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.

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.

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.

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.