Lenz Grimmer's blog

It's already a month old, but I just stumbled over this ITtoolbox Interview with Jonathan Cheyer (Open Source Community Manager) and Murat Demiroglu (Senior Product Manager) from Solid Information Technology, in which Dru Lavigne talks with them about Solid (the company) and the solidDB for MySQL storage engine, which is currently in beta testing. I still remember Solid from my times at SUSE Linux, where it used to be a part of the Linux distribution along with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas D and several other DBs...

While the MySQL Server source trees are maintained using the BitKeeper revision control system, several other MySQL projects (Connectors, GUI-Tools and the Manual) use Subversion instead.

To make it easier for external developers in getting familiar with the code base of the respective project, we now installed the FishEye SVN repository browser, which provides a very nice interface to the hosted repositories and boasts an impressive number of additional features like searching, diffing and RSS feeds.

This will hopefully encourage more developers to participate and contribute to these projects. FishEye will also make it more convenient for our own developers to work with their SVN repositories and should soon become a valuable tool for us.

JFYI: as discussed on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list today, I now moved my mercurial packages to the devel:tools:scm Project on the openSUSE build service now. Updated packages will be available from there instead of my home project.

Yes, I am an eyecandy and screensaver fan. I now added an RPM of the "Electric Sheep" screensaver to my RPM repository on the fabolous SUSE build service. Have fun!

On September 18th-21st, the second EuroOSCON will take place in Brussels, Belgium. I probably won't make it to this year's conference, but I really enjoyed the event in Amsterdam last year.

The session grid contains a number of talks related to MySQL:

• John Paul Ashenfelter: Data Warehousing with MySQL
• Peter Zaitsev: High Performance Full Text search for Database Content
• Lars Thalmann: Being a MySQL Developer

In addition to these sessions which are directly related to MySQL, here is a selection of talks that most likely cover it as well:

• Marcel Molina: Ruby on Rails
• Martin von Haller Groenbaek: Workshop on Open Source Licensing for Businesses
• Open Source @ openBC: How, Why, and Where To?
• Jim Purbrick: Open Source And Second Life
• Mårten Mickos: From Europe to USA - Culture's Consequences on Open Source Communities and Businesses

All in all, the conference program looks very promising. I wish I could be there...

Yesterday I sent out the invitations for our third MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg, which will take place on Monday, 4th of September (which is the United MySQL Meetup Day). As usual, we will meet at 19:00 in the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao" - the food is excellent and we can use a separate room with a video projector there. If you happen to live around Hamburg, Germany and would like to join, please RSVP and join our mailing list!

Currently I am still pondering on the topic of the presentation - I suggested to invite Paul McCullagh to talk about PrimeBase XT, his transactional pluggable storage engine for MySQL. Would you think this is a suitable topic for a user group meeting? Let me know.

Speaking of MySQL User Groups: have you considered establishing one in your area yet? It's actually a lot of fun and MySQL AB will sponsor the meetup.com fees. In particular, I would like to encourage our MySQL Users in India to take initiative - there are more than 300 people interested in meeting other MySQL people in the major Indian cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and others. Step up and organize a meeting! We have collected some suggestions and hints on how to get you going on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Once you are up and running, make sure to add yourself to the growing list of MySQL User Groups!

Encouraged by this flattering comment, I went through my full collection of SUSE RPMs, picked the ones worth updating to the latest versions and submitted them to my package repository at the openSUSE build service now:

• bchunk 1.2.0 - A CD image format converter from .bin/.cue to .iso/.cdr/.wav.
• kvdr 0.64 - A KDE Front-End for VDR (Video Disk Recorder)
• samefile 2.12 - Find identical files on your file system
• rss-glx 0.8.1 - Really Slick Screensavers
• rzip 2.1 - A large-file compression program

I hope none of these are already maintained somewhere else, this is something I still haven't figured out - how can I search the existing projects for certain packages?

The Build Service totally rocks, especially since it can be conveniently used from the command line as well. I submitted my first two packages via the web frontend, but have now switched to using the osc command line tool exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE Build Service Team, building packages on other platforms has never been that easy!

Thanks to Duncan Mac-Vicar for the friendly reminder: I finally bit the bullet and started using the openSUSE Build Service for building and hosting the RPMs that I build for SUSE Linux by myself. I've now moved the KeyJnote and mercurial RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 to my own repository there. Future RPMs will also be provided from there exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE team for providing this service!

In addition to our main MySQL Users Conference that took place in April, there will also be two small MySQL Conferences in Europe later this year. There will be presentations about our products and roadmaps as well as sessions about best practices and first-hand customer experiences. You will also get a chance to meet and talk with many MySQLers and share your thoughts and experiences. The conferences will take place in London, UK (Tuesday, October 17th) and in Munich, Germany (Thursday, October 19th). The conference program looks very interesting and there is an early bird discount, if you register before August 31st. So don't hesitate to register soon!

Have you ever been annoyed about the fact that uploading files via the web browser usually lacks any kind of visual feedback how far the upload has progressed already? Well, worry no more - Jan has just added that functionality via mod_uploadprogress to lighty. Now you can use some AJAX magic to display the progress on your web page. Keep up the good work, Jan!

FWIW, I just published RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.1 of KeyJnote 0.8.2 and mercurial 0.9.1 to the 10.1 RPM section. Have fun!