I have been asked many times to provide an easy way of deploying fan-in and star schema replication schemas. So far, I have been delayed by more pressing duties.

Now the time has come. Since we are about to release a new version of Tungsten Replicator, I made the effort of putting together the steps for an easy deployment.

Recipes

The package (with downloads and svn code available at Tungsten-Replicator Toolbox) includes some juicy goodies. There are recipes to install.

• Master/slave, the classic replication topology. Nothing fancy, but with the tools mentioned in the next section, it becomes as valuable as the other topologies.
• All-masters. This is the Tungsten no-SPOF topology. Every node is a master, and every node has a …

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

…

My closing presentation at the dedicated MySQL track at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 discussed various techniques and best practices for improving the ROI of developer resources using MySQL. Included in the sections on Design, Security, Development, Testing, Implementation, Instrumentation and Support were also a number of horror stories of not what to do, combined with practical examples of improving productivity.

Increasing MySQL Productivity View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.

Enter the sb script (available in version 3.0.03). Now I can shorten my typing experience with sandboxes quite a lot:

  $ sb 5135
  # same as calling 
  # …

One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …

I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind remote workers, send mail to bkjones at Google’s mail service (.com).

Some folks thought I’d passed away due to the uncharacteristic lull in posting frequency on this blog. I’m very much alive — but working for a startup and maintaining a consulting business simultaneously is hard, especially when two large projects fall into your lap at the same time. So what have I been up to?

Well, as part of the now-public merger between the company I worked for and the new company, …

Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).

The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also talk of legal issues, how (basically) to think about forming the company with the people involved, and decisions that need to …