Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of the software industry. He singlehandedly developed and popularized outliners as a software category and later helped develop XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS. 

There's a good interview on NerdTV where Robert X. Cringely interviews Winer and discusses topics such as outlining, the early days of the software industry, why programmers don't always get it, the development and evolution of OSS, publishing on the internet and more.  Dave's not known for being a shrinking violet; he has strong views on a lot of technologies.  But love him or hate him, he's had huge impact on software in the last ten years.

• NerdTV: …

I managed to get my hands on a fairly cool device, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.  The picture above doesn't do it justice, but it's a small Internet tablet with built-in WiFi and a beautful crisp screen running 800x480 resolution. It weights just 8 ounces (230 grams) and can be easily carried in a jacket pocket.  Since the device is from Nokia, you might guess that it has basic phone capabilities or GPRS based web surfing, but it doesn't.  However, if you have a bluetooth enabled phone, you can surf via your phone. 

After a couple of days experimenting, I don't think this will replace my existing Palm Treo phone or Sony Vaio laptop, but I'm still impressed with it.  It offers the …

The annual EclipseCon conference takes place in Santa Clara in less than 2 weeks.  In just a few years, Eclipse has gone from a niche technology to absolute domination in tools.  Not only is Eclipse a hugely popular platform for C++ and Java IDEs, it has become the basis for tools across a wide range of languages and technologies. Whether it's web development, data tools, or SOA, there's an Eclipse-based tool.  At this point, the only holdout is Sun, who has their own NetBeans tool, but it's never had the same kind of traction as Eclipse and I think they are just bitter about that. 

Having spent a number of years at Borland in the 90s, where I helped launch Delphi and other products, I have always had a soft spot for Integrated …

Whenever we poll our users, the topic of performance tuning and optimization always scores the highest interest level. So at the MySQL Users Conference, we have a full track devoted to performance tuning.  (Hey, we're not dummies. Everyone wants a little extra performance!) This includes best practices presentations by some of the elite performance gurus from inside MySQL and among our top users and partners.  This includes talks by people like performance engineer Peter Zaitsev (pictured above), community guy Jay Pipes, Optimization wizard Timour …

MySQL and Alfresco are putting on a web seminar on March 9 featuring Alfresco co-founder and CTO John Newton.  John was also a co-founder of Documentum and has been doing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) before it even had a fancy acronym.  He's a scary smart individual who really understands how to build and deliver software in this space that not only works well but has an enjoyable, almost Apple-like user interface.  John will be covering background on ECM, scale-out, open source strategies, best practices and case studies.  If you are looking into content management solutions and want to keep costs under control, you won't want to miss this web …

I managed to get my hands on a fairly cool device, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.  The picture above doesn't do it justice, but it's a small Internet tablet with built-in WiFi and a beautful crisp screen running 800x480 resolution. It weights just 8 ounces (230 grams) and can be easily carried in a jacket pocket.  Since the device is from Nokia, you might guess that it has basic phone capabilities or GPRS based web surfing, but it doesn't.  However, if you have a bluetooth enabled phone, you can surf via your phone. 

After a couple of days experimenting, I don't think this will replace my existing Palm Treo phone or Sony Vaio laptop, but I'm still impressed with it.  It offers the …

Whenever we poll our users, the topic of performance tuning and optimization always scores the highest interest level. So at the MySQL Users Conference, we have a full track devoted to performance tuning.  (Hey, we're not dummies. Everyone wants a little extra performance!) This includes best practices presentations by some of the elite performance gurus from inside MySQL and among our top users and partners.  This includes talks by people like performance engineer Peter Zaitsev (pictured above), community guy Jay Pipes, Optimization wizard Timour …

It’s been reported a million times elsewhere, but Oracle has acquired Sleepycat, maker of the BerkeleyDB database. This will probably affect various users of BDB itself, but not MySQL users. If Oracle bought Sleepycat to mess with MySQL, they’re smoking something really good. I don’t think they’re that stupid.

I was quoted by Computer World magazine, in their article Users unworried by Oracle?s purchase of Sleepycat as follows:

Despite its popularity …

Although I've had a few ideas brewing for some time, things finally came together tonight for my O'Reilly Open Source Convention talk proposals. I just finished putting the last of three in:

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• Creating Art with MySQL Routines (45-minute talk): a look at 10 new procedures/functions designed to be fun, not functional (looking to the Perl ACME modules).
  
• The 30-minute MySQL Cluster Installation (45-minute talk): complete step-by-step setup of a MySQL cluster (highlighting history, hardware, anatomy of the cluster, configuration, and management).
  
• Hands on MySQL 5: Procedures, Functions, Triggers and Views (3-hour tutorial): hands-on building of examples of each new enterprise feature in MySQL 5 (co-presented with Jay)
  

I was going to submit the …

Anders Hejlsberg, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, is interviewed in the Microsoft Channel 9 "Behind the Code" series.  Anders is one of the greatest minds in the programming field and has had a huge influence on programmers for more than 20 years.  Anders developed the first Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Turbo Pascal at Borland, and later developed Delphi, Visual Java, the Windows Foundation Classes, C# and the .Net framework. 

I had the pleasure of working with Anders on various versions of Turbo Pascal and Delphi back at Borland some years back.  One of the best things about Anders was he understood how to meet the needs of a very large audience of customers by applying principals of simplicity and elegance.  He was careful not to add features …