A new release of OpenOffice.org is now available. Have a look at the press release below to see the new features. One of the main features is one that is long awaited in the ability to have more than one independent monitor in Impress. If you have not already upgraded, I would suggest you seriously consider it now.

The OpenOffice.org Community are proud to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite.

There are a number of important new features for users in this release. The presentations application, Impress, now supports multiple monitors, with the presenter choosing where to display the presentation. The Calc spreadsheet has an improved HTML export capability, using styles to better recreate in a browser the appearance of the original spreadsheet. The database application, Base, has a number of enhancements, including improved support for Microsoft's Access product. The …

It’s been a while since I released an update to the innotop InnoDB and MySQL monitor, but I have not been idle. I’m currently working hard to add major new features and functionality. Here’s a quick list of what’s coming, much of which is done already but still slightly broken: Arbitrary user-defined expressions can be the source of a column in a tabular view. You are not limited to choosing from the columns I’ve defined; you can add your own, and base it directly on the available data or write an expression to calculate what you want.

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it‘s pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn‘t pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it‘s tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create …

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it's pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn't pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it's tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create excess …

The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it‘s pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn‘t pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it‘s tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create …

mysqlreport v3.0a has been released which fixes a bug on line 93:

chomperc($mycnf{’pass’} = <STDIN>);

should be just

chomp($mycnf{’pass’} = <STDIN>);

Thanks to jeroen for pointing this out to me. This bug caused mysqlreport to die when using –pass to prompt for a password:

Undefined subroutine &main::chomperc called at mysqlreport line 93

In other news: thanks also to Aurimas for some technical clarifications in the mysqlreport Guide about temp tables.

I was woken up this morning not by someone telling me "the electric is out" but instead by someone telling me "the basement is quiet".

This means that all of the computers in the racks are off.

The computers are all on two circuits with each circuit have at least 30 minutes of power. I know that both circuits haven't likely popped, and my house has a transformer on the side of it (yes, on the side, not on the pole...) and I can draw up to 600 AMPS of power so I haven't pulled enough power to blow the house.

This means that one of the daemon squirrels my dog loathes must have spent the remaining moments of its life becoming charcoal while chewing on the line to the house.

All of this comes to mind before I get out of bed.

No dead squirrel on the pavement, and no lights on at the neighbors. Power must be dead in my area.

I've of course not waken up in time for …

I received an email yesterday from Alexander Muse, the CEO of Spur, concerning a potential problem arising from his open source release of the Big in Japan social media tools. All of the Big in Japan social media tools were released under the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) in November. One of these tools is called SocialMail, which allows email to be sent as RSS.

It seems that a new startup company, SocialMail, is not happy with the naming confusion. Although this type of conflict isn’t specific to open source licensing, it does raise some interesting questions concerning open source project brand protection. In this case, Alex is pursuing trademark protection. If you search the USPTO trademark database for “socialmail” ( …

Today I was working with application which uses Innodb and foreign keys and got into locking problems possibly due to foreign keys, so I did a little investigation on that matter.

Interesting enough it looks like most people do not think about foreign keys overhead in terms of locking. The overhead about checking referenced table is usually considered but not locking which also might be important.

So lets talk how locks seems to work with foreign keys in Innodb. I've only done a quick check so could be missing some details.

All Innodb Foreign Key related operations happen on data modification. So for example if you do SELECT FOR UPDATE on CHILD table it will not lock associated rows in PARENT table and so you can run into lock waits if you do updates to CHILD table which change parents because this is when row in PARENT table will be locked to perform update.

The checks are performed "originating" from the table …

Hi All -

I’ll pile on with Stewart and let you know that the new 5.1.14 beta is out with lots of fixes, plus other niceties for you to explore. We’ve seen a decent increase in 5.1 beta interest, with downloads of 5.1 for November experiencing over a 50% bump than what we saw in October.

In addition, I’ve been taking a sneak peek at some of our preliminary survey results (please participate!), and was interested to see that 23% of you have indicated you’re using 5.1 in production. Of course, we don’t recommend that you use 5.1 for production systems, but it’s nice to see that some of you are finding 5.1 of high enough quality to do so.