Given that I don’t speak Italian, it may seem a bit strange that I just started an Italian language blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/:

But I do have a point with my blog. Let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

“Of all the languages that I do not speak, I speak Italian the best.”

This is my motto when it comes to speaking Italian. Moreover, Italy is my favorite …

Ideas welcome!

General idea... base: Delta symbol (with thicker line on right hand side - a delta it's not a regular triangle), plus one or more of the following:

• something depicting deltas: incremental small changes;
• something depicting a river delta: where streams come together before flowing into ocean;
• something depicting community: people working together, participating, communicating.

If you can draw even a little bit, rough scribbles are most welcome! We have a good artist who can turn that into magic. And, you don't have to go with the above... come up with something else suitable!

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/284161 where we're tracking this; you will find other suggestions from people, including ideas that have been dismissed for visual or other …

Ideas welcome!

General idea… base: Delta symbol (with thicker line on right hand side - a delta it’s not a regular triangle), plus one or more of the following:

• something depicting deltas: incremental small changes;
• something depicting a river delta: where streams come together before flowing into ocean;
• something depicting community: people working together, participating, communicating.

If you can draw even a little bit, rough scribbles are most welcome! We have a good artist who can turn that into magic. And, you don’t have to go with the above… come up with something else suitable!

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/284161 where we’re tracking this; you will find other suggestions from people, including ideas that have been dismissed for visual or other …

After my awful Drunken-Blogging experiment, i’m gonna try to write a real post.

This Thursday, Koke and me attended the MySQL Conference at London. Talks were customer oriented, that’s great for me as I’m used to a developer vision of MySQL, and i’ll have to talk to customers in training sessions.

There was some things that everyone was repeating on every talk. Replication, backup, high availability and sacalbility. I’m sure that I’ll be asked about those things while training.

Another interesting thing to know were the MySQL release plans. It’s supposed that 5.1 will be released at the end of this year, and 6.0 at the end of the next. Falcon will be the new storage engine included in 6.0, it’s …

Yet another release, just days after 4.009. The release is for a fix to dbd_bind_ph(), thanks to bug report and patch from Neil Katin, that was causing a core dump.

The files:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.010.tar.gz
size: 125211 bytes
md5: a63c9f73afef70b6c80d899424b003e9

CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.010/

Thanks to Neil for this fix!

Whoops, I've gone a little AWOL from the various OSS/Danga/MySQL/Drizzle/etc communities. Well, rest assured I'm down but not out!

I will be attending, and (might? should?) be speaking about DPM and database protocols at the Open SQL Camp in VA mid-november. As well as submitting papers for the next years' round of conferences.

One of my many obsessions is Brian's Drizzle project. Due to time constraints I've been unable to contribute significant code so far, but I did chip in for an awesomely appropriate domain name. Not going to say how much I sent in, but mike was cool enough to front the whole cost, so if you like drizzle please pitch in what you can!

GreenSQL is a database firewall used to protect database from SQL injection attacks. New release fixes a number of critical bugs. We recommend all users to update.

This release includes a number of pre-build packages of popular operating systems.
We supply packages for: CentOS, openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.

List of changes:
1. Code optimization.
2. A number of risk matrix calculation bugs were fixed.
3. New MySQL patterns added.
4. Minor management bugs fixes.

Together with the new release, we prepared performance test for the new version. You can access the results online here:
http://www.greensql.net/publications/greensql-performance-test

In addition to greensq-fw application we released new version of greensql-console management tool. New version contains a number bug …

In my work this week on the new test automation framework for Drizzle, I have realized that the existing MySQL test suite is in bad need of a spring (southern hemisphere) cleaning. Actually, to be clear, it's not the test runner (tests/test-run.pl and client/drizzletest.cc) which needs spring cleaning, but the tests themselves. While I have made some improvements to the runner itself, to make it more extensible and easier to understand, it is the tests themselves which represent MySQL's version of Pompeii, the Italian city buried underneath the ash of Mt. Vesuvius.

Like the bodies underneath the piles of ash in Pompeii, many of the individual tests in the MySQL test suite are frozen in time.

In a way, this is understandable, for a few reasons. …

Antony points out:

Unfortunately, I had to work with the limitations of the C programming language and its preprocessor so to achieve a solution which behaved as if it had the strong typing like generics but working with simple C;

Yeah, I started out ranting about that whole system too, but decided against it since I knew the real culprit was, as is usual, requirements. I do not envy the task of implementing C++ generics in preprocessor macros. (I do look forward to going and reading the worklog though)

As Antony suggests, I am speaking in the context of Drizzle, which means I’m speaking from the vantage point of having change the underlying assumptions. We use C++ fully in Drizzle. So whereas in MySQL this code is, as Antony says, performing properly (quite amazingly well, actually) in Drizzle …

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of Mörfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the …