To round off my memoirs from the MySQL conference 2011, I'll just write down for the historical record my own activities.

MySQL awards

With the community picking up tasks that used to be handled by MySQL AB, it somehow has fallen on my lap to drive the selection of winners for the annual MySQL awards. This was the second year we did it and we have settled on a format where the winners are chosen by a community panel consisting of 2 previous years winners, plus the conference chair(s). I think having the community nominating and voting the winners have brought forward some truly deserving and sometimes also surprising winners, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in this process. I feel privileged to be part of a process channeling so much goodwill and respect from the MySQL community to the winners.

This year's winners were already …

A collection of thoughts, quotes, jokes, .. which I posted as status updates on Facebook. My favorites are bold (no pun intended).

They say sucking is a newborn instinct we forget; some people, however, keep sucking their whole lives.

Love has the symbol ♡; what symbol would hate have?

Putting MySQL Cluster on virtual machines and expect it to behave.

If only my wallet was as big as my heart..

If you dwell long enough in shit, you forget it stinks.

A System that is not Intuitive is not a System.

Sometimes it’s better to wait for the fire to see how to actually extinguish it. Standing ready with a bucket of water, just to find out that the flames come out of a frying pan is not productive.

What’s a Miss eating a steak? .. A mistake!

What’s a t-shirt with an issue? .. A tissue!

…

As some Facebook friends already guessed from my status updates this week, my 9 month paternity leave is now over and I've survived my first week back in work life, waking up at seven in the morning! This is just a personal-life blog post to let everyone know what I'm up to, (For those asking: Ebba is doing fine, she recently started to stand up and even takes steps if I hold her hands.)

During the past months I had many interesting conversations and ideas of what to do next, but in the end Nokia was the company standing out with a very interesting offer. So as of last Tuesday I work at Nokia as Senior Performance Architect in the Mobile Solutions division, better known as the Nokia Ovi web services.

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Hi Folks,

Now that we’re blogging again I thought I might as well continue to do so.

Today we’re reading data from MongoDB with Pentaho Data Integration.  We haven’t had a lot of requests for MongoDB support so there is no step to read from it yet.  However, it is surprisingly simple to do with the “User Defined Java Class” step.

For the following sample to work you need to be on a recent 4.2.0-M1 build.  Get it from here.

Then download mongo-2.4.jar and put it in the libext/ folder of your PDI/Kettle distribution.

Then you can read from a collection with the following “User Defined Java Class” code:

import java.math.*;
import java.util.*;
import …

I just finished reading Confessions of a Public Speaker (O'Reilly) by Scott Berkun. It is the first book I have read cover to cover in 16 years. I even read the colophon (which I had never seen in a book before). I found the entire book to be very engaging. While reading it, I kept reviewing every mistake I had ever made in every talk I have given. Even if you are not a regular public speaker, there is great stuff in the book that can help you with talking to your coworkers, boss, etc. There is a chapter that is more about teaching than speaking that I found really good. I can really apply a lot of that knowledge to working with my team on …

Yesterday afternoon I returned from the SAPO CodeBits 2010 conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Just like the previous year, CodeBits has been a great conference to be at and I am grateful for having been selected for participation. Thursday, the first conference day was quite a busy one for me — I gave two presentations in a row:

• What's new in MySQL 5.5? (Slides)
• How to build you own Quadrocopter (Slides)

Afterwards, I also participated in a panel discussion about " …

I love Wordpress.  Really there isn’t a better blogging platform on this platform.  It’s that good.  And I’ve been using it to self-host my blog for the past year or so.  For awhile, I hosted it using II6 on WHS v1.  That was a real pain as it took several days to find a URL rewriting solution that worked with IIS6.  The past few months I’ve been hosting it on my Windows 7-based media center.  Since that runs IIS7, URL rewriting was easier using the standard URL rewrite module.

A few days ago I decided to test out WHS “Vail”.  After installing it, I wanted to move my blog onto it so I downloaded the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.  It promptly let me know that it couldn’t find any products in my selected language.  Huh?  This is what drives people crazy about Windows software.  Crap just doesn’t make sense sometimes.

I googled and found several links …

Last Saturday I became father to a baby girl - in addition to our 2½year old son.

Those of you who are my former collagues from MySQL, you know about the generous Scandinavian 5 week vacations. (Which in MySQL were practiced globally.) I have decided that now is a good time for me to enjoy another Scandinavian perk: long paternity leave. I will be home with the rest of the family until approximately next February :-)

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my last day with oracle (formerly sun, formerly mysql), today, came a little over eight years after my first.

on to the next thing.

I may or may not be interviewed on the Swedish language Radio Vega. The background to this confusing statement is that the Finnish government today publishes a report on the use of open source in Finnish companies and associated risks related to that. I was a contributor to the report since Monty Program is a Finnish open source company. I guess since I speak Swedish, the reporter had scheduled a telephone interview with me after the press conference.

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