Nitin's Blog

Oracle is offering commercial extensions for MySQL that provide failover clustering support, PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) and windows authentication functionality, and thread pool enhancements. Giuseppe Maxia suggests that the commercial extensions for MySQL are a means to provide funding for the project. However, other individuals in the MySQL community expressed concern over the move that may threaten the open source database.

For open source purists, however, there still is the option of switching to MariaDB. MariaDB is a binary-compatible database that has been branched off from MySQL and is a pure open-source effort. For the most part, MariaDB is compatible with MySQL and changes from new versions of MySQL are merged back to MariaDB. MariaDB does provide more features such as storage engines (Eg. the Aria storage engine – no, that is not a typo) and slow query information.

Open source software makes it possible for developers to turn software built for one application into software targeted for an entirely different need. The Mantis Bug Tracking system has been used as the platform upon which to build an applicant tracking system named Ants. It enables you to enter job applicant information, upload resumes and other files, and set the status of the applicants while organizing the applicants by job orders (vacant positions or job titles).

Dear Readers,

I’m in the final week of my course and have papers to hand in so you won’t see much on my blog till September 6, 2011. Rest assured that this blog will be once again burgeoning with new posts and interesting reads.

-Nitin

If you have pre-formatted text that you want to insert into MediaWiki, simply precede each line with a single space. MediaWiki preserves the line breaks by treating them as pre-formatted text (using the HTML PRE tag). However, if you have long lines, the browser will not wrap them to the next line either. The PRE tag is great if you want to use code. If you do not want this behaviour, you have to add a “<br />” at the end of each line to force a line break.

PS: Bryan, a MediaWiki developer, suggested that you can also modify Common.css to include something like “* { white-space: pre-line; }” (without the quotes)

MediaWiki uses 49 tables and so the installation script has to create them all. Typically, that should not be a problem but when you do run the installation on a slow computer or on a virtual machine the script may timeout. If that happens, do not panic. Simply drop all the tables in the MySQL database being used by MediaWiki (or drop and re-create the database), go to the php.ini file of your server and set the maximum execution time to something higher than it is currently at like this: “max_execution_time = 60″ (without the quotes). Then, restart your web server for the changes in php.ini to take effect and run the installation again.

If you do not have access to the php.ini file, you can define a .htaccess file in your MediaWiki directory with the directive “php_flag max_execution_time 60″ or, alternatively, edit the installation script by adding in a “set_time_limit(60);” somewhere near the top of the script.