I would like to add two follow up thoughts to yesterday’s post about Free Software.

First, I was speaking with giuseppe on IRC who said:

however, the economy of free software goes beyond passion. You can make money with services, as you have done, personally, for years!

Giuseppe is, as usual, right on. I hope I did not imply that I thought it was impossible to make money or to make a living around Free Software, or that to endeavor to do such a thing was folly. What I was trying to get at is that pursuing the writing of software with the goal of becoming rich was a bad idea. It might happen, but if it does it will likely be due to luck.

I am currently paid by Sun Microsystems to write Free Software. I am thrilled about that, and think Sun are wonderful for supporting me. I would also love to have some chunk of Free Software that I write make me rich - but neither my employment by …

Hello,

MySQL User Conference Japan 2008 will take place on October 30 & 31 at the Tokyo Station Conference (5th floor), which is just one week to go.  Staffs have been working very hard to prepare for it so that everyone will be able to enjoy the event.
So visit the conference site below to register now!

“MySQL User Conference Japan 2008 ~ Harness the Power of MySQL ~”

• Details & Pre-registration Site: http://jp.sun.com/company/events/mysql/

• Date　　: 10/30/2008 – 10/31/2008
• Location : Tokyo Station Conference 5th Floor (http://www.tstc.jp/access/index.html)
• Fee    : Free for those pre-registered in advance (5,000 JPY for non-registered)
• Hosted by : Sun Microsystems K.K. …

In this program, featured experts from Gartner and Sun Microsystems discuss the adoption and best practices of open source databases in the enterprise. You'll also learn how Zappos.com, a highly successful e-commerce site, saves over one million dollars a year and stays on top of its explosive growth by subscribing to Sun's MySQL Enterprise database subscription service.

The following comment: /* the following declarations are for internal use only */ is about 35% of the way down drizzled/plugin.h. How about:
If it's for internal use only - DONT PUT IT IN A HEADER FILE!!!!!!!!! At least not a header file that's used by things.

It's too bad I missed the October Rules Fest, as it looks terrific and I'm evaluating open source rules engines. From their description:

October Rules Fest is a three day gathering of the best and brightest in the rules engine industry, October 22nd-24th, 2008. This conference on business rules technology features the inventors and scientists behind advanced rulebased technology and leading business rule management systems.

We will be bringing together, for the first time the founders and inventors of rules technologies and methodologies.

They mean what they say, too. Presenters cover the range from academic researchers to folks from Ilog and Fair Isaac to the creators of some of the key algorithms and code behind today's rules engines. Luckily for those of us not there, many of the presentations are posted at the …

As American soap operas go, All My Children has been one of the best and most popular since it first aired in 1970. The ABC soap, which aimed to be highly topical, has long tackled difficult social issues like abortion and homosexuality when most other shows held back.

MySQL, the premier open-source database, has decided to steal the script from All My Children, addressing some of the most challenging issues in open-source software, like commercial extensions and now, in lurid detail, the fork with Drizzle, as well as an alternative patch community, OurDelta.

First, the Drizzle fork. Announced last year (likely through …

In this program, featured experts from Gartner and Sun Microsystems discuss the adoption and best practices of open source databases in the enterprise. You'll also learn how Zappos.com, a highly successful e-commerce site, saves over one million dollars a year and stays on top of its explosive growth by subscribing to Sun's MySQL Enterprise database subscription service.

During the last few months, we've continue to improve the technical foundation of opentaps in two important directions. In the backend, we've migrated key portions of our customer, order, inventory, and general ledger code to the new domain driven architecture. In the process, we've been able to make the underlying code more flexible and easier to maintain and improve its performance. (See this example.)

In the front end, we have started to integrate the Google Web Toolkit into opentaps to build more friendly user interfaces. This toolkit will allow us to turn our web forms into interactive widgets that look and feel like a more responsive desktop application. For example, take a look at this …

I took part in a webinar on cloud computing today, including some of the top names in cloud computing services. As Pythian has some MySQL clients using cloud computing, I was particularly interested…

I was interested by the many levels of what cloud computing means, including such categorizations as Facebook apps being a part of the cloud. I think many of us consider cloud computing to mean “virtual infrastructure as a service” and overlook some pretty robust cloud computing that’s already out there, such as “application components as a service” and “software [platform] as a service”.

Following are my notes:

“Our objective today is to cut through some of the noise associated with ‘cloud’ and get to a real world approach for getting some serious value from the cloud.”
…

Every so often we have a client worrying about unauthenticated users. For example, as part of the output of SHOW PROCESSLIST they will see:

+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id  | User                 | Host               | db   | Command | Time | State | Info             |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 235 | unauthenticated user | 10.10.2.74:53216   | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 236 | unauthenticated user | 10.120.61.10:51721 | NULL | Connect | NULL | login | NULL             |
| 237 | user                 | localhost          | NULL | Query   | 0    | NULL  | show processlist |
+-----+----------------------+--------------------+------+---------+------+-------+------------------+

Who are these unauthenticated users, how do they get there, and why aren’t they …