Some of you may remember a GUI tool named MySQLFront written by
Ansgar Becker, a shareware tool for Windows to administrate a MySQL server
. The development stopped with version 2.5 in September 2002, because Ansgar no longer had the time to further drive the development. About a year later, the name (not the code) was taken over by Nils Hoyer, who started to develop and sell a
product similar in functionality under that name. See
this page (in german) for a more detailed history.
Back then, many people had asked Ansgar to turn his work into an Open Source project, which he declined to do (as it would probably have required even more time to maintain properly than just doing the development all by himself).
The good news is that Ansgar revised his decision now:
HeidiSQL is the new name of his GUI tool (based on the original MySQLFront 2.5 code base), which has now been released under the GPL! The Delphi/Kylix source code is now available via the
SourceForge SVN, new binaries will be released shortly (a few bug fixes have already been applied). A
discussion forum is available, too.
I'd like to congratulate Ansgar to this step - I am sure that there are still many enthusiasts of the "old" MySQLFront around that will be excited to learn about this new development. All the best for your project and thanks for enriching the Open Source ecosystem around MySQL!
I looked through the results of the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards and was very happy to see that phpMyAdmin came out first in the Database and SysAdmin categories. Congratulations to Marc Delisle and the rest of the phpMyAdmin team!
phpMyAdmin will actually be showcasing their project in the DotOrg Pavilion at our MySQL Users Conference, taking place April 24-27 in Santa Clara, California. One more reason to not miss this event!
The
JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most
remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and
Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source
projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological
innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?
You can
submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from
this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the
JAX,
Enterprise Architecture, and
Eclipse Forum Europe conferences, which all take place in parallel on May 8th-12th in Wiesbaden, Germany.
End of last week SUSE
announced the release 10.1 Beta9 and that they decided
to postpone the release candidate to iron out the last outstanding issues. I have high respect for this move and would like to congratulate them for making this undoubtedly hard and unpopular decision. I've been running Beta8 on my laptop since last week and things are looking very promising. I reported a number of bugs which almost all have been resolved in the meanwhile - from my perspective I would be happy if at least the following two bugs could be resolved before the release candidate is made:
- BUG#159595 - Can't change CDs when using YaST2 in KDE (it surprises me that nobody else seems to be stumbling over this one)
- BUG#159667 - Postfix SASL authentication fails with "no mechanism available" (this one was actually a problem with AppArmor preventing Postfix from accessing the required libraries)
For a change, I decided to not download the full ISO images but rather just got the
delta-iso files via BitTorrent. These deltas are all one needs to create the full ISOs - the download was blazingly fast, too. I had already deleted the Beta8 ISO images from my hard disk, but still had the previously burned Beta8 CDs. To generate functional Beta9 ISOs, I just needed to install the package
deltarpm. After inserting CD1 of Beta8 in the CD-ROM drive I used the following command to generate CD1 of the Beta9 CD set:
applydeltaiso /dev/hdc SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta8_beta9-i386-CD1.delta.iso SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta9-i386-CD1.iso
The process is a bit CPU-intensive, but resulted in a functional ISO image - even the MD5 checksum matched the one from the full ISOs available for download. I repeated this process for all 5 CDs and burned them over the Beta8 CDs (I have a set of 5 CD-RWs just for SUSE beta-testing). Let's see when I find a moment to perform another test installation... So far, the
list of most annoying bugs mostly mentions issues related to the package installer - this seems to be one of the sore spots of SUSE Linux 10.1... I hope they manage to beat it into shape in time.
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!):
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.
