While looking through my new Vista, I found out that my cpu is 64bit capable! I was like.. OMFG hell yeah! I whipped out the 64bit Vista DVD and nuked all my hard work of setting up software without even giving it a second thought… About 20 mins later, I was back in my new found love, except this time I dove right into installing software. One by one, I get basic stuff installed in following order:

1. daemon tools (went out and got the upgraded vista version) no problems
2. Microsoft Office 2007 ultimate, uh.. thank god no problems there
3. McAfee VirusScan, ofcourse problems.. knew that from 32 bit version but what the hell.. was worth a try
4. Trillian - another no problem
5. VMWare Server………………………………………….PROBLEMS! Sigh.. they don’t support 64bit Vista. Who would’ve known? They support installing 64bit version as virtual machines but then why they don’t …

I'll be in Vancouver starting on February 12th till the afternoon of the 13th. I'm giving the keynote on the second day of the Vancouver PHP conference. The topic is on scaling out websites and for once it will be a completely new slide deck :)

There will be plenty of information on MySQL and other web infrastructure components like Apache. I will be covering both what is hot in design at the moment and the evolution that most sites go through while growing.

There I was sitting and working and minding my own business when I heard bunch of noise outside of my office. So I took my headphones off to tune in to the conversation. One of the developers has gone out and bought Windows Vista Ultimate edition and was talking about installing it and trying it out. I have always tried out all of the Windows flavors since 3.1 as soon as they came out and even did beta runs for NT 4, XP, 2000, 2003 and even Vista. But for some reason after installing and running beta 2 of Windows Vista, I wasn’t very impressed. But when they were talking about installing Vista, I myself got curious to find out how good/bad is the released version. So I went and got myself a copy of Vista Ultimate as well.

I didn’t want to destroy my laptop so I decided to install it on my old computer. The specs of that computer are:

Intel Pentium 3.2 with hyperthreading, 2 gig ram, Nvidia GeForce Ultra with Dual DVI

…

The second episode in my speaker spotlight series features Jess Balint, a software developer at MySQL who, like Reggie in Episode 1, also works on the MySQL Connectors team.

Jess will be presenting a session called "XA with MySQL and Java ? J2EE and Spring". I'm not a big Java guy, myself, and know pitifully little about J2EE, Spring, and the myriad acronyms all beginning with J that almost every Java developer has to know (it's almost another language, those acronyms, don't you think? ).

But, luckily for us, Jess knows Java. He knows it very, very well. And he's willing to share that knowledge with conference attendees interested in the distributed, coordinated transaction processing called XA. I asked Jess why he chose to talk about XA and Java, and what he's been working on recently. He wrote back:

Hi Jay. Java has definitely …

OK, so a number of you may have noticed some major gumming up of PlanetMySQL over the last week or so. Some feeds were not appearing at all, and yet other feeds were inserting entries that had nothing to do with MySQL — entries that previously never made it into the PlanetMySQL database. Here's the story on what happened, how I screwed everything up, and how I figured out what was going on...

The Backstory

All of the problems stemmed from a well-intentioned effort on my part to figure out why certain feeds weren't being properly aggregated by the PlanetMySQL feed reader. Arjen wrote the PlanetMySQL feed reader originally, back in 2005, and it has performed admirably up until this point. The feed reader uses the Magpie RSS library for its grunt work, and has a filtering system that allows the Planet administrators to assign a regular expression filter to a specific feed so that entries not related to MySQL don't get inserted into …

Solid has released 5.0.27-0058, which is the first point release after our GA in December. It is primarily a bug fixing release. You can get it from the usual place (http://dev.soliddb.com/download/).

It's been an exciting week again with my MySQL colleagues (PS team). We don't see each other lots, but when we do, we do it good! Last evening was fun playing a MySQL Trivia. Like, when did Monty wrote the first lines of code or who joined before our CEO Marten got in the company. Good thing we had Max in our team, we won!

Orlando is, I've been told, maybe not a good starting point to get a taste of US. It's like a big entertainment place with restaurants linking amusement parks. However, via Chad and his wife Mary Ellen, we got to know some other folks. We went to a bar and that was great experience. The Orlando downtown bar on a roof was also very interesting, good music there.

Either ways, I'm happy I'm going home soon. In a land where you get a 20oz T-bone steak or 3 cm think pork chop, I wouldn't survive long. Probably going to other states will be good to know this big country, but I'm not in a hurry. There's still …

It's been an exciting week again with my MySQL colleagues (PS team). We don't see each other lots, but when we do, we do it good! Last evening was fun playing a MySQL Trivia. Like, when did Monty wrote the first lines of code or who joined before our CEO Marten got in the company. Good thing we had Max in our team, we won!

Orlando is, I've been told, maybe not a good starting point to get a taste of US. It's like a big entertainment place with restaurants linking amusement parks. However, via Chad and his wife Mary Ellen, we got to know some other folks. We went to a bar and that was great experience. The Orlando downtown bar on a roof was also very interesting, good music there.

Either ways, I'm happy I'm going home soon. In a land where you get a 20oz T-bone steak or 3 cm think pork chop, I wouldn't survive long. Probably going to other states will be good to know this big country, but I'm not in a hurry. There's still …

Charlie Babcock has a fantastic article on the rising tide of open source in the latest edition of InformationWeek. As I've written recently, the bar is getting lower to launch a successful open source business. That said, there are tens of thousands of lame open source projects, for every good one (the same is true of proprietary software, btw). As Babcock writes:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out. …

innotop 1.3.5 is the latest release of the increasingly popular MySQL and InnoDB monitor. I recommend everyone upgrade to this release. Aside from incomplete documentation, it's close to a stable 1.4 release (I'm counting on you to find the bugs!). There are many significant new features since version 1.3, which make it more powerful and easier to use.