A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a project stand, that we will share with the OpenSolaris Community. We're still looking for one or two more volunteers that would help us manning the table! If you would like to help out, please register here!
• MySQL will have a developer room at FOSDEM on Sunday. We will be in Room AW1.126 (72 seats) and the session schedule looks great already! We're still working on the fine tuning and scheduling.
• We've almost finished with creating a Japanese version of Planet MySQL (some minor encoding quirks remain to be fixed) and I finally got rid of the remaining parts of code that still used MagpieRSS (only in the admin backend parts) - now everything uses SimplePie instead.
• Dups added the MySQL Buzz to Planet MySQL
• I'm also working on sending out invitations to various MySQL-related projects to represent and showcase their work at the DotOrg Pavilion of the MySQL Conference Exhibition Area. Currently we have confirmation for attendance from Drupal, phpMyAdmin and Sphinx. What other projects would you like to see there? I am open for suggestions/applications

Quite a lot of exciting stuff going on, and more to come. This is a great start into the new year!