Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Bart promises to cook for us if there aren't enough of us travelling to Limburg.

Which makes me wonder maybe we should organize a Geek Cooking Dinner ..

There is something about geeks and cooking ,dunno what.. couple of years ago we did a cooking workshop with some collegues and more than 60% of them really liked to cook.

And we can even eat ourselve to death when stuffing ourselves with Drupal Pie

Any Takers ? Should have thought about this earlier.. certainly with the Piemaker in the country :)

It seems like Jeremy wants to be MySQL community president this week :)

The announcement of a MySQL yum repository is a good one but it's slightly confusing me .. didn't Jeremy already have this with
Dorsal, where there are also 5.1 builds. So what's the difference between Dorsal and the new yum repo anyway .

But he asks for Adittionals packages , well 5.1 to start with, apart from that the CentosPlus repo also has builds for Cluster , having a uniform place go get those to would be good.

And what about builds for CGE ?
Oh and while you are at it .. can you run genbasedir also .. that way we can also use apt4rpm :)

Now I all need is a repository with all drupal modules packaged separatly :)

For a company that wants to become the RedHat of Drupal, Kieran is pointing a lot to RedHat's competition :)

But indeed the Brainstorm idea is a good one... if Sun wants to keep up the "big user community, no contributor community" model for it's products this is the least they can do.

Kieran also calls for more crossposting between the mysql and drupal planets :)

About 2 months ago I sent a mail to Dries, telling him

I`m losing an argument with Dag , because I can't tell him how great Mollom is :(

Luckily Dries contacted Dag ,and now we can tell the world.. Mollom is great, Mollom allowed me to open up my comments

Now if only I could do the same for trackbacks :)

It's funny how lots of oldskool demoscene people tend to be involved in different interesting startups. Back in the ninetees we were travelling Europe to party at our favourite demo events and now we are all meeting again. You'll also recognize Uncle Bob, Emperor and others in this bunch of antique articles

It was Uncle Bob who introduced me to Dries about a decade ago, at the sunny terrace of Den Hill iirc

It's a small world .. and it ain't growing bigger ..

The local Trends Magazine has a big article about Open Source and Free software.. sadly it's mistitled "Gratis software becomes real business"

Apart from mentioning the usual suspects ,the obligatory Acquia mention, and the fact that everybody who is in the business wonders where the so called market analists get their figures, the biggest surprise in the article are the things that are NOT mentioned.

It seems that these days you have to be ashamed for not wanting to use Open Source ..

Translated: "Also other and often big software companies see the advantages of using open sourcemodules in their packages, although the are not making it public. "We are a big proponent of Open Source , but I don't see how you can live from it", says the managing director of a Flemish Information Services Group, who prefers not to have is companies associated with open source"

Pretty pathetic, Yes we are using Open source, No our customers shouldn't know,
No you don't get to know who we are, we want to remain anonymous.

I've got a pretty good idea which company this might be .. do you ?

I was just chatting with Tom from Shareomatic
and realised I wasn't using Shareomatic enough .. Probably because as far as I knew there was no Drupal module for it.

So I grabbed the DiggThis 5.1 code and modified it to support Shareomatic.

Tom still needs to modify some things and I also need to .. but the initial draft is here enjoy !

A bit short notice but I`ll be giving a Xen talk tomorrow evening at the OSBC event in Eindhoven

Next week I`ll be talking to the interrested crowd about using openQRM to Manage your Datacenter at Linux World Expo Brussel

At LinuxWorld expo there are also other talks about OpenDoc Society, Drupal, Centos etc. The event is free .. so drop by if you are in the neighborhood.

I'd call this the 3rd strike and everybody knows what happens next

Marc Fleury has some good answers to the most clueless industry reporter around, starting with:
Spring is touting itself as a JBoss replacement. Smart PR, but false. Spring is a development framework comprising wrappers and dependency injection on top of Hibernate and Tomcat runtimes, both developed, and monetized by JBoss.

You can drop some balls, no one can keep track of what's going on in Open Source land, it's difficult enough to track what's going on in MySQL, Drupal, Virtualization and Distribution land but if you realize you don't have the whole picture (like not really knowing how the different tools compare to each other) please keep quiet.

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the right tool for the right project .. afterall there is no vendor pushing him to plugg a certain solution, there is no higher margin if he chooses the red box over the green box (as he isn't choosing boxes) The opensource guy will be open and explain to the customer why product X does not fit his needs and product Y does, he will give his customer some honest advise. He will help the customer to solve his problem, not create more.

I was pretty surprised yesterday that even the guys from MySQL were supportive when I stated that MySQL Cluster was not a fit for Drupal. I can't imagine people from Oracle or IBM agreeing on one of their product being a misfit for their customer ..

So yesterday I presented my findings on MySQL Cluster (ndbd) and Drupal.

I`ll be writing them out in a more detailed document some day soon ..
But the short summary is that MySQL-Cluster and Drupal are not a good fit.
One has to realise that MySQL cluster isn't always a good solution and that every problem has it's own solutions. The nature of the tables of Drupal means that you need enormous amounts of memory.

I was a bit afraid that the present MySQL crowd woudln't really appreciate my findings, however I was wrong I got some good feedback from the present MySQL crowd , they too seem to want to promote the idea that Cluster is not a fit for every problem, and they were great help in answering some of the audience questions.

The presentation is here here