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. Read more »
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!
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. Read more »
Seems like eons ago (just under 6 months..) when I joined Canonical, and hopped on a plane headed for Brussels and UDS-Maverick.
What a whirlwind, attending sessions, meeting the real rock stars of the Ubuntu world, and getting to know my super distributed team.
One of the sessions was based on a blueprint for load balancing in the cloud. The idea was that rather than rely on amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, you could build your own solution that you could possibly even move around between UEC, EC2, or even Rackspace clouds.
Read more »
So, this week, Drizzle released its beta, which is really exciting. But at the same time, I decided to ask the Ubuntu MOTU pull it out of Ubuntu 10.10 (a.k.a. maverick) entirely. The reasons, may not be entirely obvious.
Read more »
Time to give myself a little pat on the back.
Last week I sat down to work for a whole working day on “whatever I wanted to”, as part of the Canonical Server Team’s pilot “Fedex Day” program. Mathias Gug and I both looked at this idea from Dan Pink’s book “Drive” and thought it made sense to try it out.
Management approved, and we set about on a day of “work on one thing, make it go, and then show it off the following week”.
I was originally going to work on improving the search capabilities of the MoinMoin wiki software that we use at Canonical. But it turns out, somebody already did that by adding Xapian support, and so we really just need to backport that to whatever version of Ubuntu canonical’s servers run on.
So, I decided to tackle another issue that has been nagging at me. Read more »
Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS released | The Fridge.
This is pretty cool. I know as a system administrator, I never wanted to run .0 anything. So 10.04 is really like 10.04.0, and means “let somebodye lse find the bugs.”.
Well 10.04.1 means that the more conservative administrators can at least have a reasonable expectation that it will be even more stable than it was on release day in April.
If you’re already running Ubuntu servers, btw, check this out:
http://maps.ubuntu.com
Hit it and be counted as a server user. Pretty amazing how many little orange circles there are all over the world.
For those of you who’ve been telling me that my blog posts sound like “gleep ork boog florg”, a quick primer:
Ubuntu is an operating system, like Mac OS X or Windows (except more awesomer).
10.04 was their April, 2010 release (10 == 2010 04 == april).
LTS means Long Term Support. This means that the people who maintain Ubuntu will support this release for 3 – 5 years (depending on the context.. 3 for desktops, 5 for servers).
10.04.1 is a fixed up release, mainly marking the release of updated CD images for installing. If you install 10.04 and choose automatic updates, you’re already on 10.04.1 before the release.
If you love Ubuntu, and want to help out, join us for Ubuntu Bug Day tomorrow!
