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 …

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 …

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 …

For those unfamiliar with SQL Server clustering let me give you a quick blurb.  Microsoft markets SQL Server as having active-active clustering.  When most people hear active/active or clustering in the database they generally immediately think of features like Oracle Rac.  SQL Servers implementation of Active-Acitve clustering ( as of 2005 anyways ) is really a HA setup with one instance active on the A side, and a seperate unrelated instance active on the B Side.  These servers hove different ports, install directories,  and share nothing at the DB level.  A san is used with its disk presented to each node in the cluster.  Microsoft Clustering Services (MCS) is used to manage the IP take over,  handle resource transitions, etc.   The setup is really active-passive, passive-active.  This ends up confusing and even mis-leading people who are both technical and in management positions.

Why …

Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired.

The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source vendors most likely to go public in the next couple of years.

Looking at the list of contenders again it is easy to imagine that they could all be snapped up before they make it public thanks to the fact that 1) open source vendors are very attractive investments 2) it is difficult for open source vendors to build the momentum to do so.

I spoke recently with …

Today, the root file system on our public svn server nearly ran out of disk space. The reason? The /tmp directory was quickly filling up with temporary files created by websvn, which I set up parallel to the FishEye repository browser for testing purposes. A quick investigation of the apache log files revealed the culprit - a crawler from Microsoft was running haywire and decided to ignore the rules in the robots.txt file, even though it did actually looked at the file before!

Here is how robots.txt looked like (I now changed it to disallow everything):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /fisheye/
Disallow: /websvn/

If I am not mistaken, no crawler should actually consider going into the SVN browser directories. Some snippets from the apache log: