Skip to content

Celebrating Software Freedom Day in Riga, Latvia

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on

Software Freedom Day 08As I mentioned some time ago, Software Freedom Day 08 will take place on Saturday, 20th of September 2008.

Coincidentally, the a large number of Sun/MySQL Engineers and other Sun folks will be in Riga, Latvia for an internal developer meeting around this day. To make use of this opportunity, we plan to give a number of sessions and presentations (in english) about various topics and to contribute to this global celebration of Open Source Software.

We've set up a Team Page on the Software Freedom Day web site for this event - the venue will be the Cafeteria Conference room in the basement of the University of Latvia, Riga, which can accomodate 60-80 people:

Raiņa bulvāris 19
Rīga, LV-1586

There is no entrance fee and you don't have to register - just come by and meet with us! There will be free coffee, refreshments and cake during the breaks.

In the evening, Sun will host a social event (incl. free drinks and food) in the SAS Radisson Daugava hotel, starting at 19:30:

Radisson SAS Daugava Hotel
Kugu 24, Rīga, LV-1048, Latvia
Tel.:+371 6706 1147; Fax: +371 6706 1101

We've set up a tentative schedule (45 minutes per session plus 15 minutes of Q&A), please check the Wiki for eventual last-minute changes!

11:00-12:00: MySQL/Open Source in Latvia (Evijs Taube, Sun Microsystems)
12:00-13:00: Open Source Business Models: how to build a business around free software (Speaker TBD)
13:00-13:30: Lunch Break / Ask the Guru your tech questions
13:30-14:30: MySQL in the Enterprise: Customer references, commercial offerings (Rob Young/Robin Schumacher, Sun Microsystems)
15:00-16:00: MySQL Community Overview: How to engage and contribute (Giuseppe Maxia/Jay Pipes/Lenz Grimmer, Sun Microsystems)
16:15-17:15: MySQL Performance tuning best practices (Jay Pipes, Sun Microsystems)
17:15-18:15: Maintaining your Open source project with Bazaar and Launchpad (Lenz Grimmer/Giuseppe Maxia, Sun Microsystems)
19.30: Social event: Software demonstration, buffet and free beer in the SAS Radisson Daugava hotel

We'd like to thank Leo Trukšāns, Michael Dexter and Georg Richter for their help and support in getting this event arranged and organized! I look forward to being there and help to spread the word about the stuff that keeps me occupied for more than 13 years now :-)

Project Kenai: looking at the technology behind it

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on

Project Kenai LogoWhile Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

As disclosed by Tim Bray some days ago, there now is another option - Kenai is open for project hosting (currently by invitation only)! In his blog post, he interviews Nick Sieger, one of the developers behind this project about their motivation and intentions:

We need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications.

In a nutshell, Kenai is a platform for:

  • Developer collaboration
  • Communities of connected developers
  • Integrated collaboration services stack

Some of the features that are currently available include:

  • SCM services using Subversion and Mercurial
  • Bug Tracking (Bugzilla)
  • Forums
  • Wikis
  • Mailing Lists (using Sympa)

Reading the interview with Nick and looking at some presentations slides for RailsConf from Fernando Castano (a jRuby and Database performance engineer at Sun and another member of the project team),  I was able to gather a list of the tools and technologies they used to build Kenai:

I found it interesting that they decided to deploy and run the Rails application as a war file within the Glassfish application server (using Warbler). By the way, the fabolous OpenSUSE Build Service is a Rails application, too! So far, the entire site is powered by a single MySQL instance with query cache enabled.

The project is hosted on the following infrastructure:

You should check out Fernando's presentation for more technical details, tuning info and how they benchmarked the setup - it contains a number of useful tuning hints and performance graphs.

Last time I checked, 27 Projects have joined so far (e.g. jRuby, xVM Server). Kenai itself is developed on Kenai. It's going to be interesting what other projects will find their home there.

Nick also talked a bit about their future near term plans: to improve the usability and feature set, incrementally improve the site navigation and layout and adding support for hosting files/release downloads. They also consider offering Jira as an option to Bugzilla for bug tracking and Git as another SCM option.

There is an IRC channel #projectkenai on freenode.net, to get in touch with the developers directly. The mailing list for the Project Kenai site itself, is users@help.kenai.com - you can subscribe to this list here.

MySQL University Session tomorrow: OpenSolaris Web Stack

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on

MySQL UniversityTomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the OpenSolaris Web Stack:

OpenSolaris Web Stack is an OpenSolaris project and community building an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails optimized for Solaris platform. This session introduces OpenSolaris Web Stack, its status and future development including addition of newer technologies such as lighttpd, Varnish etc., as well as the ease of use features for developers and deployers. We will also be discussing an experimental web stack IPS package repository and it could be leveraged to build and make available popular end user applications such as Drupal.

MySQL University sessions are free to attend - all you need is an IRC client (to post your questions and comments) and an audio player capable of playing back an OGG audio stream, so you can listen to what is being said. See the Instructions for Attendees on the MySQL University pages for more information on how to log in and attend. The audio stream will be recorded and published on the MySQL University pages for later consumption, in case you can't make it or want to listen to a previous session.

 

More slides and pictures from DrupalCon and FrOSCon

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on

I'm back home from DrupalCon 2008 now - it has been a great event! I met a lot of nice people from the Drupal Community and learned a lot about this CMS. I've been very busy in uploading the remaining pictures from the event to my gallery - so here's for your viewing pleasure:

I also gave two talks and held a BoF there - the slides have now been attached to the session nodes, one of them (the HA session) even includes a video recording:

I've also uploaded some pictures from FrOSCon to my Gallery now, hope you enjoy them! The slides of my FrOSCon talks are now uploaded to the conference system as well:

tweetbackcheck