Archive | MySQL

The open source database, often the default.

CentraLUG, 6-Dec-2010, David Berube, MySQL Operations

By Ted Roche on December 3, 2010 in LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

The December meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group will be held as usual in Room 146 of the NHTI Library – details and directions can be found at http://www.centralug.org – and will feature David Berube presenting “Real World Experience with Large MySQL Deployments”

David recently attend the Percona Operations Day training covering real world howto’s on big MySQL deployments and will share what he’s learned.

About David: David is a principal at Berube Consulting. David Berube is a software developer, consultant, speaker, and writer. He is constantly researching, perfecting, and practicing his trade. He is a prolific writer, appearing in places such as Dr Dobbs Journal, Linux Magazine, IBM DeveloperWorks, PHP International Magazine, and many others. He speaks frequently, notably including his seminar series, “Making Money Using Open Source Software”. He authored the books “Practical Rails Gems” and “Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails”, and co-authored the book “Practical Rails Plugins.” He is also a leader in the Open Source community. He was involved with the AmphetaDesk project, developing much of its Win32 GUI code.

Notes from CentraLUG, 4-Oct-2010: Patent Absurdity

By Ted Roche on October 6, 2010 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

Five people attended the October meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group, an affiliated chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. We met at the NHTI Library, Room 146.

We had an attendee with a tech support question we weren’t able to answer on the spot, but gave him some resources to pursue. He was plugging his camera into his Ubuntu machine, and he wanted to set the mount point to be a fixed mount point rather that something dynamically created by dbus. He made some changes, but wasn’t sure of exactly what he had changed, and the device no longer appears when he plugs it in. It does appear on other machines, Linux Mint and Windows, so the device is unlikely to be broken. No one present was sure where the settings might be stored for this. We suggested joining the gnhlug-discuss list as well as the support forums provided by Ubuntu Linux. I look forward to some of our experts helping our friend out.

I let folks know that I’ve reserved the room for November and December. After that, we’ll likely start meeting with the ManchLUG group, unless someone else wants to keep running meetings in Concord. We reviewed the GNHLUG wiki for upcoming meetings. Especially noted were the upcoming DLSLUG meeting “About Lisp -or- Lambda, the Ultimate Lecture, presented by Yoni Rabkin” and the New Hampshire High Tech Council‘s TechWorld 2010 conference ($25 – $210) coming up next Thursday and Friday. We discussed the idea that a nicer-looking forum software, like Drupal, would be nice to implement on the GNHLUG site, and talked about the past efforts to do that, and some of the challenged past projects have run into.

We mentioned that there’s a effort to create a community-driven site to support and distribute a new fork to OpenOffice.org named LibreOffice. Some of the other projects involved in the MySQL – Sun – Oracle mergers have been making interesting news as well.

Thanks to Dave Rose for providing the projector. We used a Live USB version of Fedora 14 beta which shipped last week and saw a pretty remarkable “It Just Works” effect: plugging in the running ThinkPad (a T61, 1680×1050, with an nVidia controller), the open source nouveau driver recognized the Sharp projector and automatically reconfigured the display (1400×1050) for side-by-side (“twinview”) layout with the internal screen. No xrandr, no rebooting of the machine! Wow. We brought up the Gnome display properties dialog and moved them around and finally settled on a mirrored display for the main presentation. This is a huge time saver and convenience for doing presentations!

Our main presentation was a viewing of the documentary, “Patent Absurdity, How software patents broke the system” and a discussion afterwards on what you can do (contact your Congress-person, contribute to organizations, etc.). Everyone learned something from the show, and perhaps from the discussion afterwards.

Thanks to all for attending to Dave for providing the projector, and to NHTI for providing the facilities!

HowTo notes: installing REE, Passenger, Ruby on Rails on CentOS5

By Ted Roche on May 20, 2010 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Recently, I installed Redmine, the Rails-based project tracker, on an existing virtual private server, running CentOS 5 Linux and an assortment of LAMP applications and web sites using Apache, PHP and MySQL. I chose Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE), an optimized and high-performance version of Ruby, and Passenger, an Apache module to connect to Ruby. Here are the steps I followed, as a reference and in hopes it might help others:

Log onto the box via ssh. As a good practice, I run as an unprivileged user, and use sudo only when superuser rights are needed. So, download the files and un-tar them and read the READMEs and run the processes as a regular user, switching to root via sudo only when the rights are needed.
Download and install Ruby Enterprise Edition. Today, that’s:
```
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68719/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01.tar.gz
```
but follow the instructions you’ll find at http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/download.html for the latest. Those instructions will have you un-tar the file and then run the installer.
Install the tools needed to build Ruby Enterprise Edition. If you run the installer, it will prompt you for missing tools. In my case, I needed to:
```
sudo yum install gcc-c++ make patch zlib-devel openssl-devel readline-devel
```
If you’ll be using mysql, you’ll need the native code to build the matching gem. REE attempts to build gems for MySQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL, so choose your flavor and issue the appropriate command like:
```
sudo yum install mysql-devel
```
or postgresql-devel or sqlite-devel as appropriate.
Follow the instructions supplied by the REE installer. They did a nice job on that. To install Passenger when I was done, some additional source code files were required:
```
sudo yum install httpd-devel apr-devel
```
```
sudo /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module
```
Once again, follow the prompts to add the proper load module and path commands to your web server configuration, add a configuration file for your site, and you’re ready to start installing your site’s code.

NOTE: It wasn’t the case with my particular host, but you may need to adjust your SELinux settings, if you’ve got SELinux enabled. See the post at http://www.catapult-creative.com/2009/02/04/installing-rails-on-centos-5/ and look for “SELinux” for some ideas.

Visibone, a source of great reference guides and online utilities

By Ted Roche on January 14, 2010 in CSS, Home Page, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, Technology, Web Development

One of my favorite tools for the past couple of years has been a web developer’s reference guide from Visibone. The book has rarely left my desk, within arm’s reach, to help out when I just can’t remember all the options for an HTML tag or a CSS style. While there are some great online references, having it all in a couple sheets of paper makes it easy to find what I’m looking for (especially if I couldn’t remember if it was text-something or font-mumble) and the reference has also let me browse around the dusty corners and learn something I didn’t know.

Recently, I did some web development using XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 and realized my 2004 version of the guide was getting out of date. I was pleased to see many of the pages had been updated to a 2009 version. After reviewing the many options, I chose to go all in and bought the Everything Book, a step up from my earlier version. This one includes cheatsheets for PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS, HTML special characters, web colors and a great index. The reference not only includes broad coverage of each topic but many side notes and compatibility guides (for CSS, the IE-Netscape-Opera-FireFox-Safari compatibility color coding is tremendously useful!)

There are a number of bonus references available on the Visibone site at no cost. Check out the color lab, the color swatches for many of the common graphics programs, the online color codes reference, and excerpts from all of the various reference materials. In addition to reference book, Visibone offers posters, charts and mouse pads. The web site is worth a visit; it’s charmingly quirky, retro, opinionated and clearly individualistic.

Notes from Python Special Interest Group, 20-Nov-2009

By Ted Roche on November 20, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, CSS, FoxPro, HTML, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, PostgreSQL, Python, Technology, Web Development

Eight people attended the Python Special Interest Group, held a week early to avoid the Thanksgiving holiday. Anticipate a reschedule December meeting as well.

Last night’s meeting was a vigorous and far-reaching discussion of MySQL, Oracle, the future of MySQL, Maria DB, OpenOffice.org automation using Python, OpenOffice.org automation using Visual FoxPro, Twisted, IE6, Zope, Plone, Django, MS SQL Server, pyodbc, SQLAlchemy, Cascading Style Sheets, IE6, FireFox and FireBug, User Agents, IE6, how not to insulate a bungalow roof, the (Python!) cssparse module (http://cthedot.de/cssutils/), Fortune’s selection of Steve Jobs as “CEO of the Decade”, Lenovo netbooks and Ubuntu, the Millennium, why calendar years are one-based and not zero-based, distributed version control systems, master-slave and master-master replication using MySQL and Postgres, svn and git, and more! Whew! You should have been there!

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, to all for attending and participating, and to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the great facilities!

Stay tuned for an announcement of the December meeting, and hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving!

This Thursday: Patrick Galbraith at MonadLUG

By Ted Roche on September 8, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Perl, Technology, Web Development

Who: Patrick Galbraith
What: Memcached and moxi
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2009
Time: 7:00PM
Where: SAU 1 Offices, 106 Hancock Rd., Peterborough

About the presentation:

Patrick will do a talk on memcached (http://memcached.org/), the moxi memcached proxy (https://code.google.com/p/moxi/) and about Northscale’s memcached AMIs for Amazon EC2 as well as using these with the memcached functions for MySQL (user-defined database functions) that he wrote. How you can use these for caching data to reduce the load on database servers.

About Patrick:

Patrick has been working with Linux since 1993. Some of his previous experiences have included working on Slashdot, Linux.com, Newsforge.com, launching Slashcode.com and Sourceforge Foundries, developing and maintaining DBD::mysql, mysqlslap development and more than I could possibly list here.

He is the author of “Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl” published by Wylie and Sons.

Notes from New Hampshire Ruby User Group, 25 June 2009: Pat Allen, Thinking Sphinx and Casey Rosenthal SASSiJS

By Ted Roche on June 27, 2009 in CSS, Home Page, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Twelve people attended the June meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails User Group , held on the 4th Thursday of the month ( we usually meet on the 3rd Thursday) at RMC Research in Portsmouth (Thanks to RMC and to John for hosting the meeting!)

Nick Plante was our master of ceremonies. As is the custom, we made a round of introductions to find out the most of the folks were “from away.”

Pat Allen put on the first presentation, on Thinking Sphinx. Thinking Sphinx is a Ruby library (not just for Rails) that allows Ruby applications to work with the Sphinx full-text search engine. Pat presented a slightly shortened version of the presentation he gave at RailsConf, and the presentation was clear, engaging and interesting. Participants had lots of questions to ask on search technology, word stemming, project status, what it’s like to be a Freelancing God, what being the lead on a popular Open Source project is like, what’s a kilometer, and more, and Pat’s answers were insightful. Check out (pun intended) the source on github, the support on Google Groups and Pat’s guide to using Thinking Sphinx on Peepcode.

Pat also took a moment out to plug his upcoming Rails Camp, a not-going-to-make-a-profit weekend get-together in BarCamp/Unconference format for 30-ish people at Bryant Pond, Maine. It sounds like a great event and a nice location and a price that can’t be beat: $120 for 3-nights, 3-days food, lodging and conference. Get details and consider signing up at http://railscamps.com/#ne_july_2009

Casey Rosenthal asked us, “What are style sheets for?” a number of times during his presentation, for good reason. Casey talked about SASS, Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, a part of HAML and his reimplementation of SASS in Javascript, SASSiJS, sounds like “sausages” leading to all kinds of predictable jokes. But the topic was thoughtful, intriguing, interesting, and controversial. SASSiJS actually allows a .sass file to be downloaded as part of the HTML file, with similar syntax to a stylesheet link, and a JavaScript file that interprets the .sass file into CSS and applies it to the HTML document. Discussion was far-ranging and insightful: “What’s this good for?” “Would designers use this to make their CSS DRY?” View the source on GitHub at http://github.com/clr/sassijs/tree/master.

Thanks to Pat and Casey for their great presentations, to Nick for organizing, and to John and RMC for the facilities.

Notes from PySIG, 28-May-2009

By Ted Roche on May 29, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, PostgreSQL, Python, Technology, Web Development

It was a dark and stormy night. Nonetheless, six members made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester.

We had an Open Mike Night format, a round-table discussion where everyone shared what they were working on.

I plugged upcoming meetings, available as always at http://gnhlug.org — MonadLUG in particular, is to be praised for posting 4 months worth of meetings in advance.

Mark has a client who’s weaning off a proprietary OS and looking for a replacement document management system / word processing system, and is considering LyX, which is a front end to LaTeX and has numerous utility scripts written in Python. Mark asked for suggestions for additional resources and the two Bills were able to come up with some ideas.

Arc talked about some wireless technologies he’s researching (neat stuff!). Arc also reported the Gaming SIG is coming along nicely: 5 people at the first meeting, 10 at the second. Details at gnhlug.org . Hoping to schedule a FPS (First Person Shooter) night soon. Coming up next Friday June 5th, the SIG will take a look at the awesome audio utility, Audacity, as it relates to gaming, and then engage in the Battle for Wesnoth. Gaming SIG meets at the Brady Sullivan building in the DynInc offices on the fifth floor – see http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/GamingSIG.

Shawn O’Shea completed a course in Network Design and Planning at UMass Lowell (and got an ‘A’, congrats!) and showed us his lab work, written in Python! He very bravely showed us his code and we talked about some of his algorithms and looked at a couple of the modules he used, including optparse, netaddr and cmd.

Bill Freeman reported he’d been working in Plone and Python 2.4 and missed some of the features available in later versions. He created some code to address the worst of the deficiencies, and hopes to be able to release it freely soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the fine facilities, to Arc for bailing us out with an extension cord, to Janet for the awesome (!) cookies, and to all for attending and participating!

CentraLUG Notes, 4-May-2009, Cole Tuininga on MySQL Optimization

By Ted Roche on May 28, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

Sixteen people attended the May meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group. Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for the use of their meeting room and projector!

Announcements:

David Marston, SwaNH Dinner, May 14th
Maddog: working with Koolu on Freerunner-based phone, running “Cupcake,” the version 1.5 of the Google Android phone OS. See http://www.engadgetmobile.com/tag/koolu/ and
Me: watch gnhlug.org for future meeting announcements

Cole works for Dyn Inc, the parent company to DynDNS and the other Dynamic companies. Cole Tuininga presented tips and tricks on optimizing the performance of MySQL in high-traffic, large-dataset situations. He talked about the selection process Dyn, Inc went through to select databases and the large scale processes they have automated at Dyn. You can find the slides on the GNHLUG site at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MySQLOptimization.

By the way, seven of us made it to Panera Bread before the meeting for a breaking of the bread. I hope to make this a regular extension to the regular meetings.

Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for providing the facilities, to Cole for the presentation, to all for participating!

June meeting *Might* be next week, or we may have to reschedule — securing a location has proven to be a problem. Stay tuned.

Notes from MonadLUG, 14-May-2009, Tim Wessels and Kablink

By Ted Roche on May 27, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

Five people attended the May meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group. Thanks to Charlie for scrambling at the last minute to secure the Peterborough Town Library for the meeting, as our regular venue was unavailable. Charlie made the iniital announcements – Ed Lawson presents Scribus in June, Charlie will show OpenBSD in July, no August meeting, and Patrick Galbraith returns for another (not-to-be-missed) meeting on MySQL in September.

Tim Wessels did the main presentation of the evening. Kablink is the Open Source version of Novell’s Teaming product, bought from SiteScape, Inc., a company that started in Clock Tower Place in Maynard, MA. The Open Source version had been known as ICECore previously. Source code can be downloaded from http://www.kablink.org and sourceforge. Tim discussed some of the history of the project, where and how it is being used, possible ways to configure it for workgroup and corporate enterprise use. and reviewed some of the challenges and tricks to installation and configuration. If you’re looking for an Open Source competitor to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, with the ability to create portals, finely-control roles and access, and scale to thousands of documents, Kablink is worth investigating.

Thanks to Tim for the presentation, Charlie for running the meeting, and all for attending!

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