I've decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux.

I'm not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn't matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that's a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I've probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. In fact, it doesn't refer to Linux, it refers to GNU/Linux. Therefore, it should be GLAMP.

Why does this matter? I try not to say Linux, unless I'm referring to a kernel, because a kernel is not an operating system. I try to be pretty careful about saying GNU/Linux when I'm talking about an operating system. An exception is a recruiting event yesterday at the University of …

Here’s an interesting bit of news from the blurred line between open and closed source software. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it is reselling IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as both a standalone software package and as a software appliance with VMware. While Express-C is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech. Of course, if you want support it is not free at all.

DB2 Express-C is available as a free download from th Ubuntu repositories for Ubuntu 7.10 or later, while users have to register to be sent download instructions for the DB2 Express-C vitual appliance, which requires VMWare Server, VMWare Player 2.0, VMWare Workstation 5.5 or VMWare ESX …

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

Continue reading "Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)"

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning …

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Have you ever wanted to play around with(test ;) MySQL replication/clustering techniques, LVS/Apache load balancing etc but didn't have the hardware available and where smart enough not to use a production environment?

Well an easy way to be able to do this is by creating a sandbox environment using something like qemu, xen, vmware or UML which allow you to create virtual machines running inside a protected environment on your own desktop machine or whatever hardware you have spare, just be sure you have enough memory. This article will cover setting up a sandbox using UML.

My GNU distro of choice is Archlinux and this article will be based around it, but you should be able to take the …

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