Lenz Grimmer's blog

A while back I blogged about my experiences in convincing OpenOffice Impress to display text bullets on a slide one after another instead of showing them all at once. Back then, I also toyed around with how to softly fade between two presentation slides, as OOo provided a lot of different effects for this (yes, I succumb to eyecandy but I know you should not overload your slides with too many of it). While I got it working in the end, I found it quite time consuming to apply the effect for each and every slide and the transitions were not as smooth as I would have hoped (I am not sure if it's OOo or the X server itself that is so slow in rendering full screen updates).

While listening Sebastian Kügler's FrOSCon presentation about KDE World Domination, I was quite stunned by the very soft transitions between his slides and what kind of effects were used. After he also quickly switched between an overview mode and individual slides by quickly zooming out and into another slide, I was quite convinced that he had to be using Keynote on a Mac. Which I personally would have found confusing, given that he was there to talk about how to promote the KDE desktop

I was delighted to learn that he was actually using KeyJnote, which is a little Python script that takes any PDF as an input file to generate the slide show. Alternatively, you can point it to a directory with pictures, that will then be used for the slide show. It uses OpenGL for the rendering, so it requires a proper DRI setup. Fortunately SUSE Linux 10.1 already ships with all the required components to get the script working (In addition to Python and Ghostscript, it requires the following RPMs to be installed: pdftk, python-imaging, python-opengpython-pygame). As I can finally use the ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility GPU in my IBM Thinkpad T42 Laptop with the free r300 3D-driver, I of course had to give it a try and am quite happy with it!

To ease the installation of the script, I've now built an RPM for SUSE Linux 10.1, which you can now download from my RPM download section. It might work on older SUSE releases as well, as long as the RPM dependencies are fulfilled. Have fun!

The modular concept of MySQL that separates the storage engines from the SQL parser and optimizer has recently caused a number of new, independently developed storage engines to surface. Here's an incomplete selection of projects around this concept:

• DDE - Distributed Data Engine, a research project of the Technical University of Dresden
• mdbtools - a storage engine that allows readonly access to Microsoft Access .mdb database files
• PBXT - a new, transactional storage engine by Paul McCullagh
• ritmarkFS - a storage engine that represents the content of a directory as a table
• solidDB - another transactional storage engine with many features, developed by Solid.

Also check the MySQL plugins category on the MySQL Forge for more of these and please add more to the Forge Project directory, if you are aware of other interesting MySQL plugins!

Currently, the integration of these engines into the server is still a bit tricky, as it requires patching and recompiling of the server sources. Hopefully all this won't be required in the near future, when our truly pluggable storage engine API in MySQL 5.1 has matured enough. It's very exciting to watch these projects to evolve.

And did you know that not only storage engines will be pluggable? MySQL 5.1 and up supports a plugin API that will allow the loading and unloading of other server components at runtime, without having to restart the server. This is intended as a more flexible replacement of the old UDF (user defined functions) interface. It will provide more modularity in the future - currently it already provides an API to implement different full-text parser plugins. This can be useful if you need to index context in other formats, e.g. PDF files or word documents. I am curious to see what other new plugins people will come up with in the future.

If you happen to use MySQL and live around Hamburg, Germany, here's your chance to meet with other MySQL users, developers and DBAs: I am happy to announce the second Hamburg MySQL Usergroup Meeting, which will take place on Monday, 3rd of July, 19:00. The location will be the same one as last time, the chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.  The food there is quite excellent and they will provide us with a separate room and video projector again. I'll try to arrange a presentation about MySQL and there will be plenty of time for chatting and discussing. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP via our event page on meetup.com and join the mailing list for further details! Looking forward to meeting you! Some pictures of our last meeting are available in my gallery.

While I was at the FOSDEM 2006 in Brussels, I got approached by the folks from Source21.nl about performing an interview about MySQL with them. But as David Axmark (who is one of the co-founders of MySQL) was around as well, I quickly directed them to talk with him instead. The vidcast (length is ~10 minutes, the WMV is ~30MB) is now available online in various formats (OGG, MP4 and WMV) from their web site. Have fun.

The MySQL code base is quite portable - we do build it on a wide variety of compilers, operating systems and architectures, sometimes just to test if it actually builds and passes the test suite. In fact, some bugs only surface under certain environments, so maintaining this diversity helps us to catch problems quickly. But of course there are still many platforms that are not directly supported or no longer maintained. For example, we removed support for OS/2 from our code base some time ago.

Just recently, somebody from Stratus posted patches to make MySQL build on the Stratus OpenVOS environment to our internals mailing list (which by they way is a great forum to discuss patches and hacking on MySQL with the developers directly - but not to ask support requests!). So if you are interested in getting MySQL up and running on VOS, you might want to get in touch with Paul Green from Stratus about this!

Yesterday was a holiday in Germany (Pentecost), and again the weather was quite miserable, considering that it's June already. Nevertheless I spent some time in the garden, removing all withered flower clusters from the rhododendron bushes - this is called dead-heading and supposedly improves blooming in the following year. I also noticed that one of our bamboo bushes (fargesia nitida) has bloomed, which is a pretty rare case (for some species, this happens only once every 120 years)  but unfortunately also means that all bamboos of this species will bloom and die afterwards. I have already seen the same happening in several other gardens around Hamburg and spotted several postings from other bamboo fans in different forums. Looks like it's time to cut it down and dig out the roots.

The long weekend ended with a blast - yesterday I went to a Depeche Mode "Touring the Angel" Open Air Concert which took place in the Weserstadium in Bremen. The event was sold out and around 40.000 people were there to celebrate. I hadn't seen DM performing live before (except for video recordings), even though I am a great fan of them since the early eighties. It was awesome - they played a very good mixture of old and new material, including one of my personal favourites from their early days: "Photographic". It seems that I was lucky with my choice of location right in front of the stage - I did not experience any of the sound problems that many people reported on the german DM website. And the atmosphere there was great, too - people danced, clapped and cheered like mad, including me! And I guess I was also lucky to not have parked close to the stadium - the traffic around the arena came to a grinding halt after the event...

All in all I really enjoyed it - too bad it was over way too quickly!

Paul McCullagh works on a new pluggable transactional Storage Engine for MySQL, called PrimeBase XT. I met him for an interview a few days ago - you can now read it on the MySQL Developer Zone. Enjoy and have a nice weekend!