Ben Balbo, of OSDC and Melbourne PHP fame and all round nice guy, got together with some workmates and over the space of a couple of days they worked around the clock to build an online service to assist with placing victims into short-term accommodation, matching those in need with people who have a spare bedroom or holiday house or even just a mattress on the floor and are willing to open their homes up to help those in need.

The service is called Australian Bushfire Housing Assistance, and it’s accessible online right now. That’s very cool. Horay for Ben & gang!

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? by Chris Duckett and Alex Sherpo of ZDnet (Australia). They go onto a Sydney street with KDE4 telling people it’s a demo of Windows 7. Take-away from responses may be that people really dislike Vista (that’s not news though ;-)

But for me, the point is really that people don’t give a stuff whether it’s Windows or Linux as such and don’t spot the difference. This has been proven before, and means that giving someone a LiveCD with Linux that brings up a nice desktop and a browser, wordprocessor, spreadsheet and so on, does not sell. It’ll look similar to the desktop people already have, and thus asking them to switch is eh… silly? People resist change!

There has to be other motivation. Price tends to not be a great driver (might change though), and “freedom” definitely isn’t for most (it’s a vague concept for most people). Annoyance with the old/existing platform can be a driver, but I wouldn’t focus on crashes and bluescreens as Linux and Firefox can crash just fine also, no Vista may be an angle particularly since people themselves bring this up. The alternative could start with a free disk, and the cool thing about the Ubuntu LiveCD is that it has some OSS apps for Windows on it so people can try things without replacing Windows immediately. That again is a comfort thing, it makes the steps smaller and thus overcomes the resistance to change.

Now is actually an excellent time for Open Source and platform change. Not directly because people and companies have less money to spend, although that might help also. No, the real news is that Microsoft is cutting its budget for local user groups and related activities. A vital factor in Microsoft’s success is its vibrant ecosystem, most of the activity comes from value adding little local companies and usergroups that bind the developers. Reduced commitment to the ecosystem will hurt Microsoft more than anything else, and may just be the tipping point. If I were Microsoft, it’d be one of the key things to focus on now, not reduce spend. Anyway, that’s my little prediction. We’ll have to see how it plays out, but in the mean time I think it’s really important that all the OSS related user groups (local and online) show fab activity!

This little project is quickly growing into a pretty big movement, the response at and after Linux.conf.au in Hobart was tremendous! Ah sorry, should tell what this is all about eh!

Well, many among us have dealt with or are struggling with depression and related hassles. It’s not because we’re geeks, but because we’re all human. However, in our line of work we may have particular non-optimal work environments: working inside, lack of movement, lack of daylight. Also many companies are pretty high stress through understaffing, short deadlines, ad-hoc management and the like.

Also, one of the key issues with depression is the feeling of being alone, and it’s not something that commonly gets talked about. That of course doesn’t help people cope and recover.

While there are many excellent sites and organisations that provide help, BlueHackers acts as a resource hub with particular information (and links to others), and also creating stuff that helps spread awareness and reduce the feeling of being alone in dealing with these matters. One such initiative is little stickers with the BlueHackers logo, that can be placed on a laptop. Anybody can put on that sticker, which just quietly shows support and understanding. Think of it as one of those coloured ribbons (showing support for HIV/AIDS victims, servicemen overseas, opposing software patents, and so on) – but we’ve seriously run out of possible colours, and the logo is very distinct so it works well this way.

Check out the site! Spread the word! And there’ll be more stickers and other activities coming.

Consider the following query:

SELECT substring_index(column_name, ",", -1) AS blah
  FROM table_name WHERE blah='something'

Naturally, that returns with ERROR 1054 (42S22): Unknown column ‘blah’ in ‘where clause’, since you can’t have calculated columns in the WHERE clause (chicken & egg problem).

Strictly speaking, you can easily resolve this by using HAVING instead of WHERE. The query will work as desired…. but damn it’ll be slow! The server will scan through every row in the table, calculate blah, and then apply the filter.

Not good eh. So what’s the actual problem? Design. Not just the query, but the schema. Multi-valued columns don’t just break a rule of Codd, they are simply a bad idea if you need to do any search operation on them – any queries dealing with such designs will be overly complex, ugly, and slow.

Normalisation is your friend here! (and at most other times too ;-)

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