Landed last night in Seoul and got a ride into the city with a few
others who are speaking at Linux World Korea. I have a Keynote to do
today on the State of the Dolphin (aka MySQL) at the Confernce.
Thanks to my normal lack of need to sleep I decided to go walking at
6AM to see the city. Seoul is north enough to already be light out at
that time of day so I could see everything, and at not deal with
large crowds. Across from the hotel is the Buddhist temple of
Bongeunsa, and I spent a couple of hours walking through it. Its a
pretty amazing place, the art work and detail in the temples are
impressive.

The odd point in the adventure? Having a Buddhist monk come up to me
while I was in a temple and give me what turned out to be four pounds
of steamed rice with beans baked all around it. I wasn't sure
exactly what it was till I got back to the …

Sudoku solver

There are probably tons of these already available, but here is a quick sudoku solver (in Perl):

#! /usr/bin/perl

# Example:
#
# echo $'      2  \n  1 9  4 \n 2 1 5  9\n3     6  \n  68 41 5\n  427 8  \n   51    \n     7 3 \n79    5  '| perl sudoku-solve.pl
#

use strict;
use warnings;

my $s = read_sudoku();

my $res= solve($s);

if($res) {
  print_sudoku($res);
  print "Got it!\n";
} else {
  print "Failed :-(\n";
}

exit 0;

sub solve {
  my ($s)= @_;

  my $res= try_solve($s);

  return $s if $res eq 'SOLVED';

  return undef if $res eq 'FAIL';

  # Make a guess, backtracking if we were wrong.
  # Try to find some field where there are only two possibilities.
  my ($a, $b);

 OUTER:
  for my $i (0..8) {
  INNER:
    for my $j (0..8) {
      next INNER if keys(%{$s->[$i][$j]}) == 1;
      if(keys(%{$s->[$i][$j]}) == 2) {
        ($a,$b)= ($i,$j);
        last OUTER;
      } elsif(!defined($a)) {
        ($a,$b)= ($i,$j);
      } …

Using MySQL most of you will be familiar with this: searching in textfields for keywords is quite uncomfortable when using other table handler then MyISAM. If you use MyISAM, you can utilise the Fulltext-Search with MATCH … AGAINST. Otherwise you are thrown back to “simple” string comparison functions (LIKE). Not really satisfying. As this won’t [...]

As maybe you know InnoDB uses hard page size 16Kb for datafiles and for buffer pool.
However this size can be changed if you need it for your workload.

go to file innobase/include/univ.i, lines:


/* The universal page size of the database */
#define UNIV_PAGE_SIZE (2 * 8192) /* NOTE! Currently, this has to be a
power of 2 */
/* The 2-logarithm of UNIV_PAGE_SIZE: */

#define UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT 14

UNIV_PAGE_SIZE is page size (as you see - default value 16Kb). Possible values for UNIV_PAGE_SIZE is 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K. You also have to change UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT (according comment it must be 2-logarithm of UNIV_PAGE_SIZE).
For pagesize 8K - UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT=13, for 32K - UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT=15 and so on.

My work life is really fragmented at present, so I’ve decided a split approach in answer to Dave Rosenberg’s How I Work–what I have learned so far .

CentOS 4.3
FireFox 1.5, ThunderBird 1.5, Gaim, SSH, Skype, Open Office 2.
Maybe not all of these every day, but some combination of each day –> MySQL 4.1, MySQL 5.0, MySQL 5.1, MySQL Workbench, Eclipse 3.1, J2DK 1.4.2, J2DK 5.0, Apache Tomcat 5.0.28, Apache Httpd 2.0.53, JMeter.

Presently also configuring a new laptop drive running …

I’ve been using VNCViewer from RealVNC under Linux to remote connect to an older machine running windows. Two reasons, I don’t need yet another screen on my desk, and I need windows to adequately test and use the MySQL GUI products, in particular MySQL Workbench.

I never realised there was a better way, particularly over a local network, a command called rdesktop which is capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

$ su -
$ yum install rdesktop

This did only give me version 1.3.1. The current version 1.4.1 available from the rdesktop Website does provide greater commands including the syntax I use.

su -
cd /src
wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rdesktop/rdesktop-1.4.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz rdesktop-1.4.1.tar.gz
cd rdesktop-1.4.1
./configure
make
make install …

Thursday afternoon I stopped by the Usenix Annual Technical Conference on my way out of Boston to be on a panel led by Stephen Walli on Open Source Business models. I got to share the panel with Miguel de Icaza from Novell, and Mike Olsen from SleepyCat/Oracle. It was a great panel, I even got to make use of my "open source can be built on top of a tip jar economy" quote :)

There was an excellent piece of insight I gained from Mike Olson. When asked about receiving value from the community, I had said that what I find most of value was "well qualified bug reports", but what Mike thought was of more value was users who provided validation of the product's value. I've been involved in many open source projects, some well known, and some completely unknown outside of a small group. I've never concerned myself about validation since I have been lucky to have have it come naturally where I have wanted it. What Mike was pointing out was …

I was talking with someone the other day about my Lineo experiences, and it recalled to my mind just how insane the dot-com boom was. Lineo was on a strong path to IPO - we had almost no revenues (a few million dollars), were grossly unprofitable, had no differentiating product (embedded Linux, which customers were happy to buy consulting around, but not pay for the software itself, and wouldn't pay anything for support), and had a massive burn rate.

This was IPO material?

To be fair to us, a large reason that we had the burn rate was because our investment bankers (very respectable, big-name bankers, mind you) told us that we needed a large employee base to justify a high valuation. Think about that for a minute. Not revenues. Not profits. Employees. And so we acquired 6 companies, went from 40 to 440 people virtually overnight, and completed our S-1. …

There was this bug that I wrote about earlier which caused certain Stored Procedures to crash when they were executed more often than once.

I noticed in the bug report and in the change log that this bug will be fixed in MySQL 5.0.23.

I just saw a Microsoft commercial video clip using the slogan

"Better and more simple Visual Basic - goodbye anger, hello fun"

What do they want to tell us? Does that mean, the former version of Visual Studio/Visual Basic caused anger? Do they worsen their old product to make advertising for the new one?

My next thought would be - how will they advertise when the next version comes out? Will they again say, that the now current release causes anger or something similar?

I don't think that's good advertising.