Lenz Grimmer's blog

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage
• VirtualBox
• StarOffice/OpenOffice
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for SMBs

By the way, we have a limited contingent of free day passes for the fair - see this page if you're interested to get one!

I will be there to help manning the MySQL demo pod on all days. See you there!

From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, 6.0 with Falcon and Online Backup), MySQL Workbench, MySQL Enterprise Monitor as well as how to combine these with other Sun products like Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenSolaris or OpenOffice.

Some other stuff that we will be showcasing on the Sun booth:

• Be Brilliant Faster with OpenSolaris: Develop, Debug, Deploy Apps Faster with ZFS and Dtrace, OpenSolaris Live CD – Fast, Free, and Easy to Install
• Virtualize Your Business with xVM and VirtualBox: OpenSolaris, Windows, Linux & Mac OS X Virtualized, Develop on VirtualBox, Deploy on xVM, Free & Open
• Sun Studio Software for OpenSolaris and Linux: C/C++/Fortran Compilers and Tools, x86 and SPARC
• Cool New Features in OpenOffice.org 3.0: Importing PDFs and Managing Appointments, now with full support for MAC OS X (Aqua)
• Discovering Open High Availability Cluster: Overview about HA Clusters, Community Group Projects, Single Node Cluster – Service Failover between Zones
• GlassFish - the Open Source Java EE 5 Application Server: JRuby/ Rails, Ajax & Comet

I look forward to being there! Please contact me, if you are interested in visiting Linuxtag and would like to receive a free pass!

 

 

A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:

• Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or Xing.com.
• Tuesday, April 8th, 17:00: Berlin, Germany. This event will take place in the rooms of the Berlin offices of Sun Microsystems (Komturstrasse 18a, 12099 Berlin). This time, Giuseppe will talk about MySQL as an open platform, Kristian Köhntopp will share a few hints he gathered while doing consulting work at customer sites. Please use Xing.com to register for this event.

At both events, colleagues from Sun and MySQL will be present to answer questions and discuss the acquisition of MySQL by Sun and all things Open Source. There will be free drinks and food as well!

We look forward to welcome users from the various related Sun products/projects, e.g. OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, Glassfish or Netbeans. There is so much opportunity for collaboration and exchange of experience - I am very excited to be at both meetings to meet and talk with people from these communities. See you there! 

 

 

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to the usual MySQL Meetup crowd, we expect participation from various Sun communities (e.g. OpenOffice/StarOffice, Java or OpenSolaris). As usual, there will be a MySQL tech talk (this time held by Giuseppe).

I look forward to this event - it will be exciting to mingle with the people from these other communities and to exchange experiences and make new contacts. If you live somewhere around the Hambur area and would like to participate, please RSVP via Meetup.com or Xing.com soon!

 

Just stumbled over this article, which might come in handy for our Microsoft Office users out there: "Using Excel to analyze MySQL data" by Jason Gilmore explains how to set up the MySQL Connector/ODBC and connecting to a MySQL database using Microsoft Excel.

If you're a Linux user, this article on NewsForge covers a similar topic, using OpenOffice.org

to connect to a MySQL Server.

Update: Thanks to Guillermo Roditi for pointing out that both links pointed to the same article - now fixed. Sorry about that.

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!

I have been struggling with that for ages: how can I configure my slides to not display all bullet points at once when I switch to the next slide, but rather display one at a time?

I prefer not not distract my audience by having them read through the entire slide in advance instead of listening to me still elaborating on the previous bullet points. Some Google research finally pointed me to this article, which also mentions how to accomplish this:

• Mark the frame that holds the bullet points
• In the Tasks pane, select "Custom Animation"
• Click "Add" and select the Entrance Effect you want to use. For displaying one item after another, either the plain "Appear" or "Fade In" effect is probably least distracting. Apply the Effect with OK.
• Small progress: now all bullet points will be displayed at once, but after the slide itself has been displayed.
• This can be changed with the "Effect Options" Button in the "Custom Animation -> Modify Effect" dialogue of the Tasks pane (it's well hidden as the button is only labelled as "..."). Click on the button and choose the "Text Animation" tab in the appearing dialogue. In there, change the "Group Text" option from "As one object" to "By 1st level paragraphs". If you have sublevels of bullets, choose the appropriate level that suits your needs.
• Now click OK and test the presentation again. Each bullet should now be appear individually. You're done!