I was browsing around the Internet (don’t remember what for) and I accidentally found one cool aspect of MariaDB. There is a feedback plugin and this short post is meant to encourage you to use it! Ok, so what it does and why should you opt-in to be spied on 🙂 It takes some information about your MariaDB server including it’s usage and it will send it to the MariaDB folks. It doesn’t send private data from your database. It sends stuff like what OS are you running, what version of various plugins, how did you tweaked the default settings and also how big and how busy is your server. Now a short list of why I turned this on:

One of the things, that I really like about Jolla is the technology to write applications. C++ is my favorite programing language and I always admired Qt. At least big parts of it. So when I got my Jolla, I started playing with SDK and writing some simple applications. It was kinda harder than I expected, but I’ll write about there in separate blog post. This one is dedicated to the applications I wrote and to show what do they do. And if you have a Jolla, maybe get you interested in those 😉 Both of them are available via OpenRepos and Harbour.

openSUSE Flash drive I have this idea nagging me for a while about how to make our ambassadors live (and mine) easier. From time to time you need a flash drive with Live version of our favorite openSUSE to show it to people. Currently it is really simple to create one using dd. But once you do it, you cannot use flash drive for “normal” purposes. People somehow doesn’t appreciate flash drive that doesn’t contain vfat. So this project is about redoing openSUSE flash drive to make it way cooler and more usable.

This is just a little note related to my last blog about Jolla. I wrote that I’m pretty fine with messaging application although I don’t have many SMS yet in my phone. Well, I fixed that 🙂 I imported all my SMS messages from the backup of my Andriod phone. I searched around and I found really interesting thread on talk.maemo.org that describes how to import SMS from n900. As they are doing it via csv, it was easy to put together a simple one-liner that would produce the csv from my SMS database. Now how to do it…

On Monday I wrote about my new amazing cellphone – Jolla – and one of the comments/complains I got was that I haven’t said anything about how you actually use the phone to communicate. Well, I don’t use cellphone to make calls or send SMS most of the time, but since I was asked about it and I already have phone for almost two weeks, I gathered few SMS and calls. So today it will be about communicating using Jolla 🙂

It’s been a week since my new cell phone – Jolla arrived. I was probably the last of the first ones (people who preordered) due to some issues with gmail (almost as if Google didn’t want me to switch from Android to Sailfish 😀 ). But as I finally got my new phone, it’s time to share my first impressions 🙂 Let’s start with obligatory unboxing. Box is nice. It opens a little bit unusually by sliding out. Content is pretty much what would you expect. If you are more interested, take a look at pictures bellow. I quickly opened it and started to play with what was inside 🙂 First setup was was pretty ordinary nowadays – wizard asking some questions for your setup – with few exceptions/things I would like to mention. First was that Jolla asked me for my name and it didn’t had a Czech keyboard, so I couldn’t write my name with all accents. I ended up hunting them character by character from various keyboards for other nations, but I managed to succeed (thanks to Polish, French, and some others) 🙂 There is already a request to fix it and workaround available in the forums. But I don’t complain, I understand that we are small country (although I know surprisingly a lot of Jolla users from my country) and thus we are not first priority. Other thing that surprised me more (I would say pleasantly) was language selection. I was looking what options are there and wanted to select US English. It is not there! There is only UK English 😀 So no simplified English on Jolla, although I haven’t come across anything where would I notice. Part of the initial setup was also tutorial to show the gestures. I already read about most of them upfront, so no big surprise there.

Everybody knows PulseAudio. It’s a really famous piece of software, some love, some hate it, some love to flame about it. I quite like like and I still haven’t flamed about it enough, so this is my turn to flame a little bit…

Recently I had some time to do some clenaups/changes/updates in server:database repo regarding MySQL (and MariaDB). Nothing too big. Well actually, there are few little things that I want to talk about and that is the reason for this blog post, but still, nothing really important…

This Monday I was the first time guest and speaker at (contrary to it’s name) local Czech conference Europen. It was interesting experience. And I would like to share a bit of what I experienced. What made it different from conferences I usually speak at was the audience. Not many Linux guys and quite some Windows guys. I was told that this conference is for various IT professionals and people from academia interested in Open Source.

FOSDEM 2013 I started writing this post after FOSDEM, but never actually managed to finish it. But as I plan to blog about something again “soon”, I wanted to get this one out first. So let’s start with FOSDEM – it is awesome event and every open source hacker is there unless he has some really huge reasons why not to come (like being dead, in prison or locked down in psychiatric care). I was there together with bunch of openSUSE/SUSE folks. It was a lot of fun and we even managed to get some work done during the event. So how was it?