(Credit: Kate Geraghty)

I just pre-paid $20 for the newest Radiohead album (available on October 10). Radiohead, now without a label/ball and chain, has decided to let its fans choose how much to pay the company. I'm actually feeling cheap right now, even though I'd pay $10.00 or less on iTunes (if Radiohead sold through iTunes, which it doesn't, because of a somewhat silly "artistic integrity" argument).

How much will you pay? It's nice to think of all the money going to Thom and crew, rather than to a Larry in a lounge suit somewhere in Los Angeles. Just as I'd prefer to pay Marten Mickos for my database than Larry Ellison. :-) But that's not the only open-source analog here.

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Sorry, the MySQL conference in Japan and my vacation came up, but now we're finally ready to annouce the next (and hopefully last) beta of the next XAMPP release.

New in this beta are: PHP5 (5.2.4), Apache (2.2.6), phpMyAdmin (2.11.1), and eAccelerator (0.9.5.2).

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

Last Sunday, just before the MySQL Dev Meeting in Heidelberg ended, we went to see a falconry. Strictly speaking, the German Raptor Research Centre isn’t a falconry (which is a commercial venture for raising falcons), but a privately funded research station dedicated to the preservation of birds of prey, or “Eagles, vultures & co” as they say on their home page at deutsche-greifenwarte.de. Their actions over the past 30 years have given concrete results for many raptors, such as the eagle-owl (”Uhu” in German and Swedish), which is no longer on the list of endangered species in Europe. The German Raptor Research Centre has successfully set out 37 sea eagles (Seeadler, …

As I mentioned in my earlier post (http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/94693.html), the earlybird registration for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 in Brisbane (26-29 November) is only until 14th of October. The earlybird ticket is $275 for the main conference (including dinner), whereas the main conference ticket after that will cost $325. So you can save an easy $50 by being fast.

Registrations are coming in nicely at this stage. From the organisation and volunteer perspective, it's good for us to get more registrations early, as it gives us a better view of the overall numbers.
There are actually some practical caps. Like, if you book later, you could lose out on the (otherwise included) conference dinner. Very simply, the big room will be full and that's it.
Personally, I wouldn't …

This weekend I was doing some development for one of our projects and we needed to make screenshots of a web pages (see my next posts about this task). I’ve managed to develop small piece of code which uses GtkMozEmbed component (Mozilla Gecko-based renderer for web pages) to create screenshots of any page, but there was some problem… The problem was a following: GTK+ library can’t work w/o fully-functional X server running on your machine. Obviously I didn’t want to run such software (no monitor/keyboard/mouse, dumb graphics adapter on the server, etc, etc) so I’ve tried to find some solution… And in this tiny article I’ll describe the method I’ve managed to find.

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Kevin Burton wrote recently about why SHOW SLAVE STATUS is really not a good way to monitor how far behind your slave servers are, and how slave network timeouts can mess up the slave lag. I'd like to chime in and say this is exactly why I thought Jeremy Cole's MySQL Heartbeat script was such a natural fit for the MySQL Toolkit. It measures slave lag in a "show me the money" way: it looks for the effects of up-to-date replication, rather than asking the slave how far behind it thinks it is.

The slave doesn't even need to be running. In …

A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and "safe" dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I've had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book.

DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation today announced its award-winning database drivers now support the MySQL Enterprise Server, the commercial version of the most widely used open-source database and an emerging force in business-critical software deployments.

BakBone Software(R) (Pink Sheets:BKBO), a leading provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection solutions, today announced version 8.0 of NetVault(R): Backup, the company's award-winning, flagship data protection solution.

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts. New tool: MySQL Parallel Dump I wrote an introduction to MySQL Parallel Dump yesterday. It’s a much smarter way to dump your data if you have a lot of it, and it’s actually a very usable lightweight multi-threaded backup tool (it can do most dump-oriented backup jobs without a wrapper script, in my opinion).