In response to the IEEE's report on Patent Power, which lists the top companies ranked by number of patents, Ari Shahdadi and Brad Burnham made trenchant comments in email that I thought were worth sharing (with their permission):

Ari wrote:

The main article is sad to read, with choice quotes like this: "Clearly, the global recession seriously hampered innovation in the United States." If I'd like to do anything, it's end the use of patenting statistics as a metric for innovative activity, especially by groups like the IEEE.

Brad responded:
…

Changes (as compared to 3.72) include:

* If SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS returned an error that was not privilege-related, MONyog reported MySQL as non-available.  That could happen for instance if MySQL was started with –skip-innodb option. This bug was introduced in 3.71 with the support for InnoDB deadlock detection.
* A bug in the MONyog startup script could on Linux have the result that MONyog was still reported as running if it had been killed or had crashed.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Tokutek is pleased to announce immediate availability of TokuDB for MySQL, version 3.1. It is designed for continuous querying and analysis of large volumes of rapidly arriving and changing data, while maintaining full ACID properties.

TokuDB v3.1’s new functionality includes:

• Improved handling of a full disk
• Configurable disk space reserve
• Faster group commits
• Faster crash recovery
• Improved SHOW ENGINE STATUS and SHOW PROCESSLIST diagnostics

This new release builds on TokuDB’s core benefits:

• 10x-50x faster indexing for faster querying
• Full support for ACID transactions
• Short recovery time (seconds or minutes, not hours or days)
• Immunity to database aging to eliminate performance degradation and maintenance …

A nice post on Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0.

From Stack Overflow:

Suppose you’ve visited sites S0 … S50. All except S0 are 48% female; S0 is 100% male.

I’m guessing your gender, and I want to have a value close to 100%, not just the 49% that a straight average would give.

Also, consider that most demographics (i.e. everything other than gender) does not have the average at 50%. For example, the average probability of having kids 0-17 is ~37%.

The more a given site’s demographics are different from this average (e.g. maybe it’s a site for parents, or for child-free people), the more it should count in my guess of your …

Last month I spent two days in Belgium, after I got invited to the MySQL distro meeting. It was a non-public meeting with some people from Sun Microsystems and MySQL maintainers from different Linux distributions. It took place directly after FOSDEM (which I unfortunately could not attend due to personal reasons) at the Sun Microsystems Belgium office in Brussels. It was great to meet with Mathias Gug from the Ubuntu Server team in person. He had some really good ideas on how we could reduce the differences between MySQL in Debian and Ubuntu in the future. As a consequence, Debian will soon switch from Subversion to Bazaar for maintenance of …

i read Marks blog entry about fast IO for PBXT, InnoDB (1.0.6 plugin) and MyISAM with some interest.

then there was the durable, not durable and really not durable blog in which Mark and LinuxJedi discussed cluster, and Mark wondered how much IO one could get from 1 data-node with ndb.

so I decided to try.
the setup is similar.
ndb cluster using disk-tables, with a tablespace stored in /dev/shm.

Data occupied 7.3G, which is slightly less than (some of) the others, this is as we don't support having columns with indexes …

If you have been wondering why the overview and graphs pages say “no data to display” on the graphs when you first install Kontrollbase, it’s because there’s no data in the database being returned from the queries that generate the graphs – this is because a new install has no data to graph. This has […]

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day on the WordPress Publisher Blog, highlighting two women of the WordPress community.

Last week I presented “From support services to software services – the evolution of open source business strategies” at the OSBC event in San Francisco.

The presentation was effectively a work in progress update on our research into the various strategies employed by technology vendors to generate revenue from open source software.

It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.

I provided a number of examples of how the model could be used to compare the strategies of various open source businesses. …