As one of my last posts about issues with hosting provider got great response and We got a lot of good advice and offers I decided to ask for advice another problem we have as we're growing our company - organizing good phone communications.

Our goals are rather simple though the fact we're globally distributed may put us a bit aside from typical small business needs.

Normal Phone Line We're looking to get normal business phone line which would be routed to me and Vadim withing our normal business hours and voicemail outside of them. The same line could offer extensions to reach other team members plus. Plus we'd like to get direct numbers for me and Vadim at least so people do not have to pass through choice …

I have been on vacation the last week, which meant I spent the previous three weeks at work preparing to go on that vacation. :) All in all, it was much needed. It represented the first family vacation we've taken since I was still in the Air Force (and I separated in 1999). We've taken a couple of days here or there or I've taken a week off to take care of personal things, but we finally did the week long, get away from everything vacation.

Our vacation was fairly inexpensive. We spent a week at Myrtle Beach, SC, at my mother-in-law's house. I admit this is a great convenience because Myrtle Beach is certainly a vacation location and not having to splurge on hotel and being able to minimize other expenses like food was great. But I think the most important thing was the time away and the time to destress. Given that, just about anywhere with some reasonable accomodations and some things to do (and even small towns nearby always have …

Arrived early morning, not much sleep, took forever to get to hotel and then had to wait for room (double not happy), got some work done in the office and am now in desperate need of sleep before a way too early start.

(The weird thing is that the reason behind this post has nothing to do with being in Japan)

MySQL released version 5.0.48 of their database server yesterday morning. Beside other fixes, this release fixes a bug with innodb and auto-increment values.
A full list is available in the changelog.

We had various problems with replication in the past, so I´ve updated our servers with the new version to see if it´s working now.
As far as I can see, replication seems to work. However: I´ll wait a few days until I give clearance for our "new" slave.

One of the key things that attracts developers to the OSS world is the no nonsense attitude people are allowed to display in OSS development. Where in the closed source world, developers are rarely allowed to openly explain the pro's and con's of their product, its expected in the OSS world. People that BS will get slapped hard quickly. It doesn't pay off and at best the benefit would be short term until someone takes another look. There are no restrictions on publishing benchmarks etc. This is awesome.

Now given that everything is out in the open and that people expect perfect honesty when discussing your project or even more importantly when comparing your product with other products, it can be very non trivial. The reason being that its damn near impossible to be objective, simply because everybody weights things sightly different based on their experience. Also one of course knows the own product best.

That being said, I think …

By Andy Oram

I've been doing a lot of research recently into the patent system. The impetus is the history-making Peer to Patent project, and specifically an article I recently finished for the Economist magazine. ("A patent improvement" in the September 8, 2007 issue, Technology Quarterly section.)

This blog is not about the Economist article or Peer to Patent, but about how several months of immersion in the subject of patents has affected my understanding of related policy issues, and how my opinions differ from many of my friends in the software field.

Patents are necessary to promote invention

One of the fuzzier notions making its rounds in the software field condemns patents as backward and oppressive. Not just software patents--some people …

You've decided to obtain MySQL certification and that's great! Now it's a matter of how to go about it? You can go the traditional routes and take a class, or you can prepare on your own. I did the latter, and 2 exams later during MySQL Conference 2007, I passed the Certified MySQL Database Administrator (CMDBA) exams. I wanted to share my exam preparation experience, as I've never found this information in any other place. I took what I learned from how to study math and applied it to preparing for the MySQL exams. …

Version 1.5.0 of the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor is out. This release is the first in the unstable 1.5.0 branch, which will eventually become the stable 1.6 branch. I’m beginning to merge the various branches I’ve made to support some of our needs at my employer. This first release adds some major new features and prepares for some other large improvements and new features. What’s new Here’s what’s new: