Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts - Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

Brian hits the nail on the head… The way you get a usable system is install all the GNU tools.

This is how I go from fresh Ubuntu install to building MySQL:

apt-get build-dep mysql-server

apt-get install bison

(now go and build).

(and i could do this graphically if I wasn’t so stuck in my ways)

For Solaris? umm… there was a point where I could get Solaris to apply security updates and Brian could get all the stuff needed to build a MySQL Server. Together we had the knowledge needed… but neither was as trivial as with Ubuntu and combining knowledge was too much - I just gave up and went on to more productive things.

Even on an existing Solaris system… getting your PATH right is a trip into some weird fantasy land seemingly …

Jay Pipes blogged about this earlier this month. I read his post, nodded a knowing nod and finished my cup of coffee. It wasn’t until yesterday when it really struck me. I was looking through the database schema of a popular forum software package (won’t say which) when I came across this column definition in a central table (by ‘central’ I mean one that typically holds a lot of rows):

ip varchar(100),

One hundred characters to store a at-most 15-character IPv4 string? I know what you’re about to say, “But, it’s a varchar so you’re not really using 100 bytes.” Well, you *might* not be. Jay’s discussion on how MySQL uses temporary tables illustrates how you can use all 100 bytes in memory - not a good thing.

So, the minimum number of bytes you will be using is 7 if …

A bzr plugin to assist in developing focused patches. in Launchpad

I use quilt a lot for development. Currently, If I had to choose between BK and quilt - I’d choose quilt.

I use bzr in other development projects like MemberDB. I use git as a frontend for SVN (it is *so* much faster than the svn client and incredibly more space efficient… A copy of the entire history of a tree stored in git is usually less than a single svn checkout). I also use darcs (and quilt) for offlineimap and just about every other revision control tool at some point.

So this is a bit of a discussion about how I work and how bzr-loom would help it… (I’ve wished for a long time that bk had stuff like this… bk collapse is just not what I want, although others use it lots).

The loom plugin to bzr looks like a fantasy world of goodness where the revision control system …

MySQL AB today announced that Yes Loans, the UK's number one provider of specialist unsecured loans, has now processed more than 1.7 million loan applications on top of the MySQL database. Yes Loans credits MySQL with supporting its phenomenal growth, and now operates its entire business on a MySQL Enterprise subscription.

You have only a few more days to sign up for the MySQL Conference and Expo before the early-bird discount goes away. Check out the schedule of speakers and tutorials, and sign up soon! And just in case you didn’t get one from any of the other people blogging about it, you can email me for a code that’s good for a 20% discount. I’m presenting two sessions: one on the query cache, and one on EXPLAIN.

Today I realised that I have been programming for 25 years. Quite an anniversary! Of course, it does not really feel like that long, probably because a bit more than the first half of the time was really 'just for fun', as a kid's hobby and later during University.

I also realised that right from the beginning and through all the years I have had the Open Source mindset, even though I did not learn about Free Software until much later.

I believe there are two reasons:

1. I love reading source code.
2. I hate the wasted effort when code could be reused, but is not.

Right from the start I have been reading code. This was when software was distributed as BASIC listings in magazines that one would manually type into the computer. And I remember reading and modifying the dis-assembly of machine code programs, getting 'infinite lives' in games and learning the techniques they used to produce their …

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple …

Today there was a recent flurry of blog posts, starting with Charles Babcock's interview of Jonathan Schwartz about Sun's strategy of targeting Web 2.0 developers. This brought to light an interesting topic about open source development communities, the perceived insularity of Sun towards the external OpenSolaris developer community, and why Linux will apparently always be more popular and technically stronger than OpenSolaris.

The initial interview led Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation to take issue, and long comments on those posts from …

I've decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux.

I'm not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn't matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that's a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I've probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. In fact, it doesn't refer to Linux, it refers to GNU/Linux. Therefore, it should be GLAMP.

Why does this matter? I try not to say Linux, unless I'm referring to a kernel, because a kernel is not an operating system. I try to be pretty careful about saying GNU/Linux when I'm talking about an operating system. An exception is a recruiting event yesterday at the University of …

My blog been added several days ago to the Planet MySQL feed, and am now one step closer to world domination.

I'll assume that most people who see this entry at their feed readers would be unfamiliar with this blog, so I should be including an introduction here. Instead, I invite you to take a look at the home page and look at some olds posts of mine that might interest you. Not everything is about MySQL, and the Planet MySQL feed takes only the ones that I've labeled as such.

The following posts are the top search engine keywords that this blog gets, so you might want to start there:

• MySQL T-SQL CASE Statement: Bad Language Design
• …