OK, so I stumbled upon Working With Rails a while back when there was a little controversy about their methods for populating the database with Rails developers and I figured I should claim my record. I filled in a few details then forgot about it. I visited again today to mention that I’m a Rails core contributor (well, I’ve had a patch or two accepted, which is good enough for me!) after reading that CD Baby is sponsoring conferences passes for the top 20 contributors between now and the conference registration opening for RailsConf ‘07. I sincerely doubt that, with my current workload, I’ll either contribute much or make it to the American RailsConf, but why not sign up anyway?

While I was visiting …

Seems like the MySQL Symposium will be rescheduled. On one side that's bad news, on the other personally it makes my schedule a bit lighter.

On the same day I got the news about the MySQL symposium being delayed I got the news that my paper for the dutch Virtualisation conference has been accepted at least I have more time now to work on that :)

An excellent opportunity has come up to have the 2007 edition of the Open Source Developers Conference to Brisbane. Various people from Brisbane were independently interested, and we converged at LCA 2007 in Sydney last week. From discussions there, I understand that the OSDC committee is interested, but would of course like to make sure that it will once again be a well attended quality event, and a worthy successor to the previous editions in Melbourne - so we need to do some homework!

OSDC is generally held in December, the CfP would start in April. Various things would need to be in place before then. If you are able and willing to help with this, please email me at my-first-name @ my-last-name dot com dot au The current aim is for an initial meeting in Brisbane within the next couple of weeks, to go over things before submitting a full proposal to the OSDC committee.
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Some might've noticed that the check-cpu script in the MySQL BUILD directory does not always succeed in detecting the right processor:

roland@roland-laptop:/opt/mysql/5.1/bitkeeper/BUILD$ ./check-cpu
BUILD/check-cpu: Oops, could not find out what kind of cpu this machine is using.

When you dig a little deeper into that script, you will notice that the name of you particular processor (in my case: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz) is indeed not there and thus not checked. Finally you may find that the model and name of your processor are passed to the gcc compiler.

As far as I cans see the information is used to set the values of the --mtune and --march compiler options. What those are? Hehe! Ok, here's a partial result from man gcc:
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At the end of my last MySQL post I mentioned strange behavior with GROUP BY and DISTINCT. In Oracle such constructions are not valid and produce an error. Here is the test table and statements:

create table t1 (c1 int, c2 int);

insert into t1 values (1,10); insert into t1 values (2,20); insert into t1 values (3,30); insert into t1 values [...]

I hear a lot of people say: "Well, compiling MySQL from source might pose a problem to Windows users, but it's straight forward for Linux users." Quite often, the difference is explained by claiming that Linux users are used to doing things themselves, and gaining an extra bit of customization by doing so.

My impression is that a large part of the people that say this, are already quite experienced Linux users that are quite comfortable with compiling software from source. The entire toolchain that is involved is already set up on their system, and some of them probably already forgot what they had to do in order for it to make it work.

What is quite often not mentioned is that the required toolchain does not magically land on your system. If you are experiencing prolems compiling MySQL source it's quite likely the toolchain …

What a great day was had with the miniconf this year! Many people thought that there would be few people coming, or there would be issues having the PostgreSQL miniconf the next day, but it went better than could be expected.

The morning sessions were so popular it was standing room only as some of the great talks went out to an enthused audience. I was more nervous than usual delivering a talk on MySQL cluster with Stewart Smith being in the same room (he is a developer of the ndb engine with MySQL at the moment). My fears were relieved when Stewart gave me the "thumbs up" after the talk and thought it was quite good. Phew!

So was there any downside to the day - unfortunately yes. There were an over-abundance of talks submitted so some people did not have an opportunity to present. I actually submitted two talks - one on ndb cluster and one on the Sphinx search engine. Only one was accepted due to the excellent submissions made for …

Late in 2006 MySQL decided to move to a split distribution model, Community and Enterprise. A lot has (apparently) changed since then, yet nothing has really changed since then.

I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists - PHP, mod_perl, MySQL, web application security, etc. This week, there was an interesting conversation on the NYPHP mailing list - consulting rates.

It all started with an email from Edward Potter. He had previously emailed the list to inquire about consulting rates and was sharing the results with everyone:

Just to keep everyone up to date, based on interviews to …