Archive for August 2006

Will we get SkypeOut via GTalk?

Caught Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Not my kind of show. I did see Episode 9 of The Ghost Whisperer and there was a Fedora Core (GNOME-based) desktop, and a spreadsheet was open in her antique store. Fedora in the movies!

Now, Skype is still one of the only packages that I use that isn’t available for Linux/PPC. I can use Gizmo’s voip features thru Ekiga, and that works a charm. It would seem that there are quite a lot of users looking for Skype for Linux/PPC. Of course now that Apple has bowed out of the PPC market, I really do wonder if the folk at Skype see more reason to do this; however, keep in mind that a lot of the PPC-based Macs will be around for a long time to come.

The current line run Linux just fine, even if Leopard wouldn’t (i.e. Linux will run perfectly on your G3, Leopard by the looks of it, won’t).

Then I notice that Google and Skype are in a deal. Does this mean that on my 770, I can actually use SkypeOut? Does this mean that I can use Tapioca to do GTalk or Skype via my Linux/PPC box?

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An end of an era (and the beginning of one)

So, a while back, Dr. Nah, announced that my-opensource.org will be no more. I guess its a sad day, because the ever (in)famous myoss@my-opensource.org list, which has been around since 1998 (or earlier?) is now, no more.

It is now at myoss@lists.foss.org.my it would seem. And Khairil, who runs the box has created a rather important list for the newbies: one to get their Questions answered.

Of course in myoss tradition, it has expanded the discussion into one that asks if a forum is better, and a whole bunch of other things. Knowing them, it’ll get a lot larger, but its fun reading ;-) And if you’re new, and have a FLOSS related question, don’t bother about the rants on myoss, just post to the Questions list.

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MySQL Connector/PHP for MySQL 5.0.24 and PHP 5.1.5 released

We interrupt this scheduled viewing, for our faithful Windows users…

We have a new release of the MySQL Connector/PHP. MySQL has released 5.0.24 for a bit, and PHP themselves have released 5.1.5. The PHP release actually fixes some security related issues. Be sure to check the forums out if you encounter issues and if you fancy, the usual announce message.

Now back to your regular scheduled programming…

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WWDC 2006 wrap up

Some interesting quotes I’ve picked up so far:

  • Good tools obviate bad processes.
  • My hands shake, because I’m a functional alcoholic. My name is Wil Shipley, and I like rum.

Interesting time here at WWDC. Had martinis with some of the office:mac MacBU team, and heard some interesting things. The traditional AU/NZ party, which had Andrew giving us even more drink coupons than we bargained for. Then on to blogger party, which had drinks served by NewsGator (now I feel a whole lot more fuzzier paying for NetNewsWire!), and the next major event would be the Campus Bash. Food this year was sparse (i.e. I didn’t seem to get any, as they’d cleared up).

It’d seem like WWDC is an annual event of fun. And it is. The real value of which stems from the fact that you might have 4-6 coffees a day, learn a lot, and then move on to 4-6 beers a night. Throw in bagels in the morning (mmm, yum, I wish more bagel stores were around in Melbourne), a fairly healthy lunch of salads (perils of talking and going to lunch too late), and pizza for dinner and its quite heavenly.

Leopard has been previewed, and every other blog or news site has written about it. All I can say (without violating the NDA) is that there are some cool features abound when 10.5 comes out. By then, Vista would have come out. And the expectation of a “Linux desktop” would have dramatically shifted (among the home users, at least – corporations I still have hope for).

It is however interesting to see that Apple seems to be “ripping” features out of the Linux desktop. Spaces? Hello virtual workspaces. Then there are some sillies, like encouraging HTML email via “templates”.

One interesting feature seems to be the CalDAV server. (Keeping up with the Forge trend), check out Collaboration on Mac OS Forge.

Community Contributed Documentation – Tamil sees some

Open source projects have a lot of documentation. Some professionally written, others community contributed. One thing that community contributed documentation has going for it is the passionate users that write localized content.

Localization of documentation is important. While we take it for granted that we all speak/read/write/understand the English language, a lot of people just starting out in non-English speaking areas might find it useful to read some localized content. Hook them based on their interests, and slowly they can be weaned off to other non-localized documentation, and might contribute to the localizing cause eventually, even.

Localization is also not easy. If you tried to localize the MySQL Documentation, its recommended you start with something smaller like the GUI tools, rather than the entire user manual. This because of its sheer size. I dare say, we have one of the best user manuals for any open source project out there. Its cogent, its concise.

Tamil (Indian) Documentation
But the point of this post, was really to encourage more community contributed documentation. Of late, we’ve had some Tamil documentation, that I myself can’t review, but I’m sure the collaborative and distributed nature of the Internet will enable us to find some Tamil reading people, who can write better, and longer descriptions about what’s there.

I’m sorry its a Word document. I didn’t want to convert it to a PDF because I have no idea if the fonts will break. For what it is worth, there is a supplied font that you might find useful, if you were reading it. Now, who wants to review it?

Blogs via Planet MySQL
If you read Planet MySQL, you’ll realize that quite a lot of the content there is high-quality MySQL related content. What you will also realize is that these are on individual user blogs, and its all fed based on topic and regex searches (thanks Arjen, for this!). But content within Planet MySQL disappears from the front of the page after 10 entries.

To fix this, there are the Planet MySQL Archives. If you notice, these are actually cached on Planet MySQL itself, so the content will be preserved if you move blog host, or somehow manage to be taken off the Internet. However, this isn’t a hundred percent solution, as not all the content on the Planet are actually “article material”.

So wouldn’t it be nice if all the article material were on the MySQL Forge Wiki? This way, we would have a community-based data store, with available information for all to draw on.

What are your thoughts? Is publishing on the wiki too difficult? I’m interested in hearing your comments (or even better, tell me what your blog posting workflow is like). colin AT mysql dot com works too.

Feedbag Error 10

If iChat throws up a Feedbag error 10 (what oh what is a feedbag?) its because you’ve got a “Recent Buddies” group in AIM. Remove that with something sensible like Adium, and suddenly, like magic, you’ll be able to add AIM and .Mac accounts again.

It doesn’t seem well documented, but this macnn post seems to be somewhat useful. Is there still a Radar Friday going on?


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