Oracle buys Sun. The future of MySQL?

Oracle buys SUN

MySQL is ostensibly an Oracle competitor and the acquisition casts a shadow over MySQLs future. Will Oracle continue to maintain the Free MySQL earning solely from support, or is MySQL destined to go the Netscape way?

In the meanwhile, the community will do well to start looking at alternatives -

1. PostgreSQL is of course well known
2. Less well known is the Community Fork of MySQL known as MariaDB
3. Firebird is another good but relatively unknown alternative. I had blogged about it some time back

The missing punctuation we all need

How many times have you expressed the feeling of surprise with a question using the question-mark-exclamation-mark-combo?

The interrobang!

It has a special punctuation symbol of its own?!

Multi Select Bug in Google Chrome

You can "crash" Google Chrome browser in 3 simple steps -

1. Visit a page with a multi select.
2. Click on the empty area within the multi select
3. Drag up till the text of an entry

i.e. click and drag following the red line in the diagram below -

Voila!

FOSS Physics Software

FísicaLab is an educational application to solve physics problems. Is made with GNUstep and use the GSL libraries (GNU Scientific Library). The problems are setting adding elements from the palette to chalkboard, and writing the data of each element. The elements are objects as Blocks, Pulleys, Mobiles, Forces, ... . Use the SI and English systems, scientific notation and many conversion factors. The problems that can be solved with FísicaLab 0.1, are:

1. Kinematics of particles (doesn't include circular motion).
2. Static of particles in 2D.
3. Dynamic of particles in 2D (doesn't include dynamic of circular motion).

The static and dynamic problems are entered constructing the free body diagrams of the objects.

http://www.nongnu.org/fisicalab/

Best game I have ever played

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Fandango

Vala based DVB-T Guide

This is cool!

http://live.gnome.org/DVBDaemon/UserGuide

Reading input from stdin within Vala

Here's how to read stdin input within Vala (a compiler for the GObject type system) -

(This code snippet is based on the one found in Vala Input samples).

// Utility function to read input from stdin

// if single_line is true then returns as soon as the user presses enter

// else waits for end of input (Ctrl+D on Linux, Ctrl+Z Enter on windows)

string read_stdin(bool single_line) {

  var input = new StringBuilder ();

  var buffer = new char[1024];

  while (!stdin.eof()) {

    string read_chunk = stdin.gets (buffer);

    if (read_chunk != null) {

      input.append(read_chunk);

      if(single_line) {

        break;

      }

    }

  }

  return input.str;

}