Red Hat has been talking about open sourcing its Network for well over a year. Today, it finally did it.

However, code by itself is only moderately interesting. What we need now is a thriving community around "Project Spacewalk," as Red Hat calls the Network project.

Why? Well, because in some ways the commercial open-source community increasingly fragments as it matures financially. What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.

What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.

Now consider the power for Red Hat if its …

Features:

* New GRID design (’zebra’ Office 2007 style) for easier navigation.
* Multiple selection in GRIDs with SHIFT+CLICK
* Improved Data Synchronisation. Now typically 2-8 times faster than before depending on data. Option to generate a SQL sync script was added.
* New more user friendly design for the Schema Synchronisation (renamed from Structure Synchonisation). Various filter (’hide and ignore’) options were added.

Bug fixes:

* A backup script backing up all databases could fail to restore VIEWs referencing another database than the one where the VIEW was.
* Around 50 other small (mostly GUI-related) fixes for issues reported by users.

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

Taking advantage of Launchpad environment, I started paving the way for version 2.0 of MySQL Sandbox.
I opened a new branch for version 2.0, which currently holds 1.99.1, and I listed the necessary tasks using the built-in blueprints feature.

So now I have a list of tasks to keep track of the development.

• implement test suite (have a good prototype - I am getting to it)
• replace sleep with check loop (thinking - some analysis required)
• create function library (good progress)
• script to kill unresponsive servers (good progress)
• remote sandbox installer (thinking - …

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* None, apart from reinstalling my development PC.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* Integrate the RSS/Atom feeds on the website
* Commit changes to main branch

KEY CONCERNS
* Getting my development PC up and running stable.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Finishing the RSS/Atom feeds
* Discussing next task with my mentor (Extending PHP Unit tests or adding some fancy AJAX stuff to the Forge)

Thanks to my friend Dustin, and his EC2 demo using Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2 I got an EC2 image setup. With other references Link 1,Link 2,Link 3 I was also able to create my own AMI.

Some notes specific for my configuration.

Pre-config ElasticFox key for launching directly from ElasticFox SSH connections.

mkdir ~/ec2-keys
mv ~/Downloads/elasticfox.pem ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 600 ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 700 …

My company Continuent sponsors Continuent.org, an open source site that contains some of the coolest scale-out projects around. You may have heard of Sequoia, which implements middleware clustering of any database that has a JDBC driver. However, Sequoia is really just the beginning.

We have several other projects that offer interesting scale-out technologies. Myosotis implements fast SQL proxying, Hedera provides wrappers for group communications, and Bristlecone has tools for performance testing of scale-out architectures. This summer we will add projects for database neutral master/slave replication as well as cluster management. …

Horay! Thank goodness, and about time too!

On the latter, I do appreciate that any such switch is a serious change for a development team, I was involved with this while at MySQL so I'm well aware of the issues ;-)
Nevertheless, it was high time as it once again allows the rest of the world (outside of Sun/MySQL) to grab a repo and peruse the history properly. Long time ago (before bitkeeper turned fully evil) this was possible also. See MySQL is using Bazaar and Launchpad for their source code.

We had a distributed revision control talk in Bris a few weeks ago, by Ian Clatworthy of Canonical. We managed to do a video, but it's not yet online. Various attendants including Damian Hickey (of the Freeway ecommerce project) now want to move to either …

The big news in MySQL world is that MySQL has moved off BK and onto BZR.

Why is this news? I predicted the switch off of BK within minutes of the Sun announcement, in this post.

I didn't use any "insider knowledge" in that observation either, just the knowledge that Sun uses and contributes to HG, which makes using BK a non-starter, and that Sun would likely be unwilling to stop all HG work, and pay for a 30,000 seat BK site license, just to maintain access to one product.

The book, that is. My dog is already studying it. You should buy a few copies for yourself, your family, and all your pets.

Even though we had been preparing the migration to Bazaar for a while now, today's announcement kind of caught me by surprise. But I am very happy about this move!

While BitKeeper is an excellent tool and served us well the past eight (!) years, I was quite annoyed when BitMover decided to remove the fully functional free BitKeeper client, which effectively put our development back into a Cathedral: even though our source trees remained accessible via bkbits.net, the crippled bk client was only capable of cloning and pulling new revisions from there - it was not possible for an …