I gave a talk this week in Santa Clara at the MySQL Users Conference. I think it went pretty well and I got a lot of feedback from Ubuntu users about the positives of having Drizzle available in Universe.The slides are available at the link above.
Since we’re just about to 11.04 beta2, I figured its high time I start using Ubuntu Server for my personal blog.
What? Almost a year at Canonical and my blog wasn’t on Ubuntu server? Well, for over 5 years now, a personal friend has provided me with a free Xen virtual machine to run my blog on. I migrated it off of Debian then, which was sad for me, but back then I was so focused on working I didn’t have time or resources to be picky, so I said OK.
Fast forward to now, I’ve been working on Ubuntu Server and getting ribbed by my co-workers about that “crappy CentOS xen box” they’d see me logged into.
Well thats all over now. I decided to marry all the new tech I’ve been playing with lately into one glorious blog migration. Continue reading
I’ve begun a migration of fewbar.com to a new box.. more details to follow… the site may be a little weird for about 1 hour while DNS propagates.
Last week, my application to join the ranks of Core Ubuntu Developers was accepted by the Ubuntu Developer Membership Board. The process is a bit humbling, as when you dig through the roster of this team, there aren’t a lot of names, and most of them are quite familiar to anyone who has done Ubuntu Development, as they fly by in bug reports and changelogs at an almost superhuman pace, fixing, improving, and generally making Ubuntu more awesome-r.
So, a few hours ago, I made my first direct upload into Ubuntu without a sponsor. Its just a little upgrade to squid’s upstart job to make it start more reliably. I hope its the beginning of a string of uploads that will continue for a long time, and help me earn the badge that I’ve been granted.
Many thanks to all of my sponsors up to this point, and a special nod to those who were able to add a positive comment to my developer application.
Handlersocket is what all the cool kids are using these days.. I think. Basically you get a couple of new ports on your mysql server that allow SQL-free reading and writing for doing many thousands of tiny transactions per second without the overhead of parsing SQL.
Thanks to my venerable Ubuntu sponsor, Chuck Short, handlersocket is now available in Ubuntu Natty in the universe repository. apt-get install handlersocket-mysql-5.1 handlersocket-doc, then follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/handlersocket-doc/docs-en to enable it, and you have yourself a bonified NoSQL solution for your MySQL server.
There are also client libraries for perl (libnet-handlersocket-perl) and C/C++ (libhsclient-dev .. static only as the API is in flux). Other languages are still not packaged, but the protocol is simple, and links to early implementations are listed in the README file, which should be at /usr/share/doc/handlersocket-mysql-5.1/README.
It should be on Debian unstable as well soon…
Update April 3 2011, Handlersocket is now in Debian Unstable as well
Happy hacking!
Thats right, my boss. 
Canonical Server Team manager and all around Canonical Stud Robbie Williamson lays out the plan, past, present, and future…
It’s Been a Crazy Year « Not Lucky All The Time, But Smart Everyday….
This past weekend, I attended the 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show. I’m not a huge car buff. I do think that BMW’s are the bomb, and I like Honda’s common sense vehicles, but really, I am NOT a car guy. However, I thought this was an interesting chance to take a look at an industry that, in my opinion, isn’t all that different than the one I’m in.
Now, that may surprise some. Its pretty easy to think that I work for a super advanced company that has started a revolution and sits on the bleeding edge of innovation. I mean, at Canonical, we’re doing all kinds of amazing stuff with “the cloud” and building software that makes peoples’ jaw drop when they see it in action sometimes. Continue reading
I attended Puppet Camp in San Francisco this month, thanks to my benevolent employer Canonical’s sponsorship of the event.
It was quite an interesting ride. I’d consider myself an intermediate level puppet user, having only edited existing puppet configurations and used it for proof of concept work, not actual giant deployments. I went in large part to get in touch with users and potential users of Ubuntu Server to see what they think of it now, and what they want out of it in the future. Also Puppet is a really interesting technology that I think will be a key part of this march into the cloud that we’ve all begun.
I’ll be attending Puppet Camp in San Francisco tomorrow and Friday. Come say hi if you’ll be there too!
Puppet Camp: Learn More About Open Source Data Center Automation | Puppet Labs.
