As I said before, I was invited to be on a panel at Velocity Conference.  I was delighted to go.  I had never been to San Francisco.  I have been to Portland and Santa Clara several times.  The panel was great.  It was the Brian and photo sharing sites show.  Seriously, it was me (dealnews.com), John Allspaw of Flickr, Don MacAskill of SmugMug and Farhan Mashraqi of Fotolog.  Oh, there was also Shayan Zadeh of Zoosk, a social dating network and Michael Halligan, a consultant from BitPusher.  We all had similar ideas.  I told my …

Spot the problem:

You work for company X.

• Phone rings: “Hi, my name is Alice, I work for company X”
• “Hi Alice, this is Bob, in order to verify that you do actually work for X, what is your employee number and phone extension, I’ll call you back when verified”.
• “Okay Bob, it’s Alice, employee number 1234 and I’m on 555-5555″
• You look up the employee database and sure enough, Alice is there with number 1234.

Were you talking to Alice?

Will you be talking to Alice if you dial 555-5555?

As midterm reviews approach I've been working on cleaning up any and all messy hacks so I can have a nice presentation. Last week I started using the Makefile.am instead of bash scripts. This week I tried cleaning it up further so that libmemcached is compiled automatically as needed instead of as a pre-installed dependency. Now any developer can download and compile my modifications without having to jump through hoops.

I'm beginning to feel as though the build tools are more difficult to edit than the code itself.
After numerous 'unable to find header' errors I think I have finally fixed every INCLUDE declaration necessary. I think this has put me a bit behind for the midterm review and caused a bit of stress, but I think this will save me a great deal of time overall.

Had my first segfault while working on the project last week, it was a pain to track down without a debugger. The Eclipse debugger doesn't play …

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Analyzed the collected runtime data from Skoll Client. I am in the process of constructing a program to process/compare the runtime data.
• Improved Skoll Client so the it does NOT have to connect to two different databases in order to collect runtime information. This improvement makes management of MySQL configurations on the server side much easier.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Continue with runtime data processing, and then automate this processing with scripts on the Skoll server.
• Modify Skoll to use push-build tar balls for compilation and testing.

I had an update recently from ex-JBoss dude Shaun Connolly on what's going on at Ringside Networks. Ringside was founded by ex-Jboss, ex-BlueStone middleware business guru Bob Bickel. And if it's interesting enough to get him out of retirement, I figure it's worth paying attention to. The company is still in the early stages, about a dozen employees, mostly coding their brains out, on what they term a "social application server." The comparison of social networking applications with the early days of Java development is an apt one. It makes sense that there should be some kind of basic infrastructure... READ MORE

I'm pretty happy with my 1TB Apple Time Capsule. Bought it while at the MySQL Conf in April, and it does the right thing for my situation.

Con Zymaris and his crowd at Cybersource in Melbourne made something like this ages ago, aimed at small businesses: Cybersource/DATASAFE. That's a pretty neat solution, and an excellent example of how an OSS-based solution can be deployed in a business, regardless of what other technologies might already exist on the premises. The box will work just fine in a Windows environment.

Always focus on the solution (and what practical needs it solves for the client), not the technology (or the philosophy) - with a happy customer, you'll get plenty of opportunity (over time) to discuss what OSS is really about, and you're likely to find a very willing ear at that point.

Half a year has gone, most of it with my new company, Sun Microsystems.Kaj has made a detailed digest of his first half.
I took the DBA approach and queried the Planet MySQL database. I know that this qualifies as cheating, but I could not resist.
I published a total of 111 blog posts since January, with peaks in March and April (the users conference was coming).
I wrot about most everything, but some topics are prominent. Users Conference and MySQL proxy …

Please join us at the North Texas MySQL Meetup if you are in the Dallas area this coming Monday July 7th, at 7PM. This is our first time at the Sun Office (Mansions 1 and 2 rooms of the Sun Office, 16000 Dallas Parkway, Ste 700, Dallas, TX Dallas, TX 75248). We have been a good little group but now we need more room to hold more bodies. And the location should be better for those in Dallas.

There will be a short presentation on Getting Started with MySQL and Studying for the Certified MySQL Associate Certification and will be followed with a general 'round table' discussion.

Anyone interested in MySQL is welcome but please RSVP at http://mysql.meetup.com/250/

And the next night is the DallasPHP.org meeting -- a great resource for all levels of PHP coders. A blub from their website The Dallas area has many highly experienced PHP developers, and is adding new developers all the time. This July, the …

Why are the best technical books also the thinnest? To make the case, I highly recommend the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide In rack units, it’s a 1U; it fits nicely into my laptop bag; and if you’re considering implementing MySQL Cluster, it can save you a world of time.

Of course, if you get the book, you should consider the certification itself. There’s a legitimate debate about the usefulness of certification exams, but the MySQL 5.1 Cluster certification is a little more important than others for a couple of reasons:

1. In case you haven’t heard it by now, Cluster isn’t always the best fit. In many cases, an active/passive failover setup is a much more flexible and cost-effective approach. It’s not always a clear-cut decision. If you’re willing to make application changes …