Lenz Grimmer's blog

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.

Despite the quite scary-looking list of known bugs in this version, I decided to give 10.1b4 a try and downloaded the 5 CD ISO images.

Unfortunately my installation attempt fizzled out quite quickly after the the first reboot - the bootup procedure aborted while trying to initialize the LVM, which I run on top of a Software-RAID. Some research on the Novell Bugzilla revealed that this had been reported already (BUG#152237) - I hope it will be resolved for the next beta version.

I've added this one to the Most Annoying Bugs list now and hope to find a workaround so I can continue the installation. Otherwise I will have to wait for the next beta, as I can't change the disk layout on this system...

As the development of my previous blog software had been discontinued some time ago, I finally bit the bullet and moved to Serendipity now.

The move was actually quite painless and I was even able to import the most recent posts from the old blog (without the comments, unfortunately).

I have created rewrite rules that should redirect to the new RSS feeds, but I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to the new feeds advertised from the blog's front page soon (you could even subscribe to categories then). Thanks!

I've kept the old blog for archiving purposes, but it's no longer possible to post comments there.

Today I sent out the invitations for the first MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg on Monday, the 6th of March at 19:00 o'clock. It will take place in the Chinese Restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek. If you would like to attend, please join our mailing list and stay tuned for further info!

I just stumbled over this little helper (written by Christopher Brown-Floyd), which allows you to search the MySQL manual by entering a search term in the web search bar. Neat!

This is too funny. I decided to do some housekeeping on my Thinkpad T42 Laptop and checked the installed driver and firmware versions against the latest updates available from the Thinkpad web pages.

Currently, my Laptop's BIOS version is 3.12 (latest version available: 3.19), the Embedded Controller is at version 3.03 (latest version available: 3.04).

The BIOS README tells me:

- This BIOS version will only work with Embedded Controller Program
  Version 3.04 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package,
  Embedded Controller Program Version 3.04 (or higher),
  and update Embedded Controller Program in the system with it.
- If you need to update Embedded Controller Program as well as the BIOS,
  update the BIOS first.

OK, so I guess I need to update the Embedded Controller Firmware first. However, the README for the Controller Update tells me:

- This version of Embedded Controller Program will only work with BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package, BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher), and update the BIOS in the system with it.
- If you need to update the BIOS as well as the Embedded Controller
  Program, update Embedded Controller Program first.

I think it's time to make use of my extended service contract and call their hotline. Or do I really have to update the BIOS from 3.12 to 3.13 first, then update the embedded controller to 3.04 before I can apply the latest BIOS update to 3.19? This is insane.

Congratulations to Justin and Roger for getting the book out and published! I helped tech editing a few chapters (which looked very promising) and I am looking forward to the complete works. Good job, guys!