Colin Charles Agenda

One of the many reasons to come to a MySQL Meetup, is because you’ll learn something new.

We cater for beginners – Minh Van Nguyen

We cater for the more intermediate – advanced users – Arjen Lentz

You’ll start hacking stuff up, while you’re there!

You also get demonstrations, with live human beings, showing a man-in-the-middle-attack

More photos are at Flickr. Where are your meetup photos?

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

Resisting an upgrade, is hard, so I finished some work on Friday, and proposed to upgrade away to Gutsy Gibbon. I’ll talk about what I like and don’t later, but I still face a problem. I can’t seem to get X/xrandr working as well as I’d like it to. I also can’t get all the desktop effect bling going, but that is not as significant a problem as working VGA out.

lspci says, I have a Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03). I drive my laptop at 1440×900, and externally, I’ve got a 17″ LCD panel that can go 1280×1024 (FWIW, I tested against an external 19″ wide panel capable of 1440×900, but it made no difference). However, xrandr thinks I can only, at most, display 1440×1440, and I think that’s why I’m not being able to get a nice “stretch screen” (i.e. two desktops, not mirrored displays) experience going.

xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1440 x 900, maximum 1440 x 1440
VGA connected (normal left inverted right)
1280x1024 59.9
640x480 60.0
LVDS connected 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 303mm x 190mm
1440x900 60.0*+
1280x800 60.0
1280x768 60.0
1024x768 60.0
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

So, mirroring works. My desktop looks a little shitty, but at 1280×1024, all is well and dandy. I have a feeling that when I plug it into an LCD projector, I might get away with things working, for a change. That alone, is impressive. So, how do I magically get a dual-display, stretched desktop experience? My xorg.conf file for reference, is tacked to the end of this.

My heart goes out to whomever decided to write displayconfig-gtk. This is a step in the right direction. End-users will want a GUI to choose external displays and stuff. I love the idea of location profiles (so, at home, maybe I’m tacked to an external 1280×1024 monitor, at another location maybe another, a roaming locating that just creates a 800×600 display, etc.). Of course, it would help if this utility actually worked. It doesn’t, and is currently broken, from my experience with it. Why is it included, under the guise like it might work?

Kudos to Intel, and their page on How to setup Dual Head for Intel Graphics with RandR 1.2. Everyone says, stick to Intel and you won’t go wrong with Linux. Why then, does such a page need to exist? Why is my out-of-the-box experience, still so bad?

If it helps, here’s the xorg.conf configuration file (I didn’t muck with it, its dpkg configured). Help appreciated, and remind me to buy you a beer when/if I see you next.

Section "Files"
EndSection

InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Technorati Tags: xorg, xrandr, gutsy gibbon, ubuntu, displayconfig-gtk, usability, external display, keeping it real, linux, intel, intel graphics, intel 945gm

I’m not a big fan of the polls, but I do think this one’s fairly significant: What is your primary programming language for developing MySQL applications?

Why? Because this means we know what connectors to give more love to. What kind of articles to write for the DevZone. While we might think Ruby is the next big thing since sliced bread, you folk might tell us that Delphi is probably larger than Ruby and we should be applying appropriate love there (I’m sure this statement is untrue, but for arguments sake, mmmkay?).

To vote, you actually have to click the Community link, to get to the DevZone, scroll down a bit, and get to the MySQL Quickpoll. Why can’t I link directly to the quickpoll? Why can’t you vote on the results page? That is left as an exercise to the reader…

Technorati Tags: languages, mysql, primary, quickpoll, poll, website rants

Use MySQL? Fancy meeting other database geeks? In Melbourne? Free on Wednesday evening? Then come to the MySQL Meetup on Wednesday, October 17, from 7:00PM onwards. Its at Building 10, Level 8, Room 4, at RMIT University, so there’s easy access for all.

The agenda this month is simple:

• Using MySQL and JDBC, presented by Minh Van Nguyen
• A quiz of what not to do in MySQL, presented by Arjen Lentz (guest, from Brisbane)

There’s a trip to the pub later that night. There might even be dinner before-hand. If you have suggestions, make sure its vegan-friendly (hi Stewart!).

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

There didn’t seem like a clear way to make a copy (or clone) of a virtual machine with VMWare Server. Not with the 1.0.3 build-44356 which comes standard with the Ubuntu Commercial repository (one of the good virtues of Ubuntu).

So, I fired up the console, and did:
cp -ax Centos\ 5/ Centos\ 5-new

It took 4m5.643s to copy this on my laptop hard disk (only 1.5GB). I loaded it into VMWare, via their Open a virtual machine option, renamed it in the inventory, powered my new virtual machine on and was asked if I’d like to create a new UUID for it. I’d advise you to create one, and once that was done, my virtual machine is ready to go.

Create a new UUID, and you’re set

Exactly what I like. Not re-installing CentOS everytime. Just create a “golden” image and start cloning from there. Maybe with some slack/puppet integration in the future, if I end up using a lot of VMs.

Technorati Tags: linux, virtualization, vmware, vmware server, cloning an image, image, clone, testing, testbed, test environment

Dear Yahoo!,

Things on the Internet die way too quickly. I was just going through my Liferea feeds list today, and noticed about half a dozen blogs that had died. Domains don’t resolve any longer, they’ve decided to stop blogging (and remove their blog posts), and so on. Highly annoying, seeing that I have bookmarked some of these sites in del.icio.us.

I’d pay a reasonable sum for del.icio.us (say, like how I pay for my Flickr Pro account) to take snapshots of the page when I add it to my del.icio.us feed. Something like a cache (like one from your competitor in search, Google Cache; heck even your search engine caches pages!). If I visit the link again via del.icio.us, it will ideally update (via a smart diff) the snapshot, if there’s new content. However, if the content is gone, I’ll always have the original snapshot to refer to.

I know I can muck around with Google Cache or even the Internet Archive, but its just added work. Worse, sometimes blog entries aren’t cached in either :(

Hope you implement something like this in the very near future.

    Kind Regards,
    Colin, long-time del.icio.us user

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, yahoo!, suggestion, cached pages, snapshot, del.icio.us pro