I just unpacked and started setting up the Kysoh Tux toy that I got at OScon. The lucky folks with a press badge were given a free one. I had to pay for mine.

The good:

Physically, it feels to be well and solidly made. It didn't feel like they were being cheap with the fabrication. It weighs just over half a kilogram.

Physical setup is straightforward. Unstrap the parts from the box. Click in the US power module into the internationalized power cord. Plug in the penguin unit, to charge it up. It can operate both plugged in, and on internal batteries, which it charges itself. Plug the fish unit into your computer with the included USB cord. It uses a mini-usb plug.

The firmware running in the "Penguin" main unit, and the firmware running in the "Fish" USB/wireless transmitter unit, and the interface library and control software on the host are …

Note: Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is now published.

Note: I have now published “Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)”

Note: This page focuses on Ubuntu installs. Oracle has published a web page for successfully installing Linux on unsupported platforms that you may find helpful.

I come from a MySQL background, and I have been given the challenge of learning Oracle. I can’t just play around with our customers’ databases, but I remembered that Paul Vallée said that there is …

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If you are running a Linux laptop that uses NetworkManager, you can get a list of every wireless network that NetworkManager knows about by doing

gconftool-2 --all-dirs /system/networking/wireless/networks

If you want to delete one, do

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /system/networking/wireless/networks/BADNETWORKNAME

I find this useful when I'm in a venue, such as a tech conference, where there is both a free conference wireless network, and a paid wireless network run by the convention center. If you ever accidentally associate with the paid network, then whenever the signal strength of the paid network is higher, NetworkManager will prefer it to the free one. The fix is to delete the paid network data from the gconf database.

So, I had written a while back: “We currently have a DataMemory of 4GB and IndexMemory of 2GB. Based on the crude methods we have to monitor it, I think we are at about 40% capacity.” Boy, I was wrong.

After that post, I started looking at this more in detail because we were considering buying more RAM “just in case”. I figured out how to use the super secret command “all dump 1000″. The command is not documented in the MySQL documentation that I could find. I did find it in the NDB API documentation before writing this post however. Not sure why I could not find it before.

For those that still don’t know how to use it, simply type “all dump 1000″ from your management console. Then check your cluster log files …

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked about replication on MySQL 4.1.7. I’ve worked with replication in the past, just a quick and dirty job on MySQL 5, and soon forgot about it. This time, I wanted to do it on MySQL 4, and make sure I take good notes for my own benefit. If it can help somebody else, all the better. The official documentation is here. It took a little time to wade through it.

The process below is used to replicate all databases on the master to the slave(s). I will talk about replicating only certain selected databases in a future post.

1. At the master server, check if binary logging is on. Use show variables like ‘%bin%’ to check if binary logging is on or not. If it is not on, turn it on by adding log-bin under [mysqld] section in …

One of these years I will finally get a talk accepted for OScon and actually be able to attend. I always hear good things about the conference and it seems like my company almost has its own track this year.

For those of you who are attending, be sure to attend some of the great talks being delivered by my friends and colleagues:

Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications
Next-Gen Interaction with Ajax, Comet, and PHP
Advanced Production Troubleshooting
Scalable Internet Architectures …

In a talk with Raph Levien today he said:

[basically] “… the metric for the success of an open source software project is whether the author now works at Google.”

… nearly everything I’ve ever written fails to pass this test.

Hopefully someone from Google’s M&A department can help me remedy this situation. (hint hint)