So what happened? Well, two days ago I noticed connection issues while trying to create a blog post on MySQL?s new enterprise offering (more on that later). I sent in a support request to Tera-Byte, my colocation provider. After a while I checked and noticed that I could connect via SSH, but that the server was rejecting my private key and my password.This had me concerned so I called Tera-Byte and asked what was happening. Turns out that they had mistakenly deleted my virtual private server. But they were kind enough to not only increase my new virtual private server?s memory from 360 megs to 512, but also credit me one month?s fees. I was in shock at this news and thanked the tech for the upgrade and refund and hung up.After I got off the phone I skipped past the denial and bargaining stages of grief and arrived at anger. So, calling Tera-Byte back up to ask how exactly this …

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: …

I’ve introduced a new design and Wordpress backend at www.vbmysql.com, feel free to take a look and provide feedback. Now that editing will be easier I think I’ll be pushing out some fresh content too.

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting …

Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
…

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are …

I’ve been working on populating the new Sakila schema with some data, mainly by copying data from the existing Sakila 0.1 schema.

The 0.5 version is available for download as a zip archive at http://www.openwin.org/mike/download/sakila-0.5.zip.

This version has two files, sakila-schema.sql and sakila-data.sql, load the schema file first, then the data file.

This is just a rough fill-in of the data, intended to provide context for discussion. Some data related suggestions have been made in the past, if they have not been met please point out any continuing issues.

Thanks again to all who take the time to review and provide feedback!

The forums are also available for discussion at http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?121

I added some views and stored …

April 1st is still more than a month away and at least one rumour about Oracle’s upcoming purchases is true: today the software giant annnounced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (and various other products).

One interesting point is that Berkeley DB was already seeing competition from SQLite (which is an excellent, fast and free (as in beer and freedom) RDBMS). I wonder how much the acquisition is going to drive adoption of SQLite?

Additionally, Oracle now owns both half of MySQL’s transactional storage engines, which perhaps gains them another measure of control over the Swedish upstart. (The other engines are …