By the end of 2007, to the surprise of many of us, a guy at Nokia Research Center announced that they had ported and were about to publish the full LAMP stack running on the Symbian/S60 platform of Nokia mobile phones. They dubbed this the Personal AMP stack: PAMP, and you can run most of the popular PHP apps like Wordpress, Drupal, phpMyAdmin... out of the box on a Nokia phone now.

Today we had the opportunity to have a chat with Johan Wikman, the man leading the efforts of porting the AMP stack to Symbian. Johan works as Principal Research Engineer at Nokia Research Center and as such has also previously participated in porting other interesting things to Nokia phones, such as the Linux kernel, eventually leading to what maemo is today.

There is an interesting "it's a small world" aspect in that Johan used to study at Helsinki University of Technology about the same time as …

By the end of 2007, to the surprise of many of us, a guy at Nokia Research Center announced that they had ported and were about to publish the full LAMP stack running on the Symbian/S60 platform of Nokia mobile phones. They dubbed this the Personal AMP stack: PAMP, and you can run most of the popular PHP apps like Wordpress, Drupal, phpMyAdmin... out of the box on a Nokia phone now.

Today we had the opportunity to have a chat with Johan Wikman, the man leading the efforts of porting the AMP stack to Symbian. Johan works as Principal Research Engineer at Nokia Research Center and as such has also previously participated in porting other interesting things to Nokia phones, such as the Linux kernel, eventually leading to what maemo is today.

There is an interesting "it's a small world" aspect in that Johan used to study at Helsinki University of Technology about the same time as …

Sorry for a short outage today – we were moving to a new server we had some problems because of software incompatibilities on the new box. Now all sites on this box should behave as usual

Angelo recently showed an easy way to dump SQL queries using DTrace, while reading the articles I felt that some important information is missing: The name of the user executing the query and the selected database. So I sat down a few minutes and tried to collect that data.

For the database name I found a quite simple solution: It is passed as parameter to the check_user() function to MySQL so we can easily add a thread-local variable to keep that name. Simple script for that:

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

#pragma D option quiet

pid$1::*check_user*:entry
{
    self->db = arg4 ? copyinstr(arg4) : "(no schema)";
}

pid$1::*dispatch_command*:entry
{
    printf("%s: %s\n", self->db, copyinstr(arg2));
}

Getting the username is a bit harder, for the …

Planned Falcon Blog posts: 4
Actual posts: 4
Hours resolving network outage due to physically damaged router: 3
Hours from first service call that a new router arrived via courier: 2
Hours haggling with Comcast tech over router configuration: 1
Hours resolving concurrent but unrelated disk corruption: 2.5
Hours locked out of building where I was supposed to speak at MySQL Meetup: 0.5

Falcon IRC non-system messages: 2661
IRC champ: Vlad (26%)
Runner-up: Lars-Erik (19%)
Highest percentage of smiley faces per lines of chat: 19%
Friendliest chatter: Olav
German/Norwegian message ratio: 1:1
References to reiserfs: 13
References to prison: 2
References to football (soccer): 182
Gratuitous references to Ramadan: 1
Best quote: "You obviously do not live in an apartment with a bunch of left-wing girls."
Source of quote: …

Off to Melbourne again, consulting for MySQL HA and performance tuning with a few different clients Mon-Thu. I was in Melbourne already last month, and will be there again in a few weeks for custom training. Hmm, is there a (flight)pattern there? ;-)

Also visiting Stewart this afternoon. Good company, good food.

Might have a few moments to hack on OurDelta patches along the way, and with the glory of bzr I can even do regular commits while offline to gain that quintessential backup to recover from potential sillyness. Die svn, die!

On the subject of …

To understand a bit of Italian, I just need a comparatively small amount of vino bianco. By contrast, to get any information flow going at all in Russian requires larger amounts of … preparation. That doesn’t have to be vodka, it can also be interesting discussions with Russians, or the opportunity to give a speech.

Now, a blog is the scalable way to interact with the rest of humanity, and I’m trying to increase my fluency in all things Web 2.0. So, here goes, may I present my Russian blog:

Like in the case of presenting my Italian blog, let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

…

Earlier this month, an announcement about STATEMENT based binary logging would be the default starting with MySQL version 5.1.29. I've always preached that backwards compatibility was key to new releases. In this case, lessons were not learned until close to final GA date.

I would like to point out that for 90% of customer cases, STATEMENT based replication will work fine as advertised. But I'd like to point out some use cases where STATEMENT based replication will be at best spotty (at least it is in 5.1.28).

If you primarily use InnoDB as your storage engine you will want to pay close attention to your transaction isolation level. There is a minimum requirement that READ COMMITED level be used, otherwise statement based replication can not be used.

Partitioning + InnoDB + STATEMENT-based binlog also has its problems. We …

Since the day one when I joined Scribd, I was thinking about the fact that 90+% of our traffic is going to the document view pages, which is a single action in our documents controller. I was wondering how could we improve this action responsiveness and make our users happier.

Few times I was creating a git branches and hacking this action trying to implement some sort of page-level caching to make things faster. But all the time results weren’t as good as I’d like them to be. So, branches were sitting there and waiting for a better idea.

Few months ago my good friend has joined Scribd and we’ve started thinking on this problem together. As the result of our brainstorming we’ve managed to figure out what were the problems preventing us from doing efficient caching: …

Google patches V1 contain interesting patch to mirror binary log on slave. Although Google is preparing GlobalTransactionId patch, which going to be replacement for MirroredBinlogs, we still think mirroring binary logs is very useful for:

• Backup of binary logs in real time
• High availability, to switch master load to slave with mirrored binary logs

By request of our friends EngineYard we extracted this patch from Google's patchset and going to include in our next releases. Actually our patch contains features for both MirroredBinlogs and FastMasterPromotion patches, as second provides feature to make slave as master in case of main master failure.

At …