world gone mad

If, like me, your eyes were opened to the power of SQL by Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, or even if they weren't, Beat Vontobel is a great speaker to hear. I use SQL every day, and I think I could use a talk like this every 6 months to remind me of the power of SQL as a declarative programming language.

With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

I've heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, and finally had occasion to try to use it. This tutorial was very well laid out, and entirely true - maybe a half dozen commands and a couple dozen lines of code later, there was a nice set of "scaffolds" for browsing & editing my data model.

It didn't "guess" my data model, but I prefer to tell a framework how to handle relationships. Telling rails was as simple as adding a handfull of commands like "has_one :parent", "belongs_to :category". And then you get drop-downs for foreign key values and column sorting virtually free.

I'm a GNOME user, but on my brother's suggestion I tried Amarok a month or so ago, and never looked back. I've used most of the popular music players for linux as well as iTunes & WMP, and I'd actually call Amarok the best on any platform. It's not even close.

One really nice feature is the database integration. I think every application should have this option, and not just because I work for a database company. Amarok can keep all its information in a MySQL database, and that includes the song lyrics it pulls down from the web.

At last night's New York MySQL Meetup we had a great presentation on the new stuff in RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 from Goutham Kandiar (from RH's NY office down the block). The highlight was when he moved a running MySQL server from one laptop to another.

Now, I'm a Sales Engineer, so I can appreciate good dog & pony shows. I can really appreciate the difficulty of making a dog or pony of a database. So this was quite a treat.

It turns out all you need is some reasonably modern hardware (they had Lenovo T60s with on-chip virtualization) and xen. You can use older hardware, but you'll have to modify your kernel (which limits you to OSes where that is a possibility). Goutham had a gigabit switch, making the 256M image move over in ~4 seconds, but he told me that an ad-hoc 802.11g network would still do the trick in about half a minute.