Seeing this post make the news today really interested me - since I had the (dis)pleasure of being personally involved. In the Australian spirit of 'giving word to the underdog', let me provide some clarity. But before I do - my kudos to Kaj for already following up and correcting himself on the gray details.

The person in question ('KV') was not going to Australia to speak at a conference, but deliver a public training course. To do this, you do need a business visa. Heck, you need a visa if you want to teach in the USA - so those speculators calling Australia some draconian system that doesn't understand Open Source is just wrong. Some departments know it very well. A …

Seeing this post make the news today really interested me - since I had the (dis)pleasure of being personally involved. In the Australian spirit of 'giving word to the underdog', let me provide some clarity. But before I do - my kudos to Kaj for already following up and correcting himself on the gray details.

The person in question ('KV') was not going to Australia to speak at a conference, but deliver a public training course. To do this, you do need a business visa. Heck, you need a visa if you want to teach in the USA - so those speculators calling Australia some draconian system that doesn't understand Open Source is just wrong. Some departments know it very well. A …

Most software changelogs list what’s changed and what bugs are fixed during each upgrade. But when you’re evaluating an upgrade, what you’re typically concerned about is slightly different – it’s a combination of what’s changed and what might have broken. The fixed bugs aren’t as important for most people, who are either using a workaround or aren’t using the software. What people ask is “what do I have to change in my application, and/or make sure I’m not going to run afoul of, in order to use this new version?

Time for a dump of some lessons learnt from my blog posting “On Open Source and Open Competition in a not-so-Open World“.

Let me start by a recap of what the process looked from my point of view:

1. My close colleague gets his visa rejected. He is a seasoned Australia visitor, so I assumed (and still assume) he knew what he was doing.
2. We connect the dots between the rejection and an IM discussion from August 2008 (see comment #29 on my blog), related to competition and Sun employees being let into Australia. Due to the nature of how visa rejections work, I cannot prove this is the case (even with the additional …

Developer.Com has selected MySQL Workbench as the best database tool of 2009!

Competing behind Workbench were:

• Altova DatabaseSpy® 2008
• LINQ (Microsoft® .NET Language Integrated Query)
• SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services
• Oracle SQL Developer

Developer.Com has selected MySQL Workbench as the best database tool of 2009!

Competing behind Workbench were:

• Altova DatabaseSpy® 2008
• LINQ (Microsoft® .NET Language Integrated Query)
• SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services
• Oracle SQL Developer

Just today I got yet another email asking me why we do not rewrite PHP to get rid of all the cruft and past mistakes. These kinds of emails obviously have become more frequent since the namespace backslash decision. First up I wonder why people send such emails to me? After all I have only very rudimentary knowledge of C, let alone all the PHP specific infrastructure (macros etc.). So I am probably the person with the least ability to make something like that happen or even judge its feasibility among all of "PHP core" folks. But still since the question is often enough posed to me, I guess its more efficient if I reply to it in an easily linkable location. So the gist of my answer is: I would welcome a serious effort to rewrite PHP from scratch, but I do not think it should be done by PHP.net

Let me start with a disclaimer: Of course PHP is not without error. Far from it. …

You probably know that mysql -h host_or_ip can connect you to a remote host.

But did you know that you can change the host you are connected to from within mysql?

The undocumented (as far as I can tell, in the MySQL manual and in the “help” on the mysql command line) CONNECT statement can help.
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Lots of news…

We will be giving a Webinar on Waffle Grid on Febuarary 17th , if you want to know more you can find more details  here …  Also as mentioned previously We will also be talking about Waffle Grid at the 2009 MySQL User conference.  So if your interested in learning more about Waffle Grid sign up and stop by.

I am also going to be giving a session at the MySQL User Unconference entitled “Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes” …  it should be good fun, stop by and say hi.

I …

In our environment we use Apache everywhere. It's PHP integration has so far proven superiour. Now we're dealing with higher loads and we've hit some limitations.

One of the problems we had, is Apache's heaviness. Our apache2 worker processes eat up around 20 Megabytes of memory, and with 3 GB of memory will bring us up to a setting of around 150 MaxClients. Rasmus seems to think that's a pretty high setting, but based off the easy calculation (memory available for apache / size of an apache process) it works out for us.

Effectively this means we can serve approximately this much parallel request on this machine. It is therefore in our greatest benefit to get every response out as quickly as possible, increasing the amount of requests we can handle per second.

Going beyond this 150 number could cause Linux to start using swap. This is bad, because it …