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!
I had an exciting weekend at the
FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup.
Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"
Later today I will be heading off to the sixth
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various
sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the
openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.
See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to
Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.
Markus yesterday
mentioned that he started reading "
Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel, a book that I plan to read some time, too. The table of content looks promising, he covers a wide range of aspects related to building up and running an OSS project.
In addition to Fogel's work, there also is another interesting book about this topic: Matthias Stürmers master thesis "Open Source Community Building". It takes a slightly more scientific approach and documents the results of actually interviewing the members of various OSS projects about their experiences. It has been around for a bit, Matt Asay wrote a nice review about it in September 2005. I just read the rewritten german summary Mattias created for the german Open Source Yearbook and found it an interesting read! If you are running or plan to found an Open Source Software project, you might want to consult these books for some good advice on how to avoid common pitfalls and how to attract and foster a community around your project.
I've had some discussion with the developers of the
Open-XChange Groupware server about using MySQL as a storage backend.
As it turned out, a long-standing bug report has just recently been picked up and the first patches have been posted.
The procedure on how to get OX working with MySQL is also described on a Wiki page and there is a discussion about this in their Forum. So if you're interested in testing Open-XChange with MySQL, give this a try and provide them with feedback! Thanks for your support.
I finally finished my interview with
Kai Seidler, who is one of the people behind the very popular
XAMPP project.
You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!
