Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Over the past couple of days there is an increased flow of traffic to my Inbox all fairly identical mails from people that somehow are being invited by their friends to also start using Spock ...

I`m still looking for the great new feature that Spock has that urges me to switch to it or even consider using it actively. I haven't found it .. so please explain me why you are using plaxo ^H^H^H^H^H spock

Yes I create accounts on most new YASN (Yet Another Social Network) thingies, but merely as a form of Online Identity Protection. (It's pretty easy to find a new YASN and create an account there that you shouldn't be creating)

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Anyone seeing a trend here ? :)

Over at ITToolbox Tarry has another blog . He posted an article where he tried to debunk some myths about open source. I feel he needs some help there :)

Let's start with his second Myth , Open Source is Free. Off course it isn't , you need to invest your own time to get familiar with it or pay other people to use it. Compare it to building a house ... you can build one if you have the skills and the time , but you still need to pay for the bricks and the mortar, or you can pay someone who has the skills to build one for you. With software there used to be a similar thing. You could buy software, then install and configure it yourselve, or you could hire someone more skilled than you to install and support it when you run into problems. Now take away the fact that you have to buy bricks and mortar , or for this case the software. That's Free Software.. you still need to spend time to get to know the tools or pay someone to do that for you. Depending on what the core business of your ogranization is .. the choice is your.

Tarry says
BUT it remains a product that you need to get support. Just like Windows or Oracle database.
Which I don't agree with .. the fact is that I never can get the same level of experience and knowledge myselve on a product such as Windows or Oracle as I can on Linux and MySQL , I can't dig in to the source code of the first 2 products
In fact, Oracle is a better example, its an open source, right?
Whoow, when did that happen .. during which long vacation did I miss Oracle being Open Sourced ? Yes Oracle contributes a lot to open source but Oracle itselve being Open ... I must have missed that..

People won't notice but you'd have a huge application running on it in no time and you'd be stuck to that "free version" for the rest of your life. Or you choose to eventually buy the software support and even end up paying the license fee. Ha! Vendor lock Alarm!
Now there is a skyhigh difference between a limited featureset product that is free to download but not free to use in a production environment and and opensource which is free to download, to use, to modify and to contribute to. Yes there are people making a business model of supporting that piece of software but they don't force you to buy anything from them. It's a pretty sensible thing to buy services from the people that actually wrote the code , but you are free to buy the same services from someone else, someone local, someone who speaks your languag And they will be able to read the code and fix the problems.

Look at a proprietary product where you want a feature changed or a critical bug fixed.
You can call your local supplier, who can't do anything else but call his reseller who will escalate to the vendor. There is no way your local integrator will actually be able to modify the product and fix the problem. However You or an open source integrator with the appropriate skills can take the code of the product, study it and fix the problems. After which off course they will contribute these changes back to the community. I see no vendor lock in there.

Simply because no matter how small you are, you wouldn't want to risk you application on this product, you'd rather go for a full support. Same applies to the "open source" cousin! Do you really think that running Centos, Whitebox, Ubuntu etc without licensing and regular patching is a sustainable option. no sweetheart, it isn't no where. There are however places where you can carry on for a while with this scenario, but not for long.
Yes you need to patch your system in a timely manner, but I don't see where you could License Centos or Whitebox or a big set of other Open Source projects such as Apache etc.
There are different good reasons to buy support and services , you might want to financially stimulate and support the people that wrote the code so they can continue to write it, you might want to have an insurance for your boss when things go wrong , you might have a long history of making too much IT expenses, or you are forced to buy a certified product because yet another vendor only wants to work on a certified products. But risk for instability on the open source side is not amongst the list of reasons. If you have the appropriate skills and time nothing is blocking you from supporting yourselve. There is absolutely no need to buy a license from someone . So carry on ..

On Open Source Innovation..
Innovation happens at the heart of the open source with as much fury as in a "Closed Source" shop.
Call me oldfashioned but I still think of most of the closed source shops as 9to5 developers that write code because their boss tells them. Their boss is being instructed by clueless marketing people that promise impossible features to customers with impossible deadlines. An Open Source developer writes code because he wants to fix something , because he needs a feature , not because someone tells him to do so. To there is much more passion to be found in the heart of an open source developer than in your average closed shop developer.

Innovation is not happening in the Closed Source shops anymore. Innovation is happening out in the open.

Tarry, guess we need to grab some beers to discuss this further , but I feel we'll have an opportunity coming up pretty soon :)

I spent way too much time this weekend trying to get the pager stuff in Drupal working for a module I`m playing with.

I had learned a lot from the watchdog module on how paging was supposed to be working and I was trying to do the same with another database. As I got a page limited by the number of records I wanted but I couldn't find any of the fancy next, previous and page number thingies that I wanted.

The watchdog module worked for me and I started stripping the watchdog module till I could actually replace my function with watchdog_overview function. Even replaced the watchdog query with my qeury.. but not such luck.. I couldn't get $output .= theme('pager', NULL, 50, 0); to work.

So as every open source geek does.. I started looking into the code. pager.inc
The header told me the author.. I could mail him and wait or even call him , , but I read on.
$pager_total_items[$element] = db_result(db_query($count_query, $args));
Never returned anything useful.., my mysql log learned me there never was any query with a count ..
Till I modified the pager.inc file to actually perform the query I wanted it to do.. and it started working.
Then I took a closer look at the regexp that was being used to create the $count_qeury
$count_query = preg_replace(array('/SELECT.*?FROM /As', '/ORDER BY .*/'), array('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ', ''),$query);
However my query was all in lowercase so the count was never inserted.

The only difference between the working watchdog module and my own code was in the use of uppercase SQL statements.
So call me lazy :)

Arjen wonders why the MySQl Cluster Study book is published on Lulu and not trough MySQL 's traiditional publisher.

Altough I was involved in the creation process of the mentionned book, I have no idea why this decision was made but to me it makes perfect sense. MySQL Cluster is a piece of software that is still going to change a lot in the next couple of months and years.
A book published in a traditional way needs a minimal sales volume in order to be worth publishing. If there even is a slight chance that by the time the book gets published a significant amount of content of the book has already changed traditional publishers shouldn't publish the book. Now over at Lulu.com a book won't be print before a customer orders it. So when the book is being sent to me. I get the current version of the book.. If in 3 months the authors decide to rewrite a chapter or make some bugfixes. The book can be updated much faster.
I can imagine that people buying the same title in april next year will already get bugfixes on the version that will arrive at my doorstep in a couple of days.

At least that's why I would publish a technical book on Lulu.

Tarry is pointing us to a couple of companies that he thinks we should watch in the Virtualization area next year.

He's right.. these are exactly the kind of companies we will watch die fast in the next couple of years. All proprietary vendors, placing a bet on becoming the next datacenter integrator are are placing their money on the wrong side of evolution.

Why on earth would a sane IT manager want to bet his infrastructure on a 3rd party tool that implements on top of a proprietary vendor ? Because he wants to be locked into an infrastructure where he looses control over what he wants to be running ? Does he want an environment where he will be forced to puzzle together functionality he really wants by trying to integrate different proprietary vendors that won't play along ?

Heck haven't we learned enough over the last decades .. the key to growth is interoperability and openness. That's how the web was build .. it wasn't build buy 100 proprietary software vendors setting up a different service you could talk to with different fat management client all trying to accomplish the same features.

If you still haven't understood that .. please move one ... but don't bother me.

Apart form the Xen book I coauthored earlier this year the nice folks of the MySQL documentation team asked me to review parts of their MySQL Cluster Certification guide.

After a long wait it's finally out !
In contrary to the other one, this book took over a year to finish because there was actually a lot of reviewing done by different people.

You can buy it now at Lulu.com !

John might want to read it to figure out about his 5th step.

There is an interesting quote in the Information Week interview with Linus
I simply don't use Microsoft products, not because I hate them, but because they aren't interesting to me.
And that statement is true for a growing number of people each day !

IWantsandy seemed like a good idea.. send a mail with her in cc: and get a reminder of stuff you need todo. but it lacked one major feature for me. She should understand something like "remind me before" in order for me to meet a deadline in time :)

Apart from that.. I think 1 Sandy is enough and I already have one :)

So I disabled it..

One more thing about Social Networking today ..

Back at T-Dose I realized what one of the older social networks around is. It's the keysigning events that happen at different conferences. At least you have to see the people who's keys you sign and not randomly accept invitations from people you vaguely know (which is something I don't do)

Over the past couple of days there is an increased flow of traffic to my Inbox all fairly identical mails from people that I`m connected to on LinkedIn that somehow are being invited by their friends to also start using Plaxo.
I`m wondering if people don't realise they are resending their whole LinkedIn addressbook an invitation or if they do it on purpose. I`m still looking for the great new feature that Plaxo has that urges me to switch to it or even consider using it actively.
I haven't found it .. so please explain me why you are using plaxo

A couple of weeks ago I started this poll on my blog so people could vote on their social network site.
Guess what the conclusion was.. the majority of my readers favours LinkedIn, some like Facebook and only some individuals like Plaxo or Xing

Yes I create accounts on most new YASN (Yet Another Social Network) thingies, but merely as a form of Online Identity Protection. (It's pretty easy to find a new YASN and create an account there that you shouldn't be creating)

Now I`m all in favour of redundancy and high availability. But I frequently just export my LinkedIn connections to my local desktop and that gives me a nice backup.

So is this going to be the new trend ? I launch a new YASN and suddenly I create an avalanche of mails that will be send to other people. Geez.. this looks like a virus in LookOut
But how long wil our email system live if more and more people start using these tools and more and more new sites implement the feature. ? When will Inbox protection tools start with default filtersets for a list of Social Networks ?
Wil social networks start to figure out ways to evade Inbox protection tools ?

Maybe we just need to add some more meta information in our DNS servers. :)