Lenz Grimmer's blog - Personal

What have I been up to lately?

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:51:00 +0200

Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".

But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:

I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:

In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:

From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:

I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

A new technical white paper about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
An article about How to Extract Files from an Oracle Linux RPM Package Without Installing the Package
Added a new page about our Oracle Linux support offering
Updated the OCFS2 product page
Updated the Oracle Linux technical information page.

I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):

MySQL High Availability at COLLABORATE 11, Orlando (FL), USA
An introduction to Oracle Linux at the HEPiX Spring 2011 Workshop, Darmstadt, Germany
What's new in MySQL 5.5 at LinuxTag 2011, Berlin Germany
Updates on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM at fisl12, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.

Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!

Back in Linux land

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:46:19 +0200

It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.

However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.

Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect to hear more about Linux and less about MySQL from me on this blog in the future. I also started writing for the official Oracle Linux Blog as well as the OTN Garage blog – watch these spaces for future posts from me, too.

In addition to that, my travel schedule is also filling up again: at the end of this month I'll be speaking at the fisl12 conference in Brasil and Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco later this year. I also submitted talk proposals to the DOAG conference and the UKOUG conference. Looking forward to it!

Back from Lisbon, off to Nuremberg

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:31:06 +0100

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about "To SQL or not to SQL", together with representatives from other open source databases (@fdmanana from CouchDB, @antirez from Redis and @bpedro for PostgreSQL). It was an interesting but somewhat slow discussion and the overall conclusion is still the same: there's more than one tool for a given job, choose carefully what your requirements are and don't just blindly believe the hype.

On Friday, I had some more time to attend other people's presentations. In the evening I took part in another panel discussion about Physical Computing. I also had the "opportunity" to try one of the Nuclear Tacos (Video) they served — I have never had something that hot before. Ouch! Fortunately my tastebuds recovered in time for the speaker's dinner, which took place later that evening. We went to a Rodizio restaurant nearby, the food was plenty and delicious!

Saturday was a pretty low activity day for me. I spent some time in the DIY corner, doing some Arduino hacking. Later that day I attended the project presentations and the closing keynote. Unfortunately a majority of the content was in Portuguese, so I only got parts of the content. But it was still fun! I've published my pictures of CodeBits on Flickr, I hope you enjoy them

Later today, I will be travelling to the DOAG Conference 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. I'll be giving two talks (in German) there on Wednesday, 17th:

I already received my speaker badge for this conference (see the picture below). Cool idea: you can use the public transport facilities (Buses, Trams) for free, by presenting this card!

There will also be a MySQL Community Meetup on Tuesday, 19:00 at the Press Center of the Congress Center East. If you're around, you're more than welcome to join us there!

Next up in the conference schedule for this year is the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, UK (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st). We helped them with setting up a MySQL session stream, and they've created an interesting lineup of talks. I'll be speaking about Making MySQL Administration a Breeze - A Look Into a MySQL DBA's Toolchest. See you there!

Site is (almost) back...

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:41:32 +0100

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.

mylvmbackup 0.9 has been released

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:51:01 +0200

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!

Gallery updates and new camera

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:05:56 +0200

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:

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.

New pictures of Lena online!

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:18:30 +0200

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!

Back from a long weekend

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:17:53 +0200

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!

Back online...

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 03 May 2006 21:59:42 +0200

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!

Happy Birthday, Lena Grimmer!

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:38:06 +0200

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!

New pictures online

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:17:20 +0100

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!

Lost my wisdom...

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:16:39 +0100

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.