BusinessWeek has a great cover story this week on customer service, and lists the top-25 "Customer Service Elite." USAA (insurance company for military personnel), Four Seasons Hotels, Cadillac, and Nordstrom top the list. I've been fortunate to experience two of these top-four (USAA, because my dad funded his medical school training through the US Navy) and Nordstrom, and I agree that there is a profound difference in how they treat their customers than most other companies.

They certainly didn't get there by focusing on their competitors, as Oracle apparently did in its Hyperion acquisition. (It's astonishing to me how much they trumpeted the move as anti-SAP, rather than as pro-customer.). The "Elite" got there by devoting …

In my blog entry about How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation, I indicated that MySQL AB would arrange its next Developer meeting early in May 2007. For various reasons, including avoiding a crash with the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 in Santa Clara, we postponed it to September. Our finalists were Sofia, Heidelberg, Munich and Vienna, where Germany’s Next Top Dev Mtg Location was choosen to be Heidelberg, one of Germany’s most charming cities ideally located at about one hour’s shuttle distance from Frankfurt Airport.

As part of our 2007 overall theme to open up our Development …

CodeGear, the developer tools subsidiary of Borland, is now sharpening their focus around supporting the open source LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP) with their latest offering, Delphi for PHP.  Ok, full disclosure: I have a soft spot for Delphi.  I've rarely had more fun in my career than working with the original Delphi team back in the 1990s.  It was a lot of hard slogging, but we built something that was pretty amazing.  Who knew it would still be going strong twelve …

I've updated MySQL Query Profiler, which I consider the most important tool I've written. It's now included as part of the MySQL Toolkit project on Sourceforge.

I've just released MySQL Duplicate Key Checker on SourceForge. This is a complete rewrite of a tool I initially released under a slightly different name. It is now much more powerful and friendlier to use, especially for scripting, and has many more options.

Novell reports preliminary Q107 financial results…SIPBox becomes NeoPhonetics…continued debate on ‘what is open?’…and more…

Novell Reports Preliminary Financial Results for First Fiscal Quarter 2007, Novell (Press Release)

Red Hat To Webcast Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2007, Red Hat (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Upgrades Java Enterprise System ? Over 1.3 Million Subscribers Strong, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

SIPBox Renames the Company NeoPhonetics, NeoPhonetics (Press Release)

…

I got a lot of very nice feedback on the three tools I recently added to the MySQL Toolkit project on Sourceforge, and found and solved several issues with quoting and password prompting, index types, and so forth. Thank you all for your feedback, and welcome to Ruslan Zakirov, who plans to add some new tools! Updated packages are now on Sourceforge. All three packages needed minor tweaks, so I bumped the version numbers to 1.

Sorry to have been dark for the last couple of months. Things have been very busy indeed for the Zimbra team, but it is gratifying to have some of our longer-term engineering efforts baring fruit: in addition to the release of 4.5 (more info here) and opening up our product management portal for your input, we have now posted the beta release of our software appliance distribution for ZCS!

Software appliances promise to augment Software as a Service (SaaS) as an easier, cheaper way to use third-party software, especially by lowering the cost of managing independently changing subcomponents of a software "stack"---application logic, database, web application server, virtual machine, operating system, and so on. For our 1.0 software appliance, …

I was fortunate enough to be invited to beta test Windows Home server.  This is the new Microsoft product that looks to provide centralized storage and backup for the ever-growing number of home networks.  I have been too busy to do much with it so far but here's what I can tell you so far.

• The connector will complain that it can't install on Vista x64.  To fix this, simply move the .DAT file that is on the connector cd to your desktop and change it's extension to .MSI.  Then, open an elevated command prompt and run the MSI file.  It will install without trouble.  I did notice some oddity about shared folders so I'm not guaranteeing that it works perfectly but so far it's been ok here.
• At first it seems like a lot of noise about nothing when you see the shared folders appear on your desktop.  I was thinking "crap, I can do that with XP".  Well, not so fast.  These shared folders …

I’m listening to the first MySQL University session. It’s the highest form of education available at MySQL AB, hence the name. Not about how to use MySQL, but how to write code patches for MySQL.

Right now, Sergei Golubchik is sitting in Cologne, Germany, speaking behind Skype Conferencing and two pillows (sound quality!) about memory management and mysys libraries and algorithms. Monty and others are assisting Sergei over our internal IRC, where there are 31 developers listening in.

Our presenter, Sergei Golubchik, in a non-virtual setting

Here’s an IRC transcript:

monty|uni ie, only destructior is called, memory is not freed until free_root()
rafal|school monty|uni: if I initialize String from other String, or char table[] …