Time is flying by so fast, it sure doesn’t seem like it was last year I was blogging about how Android is for real. Well, let me reiterate … Android is for real. The reason I say that and stress that is despite its success, we see a variety of legal threats, accusations and actual lawsuits to come flying at Android as fast as it is growing in the market.

Still, we seem to be able to fairly easily find agreement among vendors, developers and users that Android development is not slowing down, that legal maneuvering will not pave a path to success or that any ruling or action will take Android-based phones out of consumers’ hands. This is not to say that Android faces significant challenges: real fragmentation and version overload; a software development pace that may be too fast for handset makers or consumers; innovation from rivals …

2011 seems to be a good year for both Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC. Google I/O sold out in 59 minutes and Apple’s WWDC sold out in under 10 hours. They’re both held at the Moscone Center and I guess the caps for attendance is usually set at about 4,000-5,000 attendees.

My only beef with this is that the rest of the world is forgotten. It’s only good for the developer sitting in North America (or a similar timezone). In fact folk that need to get corporate approval are probably also forgotten. Launching at 9 or 10am PST is past midnight in China and Singapore for example. Its even later in Japan. What about developers sitting in Sydney & Melbourne?

Google takes an open approach to this. They will have live streaming available and are organising extended events (which again, think about the timezones — they work if you’re all together in San …

This is your Developer Week in Review, I'm Casey Kasem. Our first letter comes from a software developer in New England who writes, "Dear Casey. My wife just got accepted into the Experimental Psych doctoral program at UNH, and I'd like you to play something appropriate for the occasion." Well, going out especially for you, here's "I'll be Proofreading Your Papers for the Next Five Years, 'Cause I'll Never Split (Our Infinitive)" (Seriously, congratulations Bonnie!)

And you thought that Justin Bieber tickets were hard to score ...

What's the matter, pal? You say you had your heart set on going to Google I/O, but the tickets sold out in 59 minutes? Well, cheer up, because tickets went on sale this week for the Apple …

Netflix went down over three hours ago, and everyone is on edge here. My son just started reciting the script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in an attempt to keep our courage up. This may be the last thing I ever write, so — Oh, never mind, it's back up again ... Crisis averted, and on to this week's developer news.

We have an App Store Appstore for that!

Amazon this week unleashed their own Appstore for Android devices. Apple took umbrage at the use of the (evidently trademarked) term "App Store" and fired a salvo of …

Just about everyone on the planet agrees that Apple products are the soul of innovative design.  But are they good for innovators?  For me the answer is "not so much."

I have been using Apple laptops and iPhones for years.  As a software developer, I have a list of annoyances with Mac OS X starting with Apple's incomprehensible management of Java.  However, Mac OS X is far more productive than MS Windows, with its viruses, crummy OS releases, and bloatware.  iPhones are close to worthless as telephones in the area where I live in large part due to ATT's network.  But you can now switch to Verizon, so that's not such a problem either.

The real problem with Apple is that their products are closed.  Want to install a new file system?  Not here.  Want to pick a different motherboard to play around with power utilization?  Try somewhere else.  Want to know what the OS is …

Coming to you from 24 hours in the future, it's this week's Developer Week in Review.

All your news cycles are belong to us

We're using the O'Reilly Tempro-Spatial Distorter to send you back news of Today's's iPad 2 launch before it's even happened. Who could have predicted that the iPad 2 would have both a 3D Retina display and Smell-o-vision? But the real shocker had to be the announcement that the iTunes store was finally going to have the long-missing catalog of Up With People available for sale.

Ok, so we don't have a time machine, and deadlines dictate that this will be going to edit before the Big Announcement today. I'm sure one or two other news outlets will be covering the event, so you can probably find out what happened sometime later this week. For those keeping score, this is something like the 3rd or 4th Big Announcement so far this year, and we're only through February. It must be truly depressing to be …

I have been a user of the iPod Touch from day one. With the iPhones being tied to unreasonably expensive mobile phone contracts it was never an option for me to buy one just for fun. But when the iPod Touch was announced I knew this was my device. I have been updating iOS whenever there was an update available, and usually I was pleased with what Apple had refined and added.

However, one thing has been bothering me for some time now, and I did not know if it was me getting older, or if really something had changed with the OS.

Long Audio Files

One of the main purposes the iPod has for me is listening to podcasts and audio books. With these I tend to almost enjoy my commutes. But also when doing chores around the house or at the gym my (now 4th gen) iPod Touch is a trusty companion.

Nevertheless, in recent times I got annoyed regularly when trying to pause playback and resume later from the lock screen. I am not …

MySQL v5.5 is GA, but is it working with Python? Yes, it does. Below you’ll find some quick, small tests I did with MySQLdb, oursql and our own MySQL Connector/Python.

My desktop is a Mac, but when it works on that, I’m sure it works elsewhere too. If not, just let us know!

MySQL for Python (aka MySQLdb)

Installing MySQL v5.5.8 64-bit from tar ball on MacOS X 10.6, it compiled fine and the module loaded giving me the …

CPTN Holdings unmasked. Oracle updates MySQL. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Florian Mueller reported that the Novell patent acquiring CPTN Holdings is Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle.

# The VAR Guy told the (previously) untold story of Novell’s sale to Attachmate.

# Attachmate committed to support the existing roadmaps and release schedules for Novell and SUSE products.

# Oracle …