Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners …

Nokia acquires Trolltech. Black Duck announces Code Center. LoopFuse launches update. (and more)

Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy, Nokia / Trolltech (Press Release)

Black Duck Code Center Accelerates Component-Based Software Development in the Era of Open Source Software, Black Duck Software (Press Release)

Former JBoss Executives Launch New Version of LoopFuse OneView, Changing the Face of Online Marketing, LoopFuse (Press Release)

New Open Source WSO2 Mashup Server Combines Best of Web 2.0 and SOA to Enable the Social Enterprise, …

While I ducked out of Giuseppe’s miniconf talk, on MySQL Proxy (a great session, might I add - it takes up 2 slots right up until lunch), I went over to the LinuxChix miniconf, to attend a talk about memcache, by Brenda Wallace. Brenda, works at Catalyst IT, in New Zealand - they use a lot of memcache, in the telco business.

Memcache: volatile cache for keeping data in. Its a daemon. The code, can connect to memcache, put values in, read values, delete values. An example of how to use memcache, is given in PHP5.

A killer feature, is the setting of expiry. You can tell it to cache for 30 seconds, and then forget about it, no worries there.

What do you store? Database, generated content (front page of a website, just like a blog even), web service lookups (useful in telco, or …

Upcoming MySQL Features - Stewart Smith

Stewart’s talk on Upcoming MySQL Features was sort of a roadmap of what one might expect to see in MySQL 5.1 and above - he touched on Falcon, online backup, batched key access, Maria, Proxy, Workbench, and some cluster changes. When he shares his slides, it might be great to link to Worklog items, and Forge pages about these new features and previews (because, believe me, the stuff thats coming in future, is clearly very exciting).

MySQL Indexing Methods - Jonathon Coombes

Sitting in Jonathon Coombes session on MySQL Indexing Methods now - he’s going through covering indexes, the B+-tree index, hash index, full text indexing.

Some select points, that aren’t in the slides (otherwise, the slides themselves are very verbose, and when they make it online, it will provide some great reading material):

• InnoDB uses a B+-tree, and a secondary …

Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections, a company in my town, posted an article on what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means for the US government. I thought Planet MySQL readers might appreciate a different angle on the issue than many of the Planet MySQL posts, which are often focused on business or community more than government. (I’m just passing the link along, not agreeing or disagreeing).

Arjen and Stewart are on stage, and there’s an introduction session going on now. We’re now, introducing the ex-MySQLers (Arjen), and MySQLers (Stewart, Giuseppe, me). Trent has just walked in, so that makes all the MySQLers that are around at linux.conf.au.

Highlights of some of the attendees:

• A user from LG, who has been using MySQL for about 3 years now
• An technology manager in defense, interested in MySQL as an education exercise
• A MySQL user for over 8 years
• Systems administrator who’s been heavily using MySQL for 5 years, however with a total of about 8 years of use
• Systems administrator at IBM, using MySQL for a long time
• Travel startup in the Gold Coast, doing lots of MySQL, replication, proxy use
• A software engineer at HP, in China, and they use MySQL for benchmarking on HP hardware
• A Connector/J user
…

I passed the MySQL 5.0 DBA I and II certification tests today with very nice results. Just figured I’d post that so it’s verifiable that I’m not entirely spewing nonsense and general rabble. Today is a good day, and I will celebrate with the finest wines, and choicest of meats.

Exam Date: Monday, January 28, 2008 at 9:00 AM
Candidate: Matthew Reid
Candidate ID: MYSQL005372
Registration #: xxxxx2740
Exam Series: 005-002
Exam: Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part I
Validation #: xxxxx5662
Grade: pass

Exam Date: Monday, January 28, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Candidate: Matthew Reid
Candidate ID: MYSQL005372
Registration #: xxxxx7164
Exam Series: 006-002
Exam: Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part II
Validation #: xxxxxx5956
Grade: pass

Just a few hours ago, Fotolog crossed the 400,000,000 photos milestone. Considering that free members can only upload one photo a day, that's a lot of dedication by 14.5 million members (and growing).

What they need the most in the short term is someone who could do customer support between 3am and 11am, London time, so someone in Australia would be perfect

Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in the job?

Ideally it would be someone who’s familiar with web technologies (web, DNS, e-mail servers), linux and maybe some web frameworks (Django, Rails,. ..).

The candidate would be doing customer support (answering tickets) but if they’re interested they could also do sysadmin work or even development work.

see the webfaction job page for more details

Great news! Monty released Maria, the new transactional storage engine for MySQL. This is fantastic news! I can't wait to try it out. I remember when it was in the planning stage. Now it's here!

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/01/maria-engine-is-released.html