Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Well it's not really a question though. I was just a little surprised that they didn't wait till taking over MySQL and then offer this express edition with a clustering option (I'll soon blog on how to create a MySQL cluster). Anyways download these express beta software at OTN

It was this post BTW and it always makes me proud. VMWare is a great technology to be associated with and I'm always thrilled using and promoting this breakthrough technology. Anyways check out the VMTN blog .

Actually this open source initiative is to kick the nuts out of EMC and HP's own Storage monopoly in the Storage world.

Hmm what more can I say? Download Windows and Linux and play on (if you already have a 64 bit desktop) PS: I'm amazed although at the speed at which they released the Windows 64 version too. Normally it follows a bit later (after Linux version)

Just got a call from Linda (Administrator/Editor) of DBAsupport.com . She asked me if I was interested in writing articles for the Database Journal. I have been lately drifting away from Oracle database, doing work with all kinds of new technologies. WeB API's, AJAX, new stuff with Java (like Hibernate, Lucene etc)and it seemed to me a great idea to start writing stuff about Oracle 9i/10g RAC. So maybe we'll just start writing stuff there. I'll talk about technologies(like Virtualization/Clustering/Load Balancing) which will compliment Oracle and IT staff in accepting the importance of such implementation in their IT setup. And ofcourse the regular Database stuff on Oracle. So stay tuned. It's gonna be on the DBAsupport Journal.

Alrite ladies follow these steps to make your own screen saver. Whether you'll do it or not do it following my advice is NOT my concern. I'll set it occasionally for the heck of it for myself. Here is a screen shot of having done it all and setting and validating my feed on the Screen Saver that we just cooked. For whole set of print screens on setting up and running it then see it on my foto gallery here . Steps are simple... download the C#Express 2005 from MSDN Start a project (as shown in the print screen) Build it Save it Go to the folder where it was saved Check under /bin and find the *.scr file Copy that file to your windows\system32 dir (if in XP) Select the NEWS screen saver Edit settings and image(s) of your choice And Run it simple ain't it! And play this AVI file to see how it works . PS: As you can see it was a *Ready Baked code*, no development but you might want to... o Do a mouse roll over to open a particular news directly f

A colleague of mine who also happens to be our client came up to me asking for developing/investigating about a screensaver where we could have our corporate news displayed via the RSS feeds (atom or RSS). I think it is very interesting as you don't force people to follow news by pounding them with emails (which they never read anyways) while especially in Holland where the recent changes in Tax Laws and Health insurance will have a major impact on your budget as to how much you will pay monthly to get and stay covered. These laws will change beginning 1st Jan 2006. There are other corporate news which are as critical for employees and students (in our case) to read. And according to a study people do leave the desk once a while and what would be a better way to welcome them back with a screensaver which will display news elegantly. No body is forced. OK so what kind of desktop/user environment do we have? We have a standard windows desktop environment There is a standard po

Since I'm working on numerous Oracle scenario's of setting up RAC. I thought I might as well take a shot at the MySQL clustering and load balancing. I'll be needing... o Atleast 3 OS's (I'll be using SLES 9 -RC5) which I just got an Evaluation version of from Novell. 2 for NDB cluster and one for a management Node. I'm on my way to install those Os's on an available server. But like I said, I'll post soon on how it went... PS: Just was curious anyways how I could publish this post from the Flock's blog editor. Hope it won't crash on me :-| PS2: This too BTW will be posted on the OraclePerf blog, I know , I know it has nothing to do with Oracle but we'll keep that kind of stuff on that blog.

Just got my Redhat Magazine and I liked reading this article about a typical Sysadmin who wants to push further to learn programming language and has done enough scripting infact read this conclusion which I mostly agree with. (Mostly because I know that if I can push myself to learn Python then why not Java). Since Python is an interpreted language, it puts a higher level of programming within reach to a different set of programmers. The lone sysadmin, who might not have the time or resources to sit down and learn Java to write an application to be used once, can write a similar application in Python, with what are essentially scripting skills, in much less time. Furthermore, this application is highly portable, and if necessary, can be embedded in C or C++. Python is a highly flexible and robust object-oriented language. The user/sysadmin/programmer who wants to bridge the gap between scripting languages such as Bash and Korn Shell and C or Java should be learning Python. Read the r

Ok people so I had applied for this beta testing and as you see I just got this email from these folks. I quickly ran it on my OS. The guys are honest enough to warn you NOT to import any settings from your existing browsers. It's OK to import IE settings...you have to lose that browser someday. :-) Anyways here we go...Check out the pics here!!! Go get it! Love this blog editor! Options pane (If you noticed, it has the Web services tab too) Neat and Groovy tab too ;) go to the site and see for yourself! So my quick and dirty opinion It's colorful It's got a neat Blog editor Added tabs/options pane Sharing your favorites is a *new* thing to me and they say ... Wondering what it's all about? Sharing your favorite web pages (a.k.a. bookmarks) is convenient and fun. You keep your list of Favorites on a web service, where you can access them from any computer with a network connection. Others can look at your lists and learn from them, and you can in turn learn

Oh no I really don't care and am not going to talk in great lengths about it (not now atleast). Sometimes I'm curious about Visitors paths to my blog and via Stat Counter I see that my pagerank on MSN search is rather high on lot's of searches. Like this one on Bukster ( a protocol which Magpie uses). And I was ranked number one! Cool huh? Does this make MSN search better that Google? I sure does make me smile!

OK I know after this I'll get like couple of thousands hits more per day...heh heh kidding. But I did launch my Oracle Performance blog to do work on stuff like... Oracle RAC setup's on Windows, Linux (Primarily Redhat and SuSe) and Unix(Solaris, HP-UX) Performance Stuff pertaining to Oracle (RAC etc) and OS Shell Scripting Clusters and Load Balancing on Database(RAC) and OS(Stuff like MPI, Oscar, Piranha) JDeveloper (also Eclipse, JCreator, IntellijIDEA) and Java Development in and around Oracle Tools of trade (for instance Stuff from Quest) for performance testing Datawarehousing and Oracle tools around it like Designer, DWH builder etc Tools like VMWare will be used often but we'll also get deeper into it by really trying out ESX servers for Production Readiness. ...to name a few. Is all that information scarce on the internet? No way! I'm just doing it all to keep myself into the learning mode and to enhance the level of my own pro

Alrite fellas, here I tried at home running the Terminal Server/Services on RHEL 3 on a application mode. What you'll be needing is... CUPS/Samba running on your Terminal Server (To print your work locally) Share your printer over network(if you have one) or just have cups find it locally. You'll need OpenOffice installed on your Linux Server. NX Client binary on your machine NX Server installed on your server. (see the following post Setting up FreeNX ) This is actually rather simple and cool, just follow these print screens to follow the whole setup and run scenario! And voila you have a not only running OpenOffice writer program but also you can print it locally. Starting up the OpenOffice application Setting up the printer And working with it! Enjoy! PS: We will try more applications on terminal services in the coming days.

Coming up. I just tested this... Running OpenOffice Printing it locally

Companies are talking about virtualization all over the place and all the time. There are vendors and resellers who have (sometimes) no clue at all as to what it is and what should we implement? What should we actually advice a client? What and where would they want to achieve virtualization? On the Server level? I did post some stuff on Virtualization on the Server Level with VMWare. But it all comes down to applications! How on earth are you going to implement a Windows to Linux Migration for all desktop applications? And then comes the interesting part, if I do propose a *Thin Client* solution where do I start if that part of applications suite (If you were doing this for say a University then you have a whole bunch of applications you will NOT just be able to run on Linux desktop) anyways you still have to move over from the Microsoft Terminal Server to something else. But what? VNC ? RDP ? Are they fast enough? Can the end user run his OpenOffice which we migrated (with his data)

Just reached home from work and got the news. He passed away this morning. I feel weird.

And it's your temple! I've been back on pumping iron for the last 5 weeks and it really feels great. We spend so much of our time on all kinds of things. Well then you can sure spend some time on your body. I remember back in 95 I had a great book (which I ordered again at Amazon) of Schwarzenegger. Great book this... This book has always been on my side. Arnold , in fact, was himself inspired by Steve Reeves. Remember the guy who played in Hercules? Check out his site This man has been a source of inspiration to a lot of people! Anyways as I was saying, it's your body. You can either spend all your time sitting behind your desk/computer or you can choose to just go to the gym and sweat it out! I will post more of my pics and also the one's that I'll take from now on. I'm growing slowly but steadily. I did have some issues with my right arm biceps and a bit on the right deltoid but it's all settling ok. Great thing is I'm suddenly remembering all the t

If I remember they did have this for quite a while. Anyways it's a beta product. Check it out here .

It's all about the numbers baby! Read here . I've been saying it all this time. It'snow time to pick up MySQL and go for the Middle and Small Business Market and push down MSSQL by releasing a "Oracle Adaptive Version" or something like that! Google Releases Google Reader This is actually not a great shaker, but anyways see it here and subscribe to what you like. Thing is, you ought to know most of the times what to subscribe to. Anyways this apparently is part of the WebOffice thing!

Tomorrow I will be interviewing a DBA for a fulltime position within our University. And I was wondering what kind of questions I ought to be asking him. I guess I'll start jotting down some of the questions I'd wanna ask a regular SQL Server DBA. Although we might just move our current mission critical application (which happens to be Blackboard Academic Suite ) to Redhat/Oracle on a fully load balanced application server cluster and Oracle RAC 9i/10g. Then I'd also wanna ask questions pertaining to OS interoperability, Linux Servers in Windows domain. I will detail out this interview thing to a more generic DBA interview where you should be able to do DBA tasks on heterogeneous OS with heterogeneous databases. I did find some questions here at (MSSQL) Vyas's site and (Oracle) James Koopman at DBASupport.com , although in my opinion they're rather theoretical. Any student out of school with no experience would read them out to you. I'd say even if your a fresh

Got this from a colleague. Funny :-)

Just like I predicted. They're going for it. Read more here Most of Sun's servers run its own Solaris operating system, a competitor to Microsoft's Windows, which runs about 95 percent of the PCs and about two-thirds of servers in the world. That is an astounding figure. Really! MS has really a massive share of the market. All the more reason to also get scared to death too, imagine you bank it all on Office products. Actually should MS Office go to a competitor, OS is practically worthless.

See the webcast here . OK I love Java technology. I mean I really loooove it! But I somehow have this thing with Sun. There's a big reason why people are quitting Sun. It could be anything. Just like Microsoft, lot's of unrest. But anyways, they have my blessings! And by the way this title "Java Momentum Good for Google", Ummm I thought it's the Goooogle who has the momentum. Anyways enjoy the webcast. PS: Jonathan mentioning "Clients matter a little bit more than before"... little bit more? OK then I am gonna start a Company soon where Client is what it's all gonna be about.

My wife ran into this little gift shop some two years ago. And since then we visit it regularly. It was her birthday today so I thought of surprizing her with a "Tuscany Theme". It really is something out of Italy (be it Provence, Tuscany) and sure also lovely stuff from Spain. Well just go to the site and then find the nearest store and just drop in. You'll thank me that you've been there. You can also see the recipes there on the site. If you're passionate about taste then this is where you stop.This one is sure a winner!

Something which IE 7 will take ages so make realize, Opera had it and also our killer fox has it for some time. The only thing is with default features you still see the new browser opening all the time. My Jr. DBA helped me open new links in tabs by pressing on that mouse's scroll button. Not so handy for a picky guy like me. So check out this updated article on optimizing firefox. I think I'll just put all the work on little hacks, tweaks or whatever that makes you help optimize firefox ,on that page. Unless if it grows too big then we can spread it out.

According to this article, apparently the investments in space related activities will rise astronomically! U.S. Defence spending on space has grown from around $15 billion in 2000 to more than $22 billion today and is forecast to reach $28 billion by 2010. India and China have joined the U.S., Europe, Russia, and Japan as having fully independent capabilities. Satellite-toconsumer television has become a $40 billion worldwide market. The markets for satellite radio and GPS positioning and tracking are being validated with growth measured in billions. The successful launch of new satellite broadband services in the U.S. and Canada beginning in 2005 could improve the market for commercial infrastructure. The development of a substantial space tourism market would have a positive but disruptive influence on the industry, though it is not likely to happen before 2010. According to Scott Sacknoff, President of the ISBC, 'With the diversity of the sector ranging from Walmart's IT n