It's not everyday I'm trying out Linux and certainly not since I switched to MacOSX on my workstations. I still have a big heart for Linux of course, but it's mostly when it comes for running it on some servers.

Today's Slashdot posting about Debian 4.0, dubbed Etch, releasing a Beta 3 got me curious. Curious enough to actually download the smallest iso with a network installation to try it out. I had to check whether my old Dell Inspiron 8000 would still spin its drive and although looking terrible ugly (oh my) compared to my PowerBook, it still made the exact annoying sound as before. So the hardware was working..



Same old, same old.. Not much changed on the default installation wizzard. Goes through everything, I'm choosing LVM for the first time since I have to check it out. After setting the wrong timezone (I did not care) I started to wait for the download of more than 600 packages.
…

Perhaps Linux has become so mainstream that a conference dedicated to it has become as superfluous as a conference on servers.  I was disappointed with LinuxWorld Boston earlier this year; no big announcements and traffic overall was light.  However, the program itself was quite strong with good keynotes and panel sessions.  Still, it had all the flavor of a regional conference.  Worth going to if you weren't going to make the trip to San Francisco. 

This week's LinuxWorld San Francisco, while certainly larger than the Boston event, seemed less interesting.  Aside from Lawrence Lessig, no really exciting keynotes or panels.  Novell had a big presence at the show, as did HP, but even Red Hat has pulled out of this event.  Perhaps LinuxWorld is played out. Or maybe I'm just sick of trade …

Slate posted an article today on "The CEO Bought a Yacht? Then it's
time to sell."
http://www.slate.com/id/2147788/?nav=tap3

A good quote from article:
"If you look at the recent record of CEOs who have become
yachtsmen, it's clear that when they buy a boat, it's the
shareholders who usually get soaked"

Computerworld is commenting on how this is not true for Oracle's Larry Ellison,
and I feel the need to share that this also not true with MySQL
Founder David Axmark.

Let me present the evidence, any guesses on who's boat is who's in
the photos?


…

In Semi-Dynamic Data, Sheeri writes about Semi-Dynamic Data and content pregeneration. In her article, she suggests that for rarely changing data it is often adviseable to precompute the result pages and store them as static content. Sheeri is right: Nothing beats static content, not for speed and neither for reliability. But pregenerated pages can be a waste of system ressources when the number of possible pages is very large, or if most of the pregenerated pages are never hit.

An intermediate scenario may be a statification system and some clever caching logic.

Statification is the process of putting your content generation code into a 404 page handler and have that handler generate requested content. The idea is that on a …

Trudy has posted to MySQL Forge the design that we are planning for pluggable authentication and authorization. Internally we are not working on this at the moment but we have had others ask what the roadmap is in terms of adding support for Roles, LDAP, and etc. The pluggable authentication system is a good project for someone who wants to learn the MySQL server's source code and it is a project that will enable additional projects.

Here is the link to the current design, feedback is welcome:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/PluggableAuthenticationSupport

If you are interested in what MySQL is planning, then you should keep an eye on MySQL Forge. We will be publishing more of our design docs in the future. At the moment we don't have a good way to make everything public in our project tracking tool, but we are working on making …

I just saw this article:
http://opensource.sys-con.com/read/261119.htm

It quotes from the personal (not corporate!) blog of Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source executive. The first time I heard Simon speak out on patents was in November 2004 at an FFII conference in Brussels. A couple of months earlier, I had criticized him in the forum of NoSoftwarePatents.com in a way that I later on regretted. Even though the NoSoftwarePatents campaign was highly successful, there are three or four things that I shouldn’t have said or written during those days, and what I said about Simon’s credibility has the top spot among that list of things.

Anyway, Simon has now said that “today’s software patents …

Yesterday I sent out the invitations for our third MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg, which will take place on Monday, 4th of September (which is the United MySQL Meetup Day). As usual, we will meet at 19:00 in the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao" - the food is excellent and we can use a separate room with a video projector there. If you happen to live around Hamburg, Germany and would like to join, please RSVP and join our mailing list!

Currently I am still pondering on the topic of the presentation - I suggested to invite Paul …

A few years ago I started an open source project called mondrian. I had been building some business intelligence applications, and had taken a liking to OLAP. I was hoping to see OLAP applications popping up here and there, on websites, in desktop applications like Quicken, and it just wasn't happening.

I soon figured out why. OLAP was cool, but it was complicated and the software was expensive. These two facts are not unrelated. If you're a software vendor who has just developed a cool new technology, you're going to want to charge a lot of money for it. But your customer, who is paying a lot of money for it, wants to see a lot more in the box than a CD and some packing peanuts. So, the software tends to get expensive, to match the customer's expectations.

Now, don't get me wrong. Business Intelligence is a complicated process. It involves getting a business …

so turns out that the ruby on rails developers had already added 4.1 authentication support for their bundled version of ruby/mysql, but they?ve found the upstream maintainer as unresponsive as i have. their implementation wasn?t quite complete, so i?ve submitted a patch to round it out.

the version included with ruby on rails doesn?t include the test suite, though.

About every second application I look at has some tables which have redundant or duplicate indexes so its the time to speak about these a bit.

So what is duplicate index ? This is when table has multiple indexes defined on the same columns. Sometimes it is indexes with different names, sometimes it is different keywords used to define the index. For example it is quite frequite to see something like
PRIMARY KEY(id), UNIQUE KEY id(id), KEY id2(id)

The logic I heard behind this often - create primary key as object identifier, now we create UNIQUE because we want it to be UNIQUE and we create KEY so it it can be used in the queries. This is wrong and hurts MySQL Performance. It is enough to create PRIMARY KEY and it will enforce unique values and will be used in the queries.

The other case is simply having multiple keys on same column(s) - I guess someone thought key would make sense while did not …