At conferences like LCA 2006, there are all these laptops running out of juice.... of course, those who try a compile of say MySQL or the Linux kernel, run out faster ;-)

This is pretty cool: SplashPower. It's a mat you put on your desktop, and then toss devices like your mobile, headset, and organiser on top of it - and voila, it will get power and charge. Less wire-clutter and very very handy.
It is of course induction based, and each device needs a tiny little strip of magic to make it work. So it is really a fairly generic solution.

SplashPower is not yet available in stores, they're currently talking with distributors.

I sent mail to RMS the other day asking what he thought of MySQL's licensing scheme:

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Conferences... Travel... Passports...
The Australian ePassport has been introduced, with very little press attention. The centre page has an RFID chip which contains the same info as the regular passport.
To me, that's actually big news. And very worrying.



While the "should you be required to identify yourself on the street" debate is still ongoing, this passport already goes a step further. Your identity could be read without asking you.

Sure, there are security features in place. For instance, the info from the machine-readable strip of the passport needs to be scanned to get the trigger sequence for the RFID. And the RFID info is of course encrypted.
But we know that this type of technology can be cracked. And since identity theft is a profitable endeavour, nasties are very likely to spend …

After playing earlier with triggers, I wanted to see whether one can update another table using MySQL triggers.

I tried something like
CREATE TRIGGER mytrigger BEFORE INSERT ON odp.points FOR EACH ROW SET total_points.points = total_points.points + NEW.points;

but it didn't work.

Is it possible or am I shooting in the dark here?

Thanks
Frank

As of MySQL 5.1.5, we’ve finally got row-based replication. This is the last piece of the puzzle to make circular replication usable. Here’s how:

I’m assuming two MySQL servers, A and B. You can, however, use as many as you want, as long as they all somehow pull the logs from all the others.

Set the following config variables on both servers:

server-id=<unique number per server>

log-bin=<hostname>-bin

relay-log=<hostname>-bin

log-slave-updates # really only necessary in circular replication > 2 servers

binlog-format=row

Using the MySQL client, create replication users on both servers:

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO repl@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘<password>’;

Then set master …

Today I took a closer look at XAMPP which seems to be a very interesting project. I even use it on a SuSE Linux 9.0 server, because I didn't want to go through the rather painful process of updating PHP to a current version (which required to resolve a lot of dependencies). There are some good things about it, but also some things that I don't like very much.

Generally I think that XAMPP is very much tailored for beginners to make it easy for them to set up a development environment. But I don't think that many advanced developers use it, because if you try to set it up for the needs of more advanced users, it's almost as much effort than installing each component manually. However, I believe that it would not be impossible to serve the needs of both groups - beginners and advances - by making a few more things customizable during the installation process.

MySQL is a product that shows perfectly that it's possible to …

My blog software got hosed for some reason. Here is the post again:

I have experimented with many many different ways to best back up a MySQL database using the mysqldump utility. It has its shortcomings. Don't get me wrong though, mysqldump is a great utility program, but its lacking in a few areas, particularly backups performed on slave servers.

While mysqldump has an option for --master-data, it only pertains to the relative position within the server's binary log. For backing up a slave server's databases, this really does no good. What you need is the last executed SQL statement position within the relay log, relative to the master server.

How do we get this position? We need to have a fixed reference point as far as a position. The best way to obtain this reference point is to issue a STOP SLAVE command, obtain the reference point using a SHOW SLAVE STATUS …

Don't know what happened to the last post, but here it is again:

I have experimented with many many different ways to best back up a MySQL database using the mysqldump utility. It has its shortcomings. Don't get me wrong though, mysqldump is a great utility program, but its lacking in a few areas, particularly backups performed on slave servers.

While mysqldump has an option for --master-data, it only pertains to the relative position within the server's binary log. For backing up a slave server's databases, this really does no good. What you need is the last executed SQL statement position within the relay log, relative to the master server.

How do we get this position? We need to have a fixed reference point as far as a position. The best way to obtain this reference point is to issue a STOP SLAVE command, obtain the reference point using a SHOW SLAVE STATUS command, …

After much procrastination, I have set up a domain name with the proper mapping for this blog.  So you can now reach it as www.theopenforce.com.   The blog is still hosted at www.typepad.com and all earlier bookmarks should still work.

Addendum: I have had reports that the RSS feed is not working. However, you should be able to get it at as before, e.g. http://zurlocker.typepad.com/theopenforce/atom.xml 

I have experimented with many many different ways to best back up a MySQL database using the mysqldump utility. It has its shortcomings. Don't get me wrong though, mysqldump is a great utility program, but its lacking in a few areas, particularly backups performed on slave servers.

While mysqldump has an option for --master-data