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 …

Flickr: macplusg3’s photos tagged with beijing

There’s some photos I’ve taken around Beijing up there. Will be posting more over the next few days (and until I leave - on the 16th). Enjoy.

Pre-requisites

This tutorial is aimed at Linux installations that has the standard development tools already installed. The INSTALL file in the source archives provides good details of the software required (e.g. gunzip, gcc 2.95.2+,make).

Create a separate user for this development work.

su -
useradd mysqldev
su - mysqldev

Get an appropiate Snapshot

You can view recent snapshots at http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots/mysql-5.1/.

The official statement on snapshots from MySQL AB.
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.

At the time of producing …

Parallel with last years international PHP conference the folks at S&S organized a novelty: an open source database conference. It was a great success. We had people from most projects for end users to talk to: PostgreSQL, BerkleyDB, MySQL, SQLite, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, Firebird and MaxDB. I hope this year Ingres will also make it and maybe a few others I do not even know yet! For the projects themselves it was a great opportunity to sit down and discuss about the potential for cooperation. The conference will be held again, same time same place. So mark your calendar November 6th-8th opendbcon 2006 in Frankfurt germany.

The …

I’ve read at times people complaining about the response to bugs, and people bag the support of MySQL on the forums at times.

Well today I logged a bug, not the first and I’m sure it’s not the last. See LAST_INSERT_ID() does not return results for a problem in the latest Connector/J 5.0.3 that was released just recently.

Now it took me about 2 hours to log the bug, and probably at least 2 hours of frustration prior to that. The initial frustration 2 hours was unsuccessful debugging of what I was sure was valid code (and it was near midnight last night). The second 2 hours today was testing the problem between two environments, different database versions and different Connector/J versions, and providing a simple reproducable case of said problem.

So the timeline of the …

I’ve just come back from lunch. I’ve managed to eat Chinese food, in China, with chopsticks and not totally embarass myself. Ate some new food, new vegetables and a seemingly different type of seaweed than I have eaten before. It tasted good though. I even think Kit would have liked some of it (once she got over the fact that it looked different and some things were green things).
I arrived safely after a flight that was fine (except for getting up rather early to get to Sydney to then take a sane timed flight). Beijing seems to be a bit like the firefly world, except with less flying cars. You’ve got heaps of stuff in English and Chinese. It could be really interesting to live here and experience things.

There’s a national English language newspaper which is fairly up to date on world events - the fact that our dear Mr Howard is going to go to the election seems to be news here! It’s not packed with local news, which would …

So, dinner tonight will start with appetizers at the Cantina restaurant at the DoubleTree Hotel. MySQL was nice enough to have an entire reception just for me…..just kidding! However, that’s where I’ll be — since I told folks to watch this space, I wanted to make sure eveyrone knew where I’d be.

Also, I’d like to point out that there’s an obvious error in an algorithm on planetmysql.com, because it lists me as the #1 top poster.