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Open Sourcery
: Open Source BlogOne Year and 100 Million Downloads Later, Firefox
SpreadFirefox.com have a gallery of screenshots up to celebrate Firefox’s first birthday.
In its first year of official release it has enjoyed more than 100 million downloads (check out the celebratory photo gallery) and is now tipped to have reached 10% market share (see Asa Dotzler’s excellent blog).
One year after releasing 1.0, version 1.5 is just around the corner, with the second release candidate build available for download now. I have been following the patches and submitting bugs for a year now, and am very proud that some bugs I reported have been fixed in the upcoming version. Submitting bug reports to the Mozilla crew has been an impressively positive and rewarding experience, due to its supportive community and team of developers and patchers.
One of the most exciting, to me, updates in Firefox 1.5 will be its incremental updates system. Updates can be downloaded automatically in the background, and installed the next time the browser restarts. What’s more, the updates are incremental - no more downloading the entire 6 MB each time a minor update is released.
If you decide to go download and install a release candidate build …
MySQL 5.0 stable release
MySQL 5 is out. This stable release is now recommended for production use, so if your installation of MySQL 4.1 is getting dusty (or worse yet, if you’re still on 4.0), now might be the time to look at updating your installation.
This release of MySQL effectively brings it to feature parity with enterprise databases like MS SQL Server and Oracle, with many new, long-awaited features:
Stored Procedures and SQL Functions
Embed a portion of your application’s business logic directly into your database to improve performance of frequently-needed data manipulaton operations.
Triggers
Further offload business logic from your application. Respond to changes in your database by executing custom operations in response to events like row insertions, deletions, updates.
Views
Define particular table columns or joins that are accessible to certain users without granting them full access to sensitive data in the relevant tables.
Cursors
The database can keep track of your application’s current position in a large result set, so that you don’t need to cache such large result sets in your application.
Information Schema
Access information about your database tables through the virtual information_schema database.
XA Distributed Transactions
Perform transactions (multi-step operations that must succeed completely or not happen at all) across multiple database servers, or even non-database systems.
SQL Mode
Switch modes …
Zimbra: Gmail and Exchange meet Open Source, Java and AJAX
Zimbra is either the coolest thing I’ve seen this month, or too good to be true. I haven’t decided which yet.
Previously known as Liquid Systems, Zimbra is the new name of the company, as well as its flagship product: an extensible open-source client/server system for managing email, contacts, and calendaring that can be accessed with either a slick, cross-browser, AJAX-powered user interface, or via desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, and others.
The server that powers all this, Zimbra Collaboration Server, is written in Java, and sits upon familiar open source components like a MySQL database, a Postfix Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) (with SpamAssassin and ClamAV for anti-spam and anti-virus by default) and a Tomcat Web Application Server.
Although the services provided by Zimbra (mail, contacts, and calendaring) are all accessible with desktop applications (see above) via the open standards that exist for these things, Zimbra also provides its own cross-browser, AJAX-laden, Web-based user interface. This UI supports many of Zimbra’s “extra” features, such as message tagging, unified search, email rendering plug-ins (e.g. linking your company’s invoice numbers to your order tracking system when they appear in email messages, or integrating services …
Software Freedom Day - September 10
Software Freedom Day is this Saturday, with events around the globe. The event hopes to promote the value to be found in the use of open source and free software.
Some press reports suggest much of the activity will occur in and around Asia with less exposure in Europe and the Americas. Of course, open source fever has caught on seemingly more widespread in Asia and Australia - however - there are no shortage of FOSS adopters elsewhere with events slated for the weekend.
The concept surely helps newcomers of all stripes as there is a focus on several levels:
- Personal users
- Small and medium business
- and the corporate enterprise
The teams are encourage to hold workshops and labs with hands on access to open source platforms as well as growing the unique social ‘community’ bond found in the open source sphere.
MySQL Archive Engine - Data Retention
I have spent the majority of my technology years in and around financial services dealing with issues of data security, retention, archiving and reporting. Though the finance sector is considered heavily regulated, so are other industries, such as health care and government.
Commercial database solutions have had a leg up on MySQL for some time in this area - however - MySQL is now joining the fray with tools to help anyone responsible for dealing with the sticky issues of data management.
The archive engine is as relevant for smaller web solutions as it is for the enterprise as it simplifies the DBA work involved in offloading data into an environment that limits interaction with data without sacrificing reporting capabilities.
Probably the single biggest difference from the existing compression features in MySQL is that one no longer needs to take a db offline to carryout exercises on data. Additionally, one can continue to insert data into archives, which is not feasible in existing MyISAM compressions.
SUSE 10 Coming Soon from Novell/OpenSUSE
Coming late in October, open source users will be sure to find SUSE 10 much more in tune with the needs of Linux desktop power users. I particularly like the inclusion of the Mozilla browser and email suite of Firefox/Thunderbird and some much needed graphics tools.
This release is a step forward for Novell into the open source community as many of the contributions of improvements and bug fixes have been driven through OpenSUSE.org. Some highlights of included applications are evolving in a list at the site.
For those who are seeking to have a complete desktop that includes support for their development efforts as well as overall organization and usage will find this closer to its Windows or Apple OS counterparts. This includes the latest greatest of Gnome and KDE desktops, OpenOffice, the aforementioned Mozilla tools, the popular GAIM multi-protocol chat tool, Scribus for desktop publishing, digiKam for photo management and editing as well as the traditional batch of web development tools.
Bonus prizes include improved wifi drivers, cd/dvd burning support and Subversion.
I have interacted with SUSE since its version 7 release and am looking forward to a gold release of 10. As always, the bold can grab …
Maturing Development and Management Tools
The growing mainstream adoption of open source has spawned a number of more serious conversations over the last several years about business models. Particularly, what will work for creating successful companies and real dollars while adhering to an open source philosophy.
In the past five years, the arguments against taking open source seriously have largely been silenced as applications have been proven in production in some of the largest environments in the world (science, retail, government, etc..).
Open Sourcery has several threads that have explored the intersection of commercial software and open source, and by now most professionals are comfortable with the idea that one can profit by supporting and otherwise working in that crossroads.
This has also been a space to highlight commercial products built to service open source applications or stacks (bundles of apps like Apache/PHP/MySQL). A timely article from Computerworld (a frequent source along with eWeek that frequently profile the growth and high performance capabilities of open source, databases especially) shows the further penetration and acceptance of the most visible databases in the space - including MySQL and PostgreSQL.
It seems coincidental - however - two new management tools for working with these popular database solutions have emerged as …
Microsoft’s Linux Lab?
ZDNetAsia ran an interesting article earlier this month that reflects a somewhat more mature view of open source internally at Microsoft.
It is obvious that a scorched earth policy on open source will not work for Microsoft, as they have discovered after previous attempts at using inflammatory remarks to debase Linux. Thus the company has started building an internal sandbox within which to explore Unix variants from Linux to Solaris to Apple’s OS X. The Windows maker is using Bill Hilf, a lifelong Unix/Linux expert to manage a lab that provides under the hood access to the competing OS.
I find it fascinating the trials and tribulations of setting up the lab - which Hilf reveals in the piece. It also suggests possible positive results of the exercise - that possible improvements to open source applications might be contributed from Microsoft’s Linux Lab and that Microsoft may be able and willing to improve how its systems interact with competing operating systems. This would be a necessary evil for them as many large Microsoft customers largely also run Unix variants side by side with Windows boxes.
Hilf may also be one of the drivers behind the company’s recent outreach …
Shell Scripting Recipes
The command line is many things to many people. Some users run in horror, preferring a GUI for point and click administration. Others will not work anywhere but in the warm glow of the Bash Shell.
I live in both worlds, having found wonderful system administration solutions in the open source world, my favorite being Webmin. However, I continually return the the command shell for many of my tasks and scripting needs. This has become even more convenient in my case using Mac OS X as my OS, having the benefit of a world-class GUI and the underlying BSD Unix tools.
For some time I have considered myself quite adept on the command line. That was until Chris Johnson’s Shell Scripting Recipes (Apress) landed on my desk. Johnson was introduced to Unix and the shell in 1990, 5 years before I had that pleasure and has surely become a master.
Taking a step back - many of us who manage servers will use the shell for SFTP or SSH sessions, managing applications such as MySQL, mail servers, web servers and so on. Additionally, we frequently will write some useful scripts for exercises such as backing up …
Use Stunnel to Secure POP, IMAP and SMTP
I have been toying with running secure pop and smtp email of late for a few roaming users as well as myself. It has been quite simple to setup running on Postfix and largely moves toward securing the transaction of checking email (other than from a man in the middle attacks, somewhat unlikely).
The beauty is leveraging Stunnel - which allows one to configure your preferred mail server as you wish and simply intercept your secure ports (for example Port 995 for POP3s and 465 for SMTP). This may not be the way to tacke it for the large scale as one can build secure configurations into the mail server - though it has worked nicely on a small scale for me during testing.
A bonus to use of Stunnel is its indifference to what mail server one is running - and its sole dependence fortunately is on OpenSSL - which most of us have by default on our boxes.
Stunnel has a straightforward Man doc and some simple examples that will enable you to test quickly. Obviously insure your mail client handles SSL connections - fairly universal at this point.
I also had a bit of a dated HowTo in …
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