Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful tool is the Web History feature of your Google account.

Though this isn’t necessarily indicative of everything I’ve accomplished in the first half of 2008 per se, it’s definitely indicative of the types of things I’ve generally been into so far this year, and it’s interesting to look back. What does your Web History say?

• Gearman - this is used by some rather large web sites, notably Digg. It reminds me a little of having Torque and Maui, but geared toward more general-purpose applications. In fact, it was never clear to me that …

Since it took me over an hour to gather this together, I thought I would relay it here. To install the latest version of Darwin Streaming Server (6.0.3 at time of writing), you need to do the following:

1. Download a patched source RPM from Sverker Abrahamsson at http://www.abrahamsson.com/DarwinStreamingServer-6.0.3-2.src.rpm
2. Install the source RPM with rpm -i DarwinStreamingServer-6.0.3-2.src.rpm
3. Switch to the spec file with cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
4. Build the spec file with rpmbuild -bb DarwinStreamingServer.spec
5. Switch to the built RPMs with cd …

I am happy to announce that a new version (0.9) of mylvmbackup has been released. This is the first release since the source code has been moved from Subversion to Bazaar and is now hosted on Launchpad.net. I would like to thank Robin H. Johnson and Patrick Hahn for providing the patches that contributed to this new release!

mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

From the …

I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational Exuberance”.

When Alan Greenspan used those words to describe the attitudes of investors toward the markets, what he was basically saying was that there were people who didn’t really know what they were doing, putting more money than they ought, into things they knew relatively little about. Further, he was saying that the decisions people were making with regards to where to put their money were a) bad, or at least b) not based on sound reasoning, or the ‘facts on the ground’.

This, I think, is where we are at with “cloud computing”. The blog post that put me over the edge is …

I'm back from my week of vacation and am ready to pick up where I left off with the interviews I conducted at the Red Hat Summit/FUDCon last month.  After today's, I will have three left: Dennis Gilmore, Max Spevack and Chander Kant of Zmanda.

The Honourable James Zemlin

On the first day of the Summit I was able to grab my buddy Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation for a spirited discussion about the Foundation, Linux and a bunch more. 

My interview with Jim (15:55)  Listen ( …

I'm back from my week of vacation and am ready to pick up where I left off with the interviews I conducted at the Red Hat Summit/FUDCon last month.  After today's, I will have three left: Dennis Gilmore, Max Spevack and Chander Kant of Zmanda.

The Honourable James Zemlin

On the first day of the Summit I was able to grab my buddy Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation for a spirited discussion about the Foundation, Linux and a bunch more. 

My interview with Jim (15:55)  Listen ( …

I'm back from my week of vacation and am ready to pick up where I left off with the interviews I conducted at the Red Hat Summit/FUDCon last month.  After today's, I will have three left: Dennis Gilmore, Max Spevack and Chander Kant of Zmanda.

The Honourable James Zemlin

On the first day of the Summit I was able to grab my buddy Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation for a spirited discussion about the Foundation, Linux and a bunch more. 

My interview with Jim (15:55)  Listen ( …

It's been a while since the last post. This is mostly due to me entering new territory in several ways. For one, I have been digging into JavaME development lately (platform change #1), building a mobile data entry and manipulation application that uses a an embedded database and talks to its server via Webservices, if connected. Otherwise data will be queued up locally and sent as soon as the

Last weekend I finally found some time to upload pictures that I had taken during various events that I attended in the past few months. So here are my impressions from the following events:

• PHP Unconference in Hamburg on 2008-04-26
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Hamburg, 2008-04-07
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Berlin, 2008-04-08
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, 2008-04 (these are available from …

Progress acquires IONA. Red Hat announces quarterly earnings. Optaros raises new round of funding. (and more)

Progress Software Corporation to Acquire IONA Technologies, Progess Software / IONA Technologies (Press Release)

Red Hat Reports First Quarter Results, Red Hat (Press Release)

Optaros Closes $12 Million in Series C Financing Co-Led by .406 Ventures & Globespan Capital Partners, Optaros (Press Release)

Sourcefire, Inc. Responds to Barracuda Networks …