I mentioned earlier that I'd blog about progress on the book as we go. It's not only progress on the book itself -- I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it's very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I'm finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

Thanks to our friends at Meinberg we (the NTP Pool) are giving away some awesome equipment for time keeping.

If you have a reasonably connected server with a static IP address (see the requirements), please join the pool. Literally millions of users are counting on you! Any old server that can keep track of the time can run ntpd too. The cpu requirements are really minimal, so your current MySQL/Apache/whatever load is not going to be affected. If you are able to setup a GPS antenna then you can also go apply for the GPS devices. They are really really cool.

Or in any case, if you are able then please …

Thanks to our friends at Meinberg we (the NTP Pool) are giving away some awesome equipment for time keeping.

If you have a reasonably connected server with a static IP address (see the requirements), please join the pool. Literally millions of users are counting on you! Any old server that can keep track of the time can run ntpd too. The cpu requirements are really minimal, so your current MySQL/Apache/whatever load is not going to be affected. If you are able to setup a GPS antenna then you can also go apply for the GPS devices. They are really really cool.

Or in any case, if you are able then please …

I’m a bit late with that “news” but I have the second article about Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensibility published in Q3 2007 issue of IOUG SELECT Journal magazine. If you are interested in that topic I should reference you back to my presentation from IOUG where I created a sample MySQL monitoring plugin. It wasn’t [...]

Ok, so the week is not over yet - but I have to name these entries somehow ;-)
And it's actually "solo again" as I used to run my own business back when I lived in The Netherlands.
Anyway... the first week at Open Query.

First booked customer?
Training. Multiple people, multiple modules. Good.

First consulting customer?
A referral - thanks Steve!
Environment: Windows (someone up there must hate me ;-), or actually a Microsoft shop (including MS-SQL) that happens to have one app on MySQL. Actually, the fact that this server runs Windows actually matters very little. But it *was* interesting to hear this fellow speak about MS-SQL and compare some things.

Microsoft SQL Server has a nice GUI for maintenance, you set up some stuff and schedule other regular things. MySQL Administrator can do some of that (and looks very …

Late last week we introduced a revised design and navigation on the MySQL web site home page.  The home page had become somewhat cluttered over time with lots of competing banners and news items and we wanted to streamline it to make it easier to read and project a more professional image.  I think the web team did a great job on this updating simultaneously in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese.  So far, response has been great.  …

Late last week we did a minor change to the layout of the MySQL home page and navigation.  While there are still a few minor issues to be corrected, overall the response has been favorable.  The key thing we wanted to do was reduce some of the clutter on the home page and provide a more streamlined and professional look.  The web team did a great job launching English, French, German, Italian and Japanese versions simultaneous.   You'll also see some other nice graphic design elements throughout the …

NetApp sues Sun over ZFS. Microsoft to work with Novell on Silverlight for Linux. XenSource releases embedded hypervisor. (and more)

Network Appliance Files Suit Against Sun Microsystems to Defend Its Intellectual Property, Network Appliance (Press Release)

Microsoft Delivers Silverlight 1.0, Extends Support to Linux, Microsoft (Press Release)

XenSource Announces Market?s First Embedded Hypervisor, XenSource (Press Release)

Battle for Open Web Standards Gains Open Source Tools, ActiveState (Press Release)

…

I mentioned earlier that I’d blog about progress on the book as we go. It’s not only progress on the book itself – I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it’s very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I’m finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

UPDATE: for all you people that missed the news and come here directly, we have an RC1 now too.

Dear Kettle fans,

After a long period of bug-squashing and other frantic coding activities, we are happy to give you Kettle’s second milestone of version 3.0.0. (77MB zip file)

What has changed since M1?

• New icons!! This is the first release to include a new set of icons and as such a fresh new look.
• A new Mondrian Input step to read from Pentaho Analyses using MDX.
• A new Regular Expression evaluation step
• Access Input (don’t ask!)
• Fixed / improved repository support
• Improved database dialect handling (SQL Server .. problem and forcing identifiers to lower/uppercase)
…