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A while ago, about 16 years ago now, I had a desktop computer.  It wasn’t a PC.  It was an Acorn.  It had an ARM processor in it.  Despite the rest of the world starting going crazy for the new Pentium chip, the Acorn with its ARM processor could run rings about it in terms of computing power.  And it was simple and easy to use, I used to write applications in assembly code for it (and it didn't have a fan!).

Not too long after that Acorn went under, Arm was already off on its own to find a new market.  Its …

I like the 5.4 developments, overall. It has useful stuff and is being developed and released a reasonable pace. Good progress. While perusing the MySQL 5.4.4 changelog, one particular change drew my attention, since it’s been (re)appearing since 2006. It’s the removal of the TYPE= keyword which was obsoleted since MySQL 4.1 in favour of the ENGINE= syntax in CREATE/ALTER TABLE.

While on the surface it may seem ok to remove the obsolete keyword, there are quite a few apps out there that use it, and that cannot be changed. So these will now be unable to use MySQL 5.4 or beyond. I filed this as a bug in 2006, MySQL bug#17501. If you’re interested in the “history of reappearance”, take a peek at the comments and their timeline. I just put in a new comment to note the 5.4.4 change. …

The OSCON 2009 is taking place next week and we have bunch of talks we're presenting. I am presenting Full Text Search with Sphinx, MySQL Community Patches and Extensions and Goal Driven Performance Optimization.

Vadim and Ryan have a talk XTraDB OpenSource Storage Engine for MySQL.

This month OSCON is taking place in Silicon Valley which is good for me as I do not have to spend the whole week away from home. Though I would …

Over a chat on the #workbench IRC channel, Collin Cusce has written a handy little Lua script to automatically create relationships (through foreign keys) for his reverse engineered database.

Reverse engineering the DB to import tables into a diagram was easy, but their database used no “hard” foreign keys and an ER diagram without relationships wouldn’t be of much use. So one option would be to individually connect each foreign key column pair by hand, using the relationship picking tool . But doing that for the thirty-something tables in the database would be too much work and something could be overlooked and left out. The other option would be to automate that, since all such foreign keys followed a naming convention like <table>_id<column> or fk_id<table>. And that led to the following (slightly modified) …

News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.

James Turner: Can you start by explaining what NPR Digital Media is …

A core economic principle is the Complementary Good . In short, when two or more things are used together, they are complementary. When the price of an item goes up, the usage of all of its complementary goods goes down. Similarly, if the price of an item goes down, the usage of all its complementary goods goes up. An example is the computer printer. Printers and ink are complementary goods. Proprietary ink products are extremely valuable—at one point ink delivered 60% of HP’s profits —so HP, understanding the principle of complementary goods, practically gives away printers because they make money on the ink. This is the classic razors and blades business model.

Businesses want to lower the cost of their products, while maintaining or improving their margins. …

Due to circumstances beyond my control..evidently involving the power supply of computer handling email for one of the authors .. the magazine has been delayed for a day or two while it gets sorted out. Sorry about that, but it is going to be worth the wait!

I ran into a rather interesting situation today with a client. It seems that the mysqld daemon stopped with no errors in the error log. I ran through the obvious problems … not enough disk space, memory utilization etc and came up empty.

The server was running MySQL 4.1 on Fedora Core 5. We can save the discussion about running your database on reasonable up to date hardware and operating system for another post. Core 5 runs the GNU/Linux kernel 2.4 along with the ext3 filesystem and so the thought was in the back of my mind that it might be an issue with file size. Well, as Sun’s own documentation shows this shouldn’t be the case.

During the investigation it was uncovered that the general query log was not only enabled but 16 gigabytes in size. Aside from being so large it was absolutely useless for anything, it was the obvious culprit for …

So, if you read my first post on the subject of cross platform GUIs, you probably think I missed one aspect, which is that on cross platform GUI toolkits. Don't these guys, in one shape or the other, solve this problem? If you ask me, the answer is no, and I will now set up to make my point here.

The problem is that the main issue persists: Do you want your app to look like Windows on Windows and like Mac on OSX. Always. For all intents and purposes? Or do you want your application to look and feel like "your application", on all platforms? Whichever path you choose, there are solid good reasons for both approaches. And that is the issue. wxWindows, Java, wxWidgets, all fine technologies, but they do not solve the basic issue.

Is the solution to make the GUI adaptable to both approaches on all …

Absolutely nothing?

5.4.0 was released with a change in the MySQL Binary distributions, delivering only 1 64bit Linux platform and two Sun Solaris platforms. This was officially announced on April 21 2009 however the 5.4.0 Release Notes state 05 April 2009. So it’s not a big deal, but consistency would be nice.

I’ve seen in a few posts 5.4.1, so I decided to try it out. Spending the time to read what’s changed in 2 months with the 5.4.1 Release Notes before I go downloading and installing, you read.

This release does not differ from 5.4.0 …