AUSTRALIA PRESS: Telstra To Charge More For Fixed Lines

great - I get to pay more for a service I DON’T WANT! I just want internet, not a phone line (which I aparrently have to have to get ADSL).

On an internal list, a thread switched over to breifly mentioning the film Munich which incidently, I saw a few weeks ago just after linux.conf.au and really enjoyed.

I thought it was really well done and a good film. I really recommend going to see it - it’s a good cinematic experience. Possibly don’t see it if you’re feeling really sad though - not exactly a happy film. Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush are superb in this film (both Aussies too!).

I found it to be more about his journey than anything else and enjoyed it as it was a personal story.

Oh, and why haven’t Margaret and David reviewed it yet? I would love to know what they thought. It’s not often I see a film before I’ve seen them review it :)

Oracle has 50,000 employees. Thats 50,000 people waking up each day to work on Oracle products, and those 50,000 get paid by Oracle each day. We have 50,000 people download our software everyday and work to make it better. But we dont pay them. Which model would you rather have?

A quote from our CEO Marten Mickos in “Oracle’s New Enemy” over at forbes.com.

It is pretty neat to have your work seen by that many people each day.

Noticed this about our web based forums today:

the “Re: What is this? “Can’t find record in ‘'’ on query.”" post on the cluster forum from 10/02/06 07:53:20 isn’t the last message in that thread. there are currently 6 messages of which I only see 2.

Not only that, but from looking at the RSS, I can’t even see this post.

argh! So I shot off an email to our internal guys. The reply was that they don’t have hacking Phorum on their radar (fair enough). Of course, this just means that Phorum sucks[1] (or at least did in the version we do) and adds to the list of reasons why web based forums are much like doing $adjective to $noun.

What is it with new internet lamers and the inability to use an email program? Or even an nntp client (okay, usenet is officially crap now unless you just want spam and …

Blog | rml

struct __packed s { … }This attribute tells GCC that a type or variable should be packed into memory, using the minimum amount of space possible, potentially disregarding alignment requirements. If specified on a struct or union, all variables therein are so packed. If specified on just a specific variable, only that type is packed. As an example, a structure with a char followed by an int would most likely find the integer aligned to a memory address not immediately following the char (say, three bytes later). The compiler does this by inserting three bytes of unused packing between the two variables. A packed structure lacks this packing, potentially consuming less memory but failing to meet architecture alignment requirements.

It should also be noted that non aligned data access on some architectures (e.g. ppc) can totally cripple performance. We’re …

PortaWiki is going pretty well. We’ve got a couple of contribututors at the moment and getting good little bits on the various oddities of various platforms. I encourage you to check it out and add things that you know.

It’d be great to have a MySQL section there too. In versions previous to 5.0 for example, you may get different results from some math operations on different platforms as we used the floating point stuff. In 5.0 we have precision math so this isn’t a problem - but it probably caused somebody to raise an eyebrow in the past. Volunteers?

it’s annoying. grr.

but, on the other hand, I am speaking about MySQL 5.0 at OSDC.

This is even cooler as 5.0 has gone GA. So it’s not “upcoming features” it’s the “here and now”.

I’ll now have to release MemberDB 0.4 (the MySQL release). Converting the Linux Australia installation over at some point soon too. The 0.4 tree fixes enough bugs that it’s worth it (one of which Pia found the other day).

At AUUG2005 last week, Arjen, myself and others were discussing the idea of trying to assemble some sort of common resources that multiple projects can use to contribute and find out about portability issues they stumble across.

The idea being that we can all then learn from each other and write better, more portable software.

So, I’ve set something up.

I present, the incredibly bare (okay, not quite completely bare) PortaWiki.

Please add whatever stuff you find, you know or anything. No idea how this is going to work - I plan to let it evolve.

(Arjen tells me that Peter Gutmann should receive credit as he thinks he came up with the idea. Kudos to him).

http://www.flamingspork.com/portawiki/

I can now give presentations from my laptop - yay.

It requires running the ATI binary drivers instead of the open source ones.

Then VGA out works without being squiggly. (that’s on my Asus V6V laptop with a Radeon X600 running Ubuntu Breezy) - there’ that should be enough google juice.

However, as if being binary only wasn’t crappy enough - suspend doesn’t work. So it’s open source drivers for all other times! I don’t use GL, so that doesn’t worry me. Of course, it may start to worry me what with all the neat cairo stuff and other accelleration coming… but not yet.

This should come in handy for the Melbourne MySQL Users Group meeting tomorrow night!

GNU/Linux and the K750i Bluetooth Remote

Works with my K700i too. Useful to know that the remote control stuff works. will be great for presentations :)