There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm …

We're pleased to also have Mark Spencer, creater of the Asterisk PBX software and founder of Digium, at the MySQL Users Conference, 24-27 April (Santa Clara, CA).

Asterisk is very popular with home users, but big VoIP providers like Vonage also use Asterisk, and MySQL of course. It's important infrastructure stuff! Mark's session is entitled Open Source in VoIP.

(early registration for MySQL UC2006 is until March 6th)

MySQL provides several variations on INSERT and UPDATE to allow inserting and updating exactly the desired data. These features provide a lot of power and flexibility, making MySQL significantly more capable than it otherwise might be. In this article I’ll give an overview of each feature, help you understand how to choose among them, and point out some things to watch out for. Setup I am using MySQL 4.1.15 to create my examples.

First I have to correct myself. In my last blog article I wrote about a bug (17564) that MySQL remains database privileges after a database has been renamed. This behaviour is described in the manual, so it's no bug.

However, this raises an interesting question. Should data definition statements also affect the privilege settings? If you for example drop a database or a table, the privileges still remain for this object. Or if you rename a database or a table, the privileges will not be set to the new name. Should the definition statements and the privilege settings be separated, or handled together?

I would be interested, what other people think about this, what SQL standard suggests and how other RDBMS handle this. Is this the default behaviour among the RDBMS, or is it a Gotcha?

Could it be a good idea to add an option to the data …

What's the most outrageous biopiracy case in your country? Who's ripping off indigenous knowledge in your community? Who's monopolizing your genes or patenting your plants? Has anyone trademarked your favorite patron saint? We need your help to identify t

Today I sent out the invitations for the first MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg on Monday, the 6th of March at 19:00 o'clock. It will take place in the Chinese Restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek. If you would like to attend, please join our mailing list and stay tuned for further info!

Today I sent out the invitations for the first MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg on Monday, the 6th of March at 19:00 o'clock. It will take place in the Chinese Restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek. If you would like to attend, please join our mailing list and stay tuned for further info!

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media will be speaking at the upcoming MySQL Users Conference April 24-27 in Santa Clara.  Tim's been at the forefront of the open source revolution for as long as it's been called "open source", having helped bring the term into the lexicon after the historic Open Source Summit in April 1998.  More recently Tim has helped bring the notion of "Web 2.0" into mainstream discussion.

NerdTV has a great interview with in which Tim discusses how he got started in publishing, founding the first Perl conference, why licensing is a red herring and more. 

If you …

At MySQL Users Conference 2006, Johan Andersson will be teaching a 3 hour tutorial on MySQL Cluster. Johan is a cluster expert with a wealth of practical experience from his daily work as sales engineer at MySQL AB. If you are thinking about deploying MySQL Cluster, or just want to learn more about it, this tutorial is for you.

Early registration for the conference is until March 6th. Tutorials are an optional extra, but the really cool thing is that during the early reg period, you can get two tutorials for the price of one! So you can save a lot and learn even more.

The first hour of a 2-hour workshop on what to do with a MySQL instance you’ve inherited. Very detailed, goes into real examples using shell prompts.

Unfortunately, the settings were incorrect on the video recorder, so only the 1st hour was captured. Presented at the Boston MySQL Meetup Group on February 13th, 2006.

Special thanks to Tom C. for securing the MIT space.

google video

flash slides

pdf slides (this might be broken, please let me know)

worksheet

As always, stylistic criticism as well as content criticism is appreciated.