Venu Anuganti Blog

For the long weekend (May 26-28) we decided in the last minute to make it to Los Vegas. Nothing was in our way due to last minute decision as we couldn’t get a nice hotel nor a decent car rental rates.

I took Toyota Sienna (8 seat capacity) from Avis as we were totally 7-people. We all left here around 12.00 PM on Friday and after 4 hour drive, took a break for 7 hours in Tehachapi by taking a room and headed back to Vegas and reached at 3.20 PM. It took us totally 7.30 hrs.

So, the rest of the day from 6.00 PM to 1.00 PM we spent in Los Vegas Strip by visiting the Mandalay bay, Luxor, Excalibur, Bellagio and ceasors palace.

Los vegas strip:

Next day morning we visited Hoover dam which is 30 miles away from Strip and after that whole day again we spent in rest of the casinos like Circus circus, treasure island, the venetian, the mirage, Paris and then headed back to room. Third day we directy headed to Grand Canyon south rim and from there we came directly to home. The drive from Grand Canyon to home took ~11hrs and the whole trip was ~1725 miles.

Hoover dam and Grand Canyon:

Overall the trip was very good even though it was un-planned; other than the speed ticket in Arizona while heading to grand canyon for driving at 92m/hr, everything else went in our way.

Since few years I was wondering why Dell never sell their computer systems and other consumer goods (notebooks, desktops, LCD monitors or TVs etc) through any of the direct electronic stores (frys, bestbuy, circuit city, wal-mart) like HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Gateway, Apple, Fuzitsu or Acer does. Thats where the majority of the systems are sold to home end users and college students.

So far I only saw Costco selling Dell products other than direct Dell website. Today just happen to see the announcement that the Dell will sell its computers at Wal-Mart . This is a good sign for the company, this will also allow the company to bounce back on the market that it lost to HP and Apple recently. Hopefully we will see Dell products in rest of the electronic stores in coming days.

Today I just happen to read the the 100 Best Products of 2007 from PCWorld; and was surprised to see there is no Windows Vista in the list, instead Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Ubuntu 7.04 and Microsoft Office 2007 was there. Yahoo! has two products in the top slot, Yahoo! mail beta at 27 and Flickr at 44.

Good to see that Both Macbook Pro (at 82) and Parallels is in the top 100 list (at 6); and there is no VMWare fusion in the race; but VMWare player is at 77. Once the parallels start supporting Bootcamp vista and readyboost with high-speed USB capabilities, then you can see the real power of Parallels. I just received a next beta version (yet to release to public) from Parallels team, so time for me to play a bit to see how it performs.

Out of top 100, I use the following products as part of day to day life:

1. Intel Core 2 Duo (2)
2. RIM Blackberry 8800 (5)
3. Parallels Desktop (6)
4. Apple Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” (9)
5. Canonical Ubuntu 7.04 (16)
6. Samsung Blackjack (25)
7. Yahoo! Mail Beta (27)
8. Google Gmail (31)
9. Google YouTube (34)
10. Firefox 2 (35)
11. Flickr (44)
12. Apple iPod Nano (45)
13. Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP (47)
14. Microsoft Office 2007 (56)
15. Digg.com (58)
16. Apple iTunes (61)
17. Craigslist.org (68)
18. VMWare Player (77)
19. Apple MacBook Pro (82)
20. Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 (91)

Thats a good amount of 20% share from me too . There are 2 products which I wanted to buy in coming days are Nintendo Wii and Sansa Connect.

Another interesting annoy bug that I noticed in Parallels. This is not one time, it happens every time. When I have the Windows Vista running in Parallels and if I keep it idle for few hours then you can’t do anything with that OS when running under Parallels. The OS will be grayed out, and will not respond to any keystrokes or mouse events. It happens either in full-screen, windows or coherence mode.

The only option left is to quit the Parallels and restart the OS back. They should let user know that the OS is in sleep mode; and should allow to start the OS directly, by identifying the underlying OS state.

I am not sure if everybody is into the same problems, but the external display to a LCD monitor from Macbook or Macbook pro is a nightmare. Whatever the way you try, either way it doesn’t have the crisp text as you see with any regular Pc laptop when you connect your laptop to external LCD display. I searched through the web to find any tweaks to make it better..but left with same issues all over without a proper solution. I tried both analog and digitial options, no way it appears better on display..

Looks like lately I started liking Ubuntu (especially 7.04, Feisty) operating system after Windows Vista, in terms of features, compatibility, ease of use and etc. Mac OS in general way behind Windows and Linux, but it has great look and feel and few misc apps; which you need to use Mac to get experienced along with Linux like emulation. But initially I thought as I am new the mac world and without knowing much I might be feeling like that. But I talked with few college going folks who has Macbook; and they too expressed the same..indeed they use Vista on mac…I still see that my Mac OS hangs most of the time, only option for me is to reboot..and at times loading of simple apps takes forever as that of Windows…and frustrating busy cursor spinning most of the time without allowing anything to be done…even on 2.16G clock speed with 2G RAM…may be time will answer when large userbase starts using Mac OS, then you will see the real comments…but will wait for Leopard.

Also, when I followed the instructions as in the macosxhints, then I cant return back to my laptop display, only option is to power it off and restart the system. This is totally annoy.

Today when I started the new MySQL 5.1.18-beta server which is built from the sources, gave an interesting error which I never came across in earlier versions of MySQL including 5.1.17 as I used the same configuration options for both the versions. The error is:

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..
70516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable flush_method of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable log_arch_dir of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable log_group_home_dir of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' disabled by command line option
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable data_file_path of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable data_home_dir of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable flush_method of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable log_arch_dir of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Warning] Server variable log_group_home_dir of plugin InnoDB was forced to be read-only: string variable without update_func and PLUGIN_VAR_MEMALLOC flag
070516 19:48:53 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' disabled by command line option

I even compiled with –with-plugins=all; but after going through the configure options and the output lib directory, noticed that InnoDB is supposed to be linked statically instead of dynamically as that of other plugin engines. Recompiling the source with –with-plugin-innobase does solve the issue and same goes to MyISAM and MyISAM Merge tables.

As a rule of thumb, all plugins which only supports builds of type ‘static‘ but not the ‘dynamic‘; must be configured with –with-plugin-PLUGIN_NAME, else plugin will be ignored in the build. One can get the list of plugins and its supported build type by running ./configure –help.

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$./configure --help
...
Description of plugins:
 
   === Partition Support ===
  Plugin Name:      partition
  Description:      MySQL Partitioning Support
  Supports build:   static
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === Daemon Example Plugin ===
  Plugin Name:      daemon_example
  Description:      This is an example plugin daemon.
  Supports build:   dynamic
 
   === Simple Parser ===
  Plugin Name:      ftexample
  Description:      Simple full-text parser plugin
  Supports build:   dynamic
 
   === Archive Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      archive
  Description:      Archive Storage Engine
  Supports build:   static and dynamic
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === Blackhole Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      blackhole
  Description:      Basic Write-only Read-never tables
  Supports build:   static and dynamic
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === CSV Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      csv
  Description:      Stores tables in text CSV format
  Supports build:   static
  Status:           mandatory
 
   === Example Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      example
  Description:      Skeleton for Storage Engines for developers
  Supports build:   dynamic
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === Federated Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      federated
  Description:      Connects to tables on remote MySQL servers
  Supports build:   static and dynamic
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === Memory Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      heap
  Description:      Volatile memory based tables
  Supports build:   static
  Status:           mandatory
 
   === InnoDB Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      innobase
  Description:      Transactional Tables using InnoDB
  Supports build:   static
  Configurations:   max, max-no-ndb
 
   === MyISAM Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      myisam
  Description:      Traditional non-transactional MySQL tables
  Supports build:   static
  Status:           mandatory
 
   === MyISAM MERGE Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      myisammrg
  Description:      Merge multiple MySQL tables into one
  Supports build:   static
  Status:           mandatory
 
   === Cluster Storage Engine ===
  Plugin Name:      ndbcluster
  Description:      High Availability Clustered tables
  Supports build:   static
  Configurations:   max

The dynamic plugins can be loaded at run-time using INSTALL PLUGIN when the server is running.