LinOSX TechnoMash

Here are a few recent posts on Teknatus.

• Saul Klein’s European Venture Scene and surprises about New Delhi
• A To-Do List for Startups
• Hiring and Firing at a Startup
• Perl for Beginners from BarCamp Delhi
• The Financial Crisis and India a presentation I gave at BarCamp Delhi

OSSCamp is gearing up for another meet on September 27th and 28th in Delhi. The volunteers have just spent a great deal of time and energy rebuilding the OSSCamp.in site and it looks great. Take a look at the site, sign up, think of a way to participate and join us on the 27th and 28th for some great talks on Open Source technologies and meet some really cool geeks

I’ve recently gotten back into some development and needed to run MySQL on my Leopard computers. The easy way out was downloading and running MAMP (a great pre-built package of Apache and MySQL). Unfortunately, I hated starting the Apache and MySQL daemons manually.

I created OS X launchctl scripts to start Apache and MySQL but I hated the fact that I was maintaining two installations of Apache (the one that comes with OS X and the MAMP one). I wanted one simple installation of everything that would start automatically. Also, occasionally, weird things would happen with permissions and I’d have to shut everything down and restart again.

It’s been some time since I compiled my own software so I was looking forward to compiling MySQL from scratch. The first thing I found was this great post on Hivelogic about compiling MySQL. I’m not going to regurgitate what’s in the post but I’m going to highlight the configure flags for Leopard. Most times, when compiling applications, getting all the flags right is the only way to ensure your specific OS and architecture are properly supported in the compilation process and it’s the only way to squeeze out the best performance.


CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors \
-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client \
--enable-local-infile --enable-shared


Make sure you change your root (data base administrator password) by running:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password 'new-password'

Don’t forget to secure your server as indicated on HiveLogic.

My plist file for automatically launching MySQL under MAMP is here. Feel free to compare it to the post at HiveLogic or change it to suit your needs. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know.

It’s great to finally hear that MSFT is beginning to see the light and getting involved in open source projects like Apache.  I just hope the right hand knows what the left hand is doing and this continues.

Read more about MSFT donatine cash to the Apache Foundation and pledging to open up some of their communications software and protocols. 

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft backs open source work

Here are some screenshots of apps I have downloaded from the Apple App store. All the apps are running on a 1st generation 8gb iPhone that was recently upgraded to the 2.0 firmware. My carrier is Airtel in New Delhi and this post is being made with the Wordpress app for the iPhone.

This is my first post using the new Wordpress App from the iTunes App Store. Pretty good so far and really easy to use.

So far the Indian government looks like it will stay in power. What does that mean for the Indo-US nuclear pact? It looks good. What does it mean for the Indian economy? More of the same once the initial euphoria of the government not falling wears off.

A great post from Nik Cubrilovic on those of us forgetting about our FOSS ideals by falling victim to the consumerist attitudes that the shiniest, sexiest gadgets in the playground evoke.

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » The New Apple Walled Garden

OSSCamp Delhi Summer Edition kicked off this morning. There was a movie called “Revolution OS” that talked about the beginning of the Free Software Foundation and GNU. It spawned a few discussions about GNU, Linux and the various distributions built around GNU software and the Linux kernel. Interesting movie - NOT an Open Source documentary.

We then had a talk given by Prateek Saxena on Blue Print and Drafter (Code not yet available online). Very cool stuff for quickly doing some design layouts and prototypes.

After Drafter, Manu Goel gave a very interesting talk on the concept of CSS Specificity. The idea being that there are certain elements or attributes in CSS that take precedence over others. We should be able to determine what elements take precedence, hence, being able to attain a finer control over your design.

Tennyson Kaniampady has given a very interesting introduction to Ingres. Ingres is one of the oldest commercially available relational databases. Ingres, unfortunately, doesn’t have a large following in India but Postgres came from Ingres and, thus, it can be relatively easy to move from Postgres to Ingres.

Tennyson is now giving a talk on Appliances.
Update 15:45
I am trying to upload videos of the Blue Print/Drafter and CSS Specificity presentations but there isn’t enough bandwidth to upload two <4min videos.

Tennyson is discussion Ingres’ BI Portfolio. it’s a bit tough to read from the back of the room so I’ll link to the presentation once its up online.

Ingres BI Stack

• Apache/Tomcat
• Java
• Ingres 2006
• Linux
• Ingres Icebreaker

The Jasper reporting engine sits on top of the Ingres Icebreaker stack.

Update 15:52
Tennyson is introducing us to their Alfresco Collaboration Suite also built on top of Ingres Icrbreaker.

Ingres CAFE is an integrated stack of application development.

• Eclipse IDE
• Ingres Database

I just asked why Postgres shouldn’t be used instead of Ingres. Tennyson mentions that Postgres is not multi-threaded and support, plus future roadmap of Postgres isn’t clearly mapped out.

Update 15:58
Tea/Coffee Break to wake up all the food coma victims

Update 16:33
We’re back from our tea/coffee break and Prateek has given a Introduction to Ruby on Rails with a great selection of pictures in his presentation.

Update 16:36
Prateek is giving us an example of an application that he’s developed on his localhost (an Apple MacBook). It’s an online shopping cart that took 2 days (18 to 20 hours).

Update 16:52
Mir Nazim is giving a an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in Python. Python is a 100% Object Oriented language and not just a scripting language. Python is concise and it looks like English.

We’re having a bit of trouble getting the Python console up and running on Apple OS X Tiger. Making the switch to a LinuxMint machine now but we’re having issues with the projector so time to reboot.

Update 17:01
Ok, we’re up and running and doing a quick demo of “Hello World” and now moved onto demoing an “if” statement. All of the other basic operators and data types are being discussed. Immutable Arrays = Tuples in Python. Tuples are very very fast and great for temporary arrays or an arrays containing values that never change.

Recommended Python Books

• Dive Into Python
• Bite of Python

Update 17:30
Mir is about to start Part II of the Python presentation, though, time might be a problem.

OSSCampDelhiSE01 comes to a close.
Thank you all for attending and contributing.

Update 21:48
A few of the videos I took at OSSCampDelhiSE01 are up on YouTube.

OSSCamp Delhi is just around the corner. On Saturday, 21st January, 2008 Open Source enthusiasts, users, and businesses will be gathering for a BarCamp-esque information exchange at The Indian Social Institute on Lodi Road in New Delhi.

Details of OSSCamp Delhi Summer Edition are here. Join Us.

This is a great video I stumbled upon.