Novell sold to Attachmate. Barnes & Noble throws the book at Microsoft. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell closed its acquisition by Attachmate and its patent sale to CPTN.

# Attachmate’s CEO discussed the company’s plans for SUSE Linux.

# Barnes & Noble …

I've been thinking a bunch about email and mailing lists recently... about how to deal with them, how to follow the ones that are important but not get drowned in a sea of email noise. I have a non-tech email account which is where friends mail me personally and where I handle theatre-related stuff. I do not receive a stupid amount of email on this account, and I am almost always interested in reading the messages that arrive there. So on my inaugust.com email address, I've been considering unsubscribing from all mailing lists and setting both Launchpad and github to stop emailing me most things.

For Launchpad and github, most things I care about have status pages of some sort: lists of bugs or branches I need to attend to or whatnot. I really don't need to get an email every time someone files a bug - it's noise.

Mailing lists are the trickier one, because so many open source projects are centered around them in one form or …

Backups are an integral and very important part of any system. Backups allow you to recover your data and be up and running again, in the advent of problems such as system crashes, hardware failures or users deleting data by mistake. I had been evaluating backup solution for a while but to be honest I really wasn't satisfied with the solutions available until I came across XtraBackup and I am loving it since. In this post I intend on showing how to do backups and restores using XtraBackup.

Yesterday I wrote down the approach used in the MepSQL build system to parameterize the TAR package name produced. Today I will follow up with how the same was done for building DEBs. The motivation is to create a system that can be used flexibly to create packages of any MySQL fork, with any brand name: mepsql-server-*.deb, percona-server-server-*.deb, mariadb-server-*.deb or even just mysql-server-*.deb (which I might do some day).

While yesterday's tricks with the TAR files were rather straightforward, with the process of building DEBs this turns out to be much more challenging. But not to worry, like my former collague Bernhard Ocklin used to say: This is software, anything …

The new year is here and I have moved my (so far quite silent) blog to use WordPress and MySQL 5.5 GA.

Since I am using Ubuntu I downloaded a compressed tar archive. I installed it in a custom directory and for starting I wrote a little upstart script.

$ cat /etc/init/mysql-5.5.conf
start on startup
stop on shutdown

env basedir=/opt/mysql/mysql-5.5
env defaults=/etc/mysql-5.5/my.cnf

script
        cd $basedir
        $basedir/bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=$defaults
end script

In wp-config.php I have set:

define('DB_HOST', …

I've done a little change to the upstart script I published in a recent blogpost. The issue is with mysqld_safe which has a few issues it seems, but so far I haven't tracked them down exactly. Anyway, if mysqld_safe is not in your path and you run it with the full path (as I do in the Upstart script which is run by root that may well not have the mysql bin directory in it's path), then mysqld_safe will behave strange in at least 5.5 when called with the full path, i.e.
/mnt/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/my.cnf &
will not work. If I then put the appropriate directory in my path, like this:
PATH=/mnt/mysql/bin:$PATH
/mnt/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/my.cnf &
It still will not work as expected. In the first case, it complains that it cannot find …

Most of the time I think of myself as living in a fairly progressive and enlightened world. I'm fotunate that I work with a set of wonderful people, I can travel all over the world and I'm a member of an excellent theatre company. As a result, hatred of things, or at least expressions of hatred are generally just not tolerated in any of the circles in which I run. (With the exception, of course, of things that FAIL, like a particularly bad piece of code - but even then it's less about hatred and more about not liking something that didn't work)

There are two social acceptable exceptions to that rule, though: Americans, and cats.

I was reading a blog post earlier this morning (which I won't link to because that's not the point here) which was a fun post about older people finding new music. As a person who is not getting any younger myself, the blog post was quite enjoyable. Smack in the middle of it though, there was a fairly …

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.10

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 10.10 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

It's entirely possible, given my propensity to swear and rant and declare things to be Web Scale, that folks might get the idea that I do not like our newer NoSQL bretheren. Quite the contrary - I think almost all of them are exciting and well suited to various tasks. My biggest beef is in thinking that a single technology should be square-pegged into every round-hole anyone can find. This holds true for Drizzle and MySQL as well, by the way. Just because I work on Drizzle does not mean I think Drizzle should be the method of data storage for every blessed thing on the face of the planet - that would be silly!

I bring this up because I had my first instance of thinking that Cassandra might be a good choice for a project someone was showing me yesterday. In this case, the project was collecting data about events, but it as the data was events about real-world interactions, the particular information stored about each collected event had the …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.10 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 10.10 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.