Open Source is global in nature. You can develop a database in, say, Finland or Sweden, and become known in, say, Ukraine or the United States.

This would imply that Open Source knows no borders.

In practice, borders hamper Open Source work a lot. I have been familiar with the hassle involving MySQLers in Russia and the Ukraine trying to get Schengen (European Union) and US visas for meetings. And I have myself gone through a lot of hassle travelling to Russia and once even (out of my own stupidity and carelessness, though) been denied entry to India when I already was on Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi.

But now, I’ve experienced what I had expected the least:

Several Sun Microsystems Inc employees, especially related to the Database Group, have been denied short stay business visas to Australia, over the last few months, …

Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, itâ€s a new fad. Itâ€s like youâ€re not cool anymore if you donâ€t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldnâ€t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone elseâ€s ideas – it doesnâ€t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and theyâ€re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

…

I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.

Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.

Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.

I’ve been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.

I want to read your story for the same reason.

Don’t hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris’ …

Sun's acquisition and integration of MySQL was one of the biggest stories of the year. But what's next? READ MORE

This is the 1st post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series. | Post 2 »

Christmas is nearly upon the Christian and Consumerist parts of the globe. Along much of my latitude, snow is piling up in record quantities and weather warnings abound. Even in oft-green Vancouver, there is a foot or so of the white stuff accumulated in my yard and the parking lot outside my window often echos with the sounds of snow-beached cars helplessly spinning their wheels.

Usually all these things taken together would mean a series of harrowing drives to visit family, followed by lovely hours staying warm indoors, eating comfort food, retelling old stories and enjoying the company of loved ones as the year draws to its close.

However, this year our family time is coming after the holidays and I'm left with the unexpected gift of a week or so of free time.

…

Marten Mickos talks about his joining the founders of MySQL in the early days, reciprocity, and what makes MySQL unique READ MORE

planet.grep.be today has a lot of active open source users and contributors.
The weird thing is that we never meet apart from Fosdem.
Yes, we occasionally run into eachother at other events but there's not enough beer involved.

I've had different people ask me what and where are the Open Source gatherings in Belgium, and we must admit that apart
from Fosdem there isn't that much in our little country.

There were a couple of MySQL User Group events, some Drupal ones, some LUG had meetings altough I have the idea most of them have dried out :(

So I have this crazy idea of inviting you all to grab a beer, maybe even free beer :) on december 29 some in a pub in Antwerp

I`m open for suggestions on good locations.

Oh and everybody is welcome, both readers and writers :)

PS. Yes I know that some of you will be drinking in Berlin at …

Open source the way it ought to be. Today, Percona announced a replacement for InnoDB that improves performance and fixes bugs. The new engine is called XtraDB.

According to Vadim at Percona:

It's 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

The release is pure GPL (v2) and commercial support is available from Percona. If percona keeps this up, they just might become the new MySQL.

The source is available from Launchpad and from …

I’ve started an investigation of MySQL Backups using LVM. I’m working with Lenz’s mylvmbackup but I found it both used Perl and needed a number of dependencies installed.

Installing dependencies failed on my test system, yet I found it actually worked when I went back to my dev system (but it is not configured with LVM for full testing).

$ sudo cpan Config::IniFiles Sys::Syslog Date::Format Getopt::Long  DBI

Details of error:

....
 CPAN.pm: Going to build S/SA/SAPER/Sys-Syslog-0.27.tar.gz

WARNING: LICENSE is not a known parameter.
Checking if your kit is complete...
Looks good
'LICENSE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.
Writing Makefile for Sys::Syslog
cp Syslog.pm blib/lib/Sys/Syslog.pm
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/xsubpp -noprototypes …

I spent this past week down in San Jose, CA at my employer’s office for team meetings and to officially kick-off my next big project. The design and architecture was very well received, and I drummed up some excitement with Gearman and working with the OSS community in general (which we’ve not done too much of in the past). We’ll be developing it entirely on Launchpad under GPLv2, and I’ll be writing a number of blog posts covering each component in detail. Why would anyone else find this interesting? It covers many topics of how to write a high-performance application in the cloud. Specific topics will include Gearman, persistent Gearman queues, eventual consistency data models (and related schemas), lightweight Map/Reduce for real-time applications, and how to combine all this with …