If you haven’t read Ian’s paper about the community-agile process, you should. You can see many of the ideas there in how the drizzle project is run. There is lots of work to do, and I think it’s going to be great fun to see how far we can push drizzle. And the code is safely in a FLOSS distributed version control system that I have mirrors of, so nobody can put the code behind a corporate firewall and seal it off - it’s alive and growing and unstoppable. If anyone wants to mirror the code, that is fine and I’ll help you do it.

Sometimes people look at databases as boring, as a solved problem. I’m here to tell you that building interesting applications that have any kind of persistent state is not a solved problem, there are a lot more fantastic ideas to try, and some ideas that have only recently become practical. Check out the code and put up a branch with some ideas of your own!

We don’t have packages for ubuntu yet, but we will be putting up a PPA soon. As you can imagine, there is still a fair amount of work involved in finishing the renaming and making packages that don’t conflict with existing mysql installs.

–
Elliot Murphy

• Spreed.com web-based meetings, with shared whiteboarding, application sharing, video, and soon mindmaps.  Why is it noteworthy? They explicitly support linux, even for whiteboarding and app sharing. The whiteboard is geared toward making notes on top of a presentation, and participants can easily generate a PDF of any page. The linux screen sharing client is written in python, and the mind maps (coming soon) promise to be compatible with FreeMind.
• Coccinella instant messaging client with shared whiteboards. What I really want is OmniGraffle for Linux, with the ability to share drawings with someone on the other side of the world and both edit in realtime. Inkscape’s Inkboard feature would be even better, if it worked, but it doesn’t, and I haven’t had time to get in and try and fix it. Coccinella doesn’t have a good way to save the drawings for later though, it’s more useful for scribbling on existing drawings. It does have a very nice way to screen grab anything and then draw on it.
• Monitoring software - I need to start doing some serious monitoring soon, and here’s what I’m looking at
  • Graphite enterprise scalable realtime graphing. in django. with a custom storage engine.
  • Collectdthe system statistics collection daemon
  • Reconnoiter - when Theo says he’s writing a better version of something, I listen. Goals are to support monitoring thousands of machines.
• Satchmo a couple of different projects that I’m working on are going to need to handle credit cards soon, and Satchmo integrates with a lot of different payment gateways, and with Django.

And then there’s the background rumblings of new database projects - innovation in this space is far from dead, and ideas want to be published! New code coming out almost every day, which is great to see.

I’ve started a new project at Canonical, and am *really* excited about it - going to be building some nice things that even my non-technical friends will want to use, and thats going to be a lot of fun. I really need to find some talented Gnome hackers and also some engineers to work on very scalable web service systems - if you are interested please contact me.

my podcast rig

Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:

Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our children and grandchildren to study and improve on. Thank you for letting me be part of a project I will be proud to tell my kids about.

The best feeling in the world is to know that you have a small role in contributing to that body of public knowledge, in building tools that the whole world can use to make things better. It’s so critical that really important software projects like MySQL are preserved in an open system - even though I’m proud of Bazaar it doesn’t really matter so much whether the choice is Bazaar or some other open system, as it does that the history be available in a fully functional free VCS. Bjarne Stroustrup said that “technological civilization depends on software”, and both when I was working at MySQL and now working at Canonical, it’s inspiring that the people in charge (hi Monty, hi Mark), have such a strong commitment to paying the bills in a socially responsible way and trying to create tools, fundamental building blocks that can benefit society as a whole at the same time.

There is plenty more work to do - go contribute to your favorite bit of open source software today! Maybe grab a branch of MySQL and make something interesting.

This is a native OS X bazaar GUI! Still in the early stages of development, but making rapid progress towards an alpha release. If you’re rocking bzr on a Mac, go give Martin a hand: https://launchpad.net/bazaarx

I also registered twitter.com/bzr, but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. Suggestions? One idea is to tweet the commits that go to the main bzr tree, along with release announcements. Greg K-H has an interesting twitter stream of his command history from selected terminals. I mentioned this to Martin last week and we talked about making a bzr plugin that would let you tweet certain things (commit messages maybe?).

Several people have drawn some parallels between twitter and IRC. For me, IRC is something that I only respond to in real time. Twitter is something that I only respond to on the same day. Email is something that piles up and tries to kill me. That spot where I don’t have to respond in a matter of minutes but things don’t pile up over multiple days is a very comfortable one indeed. I’ve seen a few other projects or companies using twitter in similar ways (VMWare Fusion is an interesting one). Is it worth the effort?