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"Chemnitz Linux Days" is one of the main Open Source and Linux conferences in Germany, for the 15th consecutive year now. And personally it's one of my favourite conferences.

Based on experience from the past two years I decided not to have a booth, but nevertheless submitted two talks. One was accepted: "Replication with PostgreSQL" (slides and script here). On the laptop keyboard&mouse: Andreas Kretschmer. On the microphone: me. It was the first talk in the morning, but the room was full with visitors. We got nice feedback about the talk as well and had to continue discussions outside of the room, when the next talk started.

Die Folien für den Vortrag "Replikation mit PostgreSQL", den Andreas Kretschmer und ich auf den Chemnitzer Linuxtagen 2013 gehalten haben, sind jetzt online:

Replikation mit PostgreSQL

Ein Link auf das Build Skript zum Nachvollziehen der Demo ist hier:

Demo Skript

Viel Spaß damit.

Und wieder einmal setzte er seinen Fuß vor die Tür, um ein neues Restaurant zu finden. Eines in dem er und seine Freunde noch nicht gewesen sind, auf das er eine Empfehlung aussprechen kann wenn es das nächste Mal heißt "Gehen wir heute abend Essen"?

Auf dem Rückweg von Schönebeck nach Hause hatte ich so gar keine Lust auf Abendessen daheim. Also ein kurzer Abstecher nach Gommern - dort ist mir beim Durchfahren schon einige Male ein Griechisches Restaurant aufgefallen. Heute nun haben wir dort angehalten und etwas gegessen.

Ispirer SQLWays is a nice (although commercial) tool to convert DDL and data from one supported database to another. We are using it regularly, the list of supported databases is impressive: PostgreSQL, Greenplum, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, Sybase, Informix, Teradata, Netezza and some more.

There's just one thing which I always forget: SQLways exports all data by default, which makes the export unnecessary big and slow.

Last night a long-running project of mine went live: pg_docbot v2.

For years, Jan Wieck provided a helper bot (rtfm_please) in the #postgresql IRC channel in the freenode network. Because of protocol changes in the freenode network, this bot was no longer functional. Together with some others we decided to write a quick and dirty new bot. As it is with dirty hacks, not everything was optimal: after timeouts the bot was not able to reconnect - more exactly the POE framework did not even recognize the timeout. Also extending the bot and adding new functionality was complicated. For a while I collected all these problems in my personal bugtracker and about two years ago I started a full rewrite.

Some of the new key features:

• pg_docbot's channel limit is gone: a user in the freenode network can only join 20something channels, the new bot was designed from the ground to handle multiple IRC connections and circumvent this problem
• function to identify stale urls: the new ?lost command shows all unconnected urls
• registered users are now either "op" or "admin": all operators can issue ?learn and ?forget, admins can - of course - do everything
  
• new command to post to all channels: the ?wallchan command let the doc post to all channels
• i18n: every channel has a configured language, default is English - all messages in this channel are posted in the configured language (if translation is available)
• watchdog on board: every session is monitored and reconnected, if necessary - no more "ads: can you please restart the bot?"
  
• nickname handling: every session is monitoring his (registered) nickname and will reclaim the nick if necessary, also nickserv handling is included now
• commands are recognized in different languages: a nice add-on, by-product of i18n, most commands can be used in different languages - like "search" (English) and "suche" (German)
• bot can join and leave channels on the fly: not much to say about, just that you can have the bot in a temporary PostgreSQL channel if you like
  
• channels can have paswords now: this works both for configured channels as well as on-the-fly joined channels
• autojoin channels: configured but not joined channels are rejoined after a while, also it is possible to configure but not autojoin channels
• statistics: the bot runs anonymous stats about his usage, like ?search, ?learn, ?forget and so on
  

There is still a lot to do, not all of my tickets are closed. If you want pg_docbot talking in your language, please send me translations. The pg_docbot code is on git.postgresql.org.

Next things on my todo list:

• verify each URL from time to time: mark unreachable as invalid
• intelligent sort order: not yet sure how to solve this problem, right now there is no specific sort order
• move pg_docbot to PostgreSQL infrastructure
• web interface: the bot should redirect the user to his website if there are more then let's say 2 or 3 urls, to avoid flooding the IRC channels
• integration in postgresql.org website: the pg_docbot database contains very useful knowledge, there are plans to integrate this into the search on the main website
• integration with explain.depesz.com: every time the bot see's a link from a paste site, it should scan the content and generate a postign on explain.depesz.com
• monitor planet.postgresql.org: publish new postings in IRC channels
• allow better search: like using a regexp
• ...
  

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

If you travel to Kuwait, you need a visa to enter the country. Although travel agencies usually offer to handle the visa process, it is far easier to let the hotel handle this. Well, if you are from certain European or American countries.

Recently I installed CyanogenMod 9 on my mobile. Everything went smooth and I'm happily running a new operating system.

Just that I cold not install Google Maps - could not find it in Google's Play Store.