With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

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As I posted a while back, Phorum will be at the MySQL Conference. Its coming up soon and I wanted to let anyone that is going to be there know that our full team (of 3 people) will be there thanks to the donations of our users and a couple of our employers. If you see the big dog, that is us. Stop by and say Hi!

By Nat Torkington

Andrew Savikas is O'Reilly's Director of Digital Content & Publishing Services and author of Word Hacks. He recently attended the Yahoo! Open Source CMS Summit and wrote up some really good notes. I've included them below the fold.

Attendance was much higher than I'd expected. Jeff Robbins (of lullabot.com, former O'Reilly employee, and husband of author Jennifer Niederst-Robbins), one of the conference organizers, said they targeted the conference at 250 based on the space Yahoo had available, and they had to close registration after less than a week with 380 registered. Most attendees were there for Drupal -- …

It's official.
I am now appointed mentor of a Google Summer of Code project.
Congratulations to Charlie Cahoon, who has submitted an intriguing proposal for improving our code coverage and testing tools. The abstract doesn't do justice to the project. The juicy part is in the details. More about it later.
More information on Kaj's announcement.

Thanks, Charlie, for proposing this project!

Thanks, Google, for promoting this great infrastructure!

Google just released the list of accepted Summer of Code projects. Overall, Google accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications. Out of those, Google accepted 10 MySQL related applications from nearly 40 applications.

I am happy to see the following successful applicants from the US, the EU, Europe outside the EU, and China:

• Charles Cahoon
• Jin Chen
• Umair Mehmood Imam
• Vangelis Katsikaros
• Warren Kenny
• Senlin Liang
• Mikkel Bach Mortensen
• Milos Prodanovic
• Mayssam Sayyadian
• Andrew Uvarov

and the following mentors (all of whom you can meet in less than two …

The MySQL Conference & Expo coming up April 23-26 in Santa Clara will feature a dozen or more Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.  These go beyond the main sessions and keynotes of the conference to provide additional interactive sessions with many of the leading MySQL developers and gurus.  Topics range from data warehousing, storage engines, Java, testing techniques and more.  The topics are still being finalized and you can submit your own BoF topic on anything you're interested in discussing. 

Check out Robin Schumacher's article on our developer zone " …

Andrew Dashin wrote about this. Basically, the function verifies whether a credit card number could be valid, using the number's internal checksum algorithm.

I had the C code from long ago, and I think I even converted it to PHP at some point. It's out there and it's no secret (try googling for the Lunn algorithm). But, I don't use it any more. Or to rephrase, you really don't want to do this check.

From discussions with credit card experts a few years ago, I have learnt that they prefer you to feed pretty much any entered number to them, and then just act on what result they send back. This allows the banks and credit card gateways to better track fraud attempts.

This may sound odd, but it does make sense. It's not so hard to generate numbers that pass the Lunn test. But if someone does an attack using a list of random or …

Well, it’s official:

http://code.google.com/soc/mysql/about.html

I am officially mentoring 2 students for MySQL, AB for the Google Summer of Code. I have great hopes for the MySQL Auditing Software. My first tasks: familiarize myself with different types of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, and the MySQL Coding Standards.

This summer is going to be great!

Sebastopol, CA -- April 10, 2007 -- The 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo is gearing up for April 23-26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. This year's program includes more than 110 tutorials and sessions to be delivered by some of the most successful companies and fast growing web sites in today's Internet economy -- including YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, whose participation underscores the influence of MySQL's open source database. According to Tim O'Reilly, CEO and founder of O'Reilly Media, Inc., "Every killer app on the Internet is a database application. And that makes MySQL the 'Intel Inside' of the next-generation of computer applications."

Continuent, Inc., the leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for MySQL high availability and scalability, today announced the inclusion of MySQL Enterprise subscriptions as an integral part of its Continuent uni/cluster for MySQL Enterprise offering.