Open Query blog

Did you realise that… having fewer slides for a presentation actually is more difficult than having lots of slides? Difficult in the sense of more work also… and I notice that most speakers are lazy; hence you get to see slideshows where people read from their own slides slower than you do. So I always [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
7 Comments »

Yep, here’s another weekend challenge. It’s not a regular thing, I just post one when I think of something and there’s no prizes except eternal glory! This time, try and come up with a nice clean and efficient way of maintaining ordered lists. That is, all items in a table, or groups of items, should [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

Code Challenge 2006, sponsored by webdevity.de and O’Reilly in Germany, is open until August 15, and offers some serious prizes – sponsored by MySQL AB and other vendors and magazines. The code challenge asks contestants to program one or more out of three tasks: Webcalendar Wikipodcast CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

Every time I’m travelling (for a conference, or teaching a training course), I wonder how the hotel operators envisage the use of the iron and ironing board. The problem is of course that one actually needs to plug in the iron. But finding a socket in a place near where you can sensibly place the [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
1 Comment »

Interesting… Slidy by Dave Raggett. Despite it being a pest, PowerPoint is of course still “the standard”. Yes, Apple’s Keynote is very nice. OpenOffice.org just clones PowerPoint and thus suffers from the same problems… the main issues I have: maintenance, collaboration, and reusing components. With a decent system that uses XHTML as its format, distributed [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
2 Comments »

This interesting write-up was brought to my attention. It’s about user interfaces, and the author (Hugh Fisher) believes there is compelling historical evidence to suggest that on Linux we need to get a grip on a single user interface, or else lose out completely. He notes that various specific other platforms that have had multiple [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

There are some proposed changes in the Australian copyright law that are just too weird. Australia has its newish free-trade agreement with the US, and so is now harmonising some of its laws. Unfortunately, things are being tightened without the corresponding “fair use” clauses that are part of the equivalent US legislation, and some flawed [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
No Comments »

Did you know that… using a CPU with HyperThreading turned on actually makes your MySQL database server slower? Reason… Well, with real multi-core or multi-CPU, MySQL’s connection threads get nicely spread. With HT it looks like you have multiple cores, but you don’t really. This possibly causes more overhead given MySQL’s multi-threaded architecture? Perhaps others [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
4 Comments »

There are these everlasting misconceptions about MyISAM’s capabilities, many documents and articles “out there” just state that it’s merely suitable for reads. Well, I’m afraid that’s an over-simplification. Quite unfortunate, since users could explicitly benefit from MyISAM strong points for quite a few other situations too. Just remember that MyISAM does not have transactions/rollback, so [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
9 Comments »

What : dinner w/ MySQL people and users Where: Melbourne. Nirankar Indian restaurant, Queen St (near Flinders) When : Wednesday June 7th, 6pm I always try to catch up with my Melbourne colleagues whenever I’m there (we have 4 in Melbourne now). Excellent people and Melbourne is a nice town. This time, we thought it [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized | by arjen
3 Comments »