I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

Among other things, these past few months I have been working on setting up Buildbot, including adding various enhancements and bug fixes that are needed to properly build and test the MariaDB and MySQL code base.

Since Buildbot is written in Python, this means I have also had to learn Python. I am an old-time Perl hacker, so this exercise feels a bit like living in enemy territory ;-)

Anyway, Python is often touted as a more "pretty" language. And in many ways it is. Still, it is not without its own gotchas. Think "scope rules". Obviously someone haven't been reading up on the subject before implementing things in Python, causing the language to behave stupidly (and certainly different from what one expects) in the following three cases that I hit during my Buildbot work.

First …

It is no joke that computer hardware has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past decade. 10 years ago, multicore systems were expensive and high-end; today, your grandmother may have one and probably have no clue what she has!

Alas, application software has not kept pace. The Linux OS has done a fair job at being able to leverage some of the power multicore systems offer us, but applications running on them have not. The same can be said more or less for Windows, but it’s been a long while since I did anything systems-level with Windows. But the same issues do apply, however.

We are today with the multicore situation where we were in the 80′s and the 90′s with the multithreaded issues. Back then, CPUs grew support for multithreaded programming, but software — including some OSes — were slow to adopt. The Macintosh, when it was first released in 1984, would only support “cooperative” multitasking when the underlying …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2009-06-16 through 2009-06-25:

• MySQL – Restoring a Single Table from a Huge mysqldump File
  This is is hugely helpful if you don't want to restore a 25GB dump file just to grab one table.
• MCS-7828-H3: Hard Drive Errors Cause Service Outage; Hard Drive Firmware Upgrade Required
  Certain Seagate hard drive models used in HP servers (listed in the Products Affected section of this document) that are configured with firmware versions prior to HPG6 might experience drive failure indications.
• Least …

The call for papers for OSDC 2009 is open until 30 June 2009; yes that’s only a few more days. Submit your abstract and do a talk at this fab conference!

This is a grassroots style conference designed by developers for developers.  It covers Perl, Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Java/Grails and Open Source operating systems as well as some business aspects.  If you’d like to cover something else as well that is Open Source themed, please feel free.

The Call for Papers can be found at: http://2009.osdc.com.au/call-for-papers
The important dates are:

• Call for Papers Closes      30 June, 2009
• Proposal acceptance         20 July, 2009
• Accepted paper submissions  14 September, 2009
• OSDC 2009 Main …

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to …

I released the second beta of MySQLdb-1.2.3 over the weekend. So far I've gotten a fair number of downloads but not a lot of feedback. I did find out though what small tweaking is required to build on Windows. It's also in the Python Package Index, so if you can also install using easy_install MySQL-python. Once I make the final release of 1.2.3, I'll put up more eggs for fringe operating systems (Mac OS X, Windows).

Let’s say you need to do a website that must support multiple languages for cultures as diverse as Japan, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, as well as the US. This can be quite a daunting task, with all kinds of unexpected gotchas.

The ideal character set of choice is, of course, UTF8. Alas, you will note that most of the systems you’ll need to use defaults to LATIN1, including MySQL. If your site is written in PHP, that also by default is set to LATIN1.

I find it quite puzzling that in this day and age of globalization that many of the tools don’t default to UTF8. And there are major issues with this, because everything in the chain of delivery must either be set to UTF8 or can handle UTF8 or you’ll see bizarreness when you attempt to display the characters of some languages. You will probably see a series of question marks (“??? ??? ?????”) instead of the actual words. Sometimes you may see a series of squares. …

I found out the hashing algorithm used in PHP-Memcache is different from that of Python-Memcache. The keys went to different servers as the hash created by python and php were different.

I posted a question on the memcache groups and was lucky to find this wonderful reply.

import memcache
import binascii
m = memcache.Client(['192.168.28.7:11211', '192.168.28.8:11211
', '192.168.28.9:11211'])

def php_hash(key):
    return (binascii.crc32(key) >> 16) & 0x7fff

for i in range(30):
       key = 'key' + str(i)
       a = m.get((php_hash(key), key))
       print i, a

This is the only thing that has to be done on Python's end, change the way the hash is calculated. The coding on PHP end remains same. All you guys using PHP for web based front-end with MySQL and Python for back-end scripts shall find this helpful.

Thanks Brian Rue.

Reference: …