Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY

I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.

All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:

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Hi all - boy, have I got news for you!

I would like to announce that The MySQL UDF Repository is no more. The rumour is that its growing popularity has caused it to be noticed by some folks at MySQL AB's legal department, kindly requesting that the project's name be changed to something even cooler.

However, these are just rumours - this is only the internet, so relying on a first-hand source, I can safely confide in you that the project's name and website are being changed mainly out of religious conviction to offer even more and better free UDFs for the MySQL …

While I haven’t spent much time going through the linux.conf.au 2008 schedules, it is now less than a few weeks away, and I’m stoked. If you’re there for the Mini-conf’s, I suggest freeing up your Tuesday, to spend it at MySQL.conf.au :) There are a bunch of interesting talks, and there will be a lot of MySQL’ers around. In fact, Giuseppe Maxia is flying in all the way from Sardinia, Italy, to give a talk. And I can assure you, he gives entertaining Proxy talks.

When I have more time to read through the schedules, I’ll work up a timetable, I’m sure. Time? There’ll be plenty, as I hop on a plane next Monday for a lengthy flight to Florida.

…

It is that time of year when folks promise themselves to get into better shape.  This is usually my time every year to do that.  The holidays always put some extra weight on me.

I know from going to conferences that there are some health conscious geeks out there.  Well, I found a geeky way to help with that.

Some guys here in Huntsville have started a fitness and health tracking site called Gyminee.  They are in the same business incubator that dealnews was in several years ago.  It is all Rails and MySQL.  It is quite convenient for me and some other guys at work since they built an iPhone interface.  Basic accounts are free and fairly full featured.  There are some advanced features that do require a small membership fee.  If I would just quit buying one …

Yes - it's that time again ;-)


The new year has just started which means the MySQL Conference and Expo is little more than 3 months away. I am very glad to have the opportunity to attend, and even more glad to be speaking.

I will be doing two sessions:

• 
  
• Writing MySQL UDFs - A 3 hour tutorial for people that want to get started writing MySQL UDFs. PHP and/or Java skills recommended - No pre-existing C skills required.
• …

I try to do a decent job of advocating for caring about good backups and business continuity strategies in my 7 Deadly Habits article. But this one beats them all:

Just too funny and great not to share. Found via this reddit article, where there is a lively discussion underway.

The Lua plugin support has been finally fixed and will be working in the next release. Together with a few other improvements, it’s now possible to write your own commands to do all kinds of tasks. Documentation for the plugin system is not yet written (and the previous one is outdated), but it should be straightforward to copy the supplied Lua plugin and change it to do something else. All you need is to know a little Lua (which is a simple scripting language) and explore Workbench internals using the GRT Shell (View -> Advanced -> GRT Shell).The sample Lua plugin is located in the modules folder. You can copy it to the custom plugins folder which is shown in the GRT Shell at startup and change things like the module name and add your own functions. I’ll write more about how to write such functions in a future post, like after the next WB is actually released.There are a few ways that plugins …

The listing of Dynamic System Variables on the MySQL Reference Manual’s page is supposed to show those variables you can change on-the-fly. innodb_data_home_dir is listed there as a dynamic variable, but it is not one, and trying to change it on-the-fly doesn’t work:

mysql> set global innodb_data_home_dir="/data/mysql/data"; ERROR 1193 (HY000): Unknown system variable 'innodb_data_home_dir'

mysql> set session innodb_data_home_dir="/data/mysql/data"; ERROR [...]

Some people obviously think I`m still interresting enough to interview

Reminds me of my first interviews over a decade ago .. I`m still being remembered by one of my famous quotes back then rougly translated to "those toddlers steal my bandwith" , when being asked about how the growing userbase of the KULeuven PC rooms in the Dekenstraat influenced my network usage :) (Think 1994 ish :))

But the acutal news is that Profoss is coming closer and closer .. and you should now Register!
So all you Drupal and MySQL folks out there.. this is your chance to learn about virtualization !