I bought a new personal laptop a few weeks back, and I’ve been using it enough to final post a short review. I’ve run linux on several different laptops over the years, and it’s always been kind of tough. Even supergeeks endure a lot of teasing at conferences about getting wireless networking configured.

This time, I went with System 76, who offer laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. Definitely the right choice! I chose a Gazelle, which is not quite as sleek as my previous MacBook. It is blazing fast. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to be productive with Ubuntu preinstalled and working perfectly: NetworkManager means my wireless connection works even better than on the MacBook, suspend to RAM and hibernate to disk worked flawlessly, and it compiles MySQL in about 13 minutes flat.

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Not having a watercooler, around which we can stand and gossip, is a serious drawback to working at home. MySQL's 300ish employees are spread out over 20-something countries. Most of the people with whom I work closely are not within a few hours of my timezone.

Our primary communication medium is IRC, a kind of continuous chat system, like an agora where people group themselves together on topics, rather than like the person-to-person chat that most people know of. Outside of that, we occasionally use our telephones, which connect to the Internet directly, bypassing long-distance carriers and bills. And, of course, there's (now-ubiquitous) email. If you consider the loss of nuance in hurried textual communication and the ever-present risk of culture-shear, one would think we would have far more misunderstandings than we do.

Not having the …

Alfresco Software Inc. today announced results for the first open source JSR-170 benchmark. The results were based on a 10 million document repository and validated by 3rd party open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) experts Optaros to assure compliance with pre-determined benchmark rules.

I wrote a while ago about a program I wrote to export GnuCash data into a MySQL database, including a couple of queries against the resulting schema. I’ve made some improvements since then to allow a simple overlay of my wife’s categories onto the GnuCash hierarchy. This article explains the improved schema, and includes some more useful tools and queries. The improved schema The heart of the schema that holds the GnuCash data remains the same, but I’ve added a table to overlay our categorization system onto it.

I was talking to Elliot this morning a bit about Linux Distributions and it made me think a bit more about where we are at today.

Let me share my thoughts on this topic.

First, I'm really unhappy with the state of Linux distributions today. Its a tower of babel for the most part. Its a hope that the LSB will solve some of this, but today shipping on Linux is a real mess. Upgrading is a mess, especially for applications developed to rely on a stable platform.

Let us talk about the first distribution by sharing a story.

Last year I walk into a customer's shop and they asked me why MySQL is crashing. The problem?

"apt-get upgrade"

It was a mismatch of libraries on their Debian systems. Debian is a great distribution to play with, but unless you have an expert (and you probably do not!) I find that its not the most stable distribution to use. I do not see this …

We have released an update to Beta 5, which contains several bug fixes. This release is solidmysql-5.0.27-beta5-0040 (note 0040 instead of 0036 from the original Beta 5). You can get it from the usual place (http://dev.soliddb.com/download/). We also have new mirrors set up through sourceforge, which should improve the download speeds for people, especially for those who are in Europe or Asia. You can access the mirrors from the same download page. ¶

From Paul Kedrosky:

Does this mean you should move to the Bay Area? Maybe. Plenty of open source companies have successfully grown outside the Valley (actually, the most successful ones - Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL), but it's certainly the case that there's more venture money in the Bay Area than anywhere else.

Of course, the primary VC complaint is having to get on a plane for board meetings, so maybe it's enough to do what Zend, MySQL, etc. have done: move management to the Bay Area. They may well be the only ones who can afford it. :-)

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Nearly at the same time as the release of yesterday's XAMPP, the developers of ProFTPD released a new version of ProFTPD (1.3.0a). The new release fixes a security vulnerability which allows an attacker to install and run malicious code: More about the security vulnerability.

As usual, in case of security-relevant upgrades, we decided to release an suitable XAMPP upgrade as soon as possible. But to cut a long story short, here it is:

Download XAMPP for Linux 1.5.5a

Here's a way to write join clauses so they are more compact, more readable, and less confusing.

Many users may be unaware of the fact that there is a great tool for automatically testing MySQL called mysql-test-run. The most recent version of this program is written in perl and resides in the mysql-test directory of the MySQL source code tree.

Tests are written as scripts (.test files) which contains SQL statements and a number of meta-commands. Each .test file has a corresponding .result file which is used to verify the test output. A text-based "diff" is used to confirm that the output generated by the test is identical to the expected result.

To run a test mysql-test-run automatically sets up a clean environment and starts the MySQL server. It then executes the test scripts specified (by default all tests are executed) and verifies the output.

Most of the tests shipped with MySQL are intended to run with the MyISAM storage engine. There are also tests specifically created for other MySQL …