While going thru the process of putting the presentation for my China trip (and describing it to a friend part way through the process), it occurred to me that I have a specific method that I seem to follow each time.

Before I describe it, I should point out that there are really two types of presentations I've had to create over the last few years: new and derived.

As I thought about this, it occurred to me that I seem to find myself presenting over and over on subjects in the same specific topic area for roughly 9 to 24 months before I move on to something newer and different. Those phases, unsurprisingly, coincide with my role at work at the time.

Past phases were roughly:

• MySQL, Perl, and Open Source in general
…

New OpenSolaris Project: Web Stack 

We just launched a new OpenSolaris project called Web Stack.  With the great response we have seen for Cool Stack, we thought this would be a good time to get the community to participate. Although the starting point for Web Stack is Cool Stack 1.1, we hope it will grow much beyond that. Please vist the project site to get more details on why we are doing this. We'd love to get your feedback on whether you think this is a good idea and what open source web technologies/apps you would like to see added.

And of course, we hope that you will participate in the project. You can help by building portions of the stack, add new libraries and applications, …

Last week I posted on MySQL Quiz Show, where among several videos I took with my camera, there appeared a guy singing a very geeky song. Well, the singer turns out to be Solomon Chang, a MySQL-certified DBA, and the song “Coder McKinnan o

In the past few days, MySQL Community 5.0.41 was released. While reading through the changelog, I noticed the following entry:

The patches for Bug #19370 and Bug #21789 were reverted.

Upon looking at Bug #21789, I noted that it was originally committed in MySQL Enterprise 5.0.32, released December 20th, 2006. The next community release which would have contained the patch is MySQL Community 5.0.33, released January 9th, 2007. This means that not only was the patch not vetted by the community, but there was a full 20 days between …

Lately, it has been popular on blogs and elsewhere to portray the relationship between open source and closed source as a non-fight.

• In The Beautiful Game, Bryan Kirschner (who leads research strategy for the Open Source Software Lab of Microsoft) blogs about the MySQL User’s Conference and shares his thinking about why Microsoft and MySQL are working together on a number of applications, including ADO.NET provider Interop, and a Visual Studio plug-in that enables developers to access MySQL data directly from VS.
• In …

The OSBC Conference is coming up next week, May 22-23 in San Francisco.  This is the absolute best business conference on open source, bar none.  Matt Asay, built this conference up from nothing when the idea of open source and business was an oxymoron (like government efficiency or software quality).  Matt is still the conference chair and also a top exec at Alfresco, the leading open source content management system. 

Keynotes this year include Matthew Szulik from Red Hat (nice to see them participate at industry events, a rare phenomena in the past), Marc West from H&R Block, Eben Moglen on the GPL, Rob Curley from the Washington Post, …

I downloaded the MySQL source code over two weeks ago and finally it is built with code coverage statistics. I am going to go through the quick step by step process I used, although it wasn't quick at the time I tried to figure all of this out.

1) Download the source and unpack to a directory called "mysql".
2) cd mysql
3) BUILD/compile-pentium-gcov

This step has a tendency to give errors, especially those requiring aclocal and ncurses/termcap libraries. Make sure you have automake installed, but to have the proper aclocal executable automake must be of version 1.5 or higher. The ncurses libraries can be found, but they need the ncurses development libraries installed as well.

4) When the build is done run the tests with 'make test-force-full'. This will take some time, so walk away, watch tv, go the gym, make dinner, go to bed, etc.
5) lcov -c -d . -o lcov.output
6) mkdir …

$ wc -l toast.c
1219 toast.c

$ git log --pretty=oneline | wc -l
46

fixing bugs, making plans. Most of the time spent on it has been adding packet parsing support. Parsing data packets into structs, using a basic state machine. Rewriting that into a more "complete" state machine right now. Presently it can fully parse and understand the handshake process and COM_QUERY commands.

We'll see what happens.

MySQL's protocol is fairly nasty. Before moving onto buildnig the next part of the scaffolding I'm just getting the basic packets and commands dealt with. Luckily it allows me to set flags for what features work and what don't. So the proxy (will) disable compression, prepared statements, blah blah.

The ugliness I'm dealing with right now is with the client command packets. They're pretty simple:

4 byte header, omnipresent for all mysql network …

I’m now in Chicago, two days prior to PHPTek. I’ve never been to Chicago, so I wanted to take the conference as an excuse for a mini vacation. I’m staying at the Embassy Suites Rosemont, which is within a mile or so of the conference Hyatt. If you’re already here, or want to meet up with me during the conference.. here is my intended schedule..

Tuesday, May 15th 2007:

• Track #1 Zend Cert Crash Course (all day).

Wednesday, May 16th 2007:

• 10:15 - 11:15 : Writing maintainable PHP Code
• 11:30 - 12:30 : …

Oh fab. Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.See http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm

(Software) patents that (IMHO) shouldn't exist in the first place, but that's not the point I want to make here. Companies now need to compete on speed of innovation and "getting it out there", not on ability to hide, hoard and protect some perceived advantages. The above will just cost a lot of money, hinder innovation, annoy users, and in the end everybody loses. What a sad waste of energy.