Colin Charles Agenda

Jesse Keating: I am never happy:
Thunderbird
Pros:
- select quoting (with an extension)

Jesse, I did try a bunch of extensions (Quick Reply Extension and TB Reset Quote Header Extension), and none of them get it “right” like Evolution does. Have you had much other luck?

I’ve been using Thunderbird for about six months now, and personally I think Evolution is a lot more mature, even though it comes with its own set of problems. Now the question is, when will Evolution be cross-platform, and make it a true winner (seeing that it has calendering, Palm synchronization, and much more)?

Fedora’s shipping Mono. RHEL5 is likely to ship Mono. When’s Evolution going to be written in C#?

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 the 6th, and possibly there’s a TASLug meeting on the 7th (is there?).

Pete Zaitcev: Torrenting FC-5 ISOs:
I suppose I can uncover the mystery which bothers dwmw2. The main reason I’m torrenting FC-5 ISOs right now is that making my own ISOs from Rawhide RPMs is too much of a hassle. I would need to have all scripts on tap, which copy RPMs, copy comps or whatever it is that Anaconda needs, and, worst of all, generate images/. And God Forbid I hit a bug in installation. Mr. Jones and Mr. Katz would tell me “your ISO must be screwed, use a normal one”, and they would be right.

Pete, I think dwmw2 downloads trees, burns a boot.iso and does NFS installs. Its probably heaps better than downloading them, and making your own ISOs from the tree. It saves a lot of CDs (or CDRWs) and these installs can magically happen pretty unattended. This is my preferred way of installing.

And Jeremy, Peter and Paul are pretty amazing when it comes to anaconda bugs. Very responsive, and always willing to investigate.

Alas, I do torrent ISOs too, because the PPC torrent tends to not receive much traffic, and I’m doing my bit for the rest…

Today, there seemed to be several interesting news items, so let me elaborate on a couple of them.

Besides the fact that the Mandrake founder Gael Duval isn’t part of Mandriva anymore, the part that interested me was the fact that he was running Mandriva’s Community Department. Their goal was “to improve Mandriva’s image in the open source arena.” Swap Mandriva, with MySQL, and thats me. From engineering grit right up to attending conferences, thats what Community does. Its funny thats what Mandriva chose to close first, seeing their dismal quarter results - basically without an OSS community, you’re nowhere in the OSS world.

I’m a regular lurker on #conary, and reading rPath Creates Malleable, Serviceable Linux Distribution made me rather happy. I’ve played with it, and its a lot of fun. They list a bunch of ex-Red Hatters, and the only silly line out of it would have to be “All of this begs the question: Who is working at Red Hat? But anyway.” They probably should’ve mentioned Justin (fedora/x86_64 man) Forbes who works remotely (see, they’re not all in North Carolina!) and Tim Gerla (ok, Tybstar, a GNOME man). Think they missed Ed Bailey from the ex-RH list as well. Give rPath Linux a try, its pretty damn swanky. Oh, and Planet Conary is a well worthy read.

Anyways, in other health related matters, I’m actually better. The artificial skin has grown over, and I’ve removed my dressing. Just got to let it heal, and give it time, of course.

Its probably worth noting that my fedoraproject.org email address is actually byte@fedoraproject.org as opposed to it being both byte@ and colin@. Email is no longer maintained on the box itself, and there was no room for my two aliases ;-)

No wonder my Bugzilla folder was getting quiet for a while…

In some surreal goodness, the Energizer Life Church in Hobart, Tasmania runs an all Mac shop, and they use (get this) Keynote for their announcements!

I told them all this was rather expensive and a misuse of church funds, and looking at Linux and OpenOffice.org will make sense in their next upgrade cycle. Besides, they can’t even get more volunteers to help, seeing that only two folk know how to use Keynote/OSX.

OOo has this wonderful advantage of being cross-platform. And even on a Mac, running in X11 full screen mode, is ideal for presentations. I’ll have to get playing with OOo Base in the near future, because combined with the Migration Assistant, there can be some powerful “NGO desktop”-styled switches.

Yes, MySQL 5.1’s new Partitioning feature definitely is a hot topic. Last week’s iPod Nano winner won thanks to interesting partitioning happenings, and this week’s one wins for the same reason.

With that, here comes a hearty congratulation to Jeremy Cole, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Jeremy’s been a long-time MySQL user, a one-time employee, and a great help on the mailing lists. In trying out new features in MySQL 5.1, he stumbled upon several bugs, one of which has been fixed. Again, the idea of repeatable bug reports is tantamount to how quickly a developer can fix a problem. (mysql#17541) Don’t forget to read his engaging blog, jcole’s weblog, which is already fed to Planet MySQL.

Want an iPod Nano next week? Its simple. File a useful, reproducible, non-duplicated bug report. Blog about it. That second step, is seemingly important. And I’ll notice it when I do my weekly bug hunt ;-)

In other news, if you want to meet Jeremy Cole, he’s presenting quite a bit at the MySQL Users Conference 2006:

• Tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability
• MySQL GIS: Overview and Tools - fairly hot topic GIS is, there’s also talk about getting it going with PHP
• A HackFest on Creating UDFs along with and a panel titled Scale Out

In Linux, there are plenty of good time trackers (karm being probably the best). On OS X, all the interfaces seem clunky, and of course, you’ve got to fork out an obligatory set of dollars to use it. I don’t mind, but I’ve not found something easy to use.

I’m after:

*--------|--------|-----------*
|TaskName|<Button>|Logged time|
*--------|--------|-----------*

I expect to click a button, and have the time move right along for the task. When I feel like resetting it (some tasks, weekly, some monthly), I want to be able to just click a reset logged time option (right click menu feature).

Anyone know if something like this remotely exists for OS X? Consider this a time tracker for dummies or something (I really don’t need a complicated interface).