If you've read this blog in the past, you may have wondered where I've been all these past five months. In truth, I often wonder myself--the last five months have gone by like a blur, as we've been doing a tremendous amount of work for both the opentaps open source ERP + CRM project and for the soon-to-graduate-from-incubation Apache OFBiz project.

Happily, all is for naught. opentaps and OFBiz have both come a long way in these past months, with better features and stability and more users and contributors.

The down-and-dirty work of making an open source ERP system work for real users is not necessarily glamorous, but it's definitely given me a better perspective on the how and why of open source ERP. Some of it falls in line with what we had expected, but some of it were quite surprising--in a good way. I hope to …

It is not worth salvaging at this point. I got a lot of use out of it in the time I've had it, and it's been very dependable, considering that I bought it used. It had failed before, and I replaced the hard drive, but now the display has failed. In retrospect it's probably been giving me warnings for a good six months or so. These flat-panel LCD displays have a fluorescent light in them, and it's been doing what aging fluorescent lights do— flickering at first, taking time to get to full brightness, etc. Now it lights up dimly for a few seconds and goes out. I can faintly see the image still on the display. I've never had a display fail like this, but as CRTs continue to go by the wayside, and flat-panel displays are pretty much the norm now, I expect we'll see more of this as time goes on. I opened up the display, hoping maybe I'd find a bulb I could replace, but no such luck. It actually turns out to be a Samsung monitor tucked in there, and …

Despite a hard stop for new features in 5.0, we are adding IF EXISTS syntax to DROP TRIGGER statement.
I wonder what needs to happen to have basic SIGNAL functionality added. I tried to implement it a few months ago and it didn't seem bigger than a task for a few days.
So, I'm looking for ideas how to make addition of SIGNAL to 5.0 a no-brainer decision. Should our community run a charity auction with this feature on stake?
Finding a customer from Fortune 500 that would declare they can't use our product without it might prove more effective :)

I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.

After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.

Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code …

I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.

After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.

Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code …

Dear Lazy Web,

In my current list of plans is to try out Zmanda's backup solution. The technology all looks good but I want to try it out for myself.

My problem?

Disk space. I am rather low on it at the moment, and to really test things out I want to backup several databases and see how it really works. My Linux boxes at this point and time are all 1U machines, so adding disks is a bit problematic. I keep reading though about some of the ~$100 NAS devices that have come out. I am thinking that I want to buy one of these and put a disk in it. 500gigs minimal should work.

Any recommendations?

From Engadget I found these:
http://www.engadget.com/tag/nas

I want something that will do NFS. I am assuming that NFS is the easiest protocol for me to deal with. I can put the box on a 1gig ethernet …

So yesterday I am sitting in front of my monitor working, and it starts to make a noise similar to a snake.

Ssssss.....

Within a minute the screen goes blank and from inside of the flat panel a small whiff of smoke rises through the air.

I think it has lost all of its magic smoke that made it work.

Kind of wimpy.

Planar Flat Screen Panels have nothing on Apple, when Apple laptops go they blow up, catch fire, and possibly take your house with them.

Now that is the way to go out in this world!

I knew I should have bought an Apple monitor instead of going with the cheap Best Buy solution (ok, the monitor was sent to me by MySQL, so its not like I had a choice at the time).

Digg this article

So, I’ve been playing around with Amazon’s new S3 service. It’s essentially an on-demand storage-and-bandwidth combination; Amazon will scale their service transparantly to provide as much as you need of either. It’s pretty cheap, too, at $0.15 per GB per month for storage and $0.20 per GB per month for data transfer. I wanted to see what would be the best way to use Amazon S3 for backups with Amanda and MySQL ZRM, so I did some tests to evaluate the performance under various circumstances.

Amazon requires that you upload data in complete ‘objects’, and it wasn’t clear to me what the …

We posted the first beta of Zimbra 4.5 this past Friday.

Major new features of 4.5 include complex password enforcement, identities, personal distro lists's, server performance improvements, backup/restore in the admin console, a search builder in the admin console, user-set default fonts for HTML compose, an upgrade to use MySQL 5.0, and a Lotus Domino migration wizard. More details can be found in the beta release notes.

We posted the first beta of Zimbra 4.5 this past Friday.

Major new features of 4.5 include complex password enforcement, identities, personal distro lists's, server performance improvements, backup/restore in the admin console, a search builder in the admin console, user-set default fonts for HTML compose, an upgrade to use MySQL 5.0, and a Lotus Domino migration wizard. More details can be found in the beta release notes.

…