CleverBlogName

Funambol, formerly Sync4J, is a number of things, but the bit I care about is that it’s a FOSS SyncML server you can download, run on your own server, and appears to be widely supported by all sorts of other FOSS tools (groupware, PIM software, and so on), and offer support for a huge variety of free and non-free SyncML clients. Since I can has data plan the idea of over-the-air syncing to a SyncML host has gained greater appeal, on top of the pre-existing appeal of making it easier to share calendars and the like with Maire.

The out-of-the-box delivery for Funambol is a binary Linux package that contains a JDK, Tomcat6, an RDBMs, and Funambol itself. On the one hand, this makes getting it up and running in a one-clickish fashion kind of easy. On the other hand, if you already have a database server and app server configured (for example) this is a bit of a wasteful duplication of resources; Funambol will let you work with (some) alternatives.

One of the best things about attending the Linuxconf is the renewed sense of enthusiam for my field (lightly dampened yesterday by battling with @#@^#%$!^% PulseAudio, which is the worst thing to be inflicted on desktop Linux in a long time, and today on arriving home to discover a household box had literally cooked itself, likely beyond repair).

A lot of the last near-decade has, for me, seen my interest in what I do wane, damn near finished off by two years of release management. I had become, well, barely a tradesman, practically an assemblyline worker; interested in doing my job properly, but largely devooid of a vast care factor beyond that.

The last while working on zLinux has helped considerably with that, and LCA has piqued my interest mightily; I want to get back into hand-rolling Postgres releases to play with the new features, I want to play with new technologies and tools and follow their development, not just because I want to be better as a craftsman of my job, but because I can glimpse my former interest in the art of what I do; of doing a thing for itself and that alone, rather than merely because it turns a crust. On that front, LCA is a huge personal success as well as providing me with a bunch of professional value, and that’s (hopefully) a genuine improvement in the whatsit of my life.

Josh Berkus

A very excisting time for PostgreSQL, since the final commitfest for PG 9.0 development.

8.5 had gone by the by because the feature set is going to be SO DAMN HUGE. 64 bit windows, exclusion constraints, JSON/XML EXPLAIN output, host standby, sync replication.

What’s a commitfest? It’s a way of dealing with scarce committer and reviewers time; review patches faster, sooner, every patch, and train reviewers. People were getting patches knocked back or forgotten because of a lack of reviewer time, which was making people unhappy.

Every other month during the development period, we clear the queue of patches; this also makes it transparent as to what’s happening in the development world. It lets you help with failing patches if you care about them, too.

Four commitfests, followed by cleanup, beta testing, and then a final release. Version 9 should be released mid-way next year.

Josh Berkus

First, a word: Josh is a neat speaker. He comes across as Good People. Nice, clear, concise, tell-it-like-it-is style, and great audience interaction, answers at his fingertips. Another on my list of “see this person if you get the chance.” Also, he’s really generous with chat time outside of presentations and very approachable.

On with Josh’s talk...

There’s been a lot of activity in the nonrelational world, with it being hard to keep track of; this talk is about how to choose relational vs nonrelational, understanding some of the things that matter, some that don’t.

I’ve been playing with TOra, a TOAD clone with the added attraction of having PostgreSQL compatibility. While it is indeed a wonderful tool, and the best TOAD-alike I’ve seen so far, it does have some drawbacks, mostly around performance. Under Windows, for example, there’s no contest for working with Oracle databases. TOAD may be more expensive, and may sell a number of the anaylsis modules TOra bundles, but waiting for screens to refresh is like waiting for paint to dry.

I still haven’t managed to coerce it into compiling on Solaris, but it’s pretty useful under Linux - certainly more attractive than the basic GUI tool which comes with PostgreSQL, for example.