I've been looking at a problem with our memory cache system at work for the last week and the problem finally clicked into place.

At work I developed this really awesome benchmarking library which exports statistics from various subsystems in our robot. It works really well - too well sometimes.

Its been telling me that one of my key caches is only functioning at 20% efficiency.

This is a memcached cache which means its broken out into many small servers running 256M or 512M or memory (really whatever they can spare).

Each of these servers was reporting that they are only 70% full so therefore I don't need to add any more memory right?

Wrong. I was look at the number of stored bytes vs the total maximum amount of bytes allocated to memcached.

The problem is …

A couple of days before Wednesday’s European Commission hearing, I learned that Managing Intellectual Property magazine, the leading international magazine for IP owners which has more than 10,000 readers around the globe, renominated me to its annual list of the “top 50 most influential persons in intellectual property”.

The first time I appeared on that who-is-who list was a year ago, and ZDNet reported on that fact under the humorous headline “Anti-patent campaigner hailed as IP hero”. While I’m not anti-patent in all respects (only against software patents), …

In my previous blog entry I described some configuration tasks that make the pre-configured pentaho demo environment installation act more like a server.

In this entry I will describe how to add a folder for our own MySQL samples. We will use this folder to deploy our real samples to. We want to use our own folder for two reasons:

• 
  
• presentation - it's much nicer if our samples stand out among the common ones everybody knows already
  
• maintenance - we can easily remove, rename or do whatever we want with all of our samples without affecting the other ones
  

Let's start off right away. Oh yeah, we won't need to stop pentaho - in fact, to demonstrate that, make sure it is started right now. Remember, you can start the pentaho BI …

MySQL on GNU/Linux appears to be able to either run multiple processes, or one process and multiple threads. We’ve noticed a significant CPU penalty for multiple processes, probably from the context switching overhead. The trouble was, one of our servers wouldn’t use threads; it wanted to use multiple processes. This article explains how we got it to use threads instead. First, we noticed the master server’s CPU utilization was higher than the replica’s, even though we expected the type of queries running on the replica should have caused it to have around the same CPU utilization as the master.

Probably the most frequently asked question to the docs team at MySQL from the public is ?I want to translate the manual into [insert language]?. That language can be anything from one we already have, through to some comparatively obscure suggestions.

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A recent photo that Julian
took. More whacky then the bunny photo?
I rather like it :)

I just signed out of the MySQL internal IRC server for the last time. Changing jobs is really bittersweet, I have truly loved working for MySQL and consider many of my coworkwers to be great friends. I hope to keep in touch but I know I will miss the daily interactions with them.

I know that tomorrow I’ll be excited to start work for OmniTI, but for today I feel the loss of the best job I’ve had to date with the best bunch of people I have ever worked with.

There's been some interesting reports lately on how open source software is eating into the traditional license and maintenance fees of the closed source legacy vendors.  Not only is open source a viable alternative to many closed source offerings, but just the fact that you're looking at open source is enough of a threat to some vendors that they will sometimes discount up to 80%.  Just put up a Linux poster and wear a MySQL t-shirt and you'll get your costs down.  Or better yet, start moving to open source where it makes sense, especially new web-based applications. 

• InfoWorld: Bargaining with Microsoft
• Tech Target: CIO's Guide to …

One of the most important requirements for any startup is hiring exceptional people. Hire weak people, and the company rises to the level of their incompetence. Hire exceptional people, and the company is elevated to the level of their expertise.

So how do you hire well in open source, given that - outside the realm of developers - very few business people actually have open source experience?

This is a question that I've had to answer repeatedly of late, as I've been hiring Alfresco's North and South American sales and business development organization. I have been very fortunate thus far, hiring three of the best people I've ever worked with: Luis Sala (Solutions Engineering), Jason Hardin (Inside Sales), and Martin Musierowicz aka "Mark" (Alliances).

What do most of Alfresco's employees have in common? Not a minute of open source experience. (Martin (JBoss) and Jason (Novell) are exceptions to this rule, as both came …

Sometimes a message from one of your database maintenance tasks makes you shudder, probably because it is an awful error message. Sometimes such a message can make you shudder even more, even if there is no error in your systems.

In a meteorological company, we use our MySQL database to keep track of a wealth of weather data from all around the world. The message from the maintenance task was short and simple: OLBA removed from list of active stations.

OLBA is the ICAO code for Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport. Their weather station continued to report even after the first bombing attacks, which forced the airport closed. The attacks continued, and the last report came in at 3 o'clock UTC this morning: a temperature of 25 °C, an air pressure of 1009 hPa, some scattered clouds and - no significant changes. The station has been silent since.