Storage Miniconf Deadline Extended!

The linux.conf.au organisers have given all miniconfs an additional few weeks to spruik for more proposal submissions, huzzah!
So if you didn’t submit a proposal because you weren’t sure whether you’d be able to attend LCA2010, you now have until October 23 to convince your boss to send you and get your proposal in.

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OSS Ability to Accept Contributions

Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But  modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each [...]

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Dogfood: making our systems more resilient

This is a “dogfood” type story (see below for explanation of the term)… Open Query has ideas on resilient architecture which it teaches (training) and recommends (consulting, support) to clients and the general public (blog, conferences, user group talks). Like many other businesses, when we first started we set up our infrastructure quickly and on [...]

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Tool of the Day: rsnapshot

rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems, based on rsync. Rather than just doing a complete copy every time, it uses hardlinks to create incrementals (which are from a local perspective a full backup also). You can specify how long to keep old backups, and all the other [...]

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Tool of the Day: Firefox Tab Kit extension

We often need many tabs open in a browser, and horizontal tabs become unmanageable. Tab Kit allows you to have them vertically on the left, with various additional configuration choices.
I opted for the tree structure, so when I open a tab from another one it’ll show up as a child to the original. I can [...]

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The Flipside of Uptime

We just had a booboo in one of our internal systems, causing it to not come up properly on reboot. The actual mishap occurred several weeks ago (simple case of human error) and was in itself a valid change so monitoring didn’t raise any concerns. So, as always, it’s interesting and useful to think about [...]

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BarCamp Melbourne 12-13 September 2009

Open Query is pleased to sponsor BarCamp Melbourne, a rocking unconference held at UrbanCamp, Royal Park, Melbourne VIC (Australia). If you’re anywhere nearby this coming weekend (12-13 September 2009), you really really want to be there and participate, learn, and enjoy! Open Query’s own Peter Lieverdink (cafuego) will be there.
Barcamps are run at low cost, [...]

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Market share vs market impact

This is very relevant in the context of the EU probe of the Oracle-Sun takeover. MySQL’s share of the database market, which is usually measured by revenue, is of course peanuts and estimated range from half a percent to something slightly more. Peanuts.
This is not surprising, considering an estimated 999 out of every 1000 MySQL [...]

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EU probes Oracle’s bid to buy Sun

It appears that little MySQL has just become a disproportionally big player in the Oracle-Sun takeover deal…. article by Associated Press: EU probes Oracle’s bid to buy Sun notes:
EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Thursday that regulators needed to examine the effect of a deal “when the world’s biggest proprietary database company proposes to take [...]

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