Personal

Sorry for the downtime of this site - until around a week ago I hosted my home page on a trusty Genesi Pegasos II system (powered by a PowerPC G4 Processor clocked at 1GHz, using Debian 4.0 PPC with 512 MB of RAM), serving these pages from my home DSL connection. Unfortunately this system provided no means of redundancy - the hard disk drive died.

Luckily I perform frequent backups, so I moved most parts of the site to a shared hosting space now - the picture gallery is unfortunately too big to fit into the space that I have there. I'll try to move the pictures into my Flickr account instead, but this will take some time.

Note that the primary domain name of this site is now lenzg.net - lenzg.org, (the domain that I tried to promote as the official domain for my site) used to redirect to the home machine at lenz.homelinux.org. Both now redirect to the new address instead. I've initiated the move of the lenzg.org domain to the other provider as well, so soon this site will be available from both the .org and .net domain. Please don't link to lenz.homelinux.org anymore, as that site will eventually go out of service. Until then, a small openSUSE Linux box (Intel PIII, 500 MHz, 192 MB of RAM) running lighttpd will perform the URL redirection.

I am happy to announce that a new version (0.9) of mylvmbackup has been released. This is the first release since the source code has been moved from Subversion to Bazaar and is now hosted on Launchpad.net. I would like to thank Robin H. Johnson and Patrick Hahn for providing the patches that contributed to this new release!

mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

From the ChangeLog:

• Applied patch from Patrick Hahn: provide an option to call external scripts/applications (hooks) at various stages of the backup process. See the man page for instructions
• Added options "--skip_hooks" to disable the execution of hooks and "--hooksdir" to define the location for these (default is /usr/share/mylvmbackup)
• Updated documentation: added new options and instructions on how to use hooks
• Applied patch from Robin H. Johnson: Full support for an rsync:// service as the backup destination. If you include any path fragments with the rsync module name, they must already exist!
• Updated documentation to reflect these changes
• Updated TODO

You can download a source tarball or RPM from the project home page. Additional packages for various Linux distributions can be obtained from the openSUSE Build Service. Packages for Gentoo and Debian should appear shortly, too.

Enjoy! Please let me know how mylvmbackup works for you, either by posting to our mailing list or by submitting a bug report. Thanks!

 

Last weekend I finally found some time to upload pictures that I had taken during various events that I attended in the past few months. So here are my impressions from the following events:

• PHP Unconference in Hamburg on 2008-04-26
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Hamburg, 2008-04-07
• MySQL Meetup Mashup in Berlin, 2008-04-08
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 in Santa Clara, 2008-04 (these are available from flickr as well)
• CommunityOne in San Francisco, 2008-05-05
• JavaOne in San Francisco, 2008-05
• LinuxTag in Berlin, 2008-05

These are probably the last pictures that I have taken with my trusty old Pentax Optio S4 - I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I have just started to toy around with it, but the first results look promising! The Pentax served me well for several years - I've taken 9745 pictures with it. But it had a few deficiencies, particularly the slow startup and flash recharge time and the bad quality of pictures indoors bothered me for quite a while. But it is very small and handy and the metal housing makes it quite sturdy.

The first picture taken with my new camera: a picture of the old one.

And probably the last picture taken using the old camera: my new Canon.

 

It took a while to go through the tons of pictures that I had taken of Lena in the past few weeks - I've now put a number of them into the Gallery. Enjoy!

Yesterday was a holiday in Germany (Pentecost), and again the weather was quite miserable, considering that it's June already. Nevertheless I spent some time in the garden, removing all withered flower clusters from the rhododendron bushes - this is called dead-heading and supposedly improves blooming in the following year. I also noticed that one of our bamboo bushes (fargesia nitida) has bloomed, which is a pretty rare case (for some species, this happens only once every 120 years)  but unfortunately also means that all bamboos of this species will bloom and die afterwards. I have already seen the same happening in several other gardens around Hamburg and spotted several postings from other bamboo fans in different forums. Looks like it's time to cut it down and dig out the roots.

The long weekend ended with a blast - yesterday I went to a Depeche Mode "Touring the Angel" Open Air Concert which took place in the Weserstadium in Bremen. The event was sold out and around 40.000 people were there to celebrate. I hadn't seen DM performing live before (except for video recordings), even though I am a great fan of them since the early eighties. It was awesome - they played a very good mixture of old and new material, including one of my personal favourites from their early days: "Photographic". It seems that I was lucky with my choice of location right in front of the stage - I did not experience any of the sound problems that many people reported on the german DM website. And the atmosphere there was great, too - people danced, clapped and cheered like mad, including me! And I guess I was also lucky to not have parked close to the stadium - the traffic around the arena came to a grinding halt after the event...

All in all I really enjoyed it - too bad it was over way too quickly!

I have now returned from my two weeks of paternal leave that I took after Lena was born. I am glad I had the opportunity to fully focus on family for some time - it takes a while to get used to such a demanding new family member! But fortunately she's developing very well and is a joyful bundle (as long as she's not hungry!). The only thing I feel a bit sad about is not having been able to attend the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara - judging from the comments on Planet MySQL, people were having a great time.

The coming weeks will be busy for me - apart from catching up with stuff that piled up during the past two weeks, I will be travelling a bit. This coming Saturday (6th of May), I will be at the LinuxTag 2006 in Wiesbaden, Germany. Just four days later, I will be in Wiesbaden again, this time to participate on a panel discussion about chances and risks in using Open Source Software in the enterprise, which will take place at the JAX 2006 conference. On May 20th, there will be a big party in Nuremberg, Germany organized by former colleagues from SUSE. I look forward to meeting many of these folks again, we had a great time together. It's quite amazing that more than four years have already passed since I left SuSE and joined MySQL - time really flies!

On Wednesday, 12th of April at 19:02, our first baby girl "Lena" was born. She weighed 3695 grams and was 53cm tall. Mother and child are doing fine - some first pictures are available from here!

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy (pictures from other MySQLers can be found on Flickr, too)

I also added some pictures from a recent weekend vacation to Waren/Müritz to the Trips and Vacations Gallery. Enjoy!

I returned home safely from Brussels on Sunday night. FOSDEM was great fun, I am going to write up my impressions in a separate entry. I wanted to do it on Monday already, but I had an appointment with the dentist in the afternoon who pulled my two upper wisdom teeth.

The operation itself was almost pain-free and went very quick. But once the effect of the local anaesthesia faded, the pain was almost unbearable. After a rough night, I decided to take it slow yesterday. I feel better today, but look like a hamster - my cheeks are quite swollen. Time to replace the ice pack.