It’s no great secret that I think the stability of OpenOffice.org2 Impress in what’s shipped in Ubuntu Breezy leaves a lot to be desired. By ‘a lot’ I mean copy and pasting is unreliably and the Slide Sorter just stopped working for me without crashes (in at least one document).

However, I took the plunge and did something I usually don’t like doing - installing non-official debs.

deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ breezy-updates/
I am now a much happy camper.

Saving is still amazingly slow, but the lack of crashes has made my week.

doko is my hero for the week. A Tip Of The Hat for him.

How to blog for a planet - MySQL-dump

I have to say I disagree with the whole teaser/article body thing. I really don’t like having RSS feeds that don’t contain the full article. It means I can’t read them offline. I often like to catch up on RSS while offline. I also don’t particularly feel the need to have to make yet another click to view the content of an article.

Yes, it’s a little more bandwidth. But really, it’s cheap. Especially with mod_gzip and whatever else optimised foo we can do.

Maybe planet aggregators could get more clever in summarising entries? Or not. How many people actually read a planet from the web site anyway?

MySQL AB :: MySQL: The World’s Most Popular Open Source Database

The cool thing is I wasn’t the one who noticed it. A holler goes out to Timmeah!

The Australian System Administrator’s Conference 2006
It’s interesting that the online registration doesn’t have an SSL certificate that matches. I now have to find a printer to produce dead tree to mail.

Considering that I don’t actually own a printer, this is getting interesting…

P.S. come to my tutorial on MySQL Cluster!

So the last few days have been randomly fun. I’ve been to Fry’s several times to grab random bits and bobs. Things I don’t need, but now have. Hung out with Mikal and Stewart quite a bit, which is always fun. Had lots to drink, and have gotten some work done!

All that aside, today was reserved mostly for our CEO’s house party. It was highly fun, there was drink, great food, and even song!

Stewart by the bar

There was Foster’s beer! Haha. Go Australian export beer. And Morgan was caught having some. I got to meet so many MySQLers its going to be hard to remember them all. I’m sure by the time the UC is over, all will be well.

…

Today my TV told me to be scared, I had a good (late) sandwich for lunch. Some nice local beer (no big brewery), a salad and the most scary looking pasta for dinner. Also hung with people. Now sleep.

It took me just under five minutes to signup for a T-mobile hotspot account, so I could send my mail. Username already chosen, form resets itself. Find credit card, re-enter information. Submit. Need to fill in the expiry date (which displays fine). Form resets. Repeat.

Funny that the immigration official today at SFO had heard of both Linux and MySQL. He’s apparently some form of online gamer, and has written a few PHP apps himself. I was, to say the least, highly impressed.

Something I noticed as funny. All the baggage carousels had Oracle ads. Must be something Oracle related happening here…

Anyways, I’m still waiting for Arjen to come out. Stewart I know is already at the hotel, and JD should arrive in due time. In the meantime, I’ll attend to mail, and upload Flickr photos at 250KB/s (yes, a marked improvement from the 30KB/s cap I have …

Beat Vontobel blogs about “fuþark: The silence of futhark and the state of the dolphin” which is basically about how he’s found that the 5.0.20 release of MySQL is when the 5.0 release is really starting to shine.

This confirms my theory (that I’ve had for quite a while now… like years) that a software release is never really mature until it hits about .20 (that’s dot twenty, not dot two).

When something reaches .10 (dot ten) it’s no longer going to be annoying for most uses, but .20 means that you’re going to be happy. Don’t ask me really why this is the case, but it is.

Think about the 2.6 kernel (yes, Linux Kernel - honestly, you think i was talking about something else?). At about …

At the recent MySQL DevConf in Sorrento, Italy, I decided to take a photo out the window of my hotel room. Here it is. I’ve stayed at worse places, just :)

It also looked really similar to this from the breakfast and lunch room.

Pity we were then stuck in the basement working for most of the day. But it rocked. Got through lots of stuff, which is good.

I spent a bit of time today organizing myself for a bunch of trips next month.

Contrary to my blog posting earlier, I will be at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, which is on the 24th-27th April. But I’m getting into San Francisco in the week before, so if you’re up to meeting me, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I have a feeling that I’ll actually be staying in Santa Clara as opposed to San Francisco proper, but there should be public transport, right?

I should also be with my colleague, Arjen, who’s speaking at the Free OSS Forum Day, organized by Open Source Tasmania. He tells me that Pia should also be there, which should rock. So Hobart, here I come on …