Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Open Source
Open Sourcery
: Open Source BlogSun Buys MySQL For $1 Billion
Reprinted from the Tech Times #182.
Open source enthusiasts were reeling this week when Sun Microsystems announced that it will be purchasing MySQL AB, the company behind the development of the popular MySQL database software, for US $1 billion.
The spin from both camps was positive, but what does the deal mean for web developers? And what impact is it likely to have on other open source projects?
To attempt to answer these questions, we need to look at a number of factors, including Sun’s history with open source technologies, its competitors, and the success of other open source technologies that have been commercialized.
While it’s not without its detractors, there’s no denying that Sun has a pretty solid history when it comes to involvement in the open source world. The company claims to be the biggest contributor to the open source community, a claim that, based upon its release of the Solaris source code in 2005, and the Java programming language in 2006, is difficult to refute.
But there is other evidence of Sun understanding the value of keeping software open source and free: projects like OpenOffice.org and NetBeans have healthy communities and promising road maps. In fact, if you examine …
OSCON 2007: People Hacks
Adam Keys is a software developer and writer. His blog is at therealadam.com.
In this talk, Adam presented a number of methods for effective advocacy and for getting along with other developers. In other words, interacting with people is as important as interacting with hardware or software. Problems in this sphere have no technical solution — they require a social one. Thus, the idea of ‘people hacking.’
People hacking is not rooted in nefarious black-hat hacking, but simply in using tools of social jujutsu (sometimes on yourself, even) to gain traction for ideas you’re trying to advocate. Paying more attention to the people side of things can help you build the kind of integrated, smoothly functioning team capable of executing (to borrow a basketball metaphor) the “no-look pass.”
A few sample ideas included:
- Simply smiling — makes yourself and people around you feel more positive
- Avoid negativity — try the ABBA Method (see the slides for details)
- Avoid criticism
- Compliment before criticizing
Some ideas followed about how to deal with jerks in your organization, including the simple-but-effective “No Asshole Rule” (from the book of the same name) that encourages a zero-tolerance toward asshole behavior in your group — even from so-called superstar programmers.
Adam also encouraged a little self-evaluation …
OSCON 2007: Managing Technical Debt
Andy Lester is with the Perl Foundation, and maintains a blog at petdance.com.
Andy’s talk gave practical advice for catching up on all the tasks you put off until some later date (that inevitably never comes) — stuff like postponed docs, fixing broken tests (or just writing tests at all), backup regimes, TODOs in your code, etc.
He had a very simple and straightforward formula:
- Identify your debts
- Determine the costs
- Pay the most profitable
- Stop incurring new debt
- Repeat as necessary
The most important takeaway for me was the idea that you don’t try to fix all your problems at once. You figure out what fix will give you the most bang for your buck — not the easiest thing to fix, not the biggest problem. You fix whatever it’s the most profitable to fix.
There was also a lot of good discussion during this talk on how to convince a manager to allow you to begin reducing technical debt with things like refactoring, increasing test coverage, adding documentation, or actually testing your disaster-recovery plan. The best advice was the idea of putting it in terms that the manager can understand (often with a manager either in money or time).
For example, if managers know that investing two …
OSCON 2007: The Holistic Programmer
Adam Keys is a software developer and writer. His blog is at therealadam.com.
The days of one guy putting together all the hardware and software together by himself in his garage are long gone — working with computers increasingly means doing something very specialized in one of the layers between the hardware and the end-user.
Adam made a good case for the idea that despite this specialization people working with computers should develop at least a passing familiarity with the layers other than their own — e.g., a guy working in the database learning typography, and a Web designer learning about compilers.
Many developers may not have the interest (or the discipline) to spend time learning about subjects so far removed from their little piece of the pie, but a couple of the benefits to doing so that Adam described seemed pretty compelling:
- The ability to converse with the people you work with and understand better how your work interfaces with theirs.
- Gaining a new perspective that allows you to find unexpected or creative solutions to problems in your own domain.
Adam spent the end of his talk going over the two example layers just mentioned — CSS/layout/typography, and compilers. That might not have been …
Open Source Image Archiving: Exif, IPTC, XMP and all that
Related to this hack started taking a serious look at the available standards and Open Source tools for adding meta data to images, in the context of building archives of digital photography. With further prompting from reading this (Hey! MS are adopting someone else’s standard!), dumping some notes…
Photo Archiving: The Golden Rule
Store metadata in the image.
Actually should be more precise about the word metadata here - there are essentially three significant types of metadata when in comes to digital images, when it comes to who created it and where it’s stored.
First; the stuff your digital camera attaches to the image when you take a picture (e.g. camera make, time the picture was taken, exposure etc.), second; meta data you manually add to an image, typically at the time you download images from the camera to your PC (e.g. where the picture was taken, a description, keywords, name of the photographer etc.) and third; “grouping metadata” - how a collection of images relate to each other (e.g. they were all part of a single photo shoot or they are all family pictures). For the purposes of this discussion, the first two types of metadata can be regarded as a the same …
OSCON 2006: TimeTravel Tables in PostgreSQL
A. Elein Mustain is a veteran developer of Ingres, Illustra, and Informix, and is the author of the weekly PostgreSQL General Bits column.
Elein showed how to use timestamps to keep an audit trail of all changes in your DB. With this technique, you never actually delete records, you just give them an end date. Multiple copies of a record (again, with timestamps for each one) also allow you to track edits. (This is a pretty standard approach, especially in ‘validated’ environments, or in government-regulated industries.)
The value of using Postgres here is in the advanced features like triggers that you can use with your deletes and updates to offload the work needed to maintain this ‘time travel’ system — rather than forcing your app logic to keep up with all of it.
You can also use PostgreSQL’s views to query the database for only the current data, or write procedural functions to query the state of the database at a particular point in time in the past.
Elein has her slides available online here.
OSCON 2006: Big Bad PostgreSQL
Theo Schlossnagle is a principal at OmniTI Computer Consulting, working in the areas of scalable internet architectures, database replication, and e-mail infrastructure.
This talk was on converting a really large (over 3 terabytes, largest table is 1.8 billion rows) data warehouse database from Oracle 8i to PostgreSQL. The reason for the conversion was to save in licensing costs. They wanted to move their Oracle licenses over from the data warehouse DB to use them on the online transaction processing (OLTP) system.
The reason for choosing Postgres over MySQL was that Postgres has a much longer history with the kind of advanced features he needed. They needed (and were able to hack PostgreSQL to get) the following features:
1. Data partitioning (spreading tables over multiple drives)
2. Large selects (50-million-row return sets, over 100GB of data)
2. Incremental COMMITs for really, really long queries
3. Replication
The bottom line was that with some patience and creating thinking, they were able to migrate a really humongous database to PostgreSQL from Oracle, and ended up saving themselves $500,000 USD in licensing costs. A pretty good chunk of change.
Theo has put his slides up here.
Track Your Hacks with CVS
The following is republished from the Tech Times #130.
Quite by coincidence, three times in the past week I have had to hack the code of some open source software that went into the site I was working on. First I had to modify phpBB to include an embedded calendar on the home page of a private forum I administer. Next I made some custom tweaks to the code of the K2 theme for Wordpress. Finally, I had to hack phpAdsNew to produce XHTML Strict output.
In each case, the hack required me to actually modify the code of the software. Obviously I prefer not to do this, because when the next release comes along the updated files will overwrite my hacks, and I’ll need to implement them all over again.
Normally I’d just document my hacks someplace and grumble about the lack of customization features in the software, but three times in a week was too much. Let me show you how I solved the problem using a common development tool in an unconventional way!
CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is a system for tracking changes made to files in a project over time, potentially by multiple developers, each working on his or her …
OSDC 2005 Wrap Up
The second Open Source Developer’s Conference, held in Melbourne this week, can be most simply described as a massive geek-fest.
It’s probably unfair to compare it to the Web Essentials conference that I attended earlier this year, because OSDC is - in the organizers’ words - “created by developers, for developers” whereas Web Essentials has less of a grass-roots base.
But I’m going to make the comparison anyway, as I think it does provide a useful measuring stick. As far as I could tell, OSDC differed from Web Essentials in five aspects:
- speakers were not paid. This meant that the presentations varied wildly in terms of quality and relevance. There were a number of excellent presentations that appealed to the entire audience, but there were also quite a few talks that were amateurish and about completely obscure topics that would only interest a handful of people.
- presentations were much shorter. Apart from a 60-minute keynote presentation at the beginning and end of each day, all talks were only half an hour long. The more experienced speakers made good use of this limited time, but for some speakers it resulted in their 73 slides being whizzed through far too quickly for anyone to digest.
- the variety …
Things to Do With Firefox 1.5
Firefox 1.5 is here, and available for all to download and use.
Many of you no doubt have tried out the Beta and Release Candidate builds. Here’s a list of things to do and see with Firefox 1.5.
- Use the back and forward buttons to see the dramatic increase in rendering speed resulting from Firefox’s new “fastback” cache.
- If you installed one of the Beta or Release Candidate versions, you could wait until Firefox updates itself using its new incremental update system.
- When tabbed browsing, grab the tabs with your mouse and drag them to the order you want.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+Delete to bring up the “Clear Private Data” window to clear private data such as history, cache and cookies.
- Go to websitedoesnt-exist.com to check out the new, non-obtrusive error messages.
- Check out “Help > Report Broken Website” to see how easy it is to report a Website that doesn’t work in Firefox.
- Install Firefox on your Mac and see how easy it is to migrate your profile information from Safari.
If you’re still itching to get involved with Firefox, you could consider the following:
- Get your Webcam ready and head on down to SpreadFirefox to take part in some sort of celebration.
- Catch up with Firefox related news at MozillaZine, …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
SitePoint Kits
Download sample chapters of any of our popular kits.
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, 2.0
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0
The Email Marketing Kit
The Usability Kit
SitePoint Books
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.