I had an enjoyable time last night at Twitter with local MySQL DBAs and developers. We had an attendee who has no experience with SQL or programming at all. She is interested in organizing her collection of recipes and had heard a rumor that MySQL was a good tool to use for this task. She indicated that her desktop runs Windows 7. I think I’m going to encourage her to turn her concept in to a community project, as she is not the first person I’ve met who wants to organize recipes!

We were hosted by Rob at Twitter, who used to work with Lisa back before she retired. He’s a member of the site reliability team and keeps the fail whale from rearing its blubbery head.

Pizza was provided by my dear friend and long-time open source buddy Gerry Narvaja with the assistance of the folks in the kitchen at Zeek’s.

We discussed new techniques in the areas of load …

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

Apache OpenOffice.org proposal approved. SkySQL Tekes new funding. And more.

# The proposal for OpenOffice.org to become an Apache incubator project was unanimously approved.

# Rob Weir discussed how the relationship between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice need not be a zero-sum game.

# Simon Phipps offered his thoughts on the potential positive and negative outcomes.

# Tekes, the main public funding agency for research, development, and innovation in Finland, …

I have had most of my test environment, aka puppetmasters, test mysql setups etc running in KVM for the past couple of years .. (yes I`m still using a lot of Xen in production environments, but we've also been using KVM for a while already .. it's a good mix) , Virtual box has always been the lesser loved Virtualization platform , however while playing more and more with Vagrant Up I realized I needed to convirt some boxen (e.g my PuppetMaster) to Virtualbox, and google was really no good help(most people seem to go the other way , or want to use some proprietary tools )

So I remembered VBoxManage and apparently I hade blogged about it myselve already ..
I just hate it when I search for stuff and google points right back to me

So I converted my puppetmaster's disks

1. VBoxManage convertdd Emtpy-clone.img PuppetMasterroot.vdi
…

Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the …

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

The White House contributes to OSS. Growth for Pentaho and MuleSoft. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The White House released some of the custom code it has developed for whitehouse.gov as open source.

# Pentaho reported 229% bookings growth and 177% Enterprise Edition customer growth in Q2.

# MuleSoft grew bookings by 140% in Q1.

# The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is now available, without Xen.

…

I caught some of the keynotes and discussion at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit today, and was particularly interested in the panel discussion on open source and cloud computing. While we are used to hearing and talking about how important open source software is to cloud computing (open source giving to cloud computing), moderator John Mark Walker posed the question of whether cloud computing gives back? The discussion also rightfully focused on openness in cloud computing, how open source might or might not translate to cloud openness and the importance of data to be open as well.

The discussion also centered on some issues regarding open standards and how open is open enough for cloud computing? …

600 new customers for SugarCRM. James Gosling leaves Oracle. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# SugarCRM added nearly 600 customers in the first quarter of 2010.

# James Gosling resigned from Oracle.

# VMware’s SpringSource acquired Rabbit Technologies and its RabbitMQ messaging software.

# EnterpriseDB hired Sun’s former MySQL VP Karen Tegan Padir as vice president of products and marketing.

# …