I had a nice chat with Kieran from Acquia at DrupalCon last week - we discussed how people running local Drupal user groups could expand their outreach into other communities, in particular into the MySQL User Groups. Scott Mattoon captured our conversation on video, which is now available on blip.tv:
The gist of what we talked about: if you are organizing a local Drupal User Group Meetup, check out http://mysql.meetup.com to find …
[Read more]In a recent article, Matt Asay was musing about the aspects of hosting an Open Source project by yourself vs. using a public project hosting service like SourceForge, GitHub or Launchpad. He concluded that it's important for commercial/sponsored open source projects in particular to do the hosting by themselves, so they can maintain full control and can gain more insight, which hopefully will turn into more revenue at some point.
However, Matt seems to reduce "hosting" to "providing downloads" only:
Control and visibility. Given the importance of customer conversions, it becomes hugely valuable information to know that it takes, say, eight months on average for someone to buy the "Enterprise" version of …
[Read more]I recently got a reminder mail to vote for the Sourceforge.Net 2008 Community Choice awards. Going through the list of finalists, I realized how many of these support MySQL as the database backend. It truly amazes me when I look at the wide range of available OSS applications today as well as how advanced many of these have become! More and more commercial applications can nowadays be replaced with Open Source alternatives/equivalents. And many times, MySQL is used to store the applications' data. This is a great trend!
After looking through the list, I spent a few minutes to add the relevant applications to the Project list on MySQL Forge. This section of the Forge is supposed to become a complete, "one-stop" directory of Open …
[Read more]A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:
PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.
We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:
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One of the nice, and funny things about working on the MySQL deal is that we took turns saying: "I like how you solved this problem, tell me more!" The deal closed; learning time starts... Jay Pipes is Mr MySQL Forge and he just released Forge 2, check out his announcement and Guiseppe's additional commentary ([1], [2]). Maybe we can invite Jay (et al.) for a presentation at a future … |
While helping a user with some questions about the geospatial extensions of MySQL on the #mysql-dev IRC channel on Freenode, I stumbled over this blog: How to use MySQL Spatial Extensions. There currently is just one post, but it was exactly what we were looking for: "Using Circular Area Selection". Nice work! I hope the author will soon provide more examples of how to make use of this functionality.
By the way, there is work in progress to improve the GIS functionality in MySQL - if you are looking for new GIS functions that do not use …
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Just came off today's MySQL University session about How to Build MySQL on Windows - Reggie did a great
job on explaining how to build the MySQL Server from Source on
Windows using the Microsoft development toolchain and some
additional required tools. I am glad to hear that we're making
progress on making it easier for Windows developers to work with
the source code and Reggie and the other members of our Windows
Task Force (what a nice acronym this one makes!) have plenty of
other ideas for improving that experience.
If you missed his session, the audio file and IRC log will be
published from the MySQL University pages shortly.
And in case you haven't heard about MySQL University before,
check out the pages on the …
Today, I again spent about an hour to revert changes made by
spambots on various MySQL Forge Wiki pages. As I was really sick of
this, I now installed a new plugin: reCAPTCHA - this will hopefully raise the bar for
spambots to create new user accounts automatically for spamming
the Wiki. If you are a registered user already, you will probably
not notice the change - by default, CAPTCHAs are only displayed
on the following events:
Let's hope it helps! Please let me know if you still experience spam problems on the Wiki.
Yesterday I sent out the invitations for our third MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg, which will take place on Monday, 4th of September (which is the United MySQL Meetup Day). As usual, we will meet at 19:00 in the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao" - the food is excellent and we can use a separate room with a video projector there. If you happen to live around Hamburg, Germany and would like to join, please RSVP and join our mailing list!
Currently I am still pondering on the topic of the presentation - I suggested to invite Paul …
[Read more]We used to maintain a list of MySQL User Groups on the MySQL Developer Zone, which made it a bit inconvenient for new User Groups to get listed there. We've now moved the User Group list and some additional info to the Wiki on MySQL Forge (which also has received a facelift, thanks a lot to Colin and Ronald!). If you know of any other MySQL User Groups not listed there, feel free to add them! We are also looking forward to seeing more helpful hints on how to successfully start and …
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