Xaprb

The slides for my talks at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo are posted.

If you’ve used OpenOffice.org Impress to run a slideshow with your laptop plugged into an external monitor or projector, you’ve probably noticed that it prefers to switch the primary and secondary display, showing you the slideshow while it shows your audience the notes and preview of your next slide! This is exactly the reverse of what you want, which is to show your audience the slideshow and let you see notes, the countdown timer, and so on.

This is annoying, but it’s easy to fix. You’ll need to plug your computer into your external monitor, though. It turns out that this setting is embedded in the slideshow itself — it is not a preference in OpenOffice.org — and it is only activated when multiple monitors are detected. Go to the Slide Show/Settings menu…

… and at the bottom of the dialog, under Multiple Displays, choose the correct display for the slideshow to appear on. I don’t have my laptop plugged into an external display, so the choice is grayed out for me:

People keep asking me “what is going to happen to MySQL now that Oracle has screwed MySQL?” I bluntly disagree that any such thing has happened. This blog post is just my personal view and does not reflect my employer’s opinion, but Oracle might have saved MySQL from what I can see. There is no evidence that supports the hysterical doomsday theories. (Witness MySQL 5.5, probably the best MySQL release in history. Not exactly what I’d call “screwing.”)

I believe that a product with such a large, diverse, and important market presence needs a variety of companies involved with it in many different ways. One of the absolutely key things is a company to make money from it. MySQL needs Oracle, because no one else involved is both capable and trying to make MySQL, the product, a large-scale commercial success. It looks like Oracle is doing what I wish Sun could have done.

Now, is Oracle going to be community friendly, and hold all our hands in a circle while singing songs and accepting our patches? No, of course not, and what an opportunity that creates for someone else. I have no issue with Oracle ignoring the community because they have decided it doesn’t fit into their plans. If you go to the hardware store to buy bread, you won’t find any. Bake a loaf if you want to eat.