During a life with computers, you sometimes see very strange things - such as this:

I have a little server at home that connects to the Internet via ISDN, and all other PCs in the network get their Internet connection through this server, which was running SuSE Linux 9.0. Everything worked absolutely fine.

Last weekend, I re-installed this server and updated to SuSE Linux 10.0. I set up the hardware settings in the same way as with SuSE 9.0 and generally, it worked again - but not always. Sometimes, I couldn't connect to the Internet anymore (while sometimes, it still works), but I found out a funny solution how to work around this problem.

I have also set up a fax server with capisuite. So if I call the fax (e. g. with my mobile phone), I can connect again right afterwards. I don't know why, but it works.

Of course, this solution wouldn't be very satisfying for the long term. But xDSL is …

Today I received an interesting request from one of the db4free.net users: is it possible to trigger emails on particular events? So for example, if a record that fulfills certain conditions is being inserted, somebody should automatically receive an email.

As far as I know, it's not possible in MySQL, but in other RDBMS. So wouldn't this be a nice feature for e.g. MySQL 5.2?

The only solution that comes to my mind is rather tricky and not 100 % accurate (since it doesn't send the email immediately after change in the database happened). Somebody could write a little application that verifies the condition and if it does, it sends the email - so this app could be defined as a cronjob to be run at a regular basis. Not very elegant, indeed.

Are there better solutions for this?

I just saw a draft of the UC presentation by Batara Kesuma about mixi.co.jp, a social networking site in Japan. It has experienced phenomenal growth since its inception, and Batara-San will tell the practical/technical story of how they scaled their Apache-Perl-MySQL based environment. Excellent stuff. Arigato!

Recently I've been working on a large-ish project where all of the UI is written in Javascript. That, in itself, is great. The environments (the browsers) are crappy crappy for development though. Sure, there are Firefox extensions etc etc to help, but it's Just Not Great. Javascript = Great. Ajax = Yay. Browsers = Bah.

Over the weekend I spent all sorts of time getting a simple Rails application running with Apache and mod_fcgid. When I gave up and tried making it work with lighttpd I got server error galore. Yay. What was wrong? My fastcgi? The fcgi Ruby extension? My ruby installation is in /pkg/packages/ruby-1.8.4 or some such and the gem tool couldn't find its own libraries after being installed there. Maybe something similar for something else? I have no idea, I got no error messages anywhere. Ruby = Great. Rails = Very nice[1]. Ruby Gems = It sure is no CPAN.pm. FastCGI/lighttpd/etc = Loosely coupled? No mister, you have some way to …

Recently I've been working on a large-ish project where all of the UI is written in Javascript. That, in itself, is great. The environments (the browsers) are crappy crappy for development though. Sure, there are Firefox extensions etc etc to help, but it's Just Not Great. Javascript = Great. Ajax = Yay. Browsers = Bah.

Over the weekend I spent all sorts of time getting a simple Rails application running with Apache and mod_fcgid. When I gave up and tried making it work with lighttpd I got server error galore. Yay. What was wrong? My fastcgi? The fcgi Ruby extension? My ruby installation is in /pkg/packages/ruby-1.8.4 or some such and the gem tool couldn't find its own libraries after being installed there. Maybe something similar for something else? I have no idea, I got no error messages anywhere. Ruby = Great. Rails = Very nice[1]. Ruby Gems = It sure is no CPAN.pm. FastCGI/lighttpd/etc = Loosely coupled? No mister, you have some way to …

Well, this entry is actually just to check if my new blog gets included in Planet MySQL, but I of course will provide you with something interesting :-)

How do you like this? I find it confusing and filed a bug report about it.

mysql> CREATE FUNCTION now () RETURNS CHAR(10) RETURN("Now");
mysql> SELECT NOW(), NOW (); +---------------------+--------+ | NOW() | NOW () | +---------------------+--------+ | 2006-03-22 11:45:27 | Now | +---------------------+--------+

So we have two functions with the same name, but the space after the name makes a difference.

zak_greant posted a photo:

After many trials and tribulations (mostly on the part of the poor publisher), the MySQL Phrasebook has finally been published.

Truth in advertising: I'm easily swayed by Monica Kumar. Monica is director of Oracle's Open Source Program Office, is very smart, and actually fun to talk with.

(This last thing should not be underestimated. I remain of the mind that people prefer to do business with nice people, not jerks. On that score, I also have to admit mea culpa for casting Oracle with a broad "jerk" brush. The funny thing is, everyone I know there now, I like. So, maybe Oracle isn't a mean, bullying company after all.... :-)

Anyway, I bumped into Monica at Novell's BrainShare conference this week in Utah. She gave me a few CDs for the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and suggested I actually try it out, instead of …

Today I was musing about how great \c is, and how it seems that many people are not aware of it, even though it’s in the banner of MySQL, and has been for a while.

So I decided to see what else I could find. I typed \h and found that a simple \W will show all warnings automatically after a query. That is great for the commandline interface! Now I just have to figure out if it’s possible to automatically do a \W (or “warnings”) whenever I log in with the commandline client.