Archive for May 2007

Bluetooth headset that pairs to multiple devices

I have deeply started liking to use my Jabra BT20V Buletooth headset, as its just dandy for hands free communication, and it was ridiculously cheap.

However, I have also found out that the device does not pair with multiple devices. So, if you have two Bluetooth capable phones (like I do now, but not when I first wrote that “review”), only one phone can actually be paired to the headset at any given time. This is, rather inconvenient.

A review of the Jabra BT8010 basically states that it can pair with 2 devices, but was buggy (firmware fix helps). But it also costs USD$149!

If anyone has any idea about Bluetooth headsets, please do assist in recommending one. I’m after largely one that will pair with at least 2 devices. If it does more, say 2 mobile phones and 2 computers (I’d ideally like to pair my headset with four devices eventually) and works seamlessly, i.e. it can answer calls from any device (I don’t expect it to make calls), I’m definitely in the market for such a device.

(for reference: bt250v review at dealtime, google says that older headsets had this feature and newer ones don’t – why’d anyone remove such a useful feature? hbh-30 works, but newer headsets suck)

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Save the date: MySQL Users Conference Japan 2007

You know you want to go. Its going to be in Tokyo, Japan. Having passed by the Narita airport quite some number of times, I’ve always wondered what was beyond those walls.

MySQL UC-J: September 11-12 2007

I would sincerely encourage all folk in the Asia-Pacific region, using or dabbling in MySQL to attempt to be there. Thats right, I’m calling on you folk from Singapore, Malaysia, China, Korea, Thailand, and how can we forget our beloved Australia & New Zealand (though I’m not sure if flying to Tokyo is any less harrowing an experience than flying to San Francisco).

Flights are going to be shorter, they are going to be cheaper, and you’re going to get to see Tokyo. More importantly, if you pre-register, rumor has it, you will not be paying an attendance fee. Seats will be snapped up fast. Session lineups are amazing. What more can I say besides its going to be a great & fun experience for all.

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Some random thoughts, notes, etc. from the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007

Here are some random thoughts, notes, observations, etc.

Jay
Jay Pipes – he made the conference possible
  • Friendster uses Bugzilla internally. Yes they’re still alive, even though MySpace and so forth are around and kicking. Had to Google them (I wanted to find their old talk about their storage engine), and found MySQL Customers – Friendster, instead. From 2005, Dathan’s (now at Flickr) presentation. Never did find the storage engine stuff, beyond random bits in the press.
  • Probably the best blog post that hit Planet MySQL, as opposed to the session summaries and so on, comes from Alexy Kovyrin. I quote: “P.S. Just remembered – I saw some women-DBAs today! Really smart girls! I never thought that pretty girl can become such great IT prefessional and now I know – I was really wrong.” Maybe we’ll have the MySQL-Women group, following on the LinuxChix.
  • While Adam Donnison from the web team at MySQL gave his talk, I noticed Planet MySQL go down. Looks like the rest of the folk in his talk did too, and Jan Lehnardt says it best in Oh Irony!
  • DorsalSource. Congratulations Jeremy Cole, and Solid. I am highly impressed with all the available binaries, from a trusted source. We’ve got the RHEL vs. Fedora vs. CentOS split now :-) (sure, building MySQL isn’t rocket science, as opposed to rebuilding an entire distribution, but consider DorsalSource+patches to be like the kbs-CentOS-Extras repository)
  • Microsoft is also wanting to sleep with MySQL, these days. Must be a promiscious world we’re living in (they probably got jealous with IBM/DB2 already being in bed with MySQL). Read The Beautiful Game, and of course MySQL on Windows: A Beautiful Game. I expect this isn’t one off (Port25, Microsoft’s open source effort, has had a lot of open source database articles in recent times).

Some of my photos from the MySQL Conference & Expo – 26 April, 27 April. I wish I had more time & energy (& inspiration) to take more photos. Lenz Grimmer took some of the photos at dinner, as he was taken away by the 50/f1.4 lens and no usage of the magic flash (in fact, I didn’t even bring my external flash unit for the trip).

Bryan Alsdorf
Mr. Eventum – at the hotel, while we all wound down

Dinner with some of the community members was fun, as always. Next year, more community members should stick around and we should all eat, meet and greet. The Fish Market has got good seafood (save for their lobster, which comes from… Australia. Not something I’d want!)

Giuseppe & Wife
I was afraid, I thought he’d eat the power squid!

Today, I am a virgin

An Ubuntu-on-my-main-desktop virgin. Or more accurately, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 on a Dell Inspiron 640m laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB RAM, 120GB disk). hermione is no longer a Fedora Core machine, its all Ubuntu now.

Getting The Software
A few weeks ago, I’m pretty sure they offered PowerPC downloads that failed if you tried it for Feisty, but succeeded for Dapper. This week, they’ve cleaned up the download site, and I obviously chose 64-bit AMD and Intel computers (hello, thats what a Core 2 Duo is, right?).


The Ubuntu Download Page

First Impressions
Everything just works. Right out of the box, from the time the Live CD was inserted, to the install process, and the after-install process. It warned me of using Restricted Drivers for my wireless card (ipw3945), and that’s the only real violation I’ve got. Volume control buttons just work, as do brightness control.

After installation however, I got a 1024×768 screen, which displayed on 1440×900 looks kind of ugly. Solved easily via: sudo apt-get install 915resolution. Thats it, I didn’t have to do any more magic, beyond that.

Suspend/resume work just fine. The external display works (so far, I’ve only just used mirrored mode but there’s no reason to think stretching the desktop will not work – how GNOME copes is another matter).

Applications
I like that Firefox 2 is shipped by default. My configuration moved from Firefox 1.5 with no apparent problems. Ubuntu however has decided to disable the backspace key for going back in the history, which seemed to be quite annoying. This is apparently an upstream bug, however for tracking purposes its #60995. This is easily fix-able by opening a browser window, entering about:config and in the search bar looking for browser.backspace_action. Change the value from 1, to 0, and all will be well. Read more about browser.backspace_action if you’d like.

I think the mirror selection based on your country for apt is actually the most sensible solution, as opposed to yum’s mirrorlist. Why? Because contacting various mirrors is silly, some stop working, some don’t feed you correctly, and so forth. Worse, you might get assigned to a bogged down mirror. Ironically, au.archive.ubuntu.com is really mirror.optus.net (i.e. really fast for me) – yum has never once picked this for me automatically.

Playing DVDs? Need MP3 support so the Rhythmbox playlists load up? Their Restricted Formats page on the wiki is amazing. I never expect support out of the box (I wonder why some people rant that Ubuntu is evil as it ships these things by default) but I do expect support to be relatively easy to get. Go Medibuntu (this is the Livna of Ubuntu).

Thoughts For Improvement
Definitely, the migration assistant shouldn’t only attempt to migrate you from Windows. Its much easier doing a migration from /home/username on an existing Linux or Unix install. Sure, its probably not the mass market doing migrations from one distribution to another, but I see it as quite possible that more and more folk move to Ubuntu for ease of use, and the “just works” mentality.

A personal preference is that I don’t like the Human theme. The color scheme seems to be all wrong. Clearlooks is much nicer on the eyes, and I’ve found a Flickr photo that I took to be more interesting on my background (first time I’ve used the image, might I add). Fedora’s backgrounds are really, so much nicer. Canonical is hiring a UI Developer.

Note: This was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks back… It for some reason sat in my ScribeFire (formerly Performancing) notes pile.

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Feed reading – Liferea, Google Reader

Liferea 1.2.10 actually rocks. It does duplicate detection in posts, and makes my feed reading life, a lot easier.


Liferea Duplicate Feed Detection at work

It also supports bookmarking with del.icio.us, which is nifty. It feels a lot faster than the previous version. It had some internal database change and did the honorable thing and keep a backup of the old one, in case I was planning on rolling back.

All my technical related feeds have been imported into Liferea, and I’m a happy camper. In my idea of making NetNewsWire even more useless to me, I’ve moved all photographic related blog reading to Google Reader.

Now, thats a nice piece of software. With access to the Internet, I can read my feeds and have them always “synced” – i.e. I’m never going to have to read an entry twice, or anything of that sort. The only caveat is that I need to actually be online.

So while it’s handy to read Google Reader feeds while I’m sitting in a shop waiting for my take-out, its also pretty darn expensive. I’m paying something like $4.95 for less than 5MB of traffic per month I think (or maybe its 10MB), with Optus.

Does there exist software to read Google Reader offline (Linux preferred, Mac OS X is OK, Windows tolerated)? Do Series 60 Nokia phones have such ability? I ask because soon I’ll not only have the N73, but an E61i (which has WiFi). If only Liferea read/synced with Google Reader, then I can move all my feeds to a cool backend.

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MySQL Community Rocks – look at all the contributed audio & video

The MySQL community is just great. I’ve been suggesting that we get recordings for the Conference & Expo, alas, its generally not in the roadmap. I mean, look at Apple and their WWDC – all attendees get amazing video recordings that switch between slides and the speaker. Last year, they even delivered it via iTunes! In previous years, they distributed DVDs (valuable, though with WWDC a lot is generally new technology announcements, and I can hardly want to reference what was cool for Panther or Tiger any longer…) Mad props also to the linux.conf.au 2007 team, who also did amazing recordings – sessions were available by the evening they were given!

The MySQL conference is a lot different. There are lots of reusable sessions. Some that you attend, you’ll get knowledge committed for life. The tendency to not see too many roadmap talks makes it very useful for future reference.

Back to why the community rocks. They’ve done exactly what should have been done – record the sessions. Give much applause to:

  • Sheeri Kritzer, for a lot of 2007 MySQL User Conference & Expo Presentations & Videos. Sheeri walked around with tripod, and video camera, and did an amazing job. She has MP3 audio and VMV video (it plays on Linux…)
  • Baron Schwartz, has a few files, that are available in OGG Vorbis format.
  • However, that’s not so good for iPod users, so Kevin Burton decided to make MP3’s of Baron’s recordings!

If that wasn’t enough, let me take a moment to thank all the Planet MySQL bloggers, who pretty much created content so regularly, that you could follow the conference, even while you were not there. Kudos to all!

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