The art of data modelling is definitely lost on some [most] people, or they never found it, even though they think they did. Over dinner with good friend Morgan last night we were swapping present stories on the topic.

Morgan wrote recently about I want my 4 bytes back damn it., and interesting example storing an ISBN. Further reference can be found at Getting started with MySQL of a more impractical ISBN example.

Disk is cheap now, so the attitude and poor excuse can be, well a few extra bytes doesn’t matter. Well no! If your a social hacker and have a website with a maximium concurrent connections of 2 maybe, but much like some recent Java Code Reviewing I just performed, just because the system isn’t 24×7, …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

So, FireFox have come up with a novel idea to promote it’s product. Check out Firefox Day.

The official blurb: Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you?ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.

You can even choose how to link your names together on the “Firefox Friends Wall”. Examples like ‘my name’ Informed ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Empowered ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Liberated ‘your name’.

Perhaps MySQL can leverage this idea for some what to promote future download!

Since OSCON, most of my time has been focused on editing a book, which is about to be finished. As I’m getting my commutes back, I have been reading up on what I’ve missed on Planet MySQL (which I affectionately call “The ‘planet.”

Y’all are prolific!

Jeremy’s On Open Source Citizenship got me thinking about the whole movement. I think there’s still a place for proprietary software in the world, as much as folks tout that “open source is ALWAYS better, because more people see it, therefore more people can help change it.”

Whenever anyone suggests a monolithic solution, I cringe. This all ties into the patent issues that are strongly debated these days. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about everything.

Jeremy’s article talked about how Yahoo! (as an example) couldn’t just open up all the source, …

Some people might have lives, but I have a webserver.

I think I’ve now upgraded just about everything (software-wise) that’s upgradable on this machine:

• Apache 1.3.33 -> 1.3.37 (Thanks for hiding the win32 binaries under “Archives” when the *nix version is out in plain view, guys)
• PHP 5.0.3 -> 5.1.4 (This required ditching my old php.ini file and doing a new one from scratch)
• MySQL 5.1.8 -> 5.1.11 (Dead easy, even on Windows - yea, TEAM!)
• Perl 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8
• Python 2.3.2 -> 2.4.3
• Tcl 8.4.12 -> 8.5.0
• BlogCMS .3.4.6 -> WordPress 2.0.4 (The RSS feed was broken, I was getting tired of seeing my posts quoted elsewhere sans formatting, and every time I tried messing with the code, it just got worse)
• Singapore 0.9.11 -> 0.10.0 (The one part of BlogCMS that I still really liked after switching …

I’ve recently completed a contract and I’ve been in discussions with agents and other employers for further work. Having had one of the worse experiences in my previous work, I’ve been extra careful to ensure what I’m told at the interview/meeting stage is indeed true and accurate (in my last case it was not). I’ve also not made the assumption that an organisation that is dependent on software has placed a certain level of value on what’s in place. (in my last case I did, simply due to the size of the organisation and volume of business).

So, when being asked by people what I’m seeking, outside of the technical skills and compendencies, I’m seeking an organisation that places value on it’s existing software, it’s software quality, it’s software improvement and most importantly it’s software developers. It was unfortunate that for an organisation that lived in software, and would not survive long (especially at …

Should you want to be on the bleeding edge, or in my case, don’t want to download 70MB each day in a daily snapshot (especially when I’m getting build errors), you can use Bit Keeper Free Bit Keeper Client that at least lets you download the MySQL Repository. This client doesn’t allow commits, which is a good thing for those non-gurus in mysql internals (which definitely includes me).

wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client.shar
/bin/sh bk-client.shar
cd bk_client-1.1
make

By placing sfioball in your path you can execute.

sfioball bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.1 mysql-5.1

This took me about 4 mins, which seemed much quicker then getting a snapshot!

You can then get cracking with my instructions at Compiling MySQL Tutorial 1 - The Baseline.

A good reference …

Just to confirm my earlier confusion about verified snapshots at Compiling MySQL Tutorial 1 - The Baseline.

“Daily snapshot sources are only published, if they compiled successfully (using the BUILD/compile-pentium-debug-max script) and passed the test suite (using make test). If the source tree snapshot fails to compile or does not pass the test suite, the source tarball will not be published.”

Seems the fine print at MySQL Database Server 5.1: Beta snapshots also states this. Well, need to take my RTFM pill there.

Thanks to Lenz for putting the record straight, and helping with my Forum Post. Seems I did uncover a Bug, now recorded as …