By default when attempting to create a relationship by way of Tools > Relationships… in OpenOffice you’ll get an error that relationships are not supported. However this is not true if you are using the InnoDB tables. In order to enable relations you need to add overrideSupportsIntegrityEnhancementFacility=true to your connection string. So where do I do that you ask? Simply append the option to the end of your Name of the MySQL database field preceded by a “?”. Just right click on the database name and choose Propeties to get there. Mine looks like this now…

test?overrideSupportsIntegrityEnhancementFacility=true

…with test being the database name.

This will work with both the Mysql Connector/J 3.1 and 5.0

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has a short journal entry and also a video of his take on Net Neutrality.

He is just one of many people who support Net Neutrality. In my last entry on the subject I quoted Scott Cleland of NetCompetition.org, an opponent of network neutrality. He listed in his NPR article a couple supporters of Net Neutrality. Here I would like to link to a fuller list of supporters on both sides.

Net Neutrality supporters ..and even more.

Net Neutrality opponents ..and more.

You decide who has the more genuine (read non-money) interest in internet freedom.

You can see the Net Neutrality proponents answers to the opponents arguments here.

If you want to change the Firefox search engine from the keyboard here is what you do.

Ctrl + k --gets you to the search box
Ctrl + Up or Down --switches the search engine.

Now my life is complete.

Slashdot has and interesting post about Net Neutrality. It deals with one pro and one con article published by NPR. The con article is written by Scott Cleland of NETCompetition.org, a telecom-funded org. Astroturfing comes to mine. The pro article is from Craig Newmark, creator of craigslist.org.

The first question I ask myself before reading the article is, “who do I trust more?” Craig wins here. He has more than proven his integrity. Scott, as a paid mouth-piece of the telecom industry doesn’t get my trust.
In Cleland’s article he says quite a few things that are misleading and obviously intended to instill fear. Some examples…

They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it’s sold.

See the last paragraph of this post as a comment to that.

First, net neutrality is really a misnomer. It’s really just special interest legislation, dressed up to sound less self-serving. Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality?

Um, and who finances your “cause” Mr. Cleland? The Net Neutrality proponents seem a little more eclectic than Clelend’s telecom-funded cause. The last sentence is easy to counter. I’ll try… Did you know AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. are lobbying for net ‘competition’?

Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.

So free and open are the terms for his cause and government-monitored and socialized are the terms for the the Net Neutrality folks. Has any one heard about AT&T allowing government-monitoring without even a court order? Oh, I think they are referring to another type of government-monitoring here.

Amazingly, the proponents of this radical change in policy don’t even have any real evidence of a problem, only unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems.

Actually, such unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems have led to much greater actions in the US. For example, a war. Of course, these unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems have proven to be wrong so it’s admittedly a a bad example. But what do we have from the telecom side to assure that these unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems don’t become true? Only your campaign to make/keep these possibliities around.

And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic.

Have I already mentioned that AT&T and friends allowed government-monitoring without even a court order? So how exactly would this reduce my privacy any more than your funders already have?

If they’re successful, they’ll get a special, low-government-set price for the bandwidth they use, while everyone else — consumers, businesses and government — will have to pay a competitive price for bandwidth.

Actually they already pay for their bandwidth. I know I pay for my server’s bandwidth. The price is currently quite low. I have never heard google complaining that there bandwidth cost is too costly. In fact, they consider the cost to power their data center more of a worry than bandwidth costs. What the content companies and a huge majority of content consumers don’t want is a toll gate as Craig mentions. I want to be able to choose what I want to see at a speed and quality not regulated by a middle-man.

I as a consumer pay the telecoms for my usage and the content providers pay for the bandwidth coming from their servers. As more users and content creators get online the telecoms make more money. The traffic demand per entity will also grow and this will require more infrastructure. This is exactly what both sides are already paying for now. If it’s not enough it’s only because the telecom shareholder’s demand for higher margins is to blame.

If you ask me, government regulation is better than the corporate regulation that Mr. Cleland supports. Governments by definition are there to govern. Corporations are there to make money for shareholders. Yes Google, Microsoft and Co. are also corporation but as I said before they are only a small part of the Net Neutrality supporters where as the Net ‘competition’ supports are by and large telecoms.

Give me an internet without toll booths.

I’ve been using Vim for the last couple years on and off. Over the last few months (since the Vim 7 release) I’ve been forcing myself to use it exclusively. To make working with Vim more intuitive for me, I’ve been trying to get my vimrc just right. Of course, this will probably be a never ending quest.

Currently it looks like this…


" set appearance
syn on
colorscheme torte
set vb " visual beep instead of audible beep
set nu

" search behavior
set incsearch


I’ve been googling and adding, googling and adding. I’ve tried to avoid the complicated stuff so far. The vim documentation is great but a little overwhelming at first. Jonathan McPherson has a nice series of articles that gives a really friendly intro to Vim.

I’m mostly doing python programming so if you have any tips please leave a comment.

Ubuntu’s quite known for its {obscure adjective} {animal} release names. I though it might be interesting to see how the Ubuntu release cycle affected the {obscure adjective}s’ search volume. I turned to Google Trends and did a query for each of the {obscure adjective}s. The results were quite interesting.

Warty wasn’t even on the chart before the initial Ubuntu release and the Hoary release showed the first clear jump in queries. It looks like the Ubuntu’s popularity really took of with the release of the Breezy Badger release and the Dapper Drake (current) release will soon top Breezy. Edgy just crossed Hoary and I suspect it will increase dramaticaly once the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Paris is finished and the work for the next release (Edgy Eft) gets underway.

I just read an article about common grammar mistakes that occur in blogs. I hope a lot of bloggers read it and it has a positive affect on blog grammar. Its always been one of my pet peaves. If your interested in improving your grammar, then their are many sites on the web to help out (i.e. Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style).

PS: I should of mentioned that I taught English in Berlin for 5 years. So I consider myself somewhat an expert.

I’ve been working on a project using Django for the last couple days and am falling in love with it. There are so many nice features that make the life of the developer much more enjoyable. The nicest thing is the automatic administration panel. For many projects it’s enough to define a model and activate the admin panel. Another nice feature that I just discovered is the automatic api documentation for you project. If you click on the ‘documentation’ link at the top right of the admin panel, the documentation is presented in a very well organized and attractive manner. You’ll need docutils installed for this. Whenever an error occurs in you code and you set ‘DEBUG’ to ‘True’ in settings.py, you get a really clean error report. Generic Views saves you a huge amount of coding.

I’m still trying to get my head around everything, but so far everything has been going quite well. I would like to have a way to automatically choose the current user in the Admin panel and some of the included apps (comments, for example) need to be documented. Most aspects of the framework have quite nice documentation, though.

Ok, back to the project.

This was originally going to be a response to a comment on my last post but it got a bit long.

I’ve been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake since Febuary and often forget about the improvements I noticed upon first upgrading. For me, Nautilus has finally become a pleasure to use instead of the pain it used to be. Although not in the default install, NetworkManager is my absolute favorite improvement. Even my wife can now connect to almost any network. The infrastructure for updates and adding/removing software is a huge step forward for linux distros. And last, but not least, the documention is light-years ahead of Breezy. I applaud the documentation and localization teams.

Some of the smallest things are also what makes Dapper such a pleasure to use. For example, my laptop’s (Thinkpad T43) volume keys finally change the master volume and not just the PCM volume. Also I now get an on-screen indication of the change. The menu layout is also much improved.

Even with all the wonderful improvements, there are still so many things to refine and many things that are still semi-broken. One of the more questionable choices in my view is making the live cd the recommended install path. I’ve tried this a couple times on machines with 256mb of RAM and it hung everytime. Even on the machines with plenty of RAM I found myself fighting with the partitioner. Both of these issues have been quite a lot of attention in Malone (The Ubuntu Bug Tracker). For me the “text-based” install is extremely easy to use and works flawlessly. I’d like the idea of have an atttactive introduction before the actuall install but not at the expense of causing a large portion of potential users the headaches that will prosumably come from the live cd.

Overall Ubuntu is hands down the best distro for the largest audience. Not only because it is currently the most user-friendly distro but because the communty (users and developers) that surrounds it is rapidly growing AND dedicated to continuing this tradition.

PS: For anyone interested in getting started with Ubuntu, Linux or open-source software, please don’t be afraid to ask questions to me directly. To start, go to ubuntu.com to get a feel of what ubuntu is.

Last night I went to the Berlin Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) release party at Danial Holbach’s (dholbach) place. It was nice to meet other ubuntu lovers. I arrived at 8pm and left at ~4:30am. By then the sun was already on the rise and by the time I arrived home it had already become completely light out. I finally woke up at 12:30pm with a sore throat from all the talking I did.

It seems as if Daniel and I share a love for a certian british band from the 80’s and the singer of said band. I met Ellen, a kde usability contributer. I envy her persistence with such a thankless task. I also met Daniel Elstner, co-maintainer of gtkmm as well as a very easy-going and likable guy. Furthermore, Matthias Klose, Nina Feyh and about 20-30 others including a couple people from Frankfurt were there.

So it seems as if the Berlin Ubuntu community is pretty strong. Too bad I’ll be leaving in a few months. Of course, the wonderfull thing about the open source community is that it really doesn’t matter were you are. The community is global.