Category: Uncategorized

Hmm, I’ve been in Frankfurt now a day and a bit, and I’m even awake at the right times. Pretty good!

Most interesting quote from the flight:
Flight attendant (after pouring a cup of coffee for someone sitting next to me):
“Yes it’s coffee.”

The combined PHP and MySQL conference here rocks… interesting people with interesting stories and good questions.
I did my tutorial yesterday on optimisation – done that one in Australia and Holland as well, so I get to compare a bit between the different audiences… this was definitely the largest crowd so far, I estimate over a 100 people. Extra chairs, and still people were standing or sitting on the floor in the back! For 2×1.5 hrs – wow.

Indu Britto of the PHP Magazine tells me there’s a blog site for the conference at http://www.php-mag.net/weblogs/ipm_phpconf_04/.
Hey, I’m on there – cool! http://www.php-mag.net/weblogs/ipm_phpconf_04/archives/2-Optimizing-MySQL-with-Arjen-Lentz.html

Well, I’m packing for my next trip… first MySQL ComCon Europe 2004 (http://www.mysqlcomconeurope.com/), then stay a few days at my friend Georg Richter’s place in Stuttgart, and then on to Munich for an internal company training meeting.

Flying StarAlliance this time, see how it matches up against OneWorld (Qantas, etc).
The first bit looks good, Singapore Airlines to Singapore in a 777. Should be enough legroom at least.

Well, we got it together… had a first meeting yesterday of MySQL users in town.
http://mysql.meetup.com/84/
This time it was at a cafe… mostly discussing ideas for future meetings.
One suggestion was to start earlier (than 7pm) because people don’t have time to drive home anyway.

A local company will probably be able to provide us with the use of a room (with projector) so we can do presentations. Ideas for that:
– database design, joins, etc
– replication (trouble shooting)
– migration (MSSQL was specifically mentioned)

Sounds interesting.

http://www.ogc.gov.uk/oss/Report-v8c.htm

Looks like a pretty decent report… and yes it’s very positive but does note relevant issues for specific areas.
It also has quite a few interesting links to other studies and sites in various countries.

I just got my new IP phone, an SNOM 190. Looks nice! Ordered it locally from OzVOIP which had them in stock, charges a very reasonable price (pretty much straight the exchange rate from EUR), no postage, and delivered quickly without any hassles.

It’s now attached to our internal company VoIP network, but these phones can have upto 7 profiles so I can “attach” it to lots of SIP servers. One other I’ve already configured is FWD. That actually looks interesting as it has quite a few facilities (such as conferencing) as well as interconnectivity with other networks and gateways. So, good stuff. And it’s free.

I can configure and talk with the phone through a decent web interface. Best discovery: the phone runs Linux 2.4.18 on a PPC, and SNOM makes available the complete sources and cross compile toolkit on their site. Very good!

So, who said Linux wasn’t ready for the desktop?
These days you buy a phone, and it’s right there 😉

(I live in Australia, so hey this stuff interests me!)

AUUG (Australian Unix Users Group) announced the winners of the 2004 Australian Open Source Awards. The awards were announced at the 6th Australian Open Source Symposium, held yesterday in Perth. The awards are voted on by AUUG members, and this year for the first time voting was opened to Linux Australia and SAGE-AU members as well.

The winners are:

Technology Award
—————-
Andrew Morton – For work on the Linux kernel.
(http://www.zipworld.com.au/~akpm/linux/)

Application Award
—————–
Richard Sharpe – For work on the Ethereal network analyzer.
(http://www.ethereal.com/)

Community Award
—————
Jeremy Malcolm – For outstanding contribution to the understanding of para-technical and legal issues surrounding open source within the Australian context.

Full details can be viewed at:
http://www.auug.org.au/awards/aosa/aosa-2004.html

Plodding away, reviewing submissions (CfP is still open) for the user conference. Seeing lots off excellent stuff actually, including from places I didn’t know. That’s a good thing.

Haven’t had time to check out the new MySQL 4.1.7 production release yet, but then I’ve been using 4.1 since it first came out in alpha 😉

This just appeared on http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1311211

“The NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign was officially launched today. It has industry support from 1&1, Red Hat and MySQL AB. The website is already available in 12 EU languages (more to be added soon), and contains a ton of information about the dangers of software patents, including the myths that surround them. Hopefully, more large companies will join this campaign in the future.”

http://www.NoSoftwarePatents.com/

Ok this is not directly MySQL-related, but I note this as your resident friendly community person 😉

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39170349,00.htm

Open Source software can indeed help make the world a better place!

MySQL 4.1.6 is now available (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.1.html) which should be the last gamma. That is, barring any nasty bugs, 4.1.7 will be labeled production (that’s G.A. for the business types – even though MySQL of course is always generally available from the first alpha).

For Windows users, there’s a new installer since 4.1.5 and it’s becoming really popular as it includes this nice “Server Instance Configuration” Wizard! If you want a smaller package with the new installer, select the “Windows essentials” package in the download list. The lead author of these new tools has written an article about all this, which you can find at http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/4.1/installer.html

Anyway it’s really important that you try this latest 4.1 version (on your development machine) and report any problems you may find at http://bugs.mysql.com/. Of course all builds need to pass the MySQL test suite on each platform before release, but there’s no substitute for testing in the real world!