I just got the word from my manager that I'm going to OSCON this year. Whee! I've been wanting to go since '98, and it seems that this is the first time I'm going to be able to make it. I'm looking forward to it.

So I'm getting the new version of the MaxDB FAQ ready for production. We used Microsoft Word to create the document and manage corrections. And then I exported to HTML. Word did a terrific (note that the root word here is "terror") job of translating to HTML, and Tidy won't touch it unless I fix some issues manually.

So here I go.

Getting most recent build from cvs:

$ cd ~/src/
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy login
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy co tidy

Building said code:

$ cd tidy/build/gmake
$ make

ld: archive: ../../lib/libtidy.a has no table of contents, add one with ranlib(1) (can't load from it)
make: *** [../../bin/tidy] Error 1

$ ranlib ../../lib/libtidy.a
$ make

Running code:

$ cd ../../bin
$ ./tidy -h
$ open ../htmldoc/faq.html …

I had to do a bit of research into postgres a while ago to help a customer migrate from postgres to MaxDB. I must admit that postgres is developing well. It is an entirely different beast than MySQL, and compliments it well.

I think that the MySQL and pg developers would do well to make amends and share some of their war stories. I think people involved in both projects have much to learn from one another.

I learned while on the #postgres channel on the Freenode irc network about a few good tools that come with the Debian packages of postgres.

Debian package names:
postgresql - object-relational SQL database management system (transitional)
postgresql-client - front-end programs for PostgreSQL (transitional package)
postgresql-common - manager for PostgreSQL database clusters
postgresql-contrib - additional facilities …

To install sudo on a debian or ubuntu system with a bash shell (this is likely you if you're reading this), change to the root user thus:

$ su -

Now that you have a "#" shell, all commands you run will be privileged. You don't want this. Trust me. Instead, you want to run most commands as your usual user and only use privileged commands when you have no other choice. To do this, I recommend installing sudo.

# apt-get install sudo

When this program finishes installing, and you are again presented with a "#" shell, do the last thing you will ever do from that shell. In the following example, "<your username>" represents the username of your non-privileged user.

# echo '<your username>  ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

If you substituted <your username> correctly, you will …

I had no idea about this, until I noticed a new section on our Wiki page that describes the installation notes for FreeBSD:

You can alternatively take the easy way and install Eventum from FreeBSD’s ports collection. At first, you need to update your ports collection using cvsup (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html). Once you updated your ports directory, use: cd /usr/ports/www/eventum && make install clean

Pretty cool

I understand that there is ‘Page Info -> Size’ in Firefox, but that only gives me the total size of the current HTML page, and not for the total download required for all bits and pieces on that page.

I want something that will tell me that there is 5kb in the HTML source, with 2kb more in CSS and 3kb in JavaScript code, for instance.

Anyone know of anything that would do this?

Do note: This is my personal blog, and all thoughts expressed here are my own, and are not necessarily shared by my employer.

So... I was talking with my cohort, Ulf about the future of MySQL and MaxDB.

He got me thinking about what the relationship between MySQL and SAP/MaxDB really is. What does the "partnership" mean a few levels below the VP?

To me, it means that, going forward, I expect to see a lot of communication and camaraderie between the MySQL and MaxDB developers. I expect to see a lot of MaxDB's rock solid, tried and true code become shared libraries which are then linked against by MySQL. I expect to see a lot of MySQL's tools that provide the usability and simplicity that the community has come to expect from them generalized in such a way that they can be used to administer a MaxDB system. I expect to see MaxDB adopt …