I had a lovely dinner the other night with Nick McGrath, the head of Microsoft's UK platform strategy. (I can say words like "lovely" because I'm in London this week. I'll therefore also throw in the words "bloke," "top of the morning, guv'nuh!", and "Arsenal.") For all the bile I spill over Microsoft (and there is very good reason for it), I continue to be impressed by the company, as reflected in its people. I've yet to meet anyone in Microsoft's Linux frontline (aka, the counterinsurgency :-) that I don't respect and genuinely like: Nick, Jason Matusow, Bill Hilf, Martin Taylor (before he left Microsoft), Steve Mutkoski, Gutierrez, etc. Great, capable people.

What I like most about Microsoft is the intelligence it brings to bear on its competition. While many enterprise software companies persist in cramming their heads …

Digital music sales seem to have peaked, as Nick Carr highlights on his blog, and as the WSJ recently reported. [Subscription required.] For this reason, EMI is beginning to experiment with non-DRM protected music files: MP3s.

For many in the music business, the sky is about to fall. Or so they think. "Why will anyone buy our wares if we don't force them to do so by preventing copying?!?"

What they don't realize is that the people who don't buy from them won't buy from them, DRM or no. The people that aren't thieves (and that's most of us) will, but convenience of purchase is key. I don't buy from iTunes because I can't get the files elsewhere. I buy from iTunes because it's a safe, super-convenient experience …

Kristian Köhntopp has a wonderful article about using oprofile to track down problems in running programs. I thought I'd add a few thoughts.

If you need to get a vmlinux kernel on redhat, apparently you just need to install kernel-debuginfo, which will provide a vmlinux image you can profile against.

If you are using debian, unfortunately there is no package I could find to allow you to get a vmlinux. so what I did was:
($kver isn't a real variable - it's your kernel version. tab completion probably comes in handy at some point)

1. Install linux-tree-$kver - which gets you the debian kernel sources
2. Unpack the tar.bz2 file that is now in /usr/src
3. Copy /boot/config-$kver to /usr/src/linux-$kver/.config
4. cd /usr/src/linux-$kver
5. make oldconfig
6. make prepare
…

Open-Xchange Inc., the leading provider of open source collaboration software, announced today that it has signed a partnership and support agreement with MySQL AB, the developer of the world?s most popular open source database. This partnership enables Open-Xchange to embed the MySQL database into its leading open source collaboration server.

By Brady Forrest

Just a quick reminder, that tomorrow night is the first Ignite Seattle from O'Reilly Radar and Make. We have over 25 speakers planned, a popsicle-stick bridge-building contest and Werewolf. We have speakers lined up from Amazon, Ontela, UW, Microsoft, MySQL, some independents, and a slew of startups. Topics range from "Dorkbot" to "Info Tech in the Third World" to "Innovation" to "Corporate Culture Hacking" to "Home VOIP Hacks". All talks are 5 minutes long with just 20 slides each on auto-play for 15 seconds.
Check the site for details and if you are in Seattle please stop by. It is a free …

Every day I talk to many engineers and managers who want to be better. Better at developing software, better at shipping software, better at reacting to change in the marketplace, better at preserving backward compatibility, better at integrating new technologies, better at working efficiently, better at preventing and detecting bugs and errors, and so on.

I have often heard arguments that essentially say “all we need is a formal written process and things will be better”. I’ve consistently argued against that mindset, since I believe that principles are much more enduring than rules, and writing many rules often prevents people from doing the right thing.

You should all read this post from Jeff Patton why the best software design and development process is all in your head. Jeff explains so much more eloquently than I could why …

I was talking to a customer yesterday and the customer was surprised that database backups can be used to detect malicious database activity from legitimate users and hackers.

ZRM for MySQL stores MySQL binary logs as part of the database backups. The binary logs provide a good audit trail of all database activity. ZRM for MySQL binary log parsing capability, usually used for selective point in time recovery, can also be used to detect malicious database activity using SQL inspection.

ZRM for MySQL plugin interface allows DBAs to write log parser plugin scripts to track the database activity that they are interested in. For example: the following script can be used to detect deletion of data from the PRODUCTS table in the database. This script …

I think the Sysadmin of the Year is a great idea, and I wish I knew about it when nominations were happening! DBA’s and network administrators also count.

From http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/

The first annual Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest has been a huge success. Nominations for SAOTY closed at midnight on October 31, 2006 with more than 5,000 sysadmins nominated. The nominations were outstanding and inspiring.

Grandprize: Washington DC Trip to Attend LISA and a $2,500 Splunk Professional License
Michael Beck — Emerging Technologies Group, USA

1st Place: MacBook
Sean Thomas — True Prism Technologies (Ulanji)

Runnerup: Splunk License
Darren Barry — US Air Force

Micah Anderson — Eggplant Media Workers’ Cooperative
Dawn Lovell — CenturyTel
Mike Jennings — Rackspace

…

Chat log with kimseong on #mysql regarding character sets.

when you dump data in a latin1 table with MySQL, is it converted by default to utf8?
 FrankMash: mysqldump? yes it is, but there are options to set it to latin1
 kimseong: thanks. I have a table in latin1 that I am planning to dump and then change one field in its structure to be utf8
 kimseong: should I dump data in utf8 (default) or specify (latin1) to preserve special chars
 FrankMash: alter table can change directly, no need to dump, but backup first anyway
 alter table does takes longer than dump/importing in our test
 FrankMash: if you data is really stored as latin1, then it does not matter
 FrankMash: it gets tricky if data is stored as utf8 in latin1 column
 kimseong: thanks. so upon re-importing the data (assuming dump is utf8) will the characters be converted back to the charset specified in the table definition
 yes
 kimseong: yes that would be …

mike kruckenberg shared his observations from watching mysql source code commits, and jay pipes commented about this commit from antony curtis which had him excited. now that?s how open source is supposed to work, at least in part.

i replied to a later version of that commit to our internal developer list (and antony), pointing out that with just a little effort the comment would be more useful to people outside of the development team. ?plugin server variables? doesn?t really do it justice, and ?WL 2936? is useful to people who can access our internal task tracking tool, but does no good to people like mike.
…