On IRC, I told Pia, that I enjoyed the Beijing SFD tremendously, and they should definitely win for 2007. I did make a note that if it was required, I would blog about it… She mentioned that it probably wouldn’t matter, because they were a contender already. Nonetheless, I figured that eventually I’d blog about it - turns out its come many months later, generally inspired by Peter Junge’s blog post. Lucky for me, all this isn’t just coming off from memory, but my trip report, that was on an internal mailing list!

First up, some quick resources: the winning report, photos, including the ones from the speaker dinner, held after …

Today I sat down and started to read the post by Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation on the recent brouhaha around Sun's announcement about supporting Web 2.0 frameworks:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/2008/02/17/hey-jonathan-the-l-in-lamp-is-literal/

What struck a chord with me about the "L" word is that it really is more then just Linux.

It is GNU.

Richard Stallman's constant mantra of "GNU/Linux" is very relevant.

It is the GNU part that really establishes the platform. FreeBSD gets that, and even Apple gets that.

When you buy a Sun box, and are going to run Solaris on it. What is the first thing you do?

You download all of the GNU utilities to make it useable.

This was true when I …

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Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.

Fronter, a leading provider of online e-learning solutions, has chosen to base its new open platform on MySQL and other open source software products -- making it possible to satisfy customer demands for scalability and easy integration with other systems. This investment means a complete transition to platforms with open source code.

Fronter, headquartered in Norway, has enjoyed tremendous success with its learning platform for the education sector. Today, more than 3.8 million users in over 3,000 learning institutions in the UK, Europe and Nordic countries utilise the system to streamline both teaching and collaboration.

Let’s begin by assuming you have a server that runs MySQL and lots and lots of traffic flows through it everyday, let’s say… something like 50% of the size of the partition that the mysql binary logs are written to is on, then we will assume the binary log is turned on. Then we assume that expire_logs_days is not set.

What happens? Nagios/etc alerts that the partition is reaching a usage threshold because - low and behold the binary logs are filling up the partition. Tuning this variable is also important. It may need to be set to as low as 1 day, in which case I would say we need a bigger partition for binary logs, but setting it so low can cause replication problems if the slave(s) gets behind more than 1 day - god help us if it does - then those binary logs that the slave is reading are no longer available, and rebuilding replication will be next on the task list. (or using maatkit)

While I’m at it here are some good ones …

I have seen it time and time again. And yet, every time, it irritates me to no end. You are on a professional web site. You are navigating around and at some point you hit the link for their forums. And just like that you feel transported to another place. The whole site design just changes. Colors, layout, navigation… everything. Here are some examples, including the new C7Y site from php|Architect which inspired this post. (I really do love you guys on the podcast I promise =)

• php|architect’s C7Y - main site - forums
• Zend’s Developer Zone - main site - forums
  Zend’s forums do at least use the Zend.com header, but you can’t get to the forums …

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.

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 …