One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …

Markus Rex returns to Novell’s Linux business unit. Red Hat’s second largest shareholder cuts its stake. The CEOs of Novell, Sonatype, Digium and Kaltura go on the record. Shaun Connolly joins SpringSource. And more.

Official announcements
Novell Announces Executive Appointments to Focus on Cross-Platform Solution Strategy and Growing Linux Business Novell

Palamida Finds Security Tops List of Concerns Inhibiting Broader Open Source Adoption Palamida

GigaSpaces Announces Extreme Scalability for MySQL Enterprise Customers GigaSpaces

…

OK, I cheated and read my 'work' email! Today my talk proposal got accepted and I'm off to the MySQL Conference & Expo, held in Santa Clara (CA, USA), end April 2009. My talk will be about the MySQL Support Team: how it started, the transformation it went through and how it scales today (and much more!).

This is my first talk overseas! I'm quite excited!

The European search technology company has picked up a series A round of funding. Its consumer product is European events search tool Happenr.

I had to disable write access for anonymous mantis account because of the spam in comments. Will enable it one I add some kind of protection. For now - please register to report a bug. Thanks.

I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …

I have seen a few people now ask about using MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing with asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (herein referred to as CJK.), however, there doesn't seem to be a good centralised article that covers it.

The information is out there, I just don't think it has been well presented yet.

As I have recently done a bunch of research on this topic for a customer, I figured it might be a good opportunity to make my debut in the MySQL blogosphere.

So here we go...

I'll open by saying that attempting to use FULLTEXT with CJK text in MySQL 5.0 will be unsuccessful.

From the CJK FAQ in the MySQL manual:

"For FULLTEXT searches, we need to know where words begin and end. With Western languages, this is rarely a problem because most (if not all) of these use an easy-to-identify word boundary — the space character. However, this is not …

Since I got fed up with Solaris the other day, the T1000 is running Debian. This means that “I’ll care about Drizzle on Linux Sparc”.

OMG were things broken in the most “trivial” ways.

A good quick intro to the issues is Memory alignment on SPARC, or a 300x speedup!

It all comes down to memory alignment.

So I pulled the MySQL 6.0 bzr tree onto the box to try it too… I haven’t seen so many compiler warnings in ages (okay… since I last built MySQL.. drizzle is warning-clean and it makes it hard to remember a time before that). I think it works purely by …

I’ve started an investigation of MySQL Backups using LVM. I’m working with Lenz’s mylvmbackup but I found it both used Perl and needed a number of dependencies installed.

Installing dependencies failed on my test system, yet I found it actually worked when I went back to my dev system (but it is not configured with LVM for full testing).

$ sudo cpan Config::IniFiles Sys::Syslog Date::Format Getopt::Long  DBI

Details of error:

....
 CPAN.pm: Going to build S/SA/SAPER/Sys-Syslog-0.27.tar.gz

WARNING: LICENSE is not a known parameter.
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
'LICENSE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.
Writing Makefile for Sys::Syslog
cp Syslog.pm blib/lib/Sys/Syslog.pm
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/xsubpp -noprototypes …

I was working on a client’s server today to troubleshoot some variances between the result timing of some queries. Guess what I came across - the profiler is not available in certain enterprise releases but it is available on community versions of the same release number.

I can understand if that feature was something that wasn’t fully tested in the enterprise code base and thus was only released in the community version - but if that’s the case then I don’t understand why the same version releases of Community and Enterprise can have different feature sets. That goes against the whole idea of versioning. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here but that is very frustrating.