type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ $i) , you can grab the value from the command (1, 6, 8) and manipulate it. Check by doing echo $type.

If you’re after getting the return value from a command (i.e. 0 for success, 127 for error, and so on), you can do echo rv: $?.

All in all, remember to read the BashFAQ. Tests and Conditionals was also essential to my reading.

ImageMagick rocks nonetheless. I’ve used it before to resize, append and much more… I’m thinking that maybe its time to read The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, written by Mikal.

In a tiny fit of paranoia, as the Norovirus has decided to pay a visit to the Moscone this week, I decided that I needed to clean my keyboard on the Macbook.

I’ve already been following best practices of washing ones hands before eating with them (say bread at a restaurant even). You learn this stuff as a kid, but somewhere in-between growing up, and finding a girlfriend, you decide to share over cleanliness. Anyway, the habit has been back for a while. This largely after looking at toilets in a many a men’s wash room, where I notice that a lot tend to not wash their hands!

Anyway, to the point. Keyboard Cleaner. Tiny application that locks everything up, allows you to clean your keyboard and trackpad, and then with the magic Command+Q only will the application exit. Its small, but it serves a useful purpose.

Presented by Jonathan Haslam, Simon Ritter, Sun Microsystems

In what I thought was completely great showmanship between Jonathan Haslam and Simon ritter, it was simply, pure comedy, having the two of them on stage. No reason to go deeply into notes (as the verbose slides are available), but the actual demonstration, the writing the code on stage, and the dynamics between the two - that made this session pure gold to attend.

You can ask a system to panic with DTrace if you want!

Some terminology:

• Probe: place of interest in the system where we can make observations
• Provider: instruments a particular area of a system, and makes probes available. Transfers control into DTrace framework when an enabled probe is hit
• Aggregation: patterns are more interesting than individual datum, so aggregate data together to look for arrays. Generally an associative array

DTrace has a PID provider, to look at applications based on PID

dvm provider is a java.net project to add DTrace support in. Install a new shared library, and make sure its in the path.

DTrace in JDK6 exists as a hotspot provider. No need to download a shared library. Its also more feature-rich.

Project DAVE (DTrace Advanced Visualisation Environment) was demoed. Also note that there’s chime.

I couldn’t resist downloading NetBeans 6.1, with GlassFish and the MySQL bundle, the moment I found out it was released. Pulling it down while at the Star Alliance Gold lounge in Singapore was easy enough, and it only took me an hour (its a pretty big bundle - 164MB, as opposed to 6.0.1 where it only weighed in at 143MB for the OS X bundle).

Instead of the 4 packages in 6.0.1, I now only see 2 files - MySQL.prefPane (because we only fixed this in 5.0.51b, which probably didn’t make the release cut-off - the included version is 5.0.51a-community), and NetBeans IDE with MySQL.mpkg. The install is slated to take 526MB and takes a good two minutes.

I noticed that it doesn’t uninstall NetBeans 6.0.1, so my Applications folder now has two versions, including two versions of Glassfish (UR1 from 6.0.1 versus UR2 in 6.1). Upon starting 6.1, it does ask if I’d like to import settings from a previous version of NetBeans; of course I would.

You are then asked to register. I never looked at registering software as important, but I’m starting to think a lot more about it. One has to provide value, for a user to register - and we’ll explore this in another blog post. I’m writing this while on a plane, so it doesn’t make sense to register, anyway.

The first thing I do? Jump to the Services tab, make a connection to MySQL (look under Drivers -> MySQL (Connector/J driver)), and play with the sakila sample database.

Design a query, using a GUI

Drill down into tables, find a table name (say, store if using the sakila sample database), drill down into a row, like store_id, right-click, and select Design Query. Now, feel free to drag tables and drop them, only to find that it now helps you create an ER diagram of your tables, while helping you design an appropriate query!

ER diagrams for free

Play with the database tool a lot more. It looks like its got plenty of potential. It also looks like NetBeans is a great IDE for all your web development needs (PHP included). I’m certainly going to use it a lot more, even though I’m notably a vim guy.

Licensing tends to be a common question, when it comes to giving a talk on MySQL. More recently, some have asked me if MySQL will be relicensed under the CDDL? Some ask why we’re GPLv2 and not GPLv3 yet? And some, genuinely want to know the merits of writing for BSD-based software (PostgreSQL) or GPL-based software (MySQL).

While I am not a soothsayer, I am pretty sure we will not be relicensing MySQL under the CDDL (might make for a good April 1 joke though?). What seems like a logical progression is to probably go GPLv3, from our current GPLv2 stance.

And Sun supports the GPLv3 just as it does many other licenses. Take for example, the recently released Open Service Tag. Its released under a GPLv3 license. Contributing to it, requires signing the Sun Contributor’s Agreement (SCA), which is largely similar to MySQL’s current CLA.

So, what is Open Service Tag? Its a small application, that provides a network-based product identifier, and it speaks XML. You can tag a device, and the information automatically becomes available over a network. It looks like inventory management made easy. Read more at Steve Wilson’s blog entry, about IT asset tracking.

It runs on Linux, and Mac OS X (release notes don’t mention OS X 10.5, Leopard, but it worked on my laptop just fine), and soon it will run on Windows too.

I can envision myself using it, when my lab is setup again (still waiting for some furniture to arrive, so most computers are still in boxes), to keep track of what kind of hardware I own…

It probably helps the MySQL DBA or sys-admin keep track of large installations just as well. Asset management and tracking is important, in these days where IT budgets are being cut, and as IT becomes even more efficient (think virtualization, more cycles on newer hardware, et al). What do you currently use for asset management?

Technorati Tags: open service tag, sun, gplv3, mysql, licensing

One thing I’ve found limiting in Zimbra, is the fact that the hot backup is only available in the Network Edition (which costs money). I remember the pain in upgrading Zimbra, and it would have been great if there was a hot backup with an easy restore feature.

Now, they’re talking about voting for Hot Backups to be in the FOSS product. I suggest everyone using Zimbra, or thinking about using Zimbra, to write on the forum, or alternatively email them, so that hot backups make it into the Zimbra OSS edition. Trust me, it will come in handy when you’re upgrading.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, hot backups, oss edition, vote