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.

A couple of months ago my Asterisk box bit the dust. What happened? As far as I can tell the motherboard gave up the ghost. Which is a new event for me, I've never had a motherboard die before!

So what does this mean?

It meant finding a box to put my Digium cards in. I tried the cheap- ass route of reusing another old computer in the house, only to discover that it too had problems. In the end I just forked out $399 for a new 1u box to install my digium cards (BTW don't plugin in FXO lines to FXS, turns out it burns out the ports....).

And for software?

Time to try out Trixbox!

Trixbox is the new version of Asterisk@Home. The Asterisk@Home project recently changed their name, which to me was a brilliant idea. While I do see some home users of their project, I find that there are more business users. Trixbox is built on CentOS and comes with both MySQL and SugarCRM.
…

Trying to dig into what's been happening in MySQL-world over the last week and bumped into something that I've seen many times elsewhere, but did not expect to see on a site run by MySQL AB/Inc:

That is, of course, the error indicating that MySQL has reached it's connection limit and won't allow the page I requested to connect to the database to get the necessary information to display page 2.

Rumors are that there's an internal server infrastructure redesign underway. Maybe that includes the Planet/Forge server.

One of the ongoing problems with documentation at MySQL is that it is getting ever larger.

Not only is the size of the docs increasing, but the formats and languages that we support is increasing too, and that is making it more and more difficult to effectively list them and make sure they are available.

read more

I am in Portland this week for OSCON. I've got a couple of talks to
do this week (and a MySQL 5.1 Tutorial to do today).

I am a bit cavalier about short trips, I don't double check my
packing as much as I should. Therefor I neglected to pack my Treo's
charger. Last night I was thinking that I would need to get up this
morning and go buy a charger and then I remembered an article I read
on LifeHacker.com about hotels having boxes of power supplies just
sitting around collecting dust.

Its true!

This morning I went down to the front desk of the Double Tree and
asked if they had a box of chargers. Down to the basement they sent
me where I found not one box, but a few boxes of power supplies.

My Treo is now happily charging :)