Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

If you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that
for the past decade I've had a love-hate relation ship with Sun.

Sun has done a lot of good things in their open source journey such as MySQL, openOffice , Virtualbox and opensourcing Java. But on the other hand they had troubles with creating really organic opensource.

I've always wondered why a company that bought StarDivision because it was cheaper than buying the MS Office license keeps wasting money on building it's own operating systems, albeit in a pretty open model, but with zero to no relevant community.

Yes I've ranted on their marketing boys and girls when they polluted forums I liked. But no I don't want this to happen. (Slicing up Sun)

However I`m in fear it actually might happen, the funny thing is that I already mentioned the same idea in offline conversations during the last couple of months.

My Advice to Sun. : Stop putting money in things you can co-create with other organisations, if there's only 2 features in your product that count for some people, contribute those 2 features to something bigger.
(That's D-Trace and ZFS and the Linux Kernel I`m talking about in case you didn't realise) Why keep throwing money down the drain ?

Also let Google, Percona and others contribute to MySQL, don't keep it as closed as it is today. As after al it's more Free software than it is Open Source, but it has a great community which I love to be part of .. and I hope for a long time to come..

I`m going to try to keep my mouth shut on this for a while.. as I think Jonathan is listening anyhow. If he was, he would have known that at some point in time when you step out of the shower and there is too much hair dropping from your skull every morning, it's time to cut off the ponytail.. , not opensource it. I did that years ago.. and it's growing much thicker again now.

My hair that is ..

because of a fine DNS problem

So it can obviously happen to other platforms as well :)

My mother suggested that she would babysit while the 2 of us went out to eat yesterday. The idea was to have a good dinner in one of the restaurants that took part of the Restaurantweek.be action.

The idea is that you get a 3 course dinner for 25 Euro a person in a good quality restaurant .. therefore no brasserie or pubfood. With different of the top restaurants of antwerp taking part of the action we decided to pic a new one we didn't know yet.

Branche Restaurant , which is the restaurant of the new Golden Tulip Hotel next to the Antwerp Train station.

When we arrived there yesterday we got asked for a voucher for the 2 for 1 action. We were pretty clueless at that point as we never heard of the 2 for 1 action. We were there for a culinary action from Restaurantweek.

The menu for the evening was going to be schrimp salad, pepper steak and tiramisu. WTF ? I can make that myselve, or If I`m hungry and I need to eat that's what I grab in a tavern, that's not what I wan't to have when I go out to eat !

But it was only going to cost us 25 euro for the 2 of us claimed the waiter.
Well.. we had to eat anyhow so why not ..

Somehow they forgot we had ordered one steak well done, and neglected to ask about how the other one. So we sent the rare steak back to the kitchen. I actualy had to get up and go ask where it stayed after about 20 minutes. By then the fries were cold.. so I asked for new ones.. by the time we got those.. the steak was cold. We got offered a free drink for the delay .. but never saw that drink anyhow.

We had dessert ... and asked for the check .. obviously I was kind of surprised that they had charged us 2x 25 Euro, unlike what they had told us upfront.
The waiter explained that he didn't know about the Restaurantweek arrangement and he mistakenly assumed we had the other , the 2 for 1 offer, the 2 for one offer got that menu for 39 Euros for 2 persons. And well.. they had given us the same menu for 2x25 euro ..

We weren't there for some cheapo fries and steak in the first place.. we went there for a culinary dish. And 39 euro's for that menu would have been a big RipOff anyhow. The only reason why we accepted the offer was because it was damn cheap and we had to eat anyhow. So now we had had crappy and way to expensive food, and bad service as well and we were inadvertedly informed that most of the tables around us that actually had the 2for1 offer even paid 10 euro less for the same menu.

Upon asking for a "btwbonneke" the waitress was absolutely clueless, c'mon .. if you work in a restaurant in Belgium you have to know what a 'btw-bonneke' is.
She didn't , luckily her collegue knew.

So Restaurantweek really should have communicated better with their restaurants that people signing up for the offer expect something different from Steak with Fries and a small schrimp salad upfront.

And as for the Branche Restaurant service .. well.. guess you'll never see us again .. and I gues you'll never see the table that was sitting next to us again either. The least you should have done was actually give us the menu for 39Euro's like some of the other tables and give us another drink as you had promised anyhow.

But all you got now .. was bad publicity. But then again .. you won't go bankrupt ..as you are part of a hotel, and a hotel needs a restaurant anyway so why should you bother in the first place.

Have to close some tabs .. what more can I say ..

2 interresting articles about Drupal and MySQL performance tuning

here and here

Enjoy

I just blogged that I wanted the skype plugin to work in my pidgin, only to have 1 central chat window.

Guess what .. this really works. it's that simple .. copy the 2 files, then setup the account .. I just had to disable the annoying skype sounds :)

As some of you know I run Fedora on my main Laptop, and Ubuntu on my EEE and my office Desktop. My Ubuntu installs were pretty fresh, but my fedora was long due for an upgrade. As after years of abuse (--force --nodeps) it usually is impossible to do a regular upgrade, so my best way out was a quick and fresh install on an isolated root partition. (my /home/ etc live on separate volumes)

Johan tricked me into installing a FC10 x86-64 setup which required some more work than usual, but I`m back in the same state as I was before I started the upgrade. We'll almost .. as I expect I`ll be reinstalling packages I don't daily use on a frequent basis over the next couple of weeks.

I'll dig a bit deeper in my x86_64 struggles later but first I had to tackle the problems I had with stepping my Evolution to a fresh and hopefully more stable version.

Evolution fails to recognise the fact that I have multiple calendars, or got confused.. anyway .. my calendar was empty and I had to recreate them all and import them again one by one.
Luckily the content was still available in .ics

Also Evolution partly forgot about all my email accounts , it remembered their passwords after recreating them, but not their settings.. well. that is if I managed to recreate them all :)
(If I`m not replying to a mail you sent me sinc last thursday.. I might just have forgotten about that email address ..

On to the x86_64 stuff then. Bort pointed me to the
Adobe Labs site that had a working flash plugin. The right symlink in my .mozilla/plugins and the first problem was solved.

There's 2 apps from Google that I sometimes abuse, I don't know why I still use Picasa, there must be plenty of good open source alternatives out there .. however for Google Earth I don't really have a good alternative. bot work (unlike previous Fedora/Googl Earth combinations)

The only thing that annoyed me was Google Earth and selinux , I had to run some chcon s to solve the problems.

chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libminizip.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/librender.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libauth.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libevll.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/lib*'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libnavigate.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/liblayer.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libmeasure.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libbasicingest.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libgps.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/googleearth/libgooglesearch.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/googleearth/libinput_plugin.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/opt/google-earth/libflightsim.so'

A couple of more frustrations later and the SELinux config got changed. Afterall .. Life is to short for SELinux.

A must, if you used too have Livna , or FreshRPMS is RPMFusion a merger of the old repositories

Skype seemed to be a bit more difficult. I tried installing the rpm at first but I failed , then I read some tips which suggested to use yum localinstall skype*.rpm

As I`m more of an apt-get user (yes even on CentOS etc) I don't usually try installing packages that way .. but it worked like a charm. Skype started, I could connect to the servers , however a test call reveals no input sound. Maybe if I try again with a headset later.

Anyway, I`m pretty satisfied so far ...

Next step is to get that skype chat integrated in pidgin.. or hope people will realize they have to drop that proprietary tool one day..

I predicted it to some people and it actually became true :(

I just removed myselve from tomorrows BarcampGent 2 subscription list.

It seems I can make it to most of the "odd" issues of Belgian Barcamps, I made it to BarcampBrussels, BarcampBrussels3 and the first BarcampGent, but for the Even Barcamps , Brussels2 and 4 and now Gent2 there always seems to be something that eventually blocks me from going. Just like with the BXL edition family priorities kicked in.

Anyway .. have fun tomorrow .. I`ll be thinking of you folks
and see you next time :)

Santa delivered his goods early at Inuits this year

Sorry John, but we figured the Girls in Your shirt trick would be better than the tags on your Fedora one :)

Bort has another pic, and Dieter suddenly wants to test Zenoss too :)

Last weekend I blogged about openQRM 4.2 being released.

This morning Matt finally let me know the long waiting fresh and new Drupal based openQRM.com is live !

Feed Added!

Matt Reid wants to know what we want in an Open Source MySQL monitoring solution ?

He is working on the second incarnation of Monolith and wants input from the MySQL community.

Now for me the bigger question is if we want an isolated tool that runs stand alone, or a tool which we can integrate it in something we already have.

To me there is a difference between a tool that I want to use to debug my environment, such as Mytop or MySQL Activity Report, in that case I need some tool that quickly installs with little dependencies and little impact.

On the other side I want a tool that is constantly there, that tells me about trends and performance history. But there I don't want an isolated toool, I want something fully integrated where I can correlate different measurements from disk io, memory usage etc , that tool should also tell me about the things that go
wrong.

We did some research earlier this year to figure out the current state of Open Source monitoring tools. Different tools have a different audience.. some go for the network layer, others take the os level and other even try to go deep inside the applications.

Given that knowledge we even had the idea to refocus that research comparing different monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Zenoss, Hyperic and Nagios again but this time with a focus on monitoring MySQL and submit that as an abstract for the upcoming MySQL conference, we didn't .. maybe next time.

There's plenty of frameworks already that will allow you to send alerts on all of the occasions you list, or allow you to graph all the values you want. And yes we want to see those values too.

But do we want yet another tool , yet another URL to browse to or do we want those alerts and graphs integrated in an existing tool such as Zabbix, Zenoss or
Hyperic .. I guess I prefer the integrated approach.