Xaprb

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:

There have been a few great blog posts recently from MySQL bloggers about Postgres, and vice versa, with good comments and follow-on from the real experts in both systems. I think this is wonderful. Learning how other databases solve hard problems is highly educational, especially because ACID databases face some of the hardest problems in computing. Making MySQL better is good for PostgreSQL. The reverse is just as true. And we should also be learning from SQLite, and CouchDB, and others who have overcome tough technical hurdles, built successful companies, created thriving and enthusiastic communities, or whatever their success has been.

Sphinx is an amazing piece of software. Andrew Aksyonoff is an amazing guy, too. But aside from Andrew’s many talents, and Sphinx’s awesomeness, I wanted to list two related examples of how Sphinx makes the world a better place. Both examples are implemented as open-source software from Ivinco, a company founded by a group of people I used to work with.

The first is the Sphinx WordPress search plugin. I have repeatedly considered using it on my own blog, but I’m running on Pair’s shared hosting, so I don’t think I should do that. But we use it on the MySQL Performance Blog. It returns highly relevant and very fast search results, and has a number of other benefits that end up being very good for SEO, among other things.

The second is the Dokuwiki search plugin. I love Dokuwiki, but its built-in search is horrible; the results are anything but relevant. The Sphinx search plugin is excellent. So if you hate Dokuwiki’s search results, try this plugin and see what you think.

Both the WordPress plugin and the Dokuwiki plugin are available from Ivinco’s open-source software page.