20080607

So I got a new laptop, a Zepto Znote 6024W.

I got it with 2GB of RAM, a 7200RPM 120GB harddisk, 1440x900 screen, 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo CPU, and Intel Pro/Wireless 4965AGN.

First overall impressions are quite good. The good stuff:

• Everything seems to work out-of-the-box with Ubuntu Hardy.
• You can customize the configuration when you order it, so you don't have to pay (money and power wise) for stuff you do not need. This includes the Operating System, so no Microsoft tax (I would probably have gotten a Thinkpad if I could have found a place to buy it without Windows).
• The machine feels fairly small, and not too heavy.
• The machine feels generally quite fast.
• It has 4 USB ports (my old one had only two).
• The mains adapter is two-legged with the cord on top, so should fit everywhere (for some reason it is quite common to get three-legged …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Switzerland is co-hosting EURO 2008 along with Austria and will be kicking off the tournament with a game against the Czech Republic on Saturday. The country is of course famous for its neutrality but has shown itself to be less than neutral when it comes to open source (see what I did there) with the federal government having adopted an open source software strategy as long ago as February 2004.

Key policies:
The …

Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile.

I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out of my collection because there’s just no room to keep them all, and it would be an almost embarrassingly large collection if not for the fact that I have no shame or guilt associated with my need for dead trees.

If you need further proof:

• I have, on more than one occasion, suggested to my wife that we take a walk around our local mall so I could browse the computer section of the book store, not to buy, but just to keep up with the new titles and stuff.
• Ok, I usually buy.
• I also go into book stores whenever I’m out of town to get a comparison of what seems to be popular in different areas of the …

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/

Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know, large * numerous = expensive, or rapidly filling disk partitions, or both.

Amazon’s S3 service, along with a simple downloadable suite of tools, and a shell script or two can ease your life considerably. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Get an Amazon Web Services account by going to the AWS website.
2. Download the ‘aws’ command line tool from here and install it.
3. Write a couple of shell scripts, and schedule them using cron.

Once you have your Amazon account, …

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source software between today and Friday June 6.

It promises to be an interesting discussion, and CIO.com has been good enough to give us some starting discussions points with its survey of attitudes towards open source in the CIO community. I’ll be …

I have used the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with OpenSSH for ages. However, I always treated it as just a dumb list of keys, where I would dump my public key whenever I needed access to a new account or host.

But today I learned from this blog entry that there is a bit more to it. Details are available from `man 8 sshd'.

Basically, each key can be prefixed by a list of options which restrict the kind of access granted to a connection attempt providing the given key.

Of particular interest is the command="/usr/local/bin/foobar" option. This makes sshd run the given command on connect, disabling the normal login shell or direct execution of commands supplied by the remote user. There are also a few further options for disabling port forwarding, …

Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to help me explain the notion (and benefits) of functional partitioning. He also covers ideas that apply directly to your application code, your database architecture (including a little insight into their sharding strategy), and more. Even more about eBay’s architecture can be found here.

Spinn3r is hiring for an experienced Senior Systems Administrator with solid Linux and MySQL skills and a passion for building scalable and high performance infrastructure.

About Spinn3r:

Spinn3r is a licensed weblog crawler used by search engines, weblog analytic companies, and generally anyone who needs access to high quality weblog data.

We crawl the entire blogosphere in realtime, remove spam, rank, and classifying blogs, and provide this information to our customers.

Spinn3r is rare in the startup world in that we’re actually profitable. We’ve proven our business model which gives us a significant advantage in future product design and expanding our current customer base and feature set.

We’ve also been smart and haven’t raised a dime of external VC funding which gives us a lot …

SourceForge announces quarterly earnings. Linux server growth strong, says analyst firm. Talend adds support for MaxDB. (and more)

SourceForge Reports Third Quarter Fiscal 2008 Results, SourceForge (Press Release)

Worldwide Server Market Shows Resiliency with Solid First Quarter Results, According to IDC, IDC (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for MaxDB, Talend (Press Release)

How everyone wins with open source software, Linux.com, Lisa Hoover (Article)

…

If you are working with MySQL as a DBA or developer, I'd like to encourage you to consider taking the MySQL Magazine Survey, which was compiled by Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover.

The survey takes around 10-15 minutes to complete and runs until June 16th. The results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine, due on July 15th. The questions cover a broad range of topics, from details about your MySQL experience and job description over connectors and languages to operating systems and MySQL versions.

Thanks in advantage for your support and input! The results of this survey will be interesting for us as well.