John F. Duffy, a professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School, recently wrote that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has increasingly taken stands on patents that "will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents." If only.

Duffy worries that "the PTO's new interpretation of ...

Yesterday I attended the Franken Web Montag meetup in Nürnberg. This time the nice folks at insertEFFECT hosted us and opened up their terrasse.
Florian Bailey opened with a talk about Facebook applications. It was quite interesting. To me these applications are just annoying, but I can see now how they are used, and how success can mean making money within Facebook. They made also a test application called 'Who is the Kitchen Master?' (needs account).
I did also try to talk about something, but I …

There are several JavaScript libraries that can be embedded in your webapplication to create a visually appealing interface. Script.aculo.us is one of the popular ones and is built on the Prototype JavaScript Framework. The library provides an easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScripts that allows you to create fancy effects commonly visible on web pages these days.

This blog entry gets you started by using Ajax.Autocompleter that allows for server-powered autocompleting of text fields. Basically, you type a character in a text field and suggestions for possible correct values starting with that character are shown . This is achieved by by sending an Ajax request to the data source on server, passing the typed …

I recently came across this article listing SourceForge Community Choice Awards Winners 2008:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/07/sourceforge_com.html

“Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition” is phpMyAdmin? Now I am not sure if phpMyAdmin actually is something that can be acquired and if there is any revenue (directly or indirectly) generated from it at all, but in my opinion phpMyAdmin has reached a point close to the end of its life-cycle, and I can hardly imagine there is anything to pay for. Except for very small additions to support new MySQL versions there has - to my best knowledge - been nothing but bug fixes for around 3 years. No new developments. phpMyAdmin basically provides an interface for viewing the content of tables, to execute statements and scripts and view …

There was a huge Sun booth at OSCON 2008. During opening hours, there were always sessions at the booth, with well known open source presenters.


After hours, you had the choice between socializing on your own or go to the organized events or go to the BoFs, like this one, where Monty presented what he called "community services" in the shape of black vodka mixed to mint candies.

The event was, of course, the Sun Party, where many strange things happened.

Jay challenged Ronald to a sumo wrestling match, only to …

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I was reading this month’s php|architect. It has a nice article about EAV modeling. I had seen this db structure in other project, but didn’t know that it was called EAV. For those who don’t read php|architect, EAV describes a method of saving a large set of attributes, only some of which apply to an individual entity. Normally you would create a table, with a row for each entity and save each attribute in a column. With EAV you save each attribute as a row.

This makes selecting the data quite tedious. If you can life with some constraints, there is an easier way to do this.

The common way

How php|architect describes it (and how it’s normally described) is to split out the values over different tables for the different data types. The DB structure proposed in php|architect look like:

CREATE TABLE field_names (
    fid INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY …

In the Skoll project, we are trying to build a community-based distributed process to test MySQL. From the users perspective, the Skoll clients connect to the Skoll server and receive instructions to build MySQL in a specific configuration. The Skoll client then compiles MySQL and runs a set of about 750 standard MySQL installation tests. Finally, the client sends a summary of the test results back to the Skoll server. What the users do not see is the big picture. How does the Skoll server model the MySQL configuration space? How does the Skoll server select specific configurations from this space to be tested.

The MySQL's configuration space is large, about 48 million of them. It is impossible and impracticable to test every single configuration for …

I was just reading The Big Mac Dilemma, who asks:

is using a Mac “selling out” from your OSS ideals?

and I’d like to be very unfriendly and answer unequivocally… YES.

Just like anything else non-free, it tempts you with shiny baubles and the promise of making all of your wishes come true. And just like anything else non-free, it shackles you into a sub-standard environment all the while telling you that your computer is now obviously superior. (Mail.app? Really? Oooh.. bouncing icons…)

I’ve been working on Drizzle recently, and in the not-so-terribly-long time we’ve been working together, we’re already having to deal with people from the OSX camp complaining about library dependencies. I can’t ingore them, because like Eric was saying, just about all the developers these days are running either OSX or Ubuntu. However, it …

Someone who should know told me that LinkedIn runs its main application on Oracle. So when I saw the press release about MySQL being their database, I read carefully, and they are not very specific about exactly what MySQL is used for. Depending on how you read it, you could argue that they left open the possibility that the main application database is not MySQL, and the MySQL deal is for something peripheral.

Now, this is nothing but a rotten rumor and I will probably burn in hell for spreading it, but I’d like it to be debunked if it’s false. What is LinkedIn’s main database server? Anyone have the provably correct answer?

PS: I see that LinkedIn is “seeing daily downloads of approximately 200 million.” I didn’t know it was downloadable. I’ve been missing out! Where can I download it?

…