MySQL Sandbox is growing old

The MySQL Sandbox project has been around for 8 years, and it has gained considerable attention from the community. I have seen it mentioned in books and articles, used in other projects, and widely adopted by testers and bug reporters.
I have used it for more than testing, and it has saved me many hours of labor by allowing me to create database servers in a few seconds.
Yet, I have gathered a long list of grievance about it, both from my own experience and from other users feedback. Here goes.

• MySQL Sandbox is not easy to install. For people used to install Perl modules, it feels natural. For experienced Perl users, installing it in user space without root access is …

I'm proud to announce the release of another open source project from myself and my colleagues at Box -- Rain Gauge.  It's puts a nice interface on pt-stalk, and helps manage running it as a daemon on all your mysql servers, so you don't miss the details when your database starts acting up.

What is Rain Gauge?  You can think of it like a web-based pt-sift.  You run pt-stalk continuously on all your database servers; this will watch your mysql process and when a configurable condition is met, then it triggers a host of collections to record what your disks, processor, and memory were doing at the time, along with mysql internal status, processlist and much much more.  It can even kick off GDB backtrace collections and oprofile gathering if desired.
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I need help with this. I had a dream… Well, not so much as a dream, maybe a “It’d be cool to…”

I thought it’d be nice to discover new photos on flickr using your favorite photos and the people who also favorited those photos, and the favorite photos of those who also favorited my pictures. Still with me?

It’s actually a quite simple code (about 500 lines, check it on github: discovr), but it’s terribly slow. Some possible reasons:

• Way too much data. I’ve found people with around more than 18000 favorites, and there are photos with more than 2k fans. After limiting to 50 last …

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our loops in more …