A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-12-14 through 2010-12-21:

• Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks: IOS HTTP client sets Host: field to IP address
  Still annoying…
• ACL IP Options Selective Drop – Cisco Systems
  Most networks do not make use of IP options. You can drop packets that contain options with the "ip option drop" global configuration command.
• Which loads faster?
  This tool has it's usefulness. It's especially nice to compare your site to similar sites and see what you can do to improve things.

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There has been a lot of buzz about the MySQL 5.5 GA release and its new features and other user-visible improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to touch on a less noticeable, but still important change.

CMake has already been used to build the MySQL Server on Windows for a long time, while the GNU autotools were used on all other platforms. Since MySQL 5.5, all builds on all platforms are now performed using the same tool chain. With the latest release of MySQL 5.5, we've made an important step to clean up and simplify the MySQL build system: the support for autoconf/automake has now …

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

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If you live in the U.S., this is the week to gorge on turkey. I wondered out loud last night to my wife if Thanksgiving is the day of the year when the most people eat the same meal. Can any of our overseas readers add to the conversation? Is there a holiday in your country where everyone eats pretty much the same thing? Anyway, before American brains shut down from an overdose of stuffing, here's some developer news you can use.

Oracle announces Plan B for Java

The Java language has continued to evolve over the years, adding features such as Generics. There's an ambitious wishlist of things that developers would like to see in Java 7, but apparently not enough time to do it all and still get a timely release out. As a result, the JCP has decided to forego some of the goodies until Java 8, which is not expected to grace the world until late 2012.

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Here's what's new for the trendy developer this week:

Java's future on Apple: Slightly less in doubt

Last week, it looked like Apple was all "You're not welcome here, Java." In the changeable world that is Jobsland, this week Apple was offering to marry the language, reiterating their support for Java in OS X, and indicating that they would be supplying code and resources to the OpenJDK project.

As I've noted before, this makes sense for Apple, because it gets them out of the JVM business, and makes Oracle the one-stop shopping solution for all your JDK and JRE needs. It also means that the Mac can be added as a regression-tested target for a new version of Java, hopefully avoiding the kind of Java versioning snafus that rendered IBM's SPSS (or is it PAWS this week?) statistics …

Here's your weekly helping of developer info:

The sudden but inevitable Apple news

Several pieces of news on the Apple front this week. First up: the Gold Master seed (which either sounds like something you plant to get nice apples, or something out of a bad SF eugenics novel) for iOS 4.2 dropped, signaling the green light for iPad/iPhone/iPod developers to submit 4.2-ready applications to the App Store. Traditionally, the pre-release to developers is followed about a week later by the general release, and is identical.

Meanwhile, continuing to muddy the waters about what is and isn't allowed on the iPhone, Adobe gave a sneak peak of …

A very good meeting in Istanbul is drawing to an end. People from Monty Program, Facebook, Galera, Percona, SkySQL, and other parts of the community are meeting with one foot on the European continent and another in Asia to discuss all things MariaDB and MySQL and experience the mystery of the Orient.

At the meeting I had the opportunity to present my plans and visions for the future development of replication in MariaDB. My talk was very well received, and I had a lot of good discussions afterwards with many of the bright people here. Working from home in a virtual company, it means a lot to get this kind of inspiration and encouragement from others on occasion, and I am looking forward to continuing the work after an early flight to Copenhagen tomorrow.

The new interface for transaction coordinator plugins is what particularly interests me at the moment. The …

As I previously noted, I’m in the midst of converting some data (roughly 2 billion records) into documents that will live in a MongoDB cluster. And any time you move data into a new data store, you have to be mindful of any limitations or bottlenecks you might encounter (since all systems have had to make compromises of some sort or another).

In MySQL one of the biggest compromises we make is deciding what indexes really need to be created. It’s great to have data all indexed when you’re searching it, but not so great when you’re adding and deleting many rows.

In MongoDB, the thing that gets me is the document size limit. Currently an object stored in MongoDB cannot be larger than 4MB (though that’s likely to be raised soon). Now, you can build your own MongoDB binaries and tweak that parameter, but I’ve been …

It turns out that the overhead of dynamic linking on Linux amd64 is 2 CPU cycles per cross-module call. I usually take forever to get to the point in my writing, so I thought I would change this for once :-)

In MySQL, there has been a historical tendency to favour static linking, in part because to avoid the overhead (in execution efficiency) associated with dynamic linking. However, on modern systems there are also very serious drawbacks when using static linking.

The particular issue that inspired this article is that I was working on MWL#74, building a proper shared libmysqld.so library for the MariaDB embedded server. The lack of a proper libmysqld.so in MySQL and MariaDB has caused no end of grief for packaging Amarok for the various Linux distributions. My patch …

In this latest release I’ve added a basic MySQL connection pool to the benchmarking script which improves the method in which connections to MySQL are handled and reused. In addition, there have been some optimizations made to the thread handler functions for better debug reporting. Download the latest release now and see how your MySQL server performs against the rest of the community! Download here: download page.