Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

To save Solaris from a certain death ?

Reading Planet MySQL the last couple of hours I'm trying really hard to convince myselve the Solaris offensive there is not orchestrated.. but I can't.
It might ofcourse be the fresh MySQL users that Sun brought in on their platform that started out blogging but hey .. I`m paranoia right :)

Are they really trying to get at least a fraction of the MySQL community on Solaris. Do they really think they can ? Yes they lost a zillion of Solaris customers that were running a proprietary database to MySQL on Linux users ,, but why would they want to move back to a semi proprietary setup ?

According to Linuxjournal Alan Cox seems to think that ZFS is the only thing that is keeping Solaris alive. I don't think DTrace was a bigg mass tool that would convince the crowds to suddenly move to an other operating system.

So is Sun trying to Lock In a community ? Other people would call it a Jail, altough I wouldn't consider this particular type of jail a Luxury one :)

Why can't Sun just drop the whole idea of building its own OS and contribute more , they are slowly learning in some other fields , but in the Operating System field they still haven't realised they should up the fight ... but then again .. I overheard someone say recently "The best fights to watch, are the ones that can't be won anymore .."

So just remember .. the L in LAMP still stands for Linux,

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Lenz just posted pointers to a great presentation of his about MySQL HA and Drupal,

Seems like a small part of me did go to Szeged afterall :)

JP just wrote in to let me know that the T-Dose 2008 CFP has been extended. So there is still time to send in your abstracts

Oh right .. I was expecting to much from you folks.

So lemme translate, Jean-Paul Saman, one of the T-Dose organizers, wrote me this morning to let the world know that he is still accepting proposals for talks at T-Dose , The Technical Dutch Open Source Event which will take place on 25 and 26 October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

In a lot of environments.

Peter gives a nice overview why you don't always need to invest in big fat redundant hardware.

We've tackled the topic last year already ..

Now I often get weird looks when I dare to mention that Raid is obsolete ..people fail to hear the "in a lot of environments"

Obviously the catch is in the second part, you won't be doing this for your small shop around the corner with just one machine. You'll only be doing this in an environment where you can work with a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Not with a server that has to sit in a remote and isolated location.

Next to that there are situations where you will be using raid, but not for redundancy, but for disk throughput.

Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

Lots of other companies are innovating on top of Open Source, they are using the LAMP stack or just Linux as an OS to build their products on they need the stability and the features an Open Source stack provides them with and only in this way they can deliver their customers with a stable and cost effective platform. Lots of these companies contribute back to the open source community (sadly some don't ..yet) .

But at the end of the day there is much more money involved in the Opensource world than the money the Open Source product vendors like RedHat, Alfresco, Zimbra, Zenoss and are getting from selling their products.

And that's what counts !!

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.

So Cuil had lots of visibility because of their "data corruption" , showing "wrong" images to people.

However it seems like they still haven't cleaned up their mess.

Somehow they manage to place Geert Vanderkelen's picture in the search results for me.
Not the other way around however.

Well.. at least it isn't what they used to show :)

So Geert , if someone ever runs up to you and says "Hi Kris" , you know where they got the picture from :)

The MySQL Performance Blog also figured it out .. Everything is a frigging dns problem :)

Baron gives a quick hint on how to test if you can safely enable skip_name_resolve or how to figure out which users to update to an IP address rather than a DNS name.

On of the many ... :)

So it seems MySQL got on the radar of the monopolist, but the quotes that came from that event are more interesting .

Over at Oscon2008 Oscon people started realizing that the old monopolist definitely isn't the one to be afraid of.. there's new ones out there..

I already got quoted in a local magazine on the fact that new startups are more looking to Google than to redmond, but it also seems that Apple is the new kid in town to envy.

However, when looking at the Linux desktop I think we shouldn't be trying to imitate anybody .. we should be trying to head the pack, just as we have already done with Vitualization and other technologies.