Slashdot | MySQL CEO MÃ¥rten Mickos Answers Your Questions
I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve been mentioned by name in the 1st commet to a /. article. Yay me!? :)
Slashdot | MySQL CEO MÃ¥rten Mickos Answers Your Questions
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Category Archives: life, the universe and everything
More training needed with gradings coming…
Made it to the Honbu today for the first time in a while. I really need to train more – have a Judo competition on Monday night (would be Saturday, but I have the LA face2face, so I’m going to the alternate).
The good thing about training on Thursday evenings is that there tends to be a lot of people on the mat – often more than at any other time. A lot of black belts show up too… some I don’t see too often (but that could be due to me generally not training as much this year).
At the end of November is gradings… so better be prepared. That, and I need to build up some fitness again.
Didn’t stay for the Sword class though, was quite knackered after the 1.5hrs of jiujitsu (well… more Judo style today). The class was good too – Kancho was on the mat and doing things for a while.
I feel I fixed some problems with my 5th and 6th hip throws today (or at least learnt where I tend to go wrong). My 5th leg still isn’t the best… but practice, practice. I think it’s more a consistency issue – sometimes I can just hammer in for the hip throws and execute them beautifully (at least for my grade…. nothing like a 3rd, 4th, 6th or 10th Dan or so throwing you around for a bit to see how far you can still go).
I totally vote we open a Melbourne MySQL office right near there (which is actually further from home for me.. which would be rather annoying, but means I could train every day :)
wishlist: Face Recognition and f-spot
It’d be really neat if f-spot could use face recognition and self-tag photos with who’s in them. It’s a real pain going through all my photos and adequately tagging them.
Restaurant Web Sites
So, having a bit of a google for restaurants around the place (well, okay, in Melbourne) and noticed that about 90% of the web sites are Flash only and hence unusable. Well, guess what – you lose.
Sound Volume
I like listening to music while I work. I also like notification sounds – such as gaim chiming when messages are received (so I look at them) and such things.
I use an iMic USB audio dongle to output sound to my headphones (partly because the connector on my laptop is a bit dodgy now) and I’ve detailed in the past how support for hotplugging of audio devices leaves a lot to be desired (it’s worse than it used to be sadly – I used to just be able to run esd against sound device and all was hunky dory).
What currently gets me is that music can be an adequate volume and then WHAM this loud gaim notification comes through.
Setting gaim to be softer and music to be louder isn’t immediately obvious and is easy to get wrong. It’d be great if the Volume Control applet could tweak it all from one place (and there was a way to change what the drop down volume applet controlled).
Doctor != Hacker
Thoughts on manadotry registration of IT professionals.
Having the argument for this and comparing to “we have it for doctors” doesn’t fly. If you start playing doctor on random people, you can kill them.
Writing code and whacking it up on the net can in no way directly cause harm to someone the same way as DIY heart surgery could.
Anybody who goes and grabs random code out in the wild and runs a system on it on which human life depends gets everything they deserve. They’re the bad guys here – not those writing and sharing code.
So how do you make sure this person constructing a system on which life depends is competant? The same way you do for everybody you hire – check their resume, talk to them, have appropriate checks and balances in place.
Just because somebody has a sheet of paper means nothing about their actual ability. Remember those crappy teachers from your school years? They all had teaching degrees. Rember how the university student tutor you had was a lot better than the teacher? Hrrm… that teaching degree obviously means a lot when it comes to ability then.
I certainly wouldn’t hire at least 80% of my past fellew undergrad students – even though they have the same sheet of paper as me.
Please, everybody go read The Daily WTF and see how much even experts with certifications can get it so, so, so wrong.
Cows earn more than humans
Cows in Europe are subsidised to about $2/day.
Quote from Hack:
“So if you’re a cow in Europe you’re doing better than 2 billion people in the world today.”
Interesting set of priorities we have.
Saturn comes back around…
For certain evil purposes last week, I assembled the old Saturn with a hard disk I found when cleaning a little while ago (I have that kind of tech stuff – you clean up and find 40GB disks – I’m pretty sure I have an 8.4 bumming around somewhere too).
I ended up being able to do the evil I needed to, but I could tell that the room was a bit warmer due to the extra box being alive. I was also lazy and couldn’t be bothered going downstairs for the D200, so this was shot with my old and trusty Coolpix 4500.
I used the box to be able to get remote access to a customers’ test setup to do some diagnosis on a bug (that’s notoriously hard to reproduce). I think I have a fair idea of what it is now though (timing related – not fun).
Remember kids, threads are evil.
Also, an interesting thing to note is that there is, in fact, a limit to not the number of fds you can pass to the select(2) system call, but to the actual number (on my Ubuntu box here, passing a fd of, say 2000 is probably going to lead to trouble). This has nothing to do with the previously mentioned bug, but an interesting point.
and the morning annoyance award goes to….
goes to VMware. Honestly, why every time i go and upgrade a kernel or version of the free (as in beer) VM it asks me about serial numbers.
They also get a “annoyance award” for not listing Victoria as a state that could be in Australia on their web site. They do list other Australian states though (e.g. Westeren Australia and the Australian Capital Territory) yet not one of the most populous.
Or it should really go to Solaris. What a pain in the arse to get to the point of being able to compile $random_free_software_project. Look at Ubuntu/Debian: install system, apt-get build-dep $project, grab source, build. No fucking around with PATH or some strange application to do security updates (which I don’t know how on earth I figured out – I know that somebody else I work with hasn’t been able to easily find it). Why oh why is it so hard? Can’t there be an easy way? Please, somebody enlighten me!
Since I’ve been back…
Saw Augie March live and have gotten Tool tickets. awesome.
Flickr: macplusg3’s photos tagged with beijing
Flickr: macplusg3’s photos tagged with beijing
There’s some photos I’ve taken around Beijing up there. Will be posting more over the next few days (and until I leave – on the 16th). Enjoy.
Tapioca VoIP happiness
and specifically, the Landell front end as it supports the use of a http proxy.
I’ve been able to call Kit and chat while I’ve been on the road this time. Means we get to avoid nasty GSM roaming charges (or any charges) and even though there’s some lag (like a second or so) and the voice quality isn’t brilliant – using Landell/Tapioca and Google Talk on her end means we get to stay in touch without feeling guilty about massive phone bills.
I totally heart free software.
Welcome to Beijing (day 1)
I’ve just come back from lunch. I’ve managed to eat Chinese food, in China, with chopsticks and not totally embarass myself. Ate some new food, new vegetables and a seemingly different type of seaweed than I have eaten before. It tasted good though. I even think Kit would have liked some of it (once she got over the fact that it looked different and some things were green things).
I arrived safely after a flight that was fine (except for getting up rather early to get to Sydney to then take a sane timed flight). Beijing seems to be a bit like the firefly world, except with less flying cars. You’ve got heaps of stuff in English and Chinese. It could be really interesting to live here and experience things.
There’s a national English language newspaper which is fairly up to date on world events – the fact that our dear Mr Howard is going to go to the election seems to be news here! It’s not packed with local news, which would be interesting to read (although I think I’ll have to learn to read first).
The hotel is a short walk from the office (down the street, across the road). Oh, the roads are at least 7 lanes – they’re big!
Hotel is pretty nice, probably about half the price of what I’d expect to pay back home. Breakfast was good – some totally delicious watermelon. Honestly thinking of just having watermelon for breakfast tomorrow :)
Although it’s rather obvious that the hotel is aimed at western visitors. At breakfast you could only really tell you’re in China by: looking out the front window at all the Chinese writing or looking at the waiters and waitresses and noticing they all a) spoke Chinese to each other and b) were Chinese. About 5 languages before my first coffee – what a way to start the day!
At some point I’m going to have to have some Chinese tea – it seems like a real obvious must-do. Although maybe I should give in at some point and buy coffee from starbucks as well….
Beware Digital Rights Traps
I’ve added the “Beware Digital Rights Traps” buttons to both my blog page and the main page of flamingspork.com.
I’ve also taken a photo I took ages ago and used it as a header image thingy. doesn’t look to bad on the front page… not 100% happy with the wordpress theme integration atm.
What kind of person googles for this?
“cut finger pictures”
one of the most disturbing search queries that got somebody to my site. really, really disturbing.
At what point in your life do you go out and desire pictures of cut fingers?
copies of the “Don’t Ban Digital Innovation and Consumer Rights” petition
I’ve just picked up a number of copies of the petition from the printing place. They’re ready to go out. If you (or your LUG, your business or friends) can get signatures on it and would like a number of physical copies to hand out, let me know and I’ll mail them to you.
Bundles could be going out as soon as tomorrow.
I also sustained a paper cut while carrying them upstairs. See, I spill blood in this cause!
Welcome – Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS
I took the plunge and last night I upgraded my laptop (my primary work machine – as in it cannot be busted[1]) to Ubuntu 6.06LTS (otherwise known as Dapper Drake. The LTS is for Long Term Support). It went pretty smoothly.
I had to remove irda-utils after the upgrade as a module being loaded was causing a panic (which showed itself by having everything freeze about 4 seconds after gdm started up and you’re about to enter your username). I should report a bug for that…
It’s slightly annoying that I had to disable gdm so i could see the panic to find out what was crashing. Perhaps we need either:
- crash dumps (a-la IRIX and others where you can then run a debugger on an image of the crashed system)
- panic over the top of X (a-la early MacOS X)
I have to say though, I am very pleased with the upgrade. Everything seems a bit snappier (much welcome) and NetworkManager works! I haven’t tried to suspend my laptop yet though.. so we’ll see if that works.
But a recent version of f-spot is welcome, I’m thinking I’m going to start using it for my photos. The next trick is going to be when i completely run out of disk space on my laptop for them.
The new Rhythmbox has me using it again. Disappointed not to see google talk support in gaim (although maybe i’m just not looking right).
The Window List still exists – a UI element I solemly think should die a quick death. It didn’t work in Microsoft Windows 95 with more than a few windows open and it doesn’t work any better now (okay, a little, but not much).
I want to take a second and marvel at the look of the new Human theme. It is rather lickable and, as we know, the only thing that matters with UI is how much you are licking your monitor. Even without wizz-bang GL compositing powered by cold fusion bucky ball quantum knot computers, it seems nice.
gnome-xchat is taking a little bit of getting used to, but the toast that pops up when somebody “stewart: hey”‘s me is useful.
Epiphany has received some updates too which are quite welcome. A bunch of elements used in phpBMS for Web 2.0 stuff are a lot faster. In previous blog entries I’ve said why I’m using Epiphany and not Firefox. I may re-asses this at some point, but I’m not really in any mood to manually move over saved passwords.
Evolution seems to suck up a bit less memory. Started out only using about 247MB. Now 338MB+52MB for evolution-data-server though…. maybe I’m just not feeling it as much due to other things chewing up less. WHY THE FUCK DOES IT TAKE 390MB FOR A PUNY 10GB[2] OR SO OF MAIL?
On the other hand though, there’s been a bunch of UI improvements in Evolution that are really welcome. I’m quite pleased with the upgrade.
My Bluetooth seems to have broken (my send image from phone to laptop didn’t work). I haven’t had time to debug yet.
Is it just me or do fonts look a bit better too?
I’m probably going to run beagle soon too.
The new version of Deskbar seems to work a lot better. I’ve noticed I’m using it more. Although is it worth 37MB of RES memory?
Tomboy seems to have gotten a bit better, but I’m still experiencing a bug where if i click anywhere that there isn’t text in my “Start Here” note I get a new note with some random large chunk of text from my “start here” note. I credit tomboy with a lot – namely a boost to productivity and not loosing notes. I massively heart it.
I’ll be trying MonoDevelop again to see how easy it really is to whip up something quickly. In breezy things seemed to crash too often to be useful.
The support for switching between audio output devices is much welcomed. However, there still seems to be some bugs – especially related to USB audio devices. I have an iMic here that I bought years ago and am again using since the headphone port on my laptop seems to be having problems (electrical connection related, not software).
Liferea (feed reader) has a lot of improvements. I think it’s chewing less RAM too.
I had to fiddle with my keyboard layout things to get my DVORAK layout working properly. It still seems as though Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow (and Right) to switch between Workspaces only works for the left cntrl and alt – not the right ones (that are closer to the arrows). Although now the little keyboard applet shows “USA” for Dvorak, “USA*” for QWERTY and “Swe” for Swedish.
My build of MySQL that I use (for important things – i.e. my invoices that make sure I get paid) that is typically a close-to-top-of-tree 5.1 install kept working after the upgrade – i.e .binary compatibility didn’t get boned. I did, however, need to rebuild some of my MySQL source trees afterwards (some linking with SSL foo failed, clean build fixed it).
I also did a fresh install from the Desktop CD under VMWARE on another machine. Quite nice installer.
I feel like I’ll move my Mum’s machine over to 6.06LTS very soon (this weekend) as I’m confident it’ll be a great release for her. I’m sure she’s going to love f-spot. I’m also going to introduce her to rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and possibly last.fm as she now has speakers plugged into her computer and a CD player in her car (okay, had it for a while, just slack in getting her up and running burning copies of CDs for the car).
I didn’t get Avahi out of the box after the upgrade… I wonder if I need this manually for the “Share my Music” feature of Rhythmbox to work. Installing now, so I’ll soon know.
I haven’t tried Ekiga (GnomeMeeting, but new name) Internet Phone yet with any SIP things. Since I have a physical SIP phone (a SNOM-190) I may not really use it (except when travelling). Good to test at some point though.
The real OpenOffice.org 2.0 is much overdue – as I’ve sworn rabidly about before. Big difference being this version actually works.
A very worthwhile upgrade IMHO.
The next box to get the upgrade will by my MythTV box – or Mum’s. But probably both this upcoming (long) weekend.
[1] I, of course, have up to date backups and a quick disaster recovery process (get machine, xfsrestore / and /home, continue working). However, this is a pain in the arse.
[2] This may be wrong… “du -sh Maildir” just takes too damn long. My Maildir is currently 1.7GB in a tar.bz2 archive.
Official Google Research Blog: Extra, Extra – Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken
Upgrade to OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and stop murderous urges
It’s no great secret that I think the stability of OpenOffice.org2 Impress in what’s shipped in Ubuntu Breezy leaves a lot to be desired. By ‘a lot’ I mean copy and pasting is unreliably and the Slide Sorter just stopped working for me without crashes (in at least one document).
However, I took the plunge and did something I usually don’t like doing – installing non-official debs.
deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
I am now a much happy camper.
Saving is still amazingly slow, but the lack of crashes has made my week.
doko is my hero for the week. A Tip Of The Hat for him.
New laws to limit use of TV recording – theage.com.au
New laws to limit use of TV recording – Breaking – Technology – theage.com.au
Not at all promising.