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 …

This past week Burlingame, California was host to the first Zend/PHP conference.  The keynotes included presentations by the founders of Zend (Andi, Zeev and Doron), as well as Marc Andreessen (Netscape wunderkind), Rod Smith (IBM's open source guru), Ken Jacobs (Oracle's Dr DBA) and Adam Bosworth (Google) among others.

Zend also announced their initiatives around a collaboration platform for PHP that involves many vendors including MySQL, Oracle, IBM, Actuate and SugarCRM as well as the PHP community at large to develop the Zend PHP framework as well as integration with Eclipse. 

Marc Andreessen's keynote was particularly interesting as he made the case that PHP is really the language going forward.  For those who missed the 1990's (or are still trying to forget it) this is an amazing endorsement both for PHP and for Zend.  …

MySQL 5.0 RC is out. It’s so exciting for me to say that because waiting 3 years for MySQL 5 and finally we have an RC. Wow. I wonder when the prod version will be out. They better release it soon.

Ok, if you don't read Swedish, you might be wondering what the headline above means.  It's a rough translation of "We kill bugs dead" which I used in a presentation to our developers a few months back in Prague.  Since then, it's become somewhat of a mantra in the Engineering team, who are relentless in killing all the bugs they can find.  Which is exactly what we wanted in our MySQL 5.0 release candidate, announced today.  MySQL 5.0 RC has no known showstopper bugs (e.g. Priority 1 or 2 bugs) and no reported bugs from our Beta testers. 

I'm sure there are still a few weird corner cases lurking here or there, but it's solid enough for production use at this stage and we're encouraging folks to take it out for serious usage.  In fact, we'll be giving away prizes for the …