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A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”

I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading BusinessWeek’s article on the potential perils facing open source vendors today. It seems to ask all the right questions, but not necessarily in the right way.

The report suggests that while industry giants such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Intel stand to benefit from open source software, investor impatience could spell trouble for open source …

Just to remind you that Packt Publishing is running their Open Source CMS Award again:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

You have two more weeks to submit your favourite CMS in the following categories:

• Overall Winner
• …

So, I wrote about the begining of our wild database issues. Since then, I have been fighting a cold, coaching little league football and trying to help out in getting our backup solutions working in top shape.  That does not leave much time for blogging.

Never again will we have ONLY a cold backup of anything.  We were moving nightly full database dumps and hourly backups of critical tables over to that box all day long.  Well, when the filesystem fails on both the primary database server and your cold backup server, you question everything.  A day after my marathon drive to fix the backup server and get it up and running, the backup mysql server died again with RAID errors.  I guess that was the problem all along.  In the end, we had to have a whole new RAID subsystem in our backup database server.  So, my …

Agenda:

* CAOS Report 8 - Community Linux
* Linuxworld review
* A look at SourceForge
* Microsoft’s new database push

iTunes or direct download (26:48, 6.1MB)

I picked up what some claim is the fastest of the current SSD drives this week, the Memoright GT.  From articles around the net I have seen performance speeds substantially faster then the mtron drive I tested earlier…. so I took the plunge.  The first results?  luke warm.  The random performance ( databases like mysql are all about random performance )  of the drive is better in mixed read/write tests over the mtron, but the mtron blew it away in random read performance.  This are are my first pass tests, so I may have something wrong …  so take them with a grain of salt:

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol …

Are you a member of a local Linux User Group? Or a MySQL User Group? Or any other group that is related to open source software? Have you heard of the Software Freedom Day yet? This is a good opportunity to spread the word and showcase what OSS is all about to a wider audience. Some quotes from their Software Freedom Day website:

Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software. Local teams from all over the world organise events on the third Saturday in September.
Software Freedom Day is a global celebration and education …

I was in San Francisco at the tail-end of last week and was fortunate to have some time to meet up with Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL core team and, until recently, a Sun employee.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including his reasons for leaving Sun (he didn’t go into detail but suffice to say he’s working a business idea), the future of the database market (more choice, more horizontal scaling, more use of specialist databases), the future of PostgreSQL (as a development platform), the level or authorization afforded to the Drizzle project, and the future of Sun.

I won’t go into the latter now, but the …

I'm off in few hours to attend DebConf 8 in lovely Mar del Plata, Argentina.  The only bummer is that its winter down there so this seaside resort is going to be a bit chlly and as a result Im not able to pack as light as I usually do.  That being said, getting away from the string of 100 degree days that we've been having here in Austin isn't such a bad thing.

I had a great time at DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, particularly since it was a homecoming of sorts for me.  This time its exciting since I've never been to Argentina before and have heard great things. Like last year, Sun is a Silver Sponsor of the event.

On the …