Lenz Grimmer's blog

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.

So if you are a member of a project that utilizes MySQL in a cool way, here is your chance to show off!

Repeating Arjen's words here: Primarily, we would like to hear from projects which are not backed/run by a company, because companies of course already have the opportunity to become a sponsor/exhibitor.

Also, note that the conference is in Santa Clara, California - while we can provide space, we are unable to fund everybody's travel/accomodation costs. So if you are overseas and unable to make it, perhaps someone else more local who also works on the project can come...

Anyway, send message to community at our main domain name, subject "MySQL UC2006 Community Pavilion" telling us the name of your project, a description of the project, website URL, other relevant details, who is involved, and which people would actually be coming to the conference (and their email addresses). Someone from the community department (probably Colin) will collect all the info so we can plan from there.

In addition to Fogel's work, there also is another interesting book about this topic: [url=http://stuermer.ch]Matthias Stürmers[/url] 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.

Unfortunately it's still unusable for me, as the sound is very choppy when using my Bluetooth headset, no matter which sound setting I choose. Which is sad, as twinkle is one of the very few OSS SIP phones that has native ALSA sound support :(

You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!

I now built RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0/x86 - you can get them from my RPM Download section. Have fun!

• Started learning Ruby
• Honed my SecondLife scripting and building skills
• Got very annoyed by 1blu, the web hosting provider I chose to host my dad's new web site. Since ordering the new domain in November, I have constantly been fighting with access and configuration problems. I am seriously considering to cancel my account soon, too many of the promised features are either not functioning (e.g. SSH access) or not available at all (e.g. PHP5 support).

Source and binary RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0 are now available from the usual place.

• Using and Tuning of the Query Cache by Boyd Hemphill
• Formatting Output in MySQL by Andrew Gilfrin, which is the "MySQL Tip of the Month" for December

Sigh. Transactions have been supported using the InnoDB storage engine since March 2001 when it was added to MySQL in version 3.23 (as part of the Max builds, it was enabled in all binaries starting with MySQL 4.0). What is it about the Internet that such myths stay around for so long? We even have an article that dispels common MySQL misconceptions like this one, but it seems checking facts is too much work...

More info on using Transactions with InnoDB can be found in this tutorial, which is a sample chapter of the "MySQL tutorial" book by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson.

The "port" to OS X on Intel was actually quite trivial: "configure; make"... We only had to fix a few trivial cosmetical issues. As the code itself has already been ported to Mac OS X on PPC and also builds on other x86 platforms (Linux, *BSD, Solaris), we did not really expect any portability issues.

Note however, that these currently are no "Universal binaries" - they only run on x86. Downlad the PPC binaries, if you have a regular G4/G5 Mac.

• SELinux is enabled and set to enforce policies. The MySQL policies don't exactly match the layout of the MySQL RPMs, therefore SELinux prohibits the proper installation of the RPM. This is filed as BUG#12676 in the MySQL bug database. The workaround is to either disable or change SELinux into "permissive" mode, exempting the MySQL service from the SELinux configuration using the system-config-securitylevel tool, or modifying the MySQL policies using this patch (See the bug report for further details). Red Hat actually fixed this in selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-2.119.noarch.rpm (see BUG#167551 in the Red Hat Bugzilla).
• When removing or updating the original Red Hat / Fedora RPMs of MySQL, they leave a /etc/my.cnf config file, that contains a line basedir=/var/lib, which causes the startup script to not find the binaries. Either comment out that line, or remove /etc/my.cnf completely, if you have not yet made any other modifications.

We have a lot of exciting plans and ideas on how to expand and improve our relationship to the MySQL user community and how to encourage collaboration and discussion. I look forward to being more active in our community and to attend Open Source events and conferences again (something I really enjoyed doing back at SuSE).

Yesterday, me and Arjen arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, to attend the first Opensource Database Conference, which is being held in parallel to the International PHP Conference.

In addition to us two, Kaj, Brian and several members of the MySQL support team will be present and available for questions and comments about MySQL. We also have a booth at the Exhibition floor, so make sure to stop by and say hello!

I already met a lot of new and familiar faces and the conference program looks promising, I look forward to the next two days.

The Opening Keynote has just ended. On Wednesday, I will be giving a talk about MySQL Backup and Security strategies - I hope it will be going well.

Maximum RPM has not been updated since the year 2000 and it was really tricky obtaining info about how to use newer RPM features without peeking into other people's spec files.

Some time ago Guru Labs posted the courseware slides of their "Creating Quality RPMs" course. These really give a good introduction into RPM building and are a well-structured guide for RPM beginners. However, they too did not get into the gory details too much.

With much delight I stumbled over a posting from Paul Nasrat today, which announces the availability of the RPM Guide. A first glance over the table of content was promising. I hope this document will be kept up-to-date!

Now if only the rpm.org website would get a new facelift at some point...

I really enjoyed EUROOSCON, they had a very nice lineup of speakers and sessions. I met a lot of interesting people and old contacts from previous conferences. I especially enjoyed the Maker Faire on Wednesday evening -I was very impressed by what was presented there. You can see pictures from the conference on Flickr - my own pictures turned out less impressive than these...

Early tomorrow morning I'll be heading for EUROSCON in Amsterdam. I look forward to being there! I have not been on a conference for quite some time...

I wanted to switch from my Grandstream BudgeTone-100 to a soft phone on Linux for quite some time, but did not want to mess with a cable-bound headset anymore either.

So yesterday I went out and purchased a Nokia HDW-3 head set. After first testing it against my regular mobile phone, I started by installing the required scn_bt_sco kernel module, which is part of the Bluetooth-alsa package. I needed to work around these small quirks:

• the bootstrap script expects automake-1.7, while the automake-1.9 from SUSE 10.0RC1 worked equally well - I just hacked the version number in the script
• there is no bluetooth-devel package - it's named bluez-libs instead and must be installed

Next I set up kphone to use ALSA via plughw:Headset as the sound device (OSS via /dev/dsp1 worked as well) and dialed into the "echo test" number on our internal VoIP server. The quality was very good! Today I participated on a first "real" conference call and I am quite satisfied with this setup.

The next task is setting up Skype, so it does not conflict with the sound device - currently it works via /dev/dsp1, but only once - every subsequent call attempt results in a "Problem with the sound device" error...

Kaj has written a nice announcement about it, I will soon post the regular release announcement, too.

If you have not done so already and you are an active MySQL user - please give this release a try! Our developers have worked very hard the past weeks to iron out the wrinkles, so we would like to know if it works for you, too! And if it does not, we'd appreciate to hear from you - thanks in advance!

While trying to sync my web site to my workstation using the Unison File Synchronizer I noticed that the version on SUSE Linux is quite outdated and refused to cooperate with the unison server on my Debian box. Hence I bit the bullet and created a SUSE 10.0 RPM of unison-2.13.16 - it's now available from my SUSE 10.0 RPM download section. Enjoy!

Today, the Bundestag elections take place and I am quite curious to see which party made it. I just casted my vote and I am just glad that the campaigns are finally over. Some political parties really annoyed me in the past weeks.

• Visited the inlaws in Austria
• Did a lot of OpenSUSE beta testing (on both x86 and PPC), filed numerous bug reports
• Visited this year's SandWorld in Travemünde, which was truly amazing.

The CfP is open until August 19th, I just filed a session proposal about "MySQL Backup and Security Strategies on Linux". Let's see if it will be accepted...

She arrived at around 5:30 am, which was definitely too early for me to attend. Instead, we decided to watch her departing again, which happened around midnight. You would not have noticed that it was so late already - it seemed like the entire city was still awake and watching. The crowd was huge!

Fortunately we had an excellent view from one of the balconies of the Adobe offices located in the Elbspeicher - thanks to Boris for hosting us! It was truly a great experience watching this huge ocean liner passing by at such close distance. She was escorted by a large number of smaller boats and cruise ships as well as several fireworks along the Elbe river.

I tried to take a few pictures, but my Pentax Optio S4 is not really great for night scenes. Much better pictures have been posted to Flickr already...

Update: Very nice daytime pics can also be seen on Andreas Vallbracht's web site.

More pictures can be seen in the Gallery.

While taking a walk through Heidelberg in the evening, we bumped into Zak, who happened to spend an evening there after attending LinuxTag (which I would have loved to visit, too). We had a good chat, it was nice meeting at such a nice location and completely unexpected :)

Oh, and I added rzip to the 9.3 RPM download section - in case you need an effective tool to compress large amounts of data... Also send tridge a very generic RPM spec file and the patches I needed to apply to make RPM building smoother (they are included in the source RPM, of course). Hopefully he will incorporate them.

• eSvn - a Subversion GUI frontend written in Qt
• samefile - a tool to find duplicate files
• svk - a revision control system
• Some additional required Perl modules for skv

I must say I really like it! It's quite small when it's folded, lightweight and looks nice. And I can finally elevate the back of the laptop so that the screen is at the same level as the external TFT screen next to it. It makes working from a Laptop much more ergonomic and it greatly improves the ventilation, too.

The only thing I am a bit worried about is taking it through X-Ray on an airport - I am quite sure it will raise questions just by it's look...

RPMs for SUSE Linux 9.3 are available from ftp.suse.com and mirrors.

But fortunately there is choice: it seems like the R300 project now supports the Radeon Mobility 9600 in my Thinkpad as well. Looking forward to seeing this code integrated in future SUSE releases :)

I started using PHP/FI (as it was called back then) at my first job when I finished my studies in 1996. Even back then it already rocked and we created many great web sites with it, based on the usual LAMP stack... I really learned a lot back then and PHP is still my preference when it comes to creating web pages with dynamic content.

So thanks and congratulations to Rasmus Lerdorf and the entire PHP community! You all did a great job.

I am especially relieved that the EU has not yet made the final decision on the SWPAT issue. This is in part because of Poland's courage to request that item to be withdrawn from the agenda. Therefore we should all thank Poland!

But we should also be grateful and supportive of the hard work that the folks from the FFII and http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ have been doing. Thank you guys and keep up the good work! Europe does not need Software Patents!

I even found some time to do something I have not done for a while - playing computer games. The games I toyed around with were demo versions of Doom 3 and Need for Speed Underground 2 - they both rock, even though Doom 3 crashed quite frequently for me... I also started playing Americas Army, but I am still stuck in basic training, though.

The sad thing about PC gaming still is that it requires to have a copy of MS Windows installed somewhere. The 3D driver situation on Linux has not improved much in the past few years, it seems. In fact, I get the feeling it has become worse! OK, nVidia seems to have become a bit better, but all other major video card vendors (especially ATI and Matrox) only deliver poor or no support for their latest video cards on Linux at all. Installing these drivers is usually a pain in the back and way to complicated for unexperienced users. Due to license restrictions, Linux distribution vendors are not able to ship and and improve the integration of these drivers in their distributions.

Better 3D support is a major hurdle for getting Linux accepted on the desktop. But this is a typical chicken-egg problem: Video card vendors do not see the requirement, as Linux on the Desktop does not have enough market share. Which it will hardly get, if there is no good support for 3D applications like games...

Frustrating. Looks like I have to wait at least until December until I can give the installation of the ATI fglrx driver another try... Until then, no 3D support for the X.org X-Server... At least ATI claims they are working on it.

The only thing I don't really need is the wireless mouse that was included in the package - I can't really think of a better input device that the Logitech Trackman Marble.

As usual, bug reports are more than welcome at http://bugs.mysql.com/.

For more info check the release notes.

I will try to build a SUSE RPM of it...

First screenshots can be seen at http://www.lenzg.org/export/PearPC/ - that's as far as I have come so far, it's still busy installing...
I will add additional pics once I have made progress.

http://www.419eater.com/
http://baita.mugu.co.uk

It's good to see that these 419 scammers can actually be tricked with their own greed as they try to do it with their victims...

More links to "scammers scammed" can also be found here:

http://spamlinks.dnslife.com/419.htm#scammed

Enjoy!

The first two packages qca-tls 1.0 (required for psi) and kphone 4.0.3 are now available from the 9.1 Download section - enjoy!

Oh, and there are some new pics in the Geek Shirt Gallery

• Henne's Update Media HOWTO
• Andreas' Working with the SUSE Kernel Sources
• Anas' AutoYaST documentation
• Stefan's YaST2 Screen Shot HowTo
• Andreas' Document about Large File Support in Linux

The year is 2004. The Domain http://www.absolutex.org is being redirected to a strange web search engine, http://www.epitera.com/ now points to a site advertising weight management products. Seems like there was no demand for yet another Linux Desktop?

LinuxDevices still has a a short article about the product and company. The original web sites can still be found, too - they still exist as references for the web designer that created these pages once:

• http://www.hakshev.co.il/ob/epitera/
• http://www.hakshev.co.il/ob/absolutex/index_n.htm

So somehow these shirts are historic documents and I decided to take pictures of them before they wear out. I just started the collection, but I will add more and more pictures to the Gallery as time goes by. Enjoy!

That letter is from 1976. Looks like even today he still has not grasped what Open Source is all about...

Anyway, I'm now back from the MySQL User Conference 2004 in Orlando Florida (for some impressions of the Event see Mike Hillyer's blog aggregator), which was followed by a MySQL Staff Meeting in Cancun, Mexico right afterwards. Pictures will be online shortly, I hope...

I am still a bit jetlagged and even though I was able to grab my mail most of the time, there is a huge backlog to wade through...

On the work side, we are very busy with finishing the release of MySQL 4.1.2 - we try hard to have it done and released before the MySQL Users Conference in Orlando. I will be there too! Looking forward to it.

Also the beta test of SUSE Linux 9.1 is nearing completion - Beta4 actually looks quite promising. Lots of new stuff! I found a few tricky bugs and they were quick to fix them, as usual. Keep up the good work, guys! SUSE Linux still is the best Linux distribution around.

Configuring a printer never has been that easy before. Setting up printer sharing between my laptop and the desktop (with an HP LaserJet 5L attached to it) with YaST was a snap.

Anyway, while I was looking for a solution to insert a large piece of text into the X clipboard (to be able to paste it into a text input field of a web page that does not support file upload), I stumbled over this little gem: xclip.

You can now download an RPM from the Download section

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/
http://mehrbudah.de/

Thanks to Nico for the pointer!

Thursday was my Mom's birthday and I had my first secondary school class reunion after 17 (!) years on Friday. So we rented a very nice car for the trip and drove down to Heidelberg.

The class reunion was quite funny, almost everybody showed up and we had a great time, looking at old photographs, laughing about stories of the past and talked about what happened to us since we left school. It was nice to get in touch with my classmates after such a long time.

My sister gave me her old Philips PCVC680K webcam, which I hope will be more suitable for my needs than the cheap Tevion USB webcam that I currently use - it frequently resets the USB which makes it unusable for streaming images.

On the home-improvement side, I installed an ISDN connection for my father's PC (he was still on a 56k modem). Installing the ISDN card and drivers was a bit of an adventure (finding drivers for Windows 98), but was a snap in comparison to locate the corresponding wires on the other end of a 25m cable (between about 10 similar looking cables that all ended in the same wall outlet). But after some fiddling and measuring I connected the correct wires. But even ISDN looked quite slow in comparison to my 2Mbit DSL line at home... I'm spoiled.

The trip home on saturday evening was stressful, as it began to snow and there were several car accidents along the route we were driving. But fortunately we made it home safely.

Today was mostly occupied by oiling our wooden staircase, now that it has been sanded off completely. Unfortunately the final colour does not exacly match our expectations - we need to find a solution on what to do with the staircase on the ground floor. We don't really want to use the same colour again, even though it might look a bit strange to have two differently painted stairs...

A funny example.

Congrats on the new CSS look, James! Well done.

I had to make some small changes to the NewsPoster RSS creation, I hope that Thomas will accept these patches, once they are in a usable state. I am thinking if I should try to make NewsPoster RSS feeds RSS 2.0 compatible...

http://www.gridenko.com/pg/
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

I also updated this Blog to NewsPoster 0.5.1, which now uses a new theme based on my suggestions. Thanks to Thomas Alfeld (the Author of Newsposter) for including it!

Which was much harder than expected, as our original plan (sand off the two layers of paint and old carpet glue) did not work - the sandpaper clogged very quickly. I wasted almost all of the sandpaper I purchased on the first two steps of the staircase.

We then resorted to using a hot air gun to peel off the old paint/glue first and then we sanded off the remaining paint residue, which was much faster. It still took us almost the whole weekend to just get rid of the paint - more sanding will have to take place before we are done with the staircase to the first floor. Especially the corners are hard to get done - the orbital sanding machine is way too big for these, even though it's indispensable for the larger surfaces. Fortunately we also have The Mouse for these areas.

And we still have the one in the second floor... Fortunately this one is not painted.

When we're done sanding, we will simply cover the wood with two layers of Osmo Hardwax Oil (as we did in the living room).

Anyway, he was happy to inform me that I am entitled to obtain a brand new cell phone now that my contract will be prolonged for another 24 months. He also wanted to know, what features I would be looking for when shopping for a new cell phone. As I have not really thought obout this (since I am very satisfied with my current model, a trusty Siemens ME45), I was not too helpful for him to fill out his survey form. He then started making suggestions of his own ("How about a long battery life? That's something that everybody wants to have"), which I happily accepted, just to get rid of him.

But as I was not able to name a new model, he threatened to call me again at the end of the week - I should make up my mind in the meantime and choose a model from their web site.

I surely would like to do that, if the web site would not refuse my web browser with a stupid error message...

Too bad the Segway is not available in Germany yet...

Very neat, I just added it to my front page as well.

$ strings siemens_en_1.00.24_pre3 | grep linux
os_name=linux

Unfortunately I did not yet manage to extract all the files. Hmm, I wonder if Siemens would provide me with the sources to this firmware as well...

This also means, that I will not provide SuSE Linux 8.2 RPMs anymore. Sorry!

After the kitchen was gone, we could focus on removing the wall tiles in the bathrooms. We already started hammering them away manually in the guest bathroom last week, which was a lot of work. Only equipped with a hammer and chisel, we managed to hammer down most of the wall tiles within a few hours. It's amazing how different they stick to the wall, depending on what's beneath the tile cement. On some parts of the wall, they simply fell off in one piece. On the other wall I almost went nuts - I had to hammer them down piece by piece.

Fortunately the guest bathroom is rather small. For the kitchen, main bathroom and the floor tiles in all rooms we have now rented a more powerful toy - a Hilti combihammer. Rock'n Roll!

As we needed to make room for the new one, we started tearing it down yesterday. This morning, we finished the work and rented a van to drive the stuff to the bulky waste collection place.

It's unbelievable what kind of stuff you can find behind a kitchen cupboards that were hanging there for more than 20 years. Ugh! Cobwebs were the least ugly things behind there. But now the kitchen is gone (we only kept the electric stove to sell it separately) and we can finally start removing the wall and floor tiles to make room for the new ones.

Yes, we've actually bought the house and have already started renovating it. It was built in 1959, but has been constantly maintained and renovated. However, there are a few things that we would like to change before we move in:

• Replace all floor tiles in the basement to get rid of the current colourful mixture (three different styles of tiles is too much)
• Get a new kitchen. The previous one was already very rotten and filthy. But I shall spare that story for a separate blog comment :)
• Completely modernize the guest bathroom. We decided to move the wall around the entrance door for about half a meter to make more room for the bathroom. The toilet and wash basin will be replaced, too.
• Completely overhaul the main bathroom. Instead of the bathtub, we will get a big shower and move the toilet next to it. Also, the wash basin will be moved from the right to the left wall.
• Get rid of the wooden ceiling in the staircase. It makes the room way too dark and small - we'd rather have plain white walls there.
• Hundreds of other things I currently can't remember.

• mysqlcc-0.9.3
• scribus-1.0.1

• Thanks to James I today fixed a nasty Apache configuration error that was redirecting URLs to kallisto.local instead of http://lenz.homelinux.org when people tried to access my site via the two external domain names (lenzg.org or lenz.grimmer.com, which both don't have enough web space to host this site)
• James also added a link to my collection of SuSE 8.2 RPMs to his web site. I am sure that will drive some additional traffic to these pages...
• I've started installing Gallery and will move all my various picture collections into there step by step. Still fiddling with the base configuration, though...

I've been pretty bad with keeping my Advogato diary up to date. I wonder, if having it on my own home page will make a difference...