Lenz Grimmer's blog

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.

The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:

• February 28: New Optimizer Features in MySQL 6.0 (Sergey Petrunia)
• March 6: How to Add a Collation (Alexander Barkov)
• March 13: Checking Threading and Locking With Helgrind (Stewart Smith)
• March 20: Building MySQL Client Applications (Hartmut Holzgraefe)

See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.

 

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

 

Continue reading "Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)"

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning talks: Jan Kneschke will speak about MySQL Proxy (not yet listed in the schedule, but likely between 15-16 o'clock on Sunday). Other sessions with MySQL relevance/relations are Kettle: extracting, transforming and loading data by Matt Casters and Alfresco: fresh document management approach by Philippe Dubois.
• DevRooms: The Drupal people have set up a DevRoom with a session track - Kris Buytaert will talk about Drupal and MySQL High Availability. Another DevRoom worth visiting will be the one organized by the Belgian Ruby User Group - they set up a Ruby on Rails Developer Room. My friends from the openSUSE project also have a great number of sessions lined up for their openSUSE Developer Room: several talks about the Build Service (proudly powered by MySQL) and a session about the openSUSE redirector (a tool to set up and manage a content delivery network with MySQL) by Peter Poeml.

If you also plan to attend, please ping me if you would like to meet!

 

 

 

When it comes to handling my work-related email, many people will probably conclude that I am an old fart in Linux terms: I still use the console-based Pine as my MUA of choice, as my fingers have been hardcoded to its key combinations over the years (my first encounter with Pine was around 1994 on a shared DEC Ultrix box in my university). So far, I have not found any other application that allows me to process email as quickly as by using this tool.

I admit that I do use Thunderbird for my personal email, though, to gather experience with it (and to toy around with the various extensions, especially Nostalgy is a gift from heaven for people like me!). And of course because the mail volume there is less critical to cope with! But I am not going to start a holy war here - this article is supposed to explain how I have configured my mail setup to rotate the log files that keep track of all my incoming mails.

Continue reading "Linux tip: Automatically rotate/archive your fetchmail/procmail log files"