Some thoughts on VirtualBox 2.0….

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I like it.

UI looks more polished (maybe QT4 renders nicer on my Ubuntu GNOME based desktop… but it certainly looks more like the rest of my apps).

Possibly a bit faster?

64bit guests – WIN!

Shared Folders still cause the XP guest to panic if i try to do anything non-trivial (e.g. build, run cmake). I still use Samba on host to share with guest – which works okay, but isn’t super-happy-fun-time fast.

Seemless mode is a bit nicer, the Windows task bar sits above the GNOME task bar, making it a lot easier to interact. It’s not perfect yet, you can still get some real visual oddities, but it’s pretty sweet.

When just using normal, in window, it can cause X to use a bit much CPU, which goes away when the VirtualBox window is minimised – leading to faster compiles in guest.

Having a guest running (in this case Windows XP) does cause a lot more CPU wakeups – draining battery life.

I wish the snapshots showed how large they were, it’s currently kinda guesswork to work out how much disk space a snapshot is using.

MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 – CFP open

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Is it that time already? MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 has opened the CFP.

Submit (well) early and often. It’s always an exciting (and exhausting) conf. Good technical, relevant content is what makes it good. Getting to talk to people who do amazing things, people who use your software, people looking to use it, people who want to chat about how you can learn off each other.

Any suggestions for what you’d like to hear from me (Cluster, Drizzle et al) are welcome – either via private mail or comments here.

OpenOffice.org 3 dev release

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So after seeing Paul Fenwick rave about the presenter screen for OO 3, I decided to grab the debs and give it a go.

It still is very slow opening large presentations (i.e. mine), but it does look nicer at least… well… at least some of the widgets do.

Will report back when I’ve had a bit more time to fiddle with it.

the power dongles come to ruin our way of life

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I recently moved.

I found enough of the power supplies for USB disk enclosures to power on the most crucial disks (read: the ones attached to mythtv).

However, I have a disk I use for offsite backups. I need to find the dongle for it. Can I find it? No, of course not. I’m user it’s one of these 5 boxes of misc office crap (including *lots* of cables).

Why can’t we just have a standard USB disk enclosure power cable?

Please, pretty please.

when the problem is likely a bug in the linker…

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Windows FAIL.

It has been suggested the current thing I’m trying to fix is actually a bug in the Microsoft linker…. and I’m quite willing to believe that.

I wonder if I can expense rehab if this Windows port leads to a drinking problem….

Building MySQL Cluster on Windows (for Windows)

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You will need:

  • CMake (at least 2.4.7)
  • Bazaar (the newer the better – 1.6 was just released – at least use that)
  • Gnu Bison
  • Visual Studio (Express works, but I’m talking about 2005 here)
  • … and all this installed on a Microsoft Windows machine.
  • … and to hate yourself, you are going to be using Windows after all.

Then, get and build it:

  1. Get the source:
    bzr branch lp:~mysql/mysql-server/mysql-5.1-telco-6.4-win
  2. Run CMake. the CMake GUI can now be used to select compile options! You’ll have to set the path “where is the source code” to where you put the source code in step 1.
  3. Hit “Configure” in CMake
  4. Select the target (i.e. the version of Visual Studio you’re going to use)
  5. Select the build options. HINT: WITH_NDBCLUSTER_STORAGE_ENGINE may be a useful one to enable
  6. Hit Configure again
  7. Hit Ok.
  8. CMAKE now generates the Visual Studio project. Use this time to drink some good scotch.
  9. Open Mysql.sln (which should launch Visual Studio)
  10. Go Build -> Build Solution (or hit F7)

Now you can go and have much whisky as this will take a few minutes. You should now have a set of built binaries for MySQL Cluster on Windows. Scary.

rather appropriate xkcd (internet connectivity)

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xkcd

yeah, one about internet in new apartment. really feeling that at the moment… except it’s a house, not apartment.

Bought an Unwired prepaid thing today… just to tide me over for the 5-7 working days (at least) before they (being Telstra) actually get my phone line working (and then DSL can get connected).

gah, gah gah.

ndb_mgm.exe builds (and works) in mysql-5.1-telco-6.4-win

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“MySQL Cluster 6.4 Windows tree” branch in Launchpad

(which really should have the -fail suffix… but anyway)

In what will (soon) be mirrored to launchpad, all but 17 targets (yeah, working on that… but it’s out of 130 or something) build.

Not only that, I’ve used the management client (ndb_mgm.exe) to monitor the cluster running my Bugzilla instance (which is now a rather old 6.3 build).

Getting closer to NDB on Windows.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

“MySQL Cluster 6.4 Windows tree” branch in Launchpad

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“MySQL Cluster 6.4 Windows tree” branch in Launchpad

That’s right folks, I’m pushing up patches for MySQL Cluster on Windows. This tree is incomplete, and no promises on when enough will be pushed for it to even compile on Windows.

Tree is updated when launchpad pulls from our internal tree.

Settlement done

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Jut got a phone call letting me know that settlement has all gone through. I now own[1] a house.

[1] where “own” is really “owe a lot of money on”

Chandler Project goes 1.0

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Chandler Project.

I’m really excited about this… it may cure my addiction/hatred of Evolution (at least for task management).

linux.conf.au paper review

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<sarcasm>Because I had nothing else on this month.</sarcasm> I’m currently reviewing linux.conf.au papers. This is fun, brutal and hard.

For those of you who submitted: never be disheartened by not having it accepted: there are so many good papers for linux.conf.au we could probably hold two conferences and they’d both be excellent.

We do, however, only have one conference – so good papers get left out.

P.S. since I just bought a house the only forms of bribes currently being accepted are large contributions towards my mortgage.

P.P.S. smaller contributions probably accepted too.

P.P.P.S. I’m not the only reviewer you need to bribe… but if you’ve got a spare few hundred thousand dollars, you probably have enough to bribe enough.

Australians get ripped off on online music purchases.

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If you read about the iTunes Music store in the US, you’ll find out that tracks are 99c USD each. This is about 1.14AUD.

If you read about the iTunes Music Store in Australia, you’ll find out that tracks here are $1.69AUD.

So why do we get a 50% markup simply for living in Australia?

Oh, and the telstra store is the same price (1.69).

Firefox on OpenSolaris fixed (and installed bzr)

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Thanks to Glynn for pointing me to the right thread on opensolaris.org (in a comment on my Good adventures with OpenSolaris post). The package verification thingy (pkg verify -v -f SUNWfirefox) did actually throw an error (indicating some sort of problem). So that’s pretty neat. The fact that it got into trouble in the first place isn’t good, but corruption detection is the next best thing.

I still occationally hit the bug in VirtualBox where if you have 127.0.0.1 in your resolv.conf on your host (e.g. running a local caching nameserver), VirtualBox passes this through to the guest, so the guest tries to use the guest 127.0.0.1 as a nameserver – this usually doesn’t work so well.

The good news is, Firefox now works in my OpenSolaris VM.

The bad news is that even though I’ve gone and set my keyboard layout as DVORAK (with the Input Method Switcher applet), whath should be ctrl-l (for location bar) in Firefox, actually brings up the Print dialog (on DVORAK, L is where P is on QWERTY).

But, I’ve managed to download bazaar now, and the install was simple (just follow INSTALL in the bzr tarball). At some point I’ll badger someone to make an OpenSolaris package for it so you could do “pkg install bzr”, but you can’t do that yet.

The next challenge will be to branch repositories from the host onto a temp drive, build and test.

Good adventures with OpenSolaris

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First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).

I recently tried again – this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.

Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:

su

pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).

The “pkg image-update” went as expected, and I’m now running build 94.

I installed SunStudio Express (compilers) pretty easily – “pkg install sunstudio”. Unfortunately, this is all in /opt/SunStudioExpress and not in $PATH, which would have been much more useful. I guess there’s still a bit to go before usability nirvana. Also, no .desktop entries, so have to explicitly run /opt/SunStudioExpress/bin/sunstudio to get the NetBeans gui. Presumably if i add /opt/SunStudioExpress/bin to PATH, building random software packages will be nicer.

So, I then want bzr so i can pull source repositories. Monty Taylor informs me that the magic packages you want are: SUNWgcc, gcc-dv and SUNWtoo. Then you can build bzr as downloaded from the website. Installed these easily.

However, now trying to get the bzr source:
$ firefox
ld.so.1: firefox-bin: fatal: /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so: corrupt or truncated file

and then symbol kPStaticModules: referenced symbol not found.

So maybe I shouldn’t have upgraded to build 94…..

But certainly in much better shape than the may release, but be warned, it’s still a work-in-progress and some things may sporadically not work from time to time (e.g. like firefox and now).

Hopefully, some time soon I’ll get a MySQL build (well… really I want MySQL Cluster, and later drizzle) going and will really be able to hammer these things with dtrace.

On Non-Dairy Creamer (now with added dairy)

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Paul notices the “non-dairy Creamer” thing that the US seems to have some kind of if not love affair, hidden addiction to. What’s almost worse than the non-dairy creamer actually containing dairy is that in my experience, sometimes airlines (and others) believe this is somehow Vegan.

jetlag fail is starting…

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stayed awake, good lunch. even been spending afternoon sending paperwork for bank for home loan (requiring lots of it now.. is just the way it is now). but now it’s starting to hit me (the jetlag thing). feeling tired, a bit hungry, not wanting to move enough to make food (or rather going out to get food to then make food). so now feeling down, everything sucks and cold and hungry. I miss the summer time of Portland. no doubt feel better in morning, but the few hours of going “need to stay awake or tz fucked”… gah. i hate the first day back from travel.

OSCON

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Arrived okay – long travel, but in one piece. Staying at the doubletree.

MySQL Online Backup with Encryption Preview Release

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Head on over to the OnlineBackup – MySQL Forge Wiki and your able to get a built preview release with Encryption support. I welcome and encourage feedback!OnlineBackup – MySQL Forge Wiki

Offer accepted!

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I just got notice that an offer I made on a property was accepted. Yay! Going to have a house now!