I love open source software so much that nearly our entire enterprise is running on it. Our internally developed software is all either written for LAMP, or some recently in Mono.

I fully understand that open source projects will sometimes become inactive, in fact I have a few I've developed myself that have fallen by the wayside yet at one time had great potential.

What I don't understand is when a commercially backed open-source solution like Openfire from Ignite Realtime has a known issue for years that goes unresolved and requires a simple workaround. Then again, who here hasn't heard of Internet Explorer?

Integrating the Openfire instant messaging system with an Asterisk phone server is relatively easy, but when you first attempt to connect it to the Asterisk server, it just does nothing. It turns out the setup script for the Asterisk-IM plugin is wrong... and has been since 2007.

Here's the solution.

I will say though, I still love Openfire with it's LDAP directory integration and my (now working) Asterisk phone system integration. The ability to know the phone status of any user by glancing at my contact list is such a small thing, but it really does make a difference.

This one is painful. I have a little gadget on my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop that shows the current CPU speed as part of my power management set.

A few minutes ago I noticed it was running 100% while idle, even though I've got it set to use power on demand. I fired up "top" and saw "dd" using 100% CPU. A little more digging showed some serious errors in dmesg about kernel panics.

A bit of Googling showed a kernel bug that causes it. Unfortunately I'm 2 revisions beyond the version cited in the bug and it still exists.

The workaround? Disable sysklogd.

While trying to figure out a problem with PHP and stored procedures, I clicked a link to the mysql.com bug database. Here's the result I got:

It seems even the people who WRITE MySQL can't get it to work sometimes! Note the error I highlighted in yellow.