In case you haven't heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.

Now, I'm by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in …

Getting back to the ranking calculation quiz I posted last week....

I was a bit surprised about all the complicated constructs with counters, stored procedures and even views. The solution actually needs to work on a 4.1 server so I should perhaps have banned using stored procs, but I didn't expect them to be needed - however I understand that people are very excited about MySQL 5 and all its new capabilities ;-)

My own early solution (which I worked out after posting the quiz) was:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT score) AS ranking
  FROM points
 WHERE score >= (SELECT score FROM points WHERE id=#)

Which is, provided we index the (score) column as well, very fast (the subselect actually gets optimized away into a constant). The server will only have to use the index. It handles ex aequo positions but without skipping …

Getting back to the ranking calculation quiz I posted last week....

I was a bit surprised about all the complicated constructs with counters, stored procedures and even views. The solution actually needs to work on a 4.1 server so I should perhaps have banned using stored procs, but I didn't expect them to be needed - however I understand that people are very excited about MySQL 5 and all its new capabilities ;-)

My own early solution (which I worked out after posting the quiz) was:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT score) AS ranking
  FROM points
 WHERE score >= (SELECT score FROM points WHERE id=#)

Which is, provided we index the (score) column as well, very fast (the subselect actually gets optimized away into a constant). The server will only have to use the index. It handles ex aequo positions but without skipping …

Finally got an evening to get the video (alternate site) of Monday night's MySQL meetup captured and ripped down to a manageable Quicktime move. The presentation is Philip Antoniades speaking about MySQL 5's new features.

It's really pretty easy with MiniDV and a firewire cable. Used Final Cut to throw in some titles (Creative Commons), fades and tweak the audio a bit. The longest part of the whole process was the export to Quicktime, about 2 hours while I worked on other things.

If you're looking for a dazzling multimedia experience, this isn't for you. The most important thing was to get the audio sounding good, and the ability to see the slides. We may …

Someone spotted this Java/MySQL job in Austin Texas, specifically asking for MySQL 5 expertise:

http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=37480170&WT.mc_n=MKT000125
In this position you will be assisting a mid size company with their open source database system. Your main responsibility will be developing a database tier in Hibernate and MySQL. Additional responsibilities include assisting with the conversion and update from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.0.

Requirements:

• Must have strong experience with stored procedures and clustering.
  
• Must have experience with MySQL and Hibernate.
  
• Must have an understanding of Java

Someone spotted this Java/MySQL job in Austin Texas, specifically asking for MySQL 5 expertise:

http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=37480170&WT.mc_n=MKT000125
In this position you will be assisting a mid size company with their open source database system. Your main responsibility will be developing a database tier in Hibernate and MySQL. Additional responsibilities include assisting with the conversion and update from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.0.

Requirements:

• Must have strong experience with stored procedures and clustering.
  
• Must have experience with MySQL and Hibernate.
  
• Must have an understanding of Java

This time, I have a little critisism, or let's say, suggestions for improvement, for the mysql.com website.

Since a few days ago, I find some contents on mysql.com in German (you know, I'm Austrian) that I used to get in English. In general, I think it's good to provide the website in the language of the country that the user comes from. Translating the website to other languages than English provides information to many more people, so it's of course a good thing.

But what I don't like so much about it is that I don't find an (easy?) way to switch the translated contents to English, if I want to. Even if I enter the website through the URL www.mysql.com, I get some contents only in German, where I had to enter www.mysql.de before to get German contents. Also that would not be so bad, but what I'd like to suggest is to provide buttons, or a drop down field, to make it …

By now, Florian has accepted the EV50 “European Campaigner of the Year” award. In his Slashdot journal, he comments on why he didn’t first accept it:

If Microsoft sponsors a series of political awards and two of the ten prizes go to vocal opponents of software patents, then one would usually think that it’s an amazingly positive outcome. That’s just what happened with this year’s edition of the EV50 Europeans of the Year. Michel Rocard, one of our key allies among the members of the European Parliament (MEPs), became MEP of the Year. I received the Campaigner of the Year award for my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign.

However, what the organizers proclaimed as the result of the poll is …

Finding your Independent Data Path:

dbmcli ?d -u , dbm_getpath IndepDataPath

Finding your Run Directory
dbmcli ?d -u , param_directget RUNDIRECTORY