CodePlex, patents and Linux code. An interesting few days for Microsoft open source.
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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have
to.”
CodePlex, CodePlex, CodePlex!
Microsoft launched the CodePlex Foundation to facilitate
open source contributions, and confirmed the departure of Sam Ramji.
Patents, Patents, Patents!
The OIN confirmed the acquisition of 22 patents formerly
owned by …
Red Hat round-up. EC to review Oracle-Sun. Dedicated Ubuntu support. And more.
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to.”
Red Hat announcements round-up
Red Hat announced a whole heap of products and projects this
week. They should have organized an event to coincide with all
the announcements. Or something. The biggest news was probably
the launch of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 including KVM and other
virtualization capabilities, while Red Hat and HP partnered to optimize
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix. The
company also revealed that Red Hat Network Satellite …
Dear MySQL and Drupal , Plone and other Open Source folks, you might want to be interrested in giving a talk at T-Dose 2009 ,
Jean Paul pinged me with the following mail :
Maybe it escaped your attention that the Call For Papers for T-DOSE 2009 is already out. It has been announced on 12th of June 2009. Below you will find the original announcement.
Call for Papers and Projects
Fri, 06/12/2009 - 13:57 — jpsaman
T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. It is held at the Fontys University of Applied Science on 3 and 4 October 2009.
Speakers can send ideas and abstracts to the organisation at abstracts _AT_ t-dose.org. The email should contain a short biography of the speaker and description of the talk. All talks will be held …
[Read more]When open source goes bad. Is open source a success or failure? And more.
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When open source goes bad
The H reported
on the apparent turmoil at the CentOS project, while Jay Lyman
offered the CAOS perspective. Meanwhile
Slashdot reported that Alan Cox has quit as Linux TTY
subsystem maintainer.
Success or failure?
Danny Windham, Digium CEO, …
I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.
Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)
I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.
I spent some time earlier this week trying to debug a permissions problem in Drupal.
After a lot of head-scratching, it turned out that Drupal assumes that when you run INSERT queries sequentially on a table with an auto_increment integer column, the values that are assigned to this column will also be sequential, ie: 1, 2, 3, …
This might be a valid assumption when you are the only user doing inserts on a single MySQL server, but unfortunately that is not always the situation in which an application runs.
I run MySQL in a dual-master setup, which means that two sequential INSERT statements will never return sequential integers. The value will always be determined by the auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset settings in the configuration file.
In my case, one master will only assign even numbers, the other only uneven ones.
My …
[Read more]I spent far too much time this past week trying to find out why a Drupal was not assigning authenticated user permissions to users who clicked on the validation link they were emailed. Instead, it would simply remove the temporary unverified user permission.
It's supposed to do the latter, but then also follow it up with the former. It turns out the problem was a Drupal bug that was triggered by my MySQL setup.
My Drupals all use a server that is a master in a set-up with two masters an three slaves. This has some implications for the auto_increment integer data type. In order to avoid clashes when two masters each insert a new record simultaneously, a master gets a specific instruction about which IDs it may assign.
These instructions specify how many numbers to skip - typically the number of masters in a cluster - and an offset to add, …
[Read more]I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.
A while ago Arjen Lentz blogged about transient MySQL errors that can occur when using a transactional storage engine, like say InnoDB.
Since I'm a fan of the reliability and automated recovery that InnoDB provides, I use it for all the Drupals that I host. However, on a very busy site, this may lead to deadlocks. These in turn lead to users seeing errors, which is something I'd like to avoid. Especially if the error could be prevented.
What I've done to make use of these error codes is change the _db_query() function in includes/database.mysql.inc and wrap the call to mysql_query() in a loop.
The function now checks the returned error code and if the code indicates a transient error, it will try to rerun the query after sleeping for 50 milliseconds. It will try each query up to three …
[Read more]About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …
[Read more]