Well, it appears I'm in Canberra for a few days next week, teaching an in-house training course. Cool customer (might tell more later) and also cool because I haven't been to Canberra yet. CLUG meetings are on another night so that's a pity... if anyone local wants to catch up while I'm there (just Sunday 22 Oct or possibly Monady 23 Oct if the customer doesn't have any other plans) do drop me a note!

It's not free, but its certainly one of the coolest open source based technologies I've read about.  MooBella, of Taunton Massachusetts, has an ice cream making vending machine built on the open source LAMP stack.  In about 45 seconds, the MooBella machine, about the size of an overweight soda machine, churns through the ingredients and delivers a cup of fresh ice cream and a range of flavors and mix-ins.  The MooBella machine features a simple graphical display, self-tuning diagnostics, wireless support, turbulent dynamic mixing and your choice of chocolate chips, walnuts, peanut butter cups or cookies & cream. 

Who says open source doesn't innovate?  It makes me proud to be a MySQLer!

• InformationWeek: …

With this topic will be my presentation in OpenFest - in Sliven, Bulgaria. Other topics, covering open communities, free beer and more can be seen here. .

Come and JOIN us:

November 4-5 Sofia - Bulgaria
November 11 Sliven, Bulgaria
November 25 Rousse, Bulgaria

OpenFest is an idea for a celebration, which should exceed the boundaries set by differences and morals. Let there be a day each year in which we, the upholders of free software all over the world try to make this a day when all people could get in touch with the freedom on the Internet, with the freedom of open source software, with free software.

Lets all do something for other people on this day - not only on the net but person to person in real life as well. Let?s leave our monitors and forget the complex terminology and explain to someone in simple terms how …

It appears that Jeremy Cole (Proven Scaling) can, as he's offering you a "free ride". To be exact, he's offering to pay for travel and accomodation. That's pretty cool! Just meals and local transportation are on you (but the local trains are cheap, and what does cold pizza cost? ;-) But seriously, there's free food on the Google campus anyway.

MySQL Camp will be held 10-12 November 2006 at Google HQ in Mountain View, California. It'll bring together MySQL hackers and other interested parties. It's not just about hard-core C coding: think nifty little tools, stored procedures, bug hunting skills... there'll be really bright people there, specifically to spend time with other bright but less experienced people, and help them go further with the cool stuff.
Plus you'll be able to say you visited Google and got the shirt! …

IONA Reports Profitable Third Quarter Results, IONA (Press Release)

Red Hat Expands Footprint in Telecommunications Industry, Red Hat (Red Hat)

Funambol Launches Industry’s First Open Source Community-Based Phone Certification Program to Accelerate Mass Adoption of Mobile Services, Funambol (Press Release)

Pentaho Announces Google Maps Integration, Pentaho (Press Release)

MySQL Enterprise Database - Ready or Not?, LinuxInsider, Jay Lyman (Article)

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One of the big advantages of MySQL is its concept of "pluggable storage engines". This means you can choose the most optimal storage engine for your needs. This also has a disadvantage: You have to know what you are doing...

MySQL has also a full text search engine built in. But this search engine is not as fast a you probably want to. Thus there are some alternative full text search engines which might be working together with MySQL.

My brother alerted me to a good posting on "The Eight Truths of Real Innovators" from the futurelab blog.  It may be a bit pretentious to call these the "eight truths" but they are certainly thought provoking.  Perhaps readers will come up with their own "truths" to add to this list:

1. Stop equating innovation to R&D
   Its not about the lab experiment, it's about how you're helping customers.  Innovation doesn't just mean the code; it can be the development model, the business model, the distribution model and more.
2. Pay people to fail
   It is the risky …

Bob Field posted his reactions to the recent MySQL announcement to offer two versions of the MySQL Server product: Enterprise Server and Community Server. I feel somewhat similarly; the change has the potential to give greater value to both the corporate customers of MySQL and their community users. It will be interesting to see how this develops as we go forward.By making less frequent

MySQL has recently started a campaign of open contribution, inviting the community to participate to the MySQL project in many ways.

The next target, also considering the higer stakes coming from the MySQL Enterprise challenge, will be Quality Assurance.
Quality AssuranceNow what is Quality Assurance (QA)? If you think that it's just bug hunting, then you have a simplistic view of the software generation lifecycle. QA deals with all the steps in the software lifecycle, and at each steps there are actions that can affect the quality of the final outcome. QA components include (but are not limited to) failure testing, statistical control, process and performance control, best practice …