My Open Source projects that still live on

I have recently created a new library called libMariaS3 for a couple of teams at MariaDB which provides a simple C API to Amazon’s S3. This was created because we needed a library which could link to GPLv2 software and Amazon’s own library is Apache 2.0 licensed which is incompatible.

It is not a perfect code base because I had a very short amount of time to get the first release out but it was a very fun project to work on. It led me to take a quick look this morning at a couple of other things I have created in the past to see where they are at today.

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Solving my Intel GPU performance issues

For the last few days I had my laptop connected to an external monitor which has a 2560×1600 resolution. Whilst having a few websites open and doing a video chat the laptop completely ground to a halt with the fan going full speed.

My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X260 with an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, so not really a lightweight which was why this was so unexpected. After trying some random things I have solved this. So I thought I would detail it here if only so I remember in the future.

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Another week with KDE Plasma

At the beginning of the year I gave KDE Plasma a try as the primary desktop on one of my devices. It wasn’t my primary laptop but I still used it heavily in that time. I enjoyed it but there were still some niggles that meant I wouldn’t have been happy with it being my primary desktop at the time.

A week ago I happened to come across the announcement for KDE Plasma 5.14. The thing that really caught my eye there was the “Display Configuration widget”. This led me to giving KDE & Plasma another chance, another week of testing. Again this is on my primary laptop, a highly-sepecced Lenovo ThinkPad X260.

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Making WiFi Great Again

TL;DR: Ubiquity UniFi gear is awesome!

When I moved into my current house one of the bigger technical challenges has been to get WiFi that works throughout my house reliably. Since we can only get regular phone lines here I’m on a VDSL2 internet connection which runs at 80/20mbit. The problem is this comes in via my office which is in the corner of the house. My kids bedrooms are in the opposite corner of the house so getting WiFi to reach that far becomes a technical challenge.

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MariaDB source visualisation with Gource

Gource is a tool which can take a source code tree and create beautiful visualisations out of it. I’ve used it a few times before for various projects. This weekend I spent a little bit of time playing with it and applying it to MairaDB Server to see what it would produce.

The end result can be seen on YouTube.

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One week with KDE Plasma

My go-to Linux distribution when I’m setting up my workstations is Fedora. I have been using it since Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 before that. I can’t even remember what RedHat version I started with now. I often try other distributions out and sometimes use them for a few months but I always end up jumping back to Fedora.

Fedora defaults to the Gnome desktop environment so I have used Gnome as my primary desktop environment for many years. Again I’ve tried others such as Cinnamon and XFCE but I always end up back in Gnome. In recent months I’ve heard a lot of good things about KDE Plasma so I thought I would give it a shot for a week. This is a report of my findings.

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