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:

• 
  
• 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 …

Wouldn't you know it just a few weeks after I bought my father a Mac for Christmas, Steve Jobs beats his previous target dates by announcing and shipping Intel-based Macs at MacExpo last week. I don't think my father is enough of a power user to notice the difference, but for most Mac heads, the new Intel-based Macs are nothing but good news. 

Not only do a lot of the MySQL developers and the open source community in general use and love the Mac, it seems to be an increasingly popular platform among our customers.  In our most recent user survey over the holidays, Mac OS/X users accounted for about 12% of respondents. This is an increase over the last year, and …

Wouldn't you know it just a few weeks after I bought my father a Mac for Christmas, Steve Jobs beats his previous target dates by announcing and shipping Intel-based Macs at MacExpo last week. I don't think my father is enough of a power user to notice the difference, but for most Mac heads, the new Intel-based Macs are nothing but good news. 

Not only do a lot of the MySQL developers and the open source community in general use and love the Mac, it seems to be an increasingly popular platform among our customers.  In our most recent user survey over the holidays, Mac OS/X users accounted for about 12% of respondents. This is an increase over the last year, and …

NASA's Mars Rover project has continued in its successful use of open source software. The ground systems controlling the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers are heavily based on open source technology including MySQL, the Castor data binding framework and Xerces XML parser.  According to Jeff Norris, a senior computer scientist at the Jet Propusion Laboratory, the rovers success is a testament to open source, laying the groundwork for greater use of open source inside the agency.  "It's emboldened, or increased our approach to use open source," he said.

MySQL is also now available under a US Federal GSA contract which should make it easier for government agencies to purchase MySQL Network.

• NewsForge: NASA's Mars Rover blazes open source path
• eWeek: …

NASA's Mars Rover project has continued in its successful use of open source software. The ground systems controlling the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers are heavily based on open source technology including MySQL, the Castor data binding framework and Xerces XML parser.  According to Jeff Norris, a senior computer scientist at the Jet Propusion Laboratory, the rovers success is a testament to open source, laying the groundwork for greater use of open source inside the agency.  "It's emboldened, or increased our approach to use open source," he said.

MySQL is also now available under a US Federal GSA contract which should make it easier for government agencies to purchase MySQL Network.

• NewsForge: NASA's Mars Rover blazes open source path
• eWeek: …

MySQL has announced a new user survey over the holidays.  The survey will take about 15-20 minutes to complete and has questions about how you're using MySQL, what features are important to you and what areas you'd like MySQL to work on.  This is a great way to influence our strategy and directions.  It helps our product managers and engineers focus on the features that are important to you.  And you may even win an iPod Nano in the process! 

• MySQL: User Survey

MySQL has announced a new user survey over the holidays.  The survey will take about 15-20 minutes to complete and has questions about how you're using MySQL, what features are important to you and what areas you'd like MySQL to work on.  This is a great way to influence our strategy and directions.  It helps our product managers and engineers focus on the features that are important to you.  And you may even win an iPod Nano in the process! 

• MySQL: User Survey

There's a good blog article on the Xooglers (ex-Googlers) web site about how they use MySQL to run their adwords program.  If you're not familiar, adwords generates something like 99.9% of Google's advertising revenues, so it certainly a business critical application.  While Google is generally quite secretive about their internal operations, there are some interesting tidbits in this posting about how Google tried a commercial, closed-source database but it was never able to perform as well as MySQL.  A few select quotes:

• "AdWords was built using the MySQL database, which is open-source and therefore available for free. It is by now also nearly as full-featured as the best commercial databases, but back in 2000 this was not the case."
• "Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore …

So I just finished installing Asterisk at Home 1.5. For some reason I got it into my head back in August before Oscon that I should format the entire asterisk server at the house and start over from scratch. Which means that I have not had a home phone in months. Its arguable if I have ever had one for the house in the first place, I cherish hacking the phone more then it actually being functional. I had been using a fairly early version of asterisk that I had hacked up/patched to do a few oddball things which are now done directly by the server (most of them had to do with fixing it so that all information was loaded from MySQL).

1.5 is definitely better then 1.2, for instance it works. The only bug I have found so far is that if I make changes in the setup I need to go into asterisk via "asterisk -r" and type reload so that all of the changes take place, otherwise it works fine. It took all of a day and a half to reload all of the …