Colin Charles Agenda

This is just for testing purposes, but you might want to play around with MariaDB 5.5.29 coming via the CentOS 6 repositories as mentioned in this post. Please test it out and report bugs if required. The process was simple on a fresh install:

yum update
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/mariadb/mariadb.repo
yum list mariadb\*
yum install mariadb-server mariadb
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

That’s it, it just works. It comes with MEMORY, CSV, MRG_MYISAM, BLACKHOLE, MyISAM, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, ARCHIVE, FEDERATED, InnoDB (XtraDB) and Aria.

Remember this replaces mysql-libs, and is set to replace MySQL in your install. Here’s hoping it hits mainline CentOS soon.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on my Thinkpad Edge 11″ (which has the machine name: magorian) for quite some time now (from 10.10). Today I did an update from 12.04 to 12.04.1 and found my wifi stopped working. Turning the card on/off using the Fn+F9 key seemed to be the fix. Minor niggle.

Some resources: Ubuntu on Thinkpad Edge 11/13/14/15 is a great place to see common problems & fixes. The ThinkWiki also has a page for the Edge 11″.

The update to 12.10 is currently going on and is expected to take 1.7GB of downloads.

I’m thinking about upgrading the RAM from 2GB -> 4GB (I’m seeing prices that are really cheap for this kind of RAM – less than RM100 ~USD33). I have to admit that the machine definitely feels a lot snappier than my aging MacBook Pro (lovegood). 

I just purchased The Humble eBook Bundle. I primarily use a Mac OSX based laptop (my MacBook Pro), and secondarily use Linux in various flavours (a Lenovo ThinkPad runs Ubuntu, various boxes run a combination of that and Fedora & CentOS, and virtual machines are growing).

It seems not only with regards to Orbitz showing better, more expensive, hotels to Mac users, even when it comes to the Humble Bundle, Mac and Linux users pay more. Are we just conditioned to pay more than Microsoft Windows users?

I’m glad to support DRM-free e-books & great content. Who knows, I might discover something new.

Try doing yum install php53 on a RHEL 5.6/CentOS 5.6 system, and see the following:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
php53-common-5.3.3-1.el5_6.1.x86_64 from updates has depsolving problems
  --> php53-common conflicts with php-common
Error: php53-common conflicts with php-common
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                        package-cleanup --dupes
                        rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Not pleasant right? Seems the only workaround is to issue a yum remove php php-cli php-common, watch the dependencies and reinstall everything. The only thing that seems to be missing? php53-tidy.

Restart Apache (service httpd restart). Update WordPress. If you miss on restarting the web server, it won’t detect the newer PHP install and WordPress will just show you a magical message as follows: “You cannot update because WordPress 3.2.1 requires PHP version 5.2.4 or higher. You are running version 5.1.6.”

I was at part of the Open Mobile Exchange at OSCON today, so here are a few scraps of notes that I found interesting (from various speakers).

While we do live in the shadow of the iPhone now, this is going to change.

Every person in the modern world uses Linux multiple times EVERY DAY (even if you don’t know it). Linux is everywhere.

The AppStore is something that’s making the iPhone rock. The reason Windows is so popular, is because there are so many applications. This is changing in the open mobile world: think Android, for example.

There are 3.3 billion mobile phones (more than PCs, cars, telephones, credit cards, and TV even).

When Apple sends a million phones in the weekend, its a drop in the ocean when Nokia sells a million phones a day! The iPhone is about usage (German iPhone users use 30 times more data; Google notices 50 times the number of searches from iPhone usage)

• User Interface – Vimeo has a video, “OpenMoko train wreck” which compares to why its a FAIL versus the iPhone
• Access to Device Characteristics (camera, location, accelerometer, network, security, privacy) – today you really don’t get access to this, this needs to happen, really!
• Standards
• Performance – Firefox 3 for example, is very performance oriented. Remember, we’ve become bandwidth gluttons (webpage size has tripled since 2003… 22 times since 1995!). We’ve all been spoiled by having high broadband connection… look at Yahoo!’s 14 Performance Rules (34 today).

There are numerous mobile web browsers, and so little documentation about them today.

Leveraging Mobile Open Source for New Wireless Apps and Services
Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager
(instead of Hal Steger)

• Push email, PIM synchronisation
• Younger generations are using more than just voice, in mobile – its SMS, data, chat
• Nokia Ovi (http://www.ovi.com/) – Nokia is using this to monetise user generated content

Average American gets 3,000 visual stimulus messages per day. That’s a lot of advertising!

Today, I completed my migration of my personal machine to one that runs OS X. For those not following Twitter, I picked up a MacBook Air last week, and have slowly been moving my stuff off from the Dell. The Dell can now serve as a full development machine, and I can start running “unstable” Linuxes on it now (“unstable” like Rawhide).

But I digress. This is about how I moved Thunderbird and Firefox over to my new box.

Thunderbird:
Copy ~/.thunderbird over, and place it in ~/Library/Thunderbird on OS X. Only problem I found was with the Lightning plugin, which managed to grab itself an update, and all was dandy.

Firefox:
Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox over, and place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. All the plugins I had, just ran fine.

Only snag? I couldn’t find a copy of Firefox 2 online. Good thing I had a copy on another Mac… Why did I need Firefox 2? Google Browser Sync. Though I suspect that in the very near future, I’ll move over to Mozilla Weave, and get all my systems up to speed with Firefox 3.

Next up, lets see how long I run OS X on the Air… or do I replace it with Linux if it annoys me significantly enough?