Lenz Grimmer's blog (Entries tagged as writings)

What have I been up to lately?

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:51:00 +0200

Despite my best intentions, I haven't posted on this blog for a while, which is a shame! I've become busy writing on so many other places since I moved into my new role in the Oracle Linux product management team in April. I've learned a lot and I am feeling quite at home here! The team is excellent and very nice to work with — I am slowly getting the "Big Picture".

But even though I've been neglecting this blog, there are a lot of things that are publicly visible and document some of my activites:

I've created two podcasts for the Oracle Linux podcasts:

In addition to working the @ORCL_Linux Twitter account and FaceBook page, I've been blogging on the Oracle Linux blog:

From time to time, I'm a guest blogger on the OTN Garage blog:

I also created new content and updated pages on the main Oracle web site and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

A new technical white paper about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
An article about How to Extract Files from an Oracle Linux RPM Package Without Installing the Package
Added a new page about our Oracle Linux support offering
Updated the OCFS2 product page
Updated the Oracle Linux technical information page.

I've been traveling a bit as well and attended a few conferences where I spoke about Oracle Linux (and MySQL):

MySQL High Availability at COLLABORATE 11, Orlando (FL), USA
An introduction to Oracle Linux at the HEPiX Spring 2011 Workshop, Darmstadt, Germany
What's new in MySQL 5.5 at LinuxTag 2011, Berlin Germany
Updates on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM at fisl12, Porto Alegre, Brazil

I probably forgot a few things in my reflection of the past few months, but these were some of the highlights.

Check out my followup blog post on what I'm up to in the coming weeks and months!

Back in Linux land

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:46:19 +0200

It's been a while since my last post on this blog; I definitely need to get back into the habit! One of the reasons for my radio silence was that I switched roles here at Oracle. After having been with the MySQL team for 9 years, I felt it was time for a change. Fortunately I did not have to look far – I'm now a member of the Oracle Linux product management team and I am having a lot of fun there.

However, I realized that while I was an active Linux user on the desktop, quite a lot has happened on the enterprise and data center side of things. Linux has really come a long way and I am glad to be back in this field, drinking from the firehose and learning a lot about recent developments and technologies. For me, this is kind of going "back to my roots", as I have been deeply involved with Linux at SuSE before I joined MySQL in 2002.

Anyway, I'm still alive and you can expect to hear more about Linux and less about MySQL from me on this blog in the future. I also started writing for the official Oracle Linux Blog as well as the OTN Garage blog – watch these spaces for future posts from me, too.

In addition to that, my travel schedule is also filling up again: at the end of this month I'll be speaking at the fisl12 conference in Brasil and Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco later this year. I also submitted talk proposals to the DOAG conference and the UKOUG conference. Looking forward to it!

Neu im Buchregal: "Open Source Projektmanagement"

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:56:14 +0200

Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!

Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:

Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.
Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.

Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.

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Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.

Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme

Some friendly advice for bootstrapping your OSS project

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:12:00 +0100

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

Continue reading "Some friendly advice for bootstrapping your OSS project"

Some new MySQL nuggets from blogs.sun.com and elsewhere

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:56:38 +0200

Thankfully my RSS reader has builtin-search capability, so I can quickly skim the full RSS feed from blogs.sun.com for keywords of interest. I found the following articles quite helpful:

Setting up MySQL Cluster using Solaris Zones by Hashamkha Pathan walks through the steps involved of setting up a virtual MySQL Cluster setup on a single Solaris instance (for evaluation purposes only - this is probably not the best idea for a productive HA environment)
Mixing SQL and shell commands in MySQL by Amit Saha explains how to write scripts that execute both SQL statements and unix shell commands using the MySQL command line client
Improving filesort performance in MySQL by Neelakanth Nadgir provides some background information about MySQL's filesort operation that is being performed when records have to be sorted using ORDER BY.
Ubuntu, PHP, NetBeans - part I by Petr Pisl is the first part of an article series that will explain how to develop PHP/MySQL applications using NetBeans on Ubuntu Linux. This part describes the basic installation of the required LAMP stack components.

If you are would like to learn more on how to develop on NetBeans with using a MySQL Server and how to create web apps that use MySQL as a backend, take a look at these two tutorials:

Over on the Novell Cool Solutions pages (which are powered by Drupal, by the way), I found this introduction on how to set up MySQL replication by Damian Myerscough. It walks you through the steps involved in setting up a classical master-slave replication setup.

Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:18:43 +0100

I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.

The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.

Continue reading "Book review: "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing)"

Interested in writing a book about the DB2 for i5/OS Storage Engine?

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:55:00 +0100

IBM plans a residency to write a Redbook about the IBM DB2 for i5/OS as a Database Engine for MySQL:

Seize this opportunity to be among the first, elite IBM System i professionals worldwide to gain hands-on and practical experience with the MySQL on i5/OS. Working alongside and exchanging knowledge with some of the top database experts in the System i, you will develop a competitive edge that will serve you well in successful service delivery to System i clients. MySQL is used extensively with opensource PHP applications. As our customers deploy PHP web applications, many of them are looking to run MySQL as well.

The residency will take place in Rochester, MN from April 21st to May 16th. This book is going to be a nice followup to the first Redbook titled "Discovering MySQL on IBM i5/OS", which was finished in December last year. If you are curious to learn how to install MySQL on this platform (or would like to prepare yourself for participating in this upcoming residency), you can get a PDF from there, too!

I initially wanted to attend this residency myself, as I have been involved in writing a Redbook before and really enjoyed the experience. However, recent changes forced me to retract my offer to volunteer. IBM covers the travel expenses and will take care of accomodation for the time of the residency. If you are interested and think you have the time and skills and you would like to expand your knowledge about MySQL on the i5/OS Platform, please contact me at firstname at MySQL dot com!

From Visions to Reality - an interview with David Axmark, Co-Founder of MySQL AB

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:58:13 +0200

I am happy to announce that my MySQL Dev Zone interview with David Axmark just went live - if you are curious to hear a few stories about how David and Monty started this whole thing more than 10 years ago, make sure to spend a few minutes and read it here!

Interview with Paul McCullagh, developer of the PrimeBase XT Storage Engine

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 15:10:18 +0200

Paul McCullagh works on a new pluggable transactional Storage Engine for MySQL, called PrimeBase XT. I met him for an interview a few days ago - you can now read it on the MySQL Developer Zone. Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

Interview with Ian Wilkes from Linden Lab now online

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:59:31 +0100

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

Enabling and using the MySQL Instance Manager (IM)

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:47:52 +0100

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL Instance Manager (IM)"

This blog has moved...

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:04:24 +0100

As the development of my previous blog software had been discontinued some time ago, I finally bit the bullet and moved to Serendipity now.

The move was actually quite painless and I was even able to import the most recent posts from the old blog (without the comments, unfortunately).

I have created rewrite rules that should redirect to the new RSS feeds, but I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to the new feeds advertised from the blog's front page soon (you could even subscribe to categories then). Thanks!

I've kept the old blog for archiving purposes, but it's no longer possible to post comments there.

Congratulations, Justin and Roger!

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:43:57 +0100

Congratulations to Justin and Roger for getting the book out and published! I helped tech editing a few chapters (which looked very promising) and I am looking forward to the complete works. Good job, guys!

Books about how to run a successful OSS project

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:37:31 +0100

Markus yesterday mentioned that he started reading "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel, a book that I plan to read some time, too. The table of content looks promising, he covers a wide range of aspects related to building up and running an OSS project.

In addition to Fogel's work, there also is another interesting book about this topic: Matthias Stürmers master thesis "Open Source Community Building". It takes a slightly more scientific approach and documents the results of actually interviewing the members of various OSS projects about their experiences. It has been around for a bit, Matt Asay wrote a nice review about it in September 2005. I just read the rewritten german summary Mattias created for the german Open Source Yearbook and found it an interesting read! If you are running or plan to found an Open Source Software project, you might want to consult these books for some good advice on how to avoid common pitfalls and how to attract and foster a community around your project.

XAMPP interview on the MySQL Developer Zone

nospam@example.com (Lenz Grimmer) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:14:00 +0100

I finally finished my interview with Kai Seidler, who is one of the people behind the very popular XAMPP project.

You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!