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.

MySQL Table Sync 0.9.2 is a bug-fix release. Since the last release users have reported several bugs. I am still postponing new features until after the MySQL Conference and Expo, because I am focusing on the innotop session I’ll be presenting at the conference. I have also created a new mailing list on sourceforge for discussing all things MySQL Toolkit. Thanks to a user for suggesting the mailing list – I needed a nudge.

About three years ago I implemented the myhttp engine. It is one of about three engines I wrote for 4.1 that I never made public.

If you have seen the example I gave at Google a couple of years ago, ha_giggle, this is the engine that it was based on (and it was the base for Mark's AWS Engine as well). Its a very basic engine that implements SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE... or as we call them in the web sphere, PUT, GET, and DELETE.

Just as an example you can do the following:

mysql> CREATE TABLE `d` (`a` varchar(125), b text, primary key(a)) ENGINE=HTTP DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 CONNECTION="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/";

What can you do from this? You can SELECT pages from wikipedia :)

For INSERT to work you need a webserver that support PUT …