The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the beta release of PostgreSQL 9.2, which will include major increases in performance and both vertical and horizontal scalability. The PostgreSQL Project asks all users to download and begin testing 9.2 Beta as soon as possible.

Major performance and scalability advances in this version include:

• Index-only scans, allowing users to avoid inefficient scans of base tables
• Enhanced read-only workload scaling to 64 cores and over 300,000 queries per second
• Improvements to data write speeds, including group commit
• Reductions in CPU power consumption
• Cascading replication, supporting geographically distributed standby databases

Install and run

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud product based on Eucalyptus, which allows you to run your personal Amazon-EC2-like cloud. It is much easier than you think. The latest beta release of Ubuntu Server 9.10, you can easily create a cloud computing infrastructure using the installer from the CD.

Requirements

To deploy a minimal infrastructure clouds, you'll need at least two dedicated systems. One of them will support the controller clouds (cloud controller - clc), the cluster controller (cluster controller - cc), walrus (S3-like service for data storage) and the data controller (storage controller - sc). For him the need to drive fast and powerful enough and fast processor. Other systems are controllers nodes (node ??controllers - nc) with the current state. For them to use processors with an extension VT, multinucleated, large amounts of RAM and fast disks. In both cases strongly suggest supporting 64-bit.
Installation of the cloud / cluster controller

While Linux is running our phones, friend requests, tweets, financial trades, ATMs and more, most of us don't know how it's actually built. This short video takes you inside the process by which the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing is organized. Based on the annual report "Who Writes Linux," this is a powerful and inspiring story of how Linux has become a community-driven phenomenon. More information about Linux and The Linux Foundation can be found at http://www.linuxfoundation.org/ and http://www.linux.com/

20 years have passed, and Linux is stronger than ever...

Linux Foundation celebrating 20 years of Linux

Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer, micro web application framework for Perl hit CPAN!

Dancer has come a long way since then, thanks to the awesome community and user base built up around the project since then.

In these two years, Dancer had countless valuable contributions from a large list of contributing users, gathered over 300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 pull requests submitted... amazing stuff.

Read more in bigpresh blog entry.

You are busy churning out code or managing the developers. You care about Perl but don't have time to go through tens and hundreds of articles and blog posts every day. You want to keep an eye on the development of perl without drowning in a sea of blog posts. You need someone to point out the most important news and articles in the Perl World.

Let me try to be your guide.

Headlines

Nice progress in the development of MetaCPAN

Olaf Alders provided his weekly report that was full of new items. You can now +1 Perl modules, use the public API of MetaCPAN and compete with other CPAN authors for fame.

Rakudo Star 2011.07 released with 10%-30% improvement in compile and execution speed

This edition of the quarterly release marks the end of era. The next release will be already using the New Object Model'.

Happy Birthday, Linux!

This past week has been quite turbulent for Debian wheezy. Mostly because of the great Perl upgrade from 5.10 to 5.12. This included rebuilding of hundreds of Perl modules to play well with new version of Perl. Most of the time I had all this stuff put on hold, and only yesterday have I found guts to digest all 300 of new packages. For one day I was without trusty pidgin, but today even that popular messenger has been recompiled to work with Perl 5.12. There's still a small number of perl modules (like libembperl-perl, libgimp-perl, libgstreamer-perl, libjifty-perl, etc...) not yet adapted, but I'm sure we won't wait long until each and every perl module has been upgraded to fit Perl 5.12.

X server is now brand new 1.10, and also Nvidia blob set of packages have been upgraded to work with the new server (from 260.19.44-1 to 270.41.06-1). This Debian packaging of Nvidia driver has been working exceptionaly well.

Ye good old glibc went from 2.11 to 2.13, a small step for humanity, but great step for Debian users. :) Although potentially dangerous, all glibc upgrades I rememeber in last few years went absolutely flawless. The package restarts services that need to be restarted, although I prefer to reboot the whole machine after the glibc upgrade, seems cleaner to me.

You blame Firefox 4 to be a memory hog? Check it out first by typing about:memory in the address bar. You'll get a nice detailed report of your browsers memory usage. While it's not guaranteed you'll understand every statistic available in the report, you can at least peek at the overall memory use, and see how much it's fragmented by comparing "memory mapped" and "memory in use" numbers.

I definitely see memory usage of my browser only go up during regular use, but it's not really problematic, considering there are gobs of RAM in today's computers. And there has also been a steady improvement in memory usage efficiency, 3.0 has been the biggest hog for me, 3.5 was quite an improvement, and now 4.0 is absolutely the best of them all. Alive and kicking (though, much of the responsiveness improvement comes from better javascript engine, I suspect). It's good to know that Mozilla plans even more improvements on that front with Firefox 5, 6, 7... which they advertise will be released this year!

This last week has been fun. Lots of stuff has been fixed. Let's start with the packaging system...

The packaging system

dpkg/dselect is now at version 1.16.0. Except the ability to show new packages (which is still missing), it has been working very well. Apt has also been fixed and it now doesn't pull all package files all the time. One other thing started to really bother me, those pesky "Hash Sum Mismatch" errors. From what I understand, it happens if the mirror site uses old software to sync stuff. So I decided to switch mirrors, and configured back the good old ftp.debian.org. Now it works well, although slightly slower than before, but I can live with that.

One other thing, if after upgrading dpkg you start getting warnings like this:

dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 15307 package 'sortmail':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 40773 package 'loadwatch':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 52116 package 'libdbix-profile-perl':
missing architecture
dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 83356 package 'cthumb':
missing architecture

just apt-get install --reinstall all those packages (I got the warning only for those four), and the warnings will go away.