May 11, 2008
Arjen Lentz — From normalised schema to spreadsheet
Here's one for you... imagine you have a properly normalised schema, but you need to output it to CSV for a spreadsheet. So, you have multiple attributes for each item. The number of items is larger than the max # of joins (61) that you can do in MySQL. How to do this in a single query?May 09, 2008
Adrian Sutton — Finally Set Up At IBM
Since Ephox is an IBM business partner and we pulled the right strings and made friends with the right people, I get access to IBM’s offices (apparently world wide but Bedfont Lakes is closest and best set up). They’ve got quite a nice business partner suite on the first floor looking up at all the real IBM employee’s offices but before today it’s always been a major pain.
Firstly, without a car it takes about 2 hours to get here which is never fun, but today I have a car so that was ok.
Then you need to have your IBM badge to get in the front door which on previous occasions I’ve either not had yet, forgotten or in one case walked in the front door and lost, gone back out cancelled it and got a temporary replacement, walked back in a found my last card on the floor. Today I remembered my badge and at least so far it’s managed to not fall out of it’s little holder so it’s still with me.
Once you’re in the business partner suite you find that it’s very difficult to plug a MacBook power adapter into the power points here if you only have the short plug - you need to have the actual cord which until recently I only had an Australian version of.
Then you find that you need a login for the wireless internet which is easy enough to sort out but until today, somewhat inexplicably, HTTP POST didn’t work (GET worked perfectly, but not any HTTP operation that sent a request body), so I was left using my mobile internet. It seems that while I was back in Australia they’ve managed to fix that so I’m up and running again.
Even better, there’s now a beasty Dell server sitting in my utilities cupboard at home running the IWWCM VMs I need to work with and demo and I’ve actually got the firewall configured right so I can SSH in and set up tunnelling to access it from here.
Who knows, I might actually be settling in over here!
May 08, 2008
Martin Pool — Bazaar gedit integration
Javier Derderian is working on ">">"integrating Bazaar into gedit, the GNOME standard text editor, so that you can very easily record changes, push them to a server, and so on. Bazaar's model that a branch is just a directory with extra metadata fits pretty well here. He just made another exciting release (or should that be "excited"? :-)
Martin Pool — Economist article titles, or indy playlist?
- Suicide in Japan
- Too soon to relax
- A lot to be angry about
- Fearful asymmetry
- Death be not proud
- Unsteady as she goes
- Speedy decline
- The Montana Meth Project
- Prove who you are
- Cristina in the land of make-believe
- Unfraternal
- Right back
- Hopes of healing
- Oceans apart
- Rank injustice
- Look behind you
Now I want to hear what A lot to be angry about sounds like.
Martin Pool — Avoiding "not permitted to upload" errors from PPAs
Morten asked today on irc about an error I have hit before myself: you go to upload your new package to a PPA, and get an odd message of Not permitted to upload to the RELEASE pocket in a series in the 'CURRENT' state.
What this means is that your upload was trying to go into the Ubuntu distribution, rather than into a PPA, and you're not authorized to put it there. The underlying reason is that the command line for dput, the tool for uploading source packages, is
dput [options] [host] package.changes ...
It's easy to forget the optional host parameter and if it's omitted it uploads into the Ubuntu archive.
There is a pretty easy (if crude) way to disable this behaviour, by adding these lines to your ~/.dput.cf:
[DEFAULT]
default_host_main = notspecified
[notspecified]
fqdn = SPECIFY.A.PPA.NAME
May 07, 2008
Arjen Lentz — OSDC 2008 Sydney - Call for Papers open!
The call for papers for the 2008 edition of the Open Source Developers' Conference, is open. This year the conference will be held in Sydney, 1-5 December 2008.No, haven't got anything to do with this year's OSDC organisation, although I'm still on the OSDClub's exec. There's a specific Sydney team in charge of the conf. Blissful ;-)
But I do intend to submit something as a speaker, will have to ponder what....
James McPherson — Now *this* is some serious storminess!
While lurking over on freenode, I saw this url. Amazing photos of some insane storm activity related to the recent eruption in Chile.
Check it out!
May 06, 2008
Adrian Sutton — Andrew Roberts Talks Enterprise Content Management
Ephox’s fearless leader, Andrew Roberts turned up in an interview with Randal Leeb-du Toit. Some good stuff in there, definitely worth a listen.
Adrian Sutton — iPhone Coming To Australia
"Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network," Britain-based Vodafone said in a statement.
The plans for the iPhone in Australia will be very interesting - mobile internet is ridiculously expensive there at the moment and the iPhone is basically dependant on an unlimited data plan. While I was over in Australia recently with data roaming turned off my iPhone was pretty much reduced to a big, somewhat ineffective phone rather than a mobile internet sensation…
I had previously scoffed these rumours purely based on the mobile data costs in Australia. I’m sure my friends stuck back in Oz will be very glad to see I was wrong.
May 05, 2008
Arjen Lentz — When humans fail - yes, that's me too
Open Query develops its own training materials, rigorously kept up to date, and thus always printed "on demand", i.e. just before an actual training course takes place. They're neatly bound with colour cover and green back board, just looks nice and clean. They also have a special layout that makes note-taking easier.I'm teaching a custom MySQL training day tomorrow, so I had the stuff ready last week and took it to a friendly local shop for the usual treatment. All seemed perfect. I happened to be out of town on Saturday, so I was just going to pick things up today (Monday). Easy enough, I know the local shop and trust them now to always do a good job and deliver whatever they promise.
Except... today is a public holiday in Queensland: Labour Day. Many years ago I worked for an employer (no longer in business) in the Netherlands who reckoned that labour day was really a day that his people *should* be working, but it really is a day here where most shops are, just, closed. So, I'm certain my custom training manuals are perfectly ready in the shop waiting to be picked up, except I can't get to them until about the time when I really need to be at the training venue in town starting the day. Hmm. Bummer.
I shifted to using a laser printer at home years ago, because it's just more economical, less messy, and better looking output than an inky. But still it's not quite the same as the neatly bound magic I usually deliver. Perhaps I should've allowed for additional days, perhaps I should've checked on my ical which does have all public and school holidays, or perhaps the shop should have realised and warned me, but that's all something to ponder for next time. In fact, that's only mere days away because of the Melbourne course days coming up next week, which I am happy to say are pretty much booked out.
Anyway, you can smile the smile of recognition with me, or simply have a little laugh at my expense. That's ok. Another little lesson learnt! That's life.
Arjen Lentz — on geek sites and logo colours...
Just two observations as I was browsing along today... see https://glassfish.dev.java.net/ (the GlassFish site).What is GlassFish, you may ask? Well you may indeed ask that, it's not unreasonable to do so ;-), but the site (or at least the front page) won't tell you. This is just a funny observation that actually holds true for many if not most geek-focused software products. A site will rave on about the latest version and news, but nowhere will you see described what it actually is. CLEARLY, if you are looking at the site, you already know, right? WRONG ;-)
Then, and this is just seriously funny IMHO, look at the pool of logos on the right, all except the NetBeans one are in these shades of orange and blue. Most of them come from Sun/Java, and there's of course the MySQL logo. They really do neatly blend together. What a charming coincidence! (the current MySQL logo and font/colourscheme was developed by a Finnish agency, around 2001)