I watched the Falcon presentation from the MySQL Meetup in Boston. There was one optimization Jim spoke of that I was particularly fond of;

Falcon has a kind of two stage index retrieval. It first builds a list of what records it has to get, then buffers that and flips them into the correct order to scan through on disk. Potentially this means much faster retrievals; based on the assumption people are using one disk, or one of the RAID levels that doesn't support striping. Disk seek time is a real killer on performance in any database application, but I'm trying to think to myself now at what point the cost of software-sorting becomes more expensive, and this is actually a hindrance (since the raid controller will send the requests to different volumes anyway).

I'm guessing since disks are always a bottleneck, anytime you …

Well today is Monday, so this must be OSCON.  Actually, it's just been pre-conference tutorials so far, but MySQL was well represented with tutorials by Brian Aker and Jay Pipes on MySQL 5.1 in Depth and Maximum Velocity MySQL respectively.  And a group of us had dinner at a local Greek restaurant, which was fun.  Since MySQL employees are quite distributed, it's nice to get a group together at a conference.  We have speakers here at OSCON from Seattle, Australia, …

Just a quick reminder about the MySQL reception at the DoubleTree hotel tomorrow night (Tuesday) from 5:30 to 7:30pm at the Cantina Bar. We'll be giving away the famous uptime t-shirts, along with a variety of books, plus you get a great chance to meet MySQL developers and team members. Oh, did I mention the free drinks? See you there!

On another OSCON note, "Maximum Velocity MySQL" was a great time today. The only snag was a complete power outage about ten minutes from the end of the tutorial, but it was very well timed, as at the time I was going over the importance of having a battery-backed disk controller when using InnoDB. How very, very ironic, huh?

Last night, myself, Monty, Arjen, Brian, David, Julian, Zak, and Monty's son and daughter, Max and My, went out for Indian cuisine and had a good time. Tonight, some more MySQLers are doing the same; it might be the last time I get to have a good chat before the flood of main …

One week ago today I started work at OmniTI as a sales engineer for their Ecelerity MTA offering.

I’ve met and caught up with a great bunch of coworkers, learned a great deal about the new software I’ll be supporting, and generally had a really good time.

I think it is too early to really draw a comparison with working for MySQL, but it is a nice change of pace to sit in an office for a couple of weeks with the human interaction that goes along with it.

So what is Ecelerity? It’s a high-performance, extensible, clusterable MTA (mail transfer agent). Ecelerity is used by companies that need to send high volumes of mail such as Techtarget with their newsletters and reports. Where Sendmail may typically see 100K emails per hour of throughput, Ecelerity is marketed at one million messages per hour and sees several times that amount in the wild.

I’m in Maryland till Thursday then off to Seattle till Sunday, …

Just a quick note to say that the MySQL Forge Wiki looks like the rest of the Forge, and there’s now SpamBlacklist installed. If spam still persists (you know you’re popular when spam’s abound, right?), we might have to install captchas. From an accessibility perspective, I don’t quite like this idea, so lets hope the spam stays under control nonetheless.

Maybe inflammatory, but I don’t quite remember spam on the Fedora Project wiki. Do Python-based wikis suffer less spam (or no spam) than the PHP-based ones? (otherwise known as MoinMoin vs. MediaWiki)

MySQL AB today announced that Forrester Research has named the company and its database software as an open source leader in two recent independent industry reports. MySQL was the only company, product or software project cited as a leader in both reports -- "The Forrester Wave: Open Source Databases, Q2 2006," Forrester Research, Inc., June 2006 and "The Forrester Wave: Open Source Projects, Q2 2006," Forrester Research, Inc., June 2006.

This is more a reminder for myself than a regular post. Because I have been fiddling around with the xorg.conf to get my Linux desktop right with dual head and the right resolution on each screen, I post my configuration here. If anybody finds it useful, they are welcome to copy it.

I am currently using Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) which comes with X.Org 7.0. My machine has a GeForce 5600XT based graphics board by LeadTek. It has a DVI-I and a VGA port. I installed the closed-source nvidia driver to get hardware acceleration and extended features the X.Org nv driver does not provide. Moreover I could not get dual head right with the X.Org driver.

The following configuration sets up two screens, one for the left display (analogue TFT, 1280x1024) and one for the right (CRT, 1024x768).

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by …

If you’re interested in finding out more about SEO, SEM, and just general web design tips, I recommend you visit Web Jam Session A list of Sessions is available for those interested. Two of my friends are speaking at this conference, so I’ll be there to listen to what they say, as well as make fun of them from the audience. I know I’ll be quiet during the “Web Site Promotion” talks by Google and Yahoo!, as well as the CSS sessions. I normally do not talk about events etc that I am interested in attending, but as I make the personal transition from going to just technical events, to somewhat more “marketing/design” type events, I wanted to know what other events you guys go to.