Open Query blog

Van Jacobson… a modest man. But you may know his name from the TCP header compresson, and the traceroute and tcpdump tools. He’s here at LCA 2006, and presented a neat new idea.
As different components of our systems and networks speed up, bottlenecks shift. It is wise to shift processing “outward” as that’s where most [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
1 Comment »

Some time ago, business were missing the components needed to run their business – if they wanted to use Open Source software. That is no longer the case, with SugarCRM, Zimbra, and SequoiaERP.
Accounting (general ledger style stuff, and mroe) is possibly the last big challenges; some partically solutions are out there and SequoiaERP is currently [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
5 Comments »

I’m just listening to a talk by Rusty Russell (an excellent speaker anyway) about Tridge’s talloc. It extends the traditional malloc() mechanism by making every returned pointer effectively be a memory pool. You can allocate memory that is “attached” to an existing pointer. When a parent pointer is freed, so are its children.
There are additional [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
1 Comment »

Revision control is of course very important in software development, particularly when many developers are doing a lot of commits in a very distributed environment – like with MySQL: our developers are based all over the planet, but also travelling, off-line at times, and so on.
So revision control interests us a great deal, and distributed [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
6 Comments »

LinuxConfAU is generally held at a university in the Australian/New Zealand summer holidays. This gives the event enough space with big lecture theatres and other infrastructure.
The easiest accomodation is at the campus colleges (ye roughing it , which have shared bathrooms. Someone who doesn’t need to shave can optimise their bathroom presence and therefore [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

At conferences like LCA 2006, there are all these laptops running out of juice…. of course, those who try a compile of say MySQL or the Linux kernel, run out faster
This is pretty cool: SplashPower. It’s a mat you put on your desktop, and then toss devices like your mobile, headset, and organiser [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
1 Comment »

Conferences… Travel… Passports…
The Australian ePassport has been introduced, with very little press attention. The centre page has an RFID chip which contains the same info as the regular passport.
To me, that’s actually big news. And very worrying.

While the “should you be required to identify yourself on the street” debate is still ongoing, this passport already [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
3 Comments »

It’s LCA time again, in the opinion of people like Ramsus and Linus among the best conferences in the world. It’s the conference put on by LinuxAustralia, but this year it’s held in Dunedin (New Zealand) at the University of Otago.
Brian Aker (MySQL Director of Architecture) will be there too (courtesy of the MySQL community [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

It’s definitely possible to run MySQL Server (with all its tables) on a CD-ROM, MySQL is extremely suited for such applications. It can run entirely from CD-ROM and can be configured to be completely read-only. This has even recently been done by someone in Melbourne to create a Wikipedia DVD.
Yes it need to be able [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
2 Comments »

OSCON 2006 has opened its call for papers. The event will be July 24-28, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.
There is a dedicated database track, and reps from various OSS databases are on the program committee. So it’s up to us to make sure that there are fab MySQL sessions and tutorials!
Naturally, [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
2 Comments »