In recent years, the software tools business has been a tough one. While Borland was a high flyer in the 80s and early 90s, the tools business was commoditized by and large by Eclipse over the past few years. The company is a shadow of its former self and recently sold off its development tools business to Embarcadero. But Borland isn't the only casualty in the tools space. There's been ongoing consolidation in tools for years. And we've seen other tools companies suffer, too. Agitar, which by all accounts had impressive testing tools and a great pedigree, recently decided to... READ MORE

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Even though this is the start of the SoC, I have been working on MySQL testing for some time now. My research group at University of Maryland has been working on automated testing for highly configurable software, and we have been testing MySQL for awhile. Our project is called Skoll (http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/skoll/contribute/mysql.html), which automatically tests highly configurable software on distributed computing resources.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• Finished all my final exams and projects last week, ready to start this project full time.

KEY CONCERNS

• I contacted MySQL to get access to push-build source tar balls, so Skoll can test each "push release" of MySQL instead of each check-in. I am waiting for MySQL to provide a way to …

The project I am working on for Google Summer of Code 2008 is "A Test Scheduler for the MySQL Build Farm Initiative". The MySQL Build Farm Initiative seeks to create an automated environment that tests MySQL in multiple configurations over a powerful, virtual computing grid provided by community member's local machines.

Currently, MySQL developers use an internal system called push-build to test a static set of configurations across a static set of computing resources. My project will take a step towards realizing the MySQL Build Farm; modify push-build to test a dynamic, rather than static, set of configurations and computing resources.

I will do this by creating a management layer that

1. models the configuration space to be tested
2. selects specific configurations from this space to be tested based on programmable coverage criteria
3. packages and distributes build and test scripts to clients who …

The project I am working on for Google Summer of Code 2008 is "A Test Scheduler for the MySQL Build Farm Initiative". The MySQL Build Farm Initiative seeks to create an automated environment that tests MySQL in multiple configurations over a powerful, virtual computing grid provided by community member's local machines.

Currently, MySQL developers use an internal system called push-build to test a static set of configurations across a static set of computing resources. My project will take a step towards realizing the MySQL Build Farm; modify push-build to test a dynamic, rather than static, set of configurations and computing resources.

I will do this by creating a management layer that

1. models the configuration space to be tested
2. selects specific configurations from this space to be tested based on programmable coverage criteria
3. packages and distributes build and test scripts to clients who …

The PostgreSQL community is getting really serious about replication. On Thursday May 29th, Tom Lane issued a manifesto concerning database replication on behalf of the PostgreSQL core team to the pgsql-hackers mailing list. Tom's post basically said that lack of easy-to-use, built-in replication is a significant obstacle to wider adoption of PostgreSQL and proposed a technical solution based on log shipping, which is already a well-developed and useful feature.

What was the reaction? The post generated close to 140 responses within the next two days, with a large percentage of the community weighing in. It's one of the most significant announcements on the list in recent history. …

This weekend our networking guys decided to change ips for all of our servers. They also changed our subversion server’s ip. This caused some issues in the subversion world with developers who had checkouts pointing to ips instead of hostname, using command similar to:

svn co svn+ssh://192.168.1.10/svn/myrepos/ /home/mycheckout/

Now when they do “svn update” inside the their /home/mycheckout/ directory, they get an error:

We needed to point the checkout to the new ip. Easiest way to do this is to delete your checkout and re-checkout. Unfortunately, some of the developers had a lot of modified files which wasn’t checked in yet. I fixed it by issuing:

find /home/mycheckout -name "entries"|xargs /usr/bin/perl -w -i -p -e "s/192.168.1.10/10.1.1.10/g"

Find command helps us in finding all the files with name “entries” and xargs takes the filename and passes it to …

In the next proxy release we introduce plugins, we talked about it already in MySQL Proxy: a chassis and a mysql server. Take a look at http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysql-proxy/trunk/plugins/ and check out:

• proxy
• admin
• debug

each of them sharing the common code that is provided by the chassis.

The debug plugin is a lua shell with a mysql-protocol ... well, just read on ;)

The purpose of the plugin is to be able to introspect the proxy at runtime. If it is loaded you can connect to port 4043 and execute lua code inside the proxy core:

$ mysql --user=root --password=secret --port=4043 --host=192.168.2.113
root@192.168.2.113:4043 [(none)]> return 1;
+------+
| lua …

Firefox has been my steady web companion since version 1.0 (and Mozilla before that). For some time now I wanted to try Firefox 3. I was reluctant to abandon Firefox 2, because of the unavailability of most add-ons. I was especially missing the Google Bar, which I have been using on a regular basis.
However, a few days ago I found a replacement. GoogleBar Lite is almost like the original, minus some feature that I wasn't using anyway.
So I have been using Firefox 3 for a while, and I noticed better performance, and no trouble. The additional features are cool, like the Most Visited pull down menu or the location bar integrated with history and search.
Firefox enthusiasts want to set a …