thus spake the Oracle: "all your MySQL are belong to us!"
patrick — Tue, 2009-04-21 14:05
If you've not seen the news yet, Oracle is buying Sun for 10 cents a share more than IBM's final offer (Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems). And if you're really lagging in tech news, MySQL was purchased by Sun a while ago.
Many people were worried about Sun's purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.
I'm thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn't really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.
OLPC Update
patrick — Sat, 2008-09-13 18:28
I know there were several people wanting updates on the OLPC. The GUI is non-standard for a PC of any breed (Mac, Linux, Win) & I had thought of looking to see what other projects were around that would provide an interface I'm more familiar with.
I'm not a large fan of the Red Hat's (the linux distro that OLPC uses) rpm (yes, I realize yum has come out since I left), but I figured I could mess with whatever for a laptop I'd only be using for taking notes at conferences & such. I'd still have access to pretty much all the tools & utilities I'm used to.
I ended up with other projects that were more of a priority for me (my mythtv boxes, work, fun...). And then somebody pointed out Fortune Magazine - With Microsoft, OLPC may finally succeed. While a nifty title I find it on the humorous side.
MythTV - An Installation of Epic Proportions
patrick — Tue, 2008-05-20 12:05
I've been talking about putting together a set of MythTV boxes for quite a while. I've been looking at hardware for the last couple of years and last summer I had stumbled across an mini-ITX board that I wanted to test, but I had need a file server, my job ended, and then I got overly busy with a new job. This last christmas I ended up buying parts for a new desktop (the timing just ended up being right) and the project got delayed again.
A friend of mine has kept nagging me about why would I want to build my own and possibly spend a lot of money on this crap if I could just spend money over time to rent a TiVo or whatever cable company's DVR. When I was down in Tulsa this last year I did just that - I rented a dvr from Cox cable and other than the hard drive being to small (and not being able to upgrade), being limited to 2 channels total, and not being able to archive something for later viewing... it worked great! Well, at least until I was getting ready to move out... I had been keeping up with a particular series and hadn't had time to watch a couple episodes and as I was heading up to visit my parents I figured I'd drag it along and show my parents the greatness of what a dvr does. I plugged it into the TV and got nothing initially. I then figured I'd plug it into their cable and see if that might help and if I might be able to record something from their cable provider... How niave. Plugging it into their cable provider completely reset the dvr (deleting everything I had recorded and had been hoping to watch). Ok, my stuff is gone, but surely I can at least record stuff for them - even on the non digital channels that don't require a set top box? Nope, nothing... just sat there trying to configure itself and boot up. Of course, when I got back to Tulsa it came right up, reconfigured itself, and was ready to go - I think it even remembered what TV shows I was recording. Yay for proprietary crap.
Another Way To Build A File Server
patrick — Thu, 2008-03-27 17:07
Somebody was talking about ZFS today and I hadn't heard of it, but thought it might be similar to XFS. After pointing me in the direction of some information I'm not sure of the exact differences, but ZFS is more akin to raid... or at least from the information I've read so far.
My OLPC Arrived!
patrick — Tue, 2008-03-18 23:05
So I got this weird box in the mail today and started googling for it. I didn't find anything via google, but looking closer at the FedEx & contents stickers I noticed "OLPC XO" on the side! My OLPC had showed up! Somebody asked for pictures so here's the top & bottom... After getting a closer look at what all is on it I'll make another post.
Friends & Family Fileserver & Backup Idea
patrick — Mon, 2007-07-02 11:47
This was originally started somewhere around 2007-06-27, but has taken several days of digging through information and sorting ideas to put this together.
