In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" booth as …

Zak Greant is running a free event this year parallell to OSCON that should be very valuable to anyone who is trying to get a start in Open Source or looking to start an Open Source project:

The project is called FOSSCoach and it is the successor to OSCAMP (the
Barcamp-like event that OSCON hosted for the last few years.)

FOSSCoach is focused on teaching people the skills that they need to
participate in (or start) distributed online projects - like PHP or
Wikipedia. Participation is free and people don’t need to be signed up
for OSCON to get in.

The event is meant to provide a way for OSCON to better serve the broad
FOSS community in Portland and surrounding regions.

Details on the event live at in a wiki at:

…

I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest:

• The starbucks in the conference center charges over $2 for a small cup of joe. There’s a starbucks right across the street (you can see it from the breakfast area - seriously, it’s 5 seconds away), and they charge less than $2 for a medium (grande). That’s less than I pay at home.
• The ATM outside the starbucks charges $3 for cash. I’ll report back when I find a cheaper one, but most places seem to take plastic here.
• Every computer involved in this conference, from registration to the video screens that dot the common areas, are running Windows XP. Just sayin’.
• The …

Ever since Sun acquired MySQL the rumours have been rife that Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member and Sun’s PostgreSQL lead, would soon be heading out the door.

Josh has now confirmed that he is indeed leaving Sun, but before the doomsayers start writing of Sun’s PostgreSQL support business completely, Josh also notes that Peter Eisentraut is joining the team as PostgreSQL software engineer. Peter has also confirmed his new role.

From the MySQL team, Kaj Arno does the hellos and goodbyes. Losing Josh is significant for Sun’s role in the PostgreSQL community but the quick appointment of Peter indicates that …

In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" …

In about 20 minutes I leave for the airport, arriving tonight in lovely Portland, OR to attend OSCON.  This will be my third appearance there and I look forward to listening, learning, being interviewed and podcasting.  In fact it was at last year's OSCON that I kicked off my foray into the wild and wacky world of podcasting.    A year later I've got over 70 under my belt and am looking to grab a few more.

What to look for 

As I mentioned previously, Dalibor will be giving a talk and as Ken points out, Sun will be having its "coach potato" …

Today I was doing some work on one of our database servers (each of them has 4 SAS disks in RAID10 on an Adaptec controller) and it required huge multi-thread I/O-bound read load. Basically it was a set of parallel full-scan reads from a 300Gb compressed innodb table (yes, we use innodb plugin). Looking at the iostat I saw pretty expected results: 90-100% disk utilization and lots of read operations per second. Then I decided to play around with linux I/O schedulers and try to increase disk subsystem throughput. Here are the results:

If you are a GUI-oriented person, you need not read this. But if you are like me, you make heavy use of the console. If you are managing many machines as well as your own Linux workstation, it’s VERY important to know where your console session is.

Too many times in the past I had wanted to bring down my workstation, and would type “shutdown” or “reboot” in the console window, only to find out to my horrors that the console was really a remote session to one of my web servers serving up hundreds of web sites.

Whoops!

Well, that prompted me into developing a solution where I can tell at a glance where I happened to be logged in. This way,  I wouldn’t be in danger of issuing dangerous commands on the wrong server. And if you are working for someone else, it also keeps you from being FIRED!

I use KDE to do my development and …

Earlier this week I posted how OpenJDK was knock, knock, knockin' on Lenny's door.  At that time I also mentioned how it was already in Ubuntu and Fedora.

What I failed to mention, however, and was right under my very nose was that fact that OpenJDK had already made it into OpenSUSE 11.  Thanks to MySQL Euro-community manager and former SUSE employee Lenz Grimmer, I was …

Tag1 Consulting is focused on improving Drupal's performance and scalability. We also believe that when information is freely shared, everyone wins. Toward these ends, we are working on an online book titled, "Drupal Performance and Scalability". The book is divided into five main sections, Drupal Performance, Front End Performance, Improved Caching and Searching, Optimizing the Database Layer, and Drupal In The Cloud. The book is primarily aimed toward users running …