Aah vacation, a time when married men spend 8 hours a day doing the whim of their wife instead of their company. My vacation started yesterday (or last Friday if you count the Canadian national holiday), and so far I have taken in a parade and done little else.

One thing I am working on is a time tracker tool for myself. I wanted something that was simple that I could develop as a practice project which would be of use to me:

In essence it will be a simple Open Source time tracker/punchclock tool. I am using VB.NET with MySQL 5, SQL trees for managing the project hierarchy, and a nice helping of views, stored procedures, and the like.

This should be handy for keeping track of what I do in a given week, where my time goes, and what I have accomplished. So far I can punch in and out of existing projects, and delete events that …

As you may recall, I have started a new project to create a new MySQL User Guide oriented at users who are new to SQL or who know SQL but are new to MySQL.

Well, I have a chapter on indexing done and I would love to have some people review it. Mainly I am looking for people who fit into the profile I just mentioned. The indexing chapter is only about 8 pages so it should not take too much time.

Please email mike (at) thisdomain if you are interested.

Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.

Others also make mistakes

It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.

Sex sells?

To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a …