Lenz Grimmer's blog

Arjen asked me, if I could provide an updated RPM of the Mercurial revision control system for SUSE Linux 10.0 (0.8 is the current version SUSE Linux 10.0 shipped with 0.6c). Here it is! Enjoy.

Frappr is an interesting way of showing the geographic locations of people that share a common interest. It's based on Google Maps and of course there is MySQL Users Group, too!

A few days ago I received a neat little gadget: a Yakumo QuickStick DVB-T, which allows me to watch TV via the USB-2 port on my Thinkpad. Amazon sold it for 52 EUR, so I could not resist, after making sure that it was listed in the list of supported devices on the very informative LinuxTV Wiki pages. All what was left to be done for me was to download the firmware and putting it into /lib/firmware. The driver and firmware were loaded automatically when I plugged in the device:

Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-01.fw' to the 'Cypress FX2'
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 8
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in warm state.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 300 msecs.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.

Now I fired up the KDE video player Kaffeine 0.7.1 and configured it to scan for available channels. That's all there was to it! I am positively surprised.

MySQL 5.0.19 was announced on March 10th and the developers have been very busy with resolving many of the bugs that were reported. Something that did not really get much attention because of all these changes was the fact that we now provide binaries for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 (AMD64/Intel EM64T) as well!
If you run the 64bit version of this OS, give these binaries a try and let us know how they fared for you! Kudos to the build team for making these happen.

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy (pictures from other MySQLers can be found on Flickr, too)

I also added some pictures from a recent weekend vacation to Waren/Müritz to the Trips and Vacations Gallery. Enjoy!

Last night I returned home from our internal MySQL Developer Meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The trip again was uneventful (something I certainly don't mind) and I used it to catch up with email and other work that I could not take care of while being at the conference.

The event was very well organized (kudos to Carol and the rest of the team!) and I enjoyed meeting old and new colleagues. It was nice being able to discuss stuff from face to face and hearing about what's cooking at the various other parts of the company in more detail. Too bad that we sometimes had so many tracks in parallel - it was difficult at times to decide which session to attend without fearing to miss something else. I gave a presentation about SUSE Linux (why it's the best Linux distro to use) and how our developers can help to foster our user community.

On Monday evening, we arranged a small meeting with local community users, some of them actually came all the way from Rome! David Axmark gave a presentation about MySQL (the company), later we headed out for dinner in a local Sorrento restaurant. The food was excellent and I got the impression that everybody had a great time!

Now I'm back home in Hamburg, where it's cold and nasty outside and there's still plenty of snow. I miss the spring-like weather that we had the past days and I am a bit envious about the folks that are still there (the meeting ends on Sunday, I left earlier).

I am excited to announce that the phpMyAdmin project confirmed to be present at the DotOrg Pavilion of our MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara next month. Thanks a lot to Marc Delisle for the quick reply and arrangement of a representative. One more good addition to the excellent program we've already lined up!

By the way, we still have some open slots to give away for interested projects! So if you're a developer or member of an Open Source project that utilizes MySQL, here's your chance to show off your work to a very special audience. The exhibition will be open on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we'll provide each project with one free conference pass that will entitle you to attend all the other conference sessions! If you are interested in participating, please contact us at community at mysql dot com for more details.

I finally managed to hook into our wireless LAN here at our conference hotel. The flight from Hamburg to Naples via Munich was uneventful, I met Jan at Hamburg airport and we bumped into a whole bunch of MySQLers at the Munich airport already. From Naples airport it was another exciting hour to Sorrento in a small bus - I completely forgot that Italians have a slightly different driving style than us germans

I am looking forward to the meeting which officially starts tomorrow. I will be giving a presentation about the MySQL Community work and hope to encourage some more of our developers to become more active in there...

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.

I have been struggling with that for ages: how can I configure my slides to not display all bullet points at once when I switch to the next slide, but rather display one at a time?

I prefer not not distract my audience by having them read through the entire slide in advance instead of listening to me still elaborating on the previous bullet points. Some Google research finally pointed me to this article, which also mentions how to accomplish this:

• Mark the frame that holds the bullet points
• In the Tasks pane, select "Custom Animation"
• Click "Add" and select the Entrance Effect you want to use. For displaying one item after another, either the plain "Appear" or "Fade In" effect is probably least distracting. Apply the Effect with OK.
• Small progress: now all bullet points will be displayed at once, but after the slide itself has been displayed.
• This can be changed with the "Effect Options" Button in the "Custom Animation -> Modify Effect" dialogue of the Tasks pane (it's well hidden as the button is only labelled as "..."). Click on the button and choose the "Text Animation" tab in the appearing dialogue. In there, change the "Group Text" option from "As one object" to "By 1st level paragraphs". If you have sublevels of bullets, choose the appropriate level that suits your needs.
• Now click OK and test the presentation again. Each bullet should now be appear individually. You're done!

Next week, the MySQL Development Team (around 100 people) will meet for our internal annual development conference in Sorrento, Italy (between Naples and Salerno).

On Tuesday evening (18:00), we would like to meetup with local MySQL users and affiliated OSS developers to chat about MySQL and OSS and go out for dinner together. So if you are located close to Sorrento, please get in touch with us at community at mysql.com for further details! Looking forward to meet you there - I will be attending the conference until Wednesday.

Update: We decided to meet earlier (at 18:00) instead of 19:30, to have some more time for discussion before heading out for food.

The first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting was held yesterday evening. It took place at 19:00 in a chinese restaurant named Ni Hao - they had a separate room for us that also provided a video projector. The location was suggested by Jens Bollmann, thanks a lot for the hint! We had a pretty good lineup from the MySQL side: Jens Bollmann (Consulting), Jan Kneschke (MySQL Network Development), Kai Voigt (Training/Consulting), Ulf Wendel (MaxDB) and myself (Community) were present. We had a total of 35 people attending.

I started the meeting with introducing myself and the community relations team and giving a short presentation about MySQL (the company - some facts and figures). I then asked everbody to shortly introduce himself to the others. After the round of introductions dinner was served - the food was excellent. There was a lot of chatter and discussion during this time.

After the food Kai gave a presentation about MySQL Cluster (by popular demand), which also led to some interesting discussions and comments. After the presentation, a few people left while others stuck around for another beer and more talking. We wrapped up at around 23:30. I received a lot of positive comments, people really liked the event and were asking to do it again. We will discuss this over the mailing list in the coming days. I've taken some pictures of the meeting, which are now available from the gallery. The slides of Kai's and my talk are available from here.

All in all, the meeting was very well received and (from my perspective) a great success. Thanks to everybody who participated! I look forward to the next one.

Alfredo announced the availability of version 1.0.5 beta of the MySQL Workbench, the latest product in the MySQL GUI tools family (also check out the Administrator, Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit).

I downloaded the RPM for SUSE Linux 9.3, which installed flawlessly on my SUSE 10.0 system. To test the reverse engineering capabilities, I installed the latest version of the Sakila sample database, which also worked very well. Kudos to our GUI team for the good work!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL Instance Manager (IM)"