Hot on the heals of ndb_watch 0.6.0, 0.6.1 has been released.  This is primarily a bug fix release dealing with minor reporting issues and a couple of potential crashes.

0.7 is also nearing completion and will have features such as better configuration handling and better memory status reporting.

0.6.1 can be downloaded at SourceForge and 0.7.x is currently in the SVN trunk hosted there.  I will branch it as soon as I am ready to declare a feature freeze.

After a year of almost no development I decided recently to pickup ndb_watch again and see if I could improve it.  A few weeks later and I have 0.6.0 ready for the world to use.

ndb_watch is a utility I written in C to monitor MySQL Cluster NDB nodes and mail a systems administrator when they fail.

It has many new features such as memory statistics (thanks to Monty Taylor), multiple management nodes and better email handling.  There are also many bug fixes.

If you fancy taking a look please go to its sourceforge page.

I am open to patches, bug reports and suggestions for future versions.

UPDATE 10th August
There is now an Ubuntu Hardy i386 package on SourceForge for this too.  Built against the packages at https://launchpad.net/~ndb-bindings/+archive

I quite often have to compare files that were originally edited on Linux or a Mac and then edited in Windows.  If you subsequently run this through the 'diff' command line tool it will think every line is different because many Windows editors change the line endings from the Unix native LF (\n) to Dos/Windows native CRLF (\r\n).

There is however a solution to this problem, if you use diff in the following way it will stop these problems from happening:

diff --strip-trailing-cr -ubB

--strip-trailing-cr - Ignores the difference between Unix and Windows line endings
-u - Unified diff format (In my opinion the most readable and pretty much standard now)
-b - Ignore space change, ignores the difference in whitespace
-B - Ignore blank lines, if line spacing in certain areas has been changed this won't be a factor in the diff

Just one week after my Zend Certified Engineer exam I have taken and passed both CMDBA I & II.  This means I am now a Certified MySQL Database Administrator!

Now I think I will have a break from exams

Today at 12pm I passed my Zend Certified Engineer exam.

Cheers for all the 'good luck' messages and encouragements.

I should be able to put a logo up in the next 24-48 hours linking to my Zend Yellow Pages profile.

Dennis Interactive guys: I owe you a box of doughnuts, as per tradition

Ian: You owe me and Natalie dinner I believe

Rackspace UK: Thanks for all the support.

My kids were watching 'Pinky Dinky Doo' today and I found evidence that cartoon characters are adopting Open Source Software.  Here is Pinky wearing what appears to be a Debian top:

Most major Linux distribution vendors are trying to push the Linux desktop harder than ever, in my opinion this is mainly due to the new hugely popular subnotebook craze (such as the EeePC).  There is however one major problem to this and that is most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are not release read yet.

For example, anyone who has wanted to go out and by a wifi dongle for their Linux desktop has had to proceed with caution...or use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver.  If you want flash there are 2 open source solutions, both good but neither support everything.

So vendors have had 2 choices, try and assist development of these open solutions and push a distro that does x, y and z but not a, b and c.  Or do deals with the devil.

Fedora appears to have gone one way (only open source), openSUSE the complete opposite (evil deals with MS) and Ubuntu appears to be somewhere in the middle (including some proprietary drivers and codecs).

My worry is the massive explosion of proprietary additions into a Linux distro to get competitive edge over other vendors could cause the original end goal for Linux to be lost complete.

The question is this:  When does proprietary additions into a Linux distro become evil?

Believe me when I say I am no fan of Belkin gear.  Its very overpriced and often poorly made.  In fact I have hardly had any Belkin hardware that I haven't had to take back for not working as advertised (especially wifi kit).

A long while ago I was given a Belkin USB bluetooth dongle, which I completely forgot about, my wife washed my coat one day with the dongle still in it.  It came out quite badly scratched but in one piece, I shoved it in a draw and forgot about it.

Today I wanted to link up my new(ish) Sony K800i to my Dell D530 laptop which doesn't have bluetooth.  I remembered the dongle, dug it out and plugged it in.  2 shockers:

1. It worked perfectly!
2. Ubuntu saw it straight away and configured it!

Maybe this is the recipie to get Belkin gear to work properly!

I am currently a distro torn person...
I want to like Fedora 9, but it is far too buggy to use...
I want to like Opensuse, but there is the whole Novell / MS thing and the package management is terrible...
I don't want to like Ubuntu, I think the LTS on 8.04 was a terrible decision, I think the idea of aligning all package and distro release dates is an insane pipedream.  Unfortunately Ubuntu just bloody works on my laptop, has all the packages I need without extra hidden repositories and has an excellent package system.

The whole Linux world is a constant state of flux, I would say more so right now with the extra publicity generated during the recent lauches, KDE4's brokenish releases, etc...

For now I will stick with going against my feelings and stick to Ubuntu...

I have been following KDE 4 with interest since before the early alpha releases.  I have seen it evolve and even tried it out as my main desktop for a few days.

My verdict? (it that is worth much):

Its pretty damn good.

I am all for usability, KDE3 is quite...cluttered in my opinion.  Gnome has gone too far the other way, for example if I want to change the text on a text screensaver I have no hope.  KDE4 is a great middle ground.

I know a lot of things have caused controversy in the KDE community but I believe a lot of it had to be done.  Dolphin is great, a bit buggy still in 4.0.3 (it crashed a few times for me) but really goo at what it does, and I think the tagging and ratings are a really good idea in a Web 2.0 (and Desktop 2.0?) world.

There are still things I'm not so keen on yet, there are big bugs still, gaping holes where packages are missing (ie. no replacement for KDE3's Kontact yet) and using the launcher to find what program I want can be a bit fiddly.  But this is all being addressed at an incredible pace, most will be sorted by KDE 4.1 this summer.  I do personally think that KDE 4 will be the future of the desktop, and may well be using it as my primary desktop with OpenSUSE 11.

Ubuntu has taken the world by storm in the last couple of years.  I doubt that there is anyone who knows what Linux is who hasn't heard of it.

There are several things I don't like about it however.  They seem to worship the gods of Gnome without spending much time for KDE, I'm not blaming the Kubuntu KDE developers here, they do a great job, but there isn't as nearly much resources available to Kubuntu.

My next main gripe is at the Ubuntu team that deal with bug reports.  I have seen them ask things that users who are filing the bugs would find impossible to do, and in several cases I have seen are quite rude to the bug reporters.  They will not acknowledge a bug exists until it can be proven, which is fair enough, but a reproducible list of instructions does not seem to be good enough.

I have a lot of respect for RedHat and Novell (despite the MS deal) as they put a lot back and from what I have seen they have patience to listen to the users.  I believe Ubuntu is trying, but it not there yet.

Why do I use Ubuntu then?

I don't know, I am really questioning myself today.  I have had package management problems with OpenSUSE 10.3 which is the only thing that put me off it.  These are reportedly resolved in 11 and I am finding OpenSUSE hard to resist again.  I am downloading 11 beta 1 now.  If it looks promising from the live CD I may well switch to it when I get given a new laptop on Monday.

Me being the fickle person I am when it comes to a Linux distro I have snuggled back up with Ubuntu Hardy.

After a month of playing with OpenSUSE 10.3 things were going great, then I needed a package or 2 which were non-standard, which needed dependancies, which broke other dependancies and before long I was in depandancy hell!  It was at this point I thought "This crap doesn't happen with a DEB package manager".

I had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 alpha 3 (with pain) and after about an hour formatted my Linux partition again, it is noway near usable on this laptop yet.

So I re-installed Ubuntu Hardy (using a MacBook pro I needed a version that would support all hardware out of the box), this time the Beta version.  Boy was I suprised at the change in such a short time.  Everything that had been a show stopper for me was fixed.  Not only that but there was an update today for Open Office 2.4 and it is fantastic, the font rendering is much better and I can't even remember any of the other reasons why I was put off.

I can have Compiz and suspend on this MacBook Pro!  This hasn't happened on any distro so far!

My only bugbear, and this is with all current distros, is that Evolution is very buggy with the Exchange connector.  At the moment I will find once a day it just refuses to work anymore saying it that Evolution has lost connection with the Exchange connector.  Killing every evolution spawned process doesn't seem to fix this either, I need to reboot.  I believe the libmapi library may well be used in Ubuntu Intrepid which should solve most of these problems.

All in all I am very satisfied with Hardy, and will be keeping it on this laptop, I'm even considering flattening the MacOS install from this laptop, as I can't remember the last time I booted it and its eating around 60GB.

There were a few things that annoyed me with Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago, yes I was using Hardy, but I think I would feel the same if using Gutsy (Gutsy is PITA to setup on my MacBook Pro).

So, I tried several different distributions, and have stuck with OpenSUSE 10.3.  It has a feel of 'just works' for me, despite the problem getting GRUB working on a MBP (which is documented) I have had no problems with it.

OpenSUSE is not without its problems, but they are more minor to me for day-2-day stuff, the package manager is relatively slow for example, but that doesn't really affect me post-install.  I have had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 Alpha 3 as well, it is too unstable for me at the moment, but there are massive improvements to the package manager.  I am really looking forward to this becomming a final release.

Compared to Ubuntu it is much more asthetically pleasing and I am one of those freaks that actually likes SLAB (the OpenSUSE replacement for Gnome Menu).

One thing that does kind of annoy me for some really strange reason is no one seems to be able to pronounce SUSE, even Linux veterans, and I would imagine this would annoy Germans more than me.  The closest the English can get to pronounce is is 'soo-zuh', not 'soose', 'suzy' or 'sooz'.