[Update]As can be read on Mac OS X Hints here, this setting also applies to the side bar in Mail.[/Update]

Apple has - as was to be expected - slightly modified the appearance of many Mac OS X controls in 10.7 "Lion". Some of those changes have caused protest and debate around the net, but I believe this is just the same as it is with face-lifted car designs, which means in a few weeks everyone will have gotten used to the new style and consider the previous version old-fashioned.

However, there is one particular little issue that I could tell I would not come to like immediately: The icons - and more importantly the font-size - in the Finder's left hand sidebar is way bigger than it was in Snow Leopard. This makes the source list look much more cluttered in my opinion.

At first, I headed for the …

This is about wasting a lot of time, effort and some energy on an unfortunately not so successful transition from smaller to bigger disks. Actors include a few external drives, Time Machine, an iMac with a dying system disk and me, being a little stupid. Fortunately there were no really serious consequences, however if I ever face a similar situation again, I might come here and read up on how to migrate systems and backups more sensibly.

Previously on Lost Daniel’s machine

To understand the situation fully, this is what my drive and partition layout used to be:

• 320GB internal hard drive called “Snow Leopard internal”
• 2TB external USB drive
  
  • 500GB partition called “TM500” for Time Machine
  • 1.5TB partition called “TMRest” for media, disk images etc.
• 2x1TB in a Firewire 800 Western Digital MyBook II …

Drizzle 7 GA has been released, so I wanted to compile and test it on my Mac running OS X 10.6.7.  Since Drizzle 7 is new, Mac binaries are not available yet.  I’ve compiled MySQL from source more times than I can remember, and Drizzle was forked from MySQL, so I expected the build process to be similar and pain-free, and for the most part it was.  I did not use MacPorts or Homebrew for various reasons, mainly because I know that I will compile, tweak and recompile Drizzle often while hacking on it.  Also, the blog post  Drizzle in the Snow is about building Drizzle on Mac OS X, but it’s out of date …

Recently I happen to install MySQL on Mac OS X (Darvin Kernel).  Below are the quick 5 steps to accomplish the task. Step 1: Check Mac Version Very first step…

The post Installing MySQL On Mac OS X (Darwin Kernel) first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

aka “How to use multiple MySQL Servers and Workbench in Snow Leopard without using Terminal… and live happily ever after”

The MySQL Community is a world of command-line aficionados. Many people, including myself, show their love to the simple-but-powerful interface of the mysql command-line client, but not everybody is keen to use a bash shell and give up its GUI, no matter how powerful the software is.

Until recently, GUI tools for MySQL were half baked solutions: in the end, there was always something that you had to do via the command line. Today, you can install, set up and use MySQL on your Mac with Snow Leopard without using Terminal, at all.

My Special Needs

Before digging into the details of the installation, let me describe what I need on my Mac. I use various versions of MySQL and I often need to run 2 or more instances at the same time. I constantly build, install and uninstall versions of …

This is part four of an ongoing series about my experiences while writing the MySQL Admin Cookbook for Packt Publishing. All previous parts can be found under the mysql-admin-cookbook label.

This part will be about more software used in the process of writing the book. The last episode covered writing tools, file/version management and backups. What's up now is graphics programs, virtualization and PDF handling.

Outlining

For outlining and structuring thoughts I like mind-maps. I know they are not for everyone, but if you like them and do not want to spend a lot of money on …

Others have done it, so why shouldn’t I do it, too? Well, usually that’s not my line of thought, but when today I read David Linsin's blog post about his stats I thought I might follow along.

Overall stats

The overall visits to my blog – and countless others with no doubt – display the workday/weekend jagged line one would expect. The summer months seem to be a little lower on average, but that’s ok, people deserve their vacations. Blue line is 2009, green line is 2008 for comparison.

In one week, on December 24th, it will be exactly one year since I was first contacted by Packt Publishing. After reading several posts from this blog they asked me if I’d be interested in writing a MySQL administration cookbook with hands-on recipes for those among us who have to make sure the MySQL servers are kept running and in good shape.

Funny thing, I almost deleted their email, because initially I thought GMail’s spam filter had not caught some sort of bulk or phishing email, because I had never heard of Packt Publishing before and at first only saw an unfamiliar sounding sender’s name. As I was one of very few people in the office on that day I decided to read it anyways. Turned out to be not so spammy after all…

What followed were several weeks of sending mails back and forth, convincing a colleague to co-author and together set up a chapter outline. Finally, around February we started writing actual contents. …

Sorry for the (relatively) short notice, but I will be talking at Sun’s CommunityOne conference in San Francisco on June 1st.

I’ll be talking about, and demonstrating, the DTrace probes we have put into MySQL in a joint presentation with Robert Lor who will be doing the same for Postgres.

CommunityOne West Badge

Our presentation is on the Monday afternoon.

Check out the CommunityOne West Conference Site for more details and registration.

At the European Customer Conference a couple of weeks back, one of the topics was the use of DRBD. DRBD is a kernel-based block device that replicates the data blocks of a device from one machine to another. The documentation I developed for that and MySQL is available here.

Fundamentally, with DRBD, you set up a physical device, configure DRBD on top of that, and write to the DRBD device. In the background, on the primary, the DRBD device writes the data to the physical disk and replicates those changed blocks to the seconday, which in turn writes the data to it’s physical device. The result is a block level copy of the source data. In an HA solution, which means that you can switch over from your primary host to your secondary host in the event of system failure and be sure pretty certain that the data on the primary and seconday are the same.

…