OK, so I'm starting to get really excited about MySQL Camp in a couple weeks. Things are shaping up to be a fantastic event. Later today, I'll be cleaning up the SessionSchedule wiki page with more information on exact times and rooms for everything.

I will be arriving in San Jose airport on Thursday (November the 9th) evening at 7:30pm and will be getting a rental car at the airport (thanks Blue Chip program at Thrifty!). I'll be hanging out at the airport at the Internet cafe until 10pm so that I can give Baron Schwartz and Sheeri Kritzer a ride to the hotels in Palo Alto (we're staying at Motel 6, which AFAIK, still has available rooms). That leaves an extra seat in the car for another camper, so shoot me an email to …

I wish I could say that Europe is free from software patents, but it is not. In contravention of the existing statutory law, the European Patent Office (EPO) continues to bend and break the law every day by issuing European software patents. And if the EPLA were to be ratified in its current form or any form near the present proposal, tens of thousands of existing European software patents would become strongly enforceable overnight.

Earlier this year, the NoSoftwarePatents Award campaign started in order to draw attention to the EPO’s unacceptable granting practice. That award is not linked to the original NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign I founded in 2004 and handed to the FFII …

Saturn’s autoweb

I’ve hacked my scripts that generate doxygen docs to also build MySQL 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 for AMD64 (the box that it’s running on) with Cluster. This is to help my idea of running Gallery at home with NDB disk data tables in very recent MySQL builds.

How’s it going so far? Well… I’ve found some bugs and some seemingly strange behaviour here and there. However, bug reports will come, and I’m currently running a bit of an older build.

I’ll make the URL of the Gallery public at some point too

Zend is hosting it's second annual Zend / PHP Conference & Expo on Oct 30 - Nov 2 in San Jose at the Doubletree Hotel.  The program has expanded from last year and includes a full day of tutorials on Monday.  The conference features in-depth technical sessions on topics such as high volume scaling techniques for PHP and MySQL, performance tuning, web services as well as sessions on new capabilities in forthcoming PHP 6. There are also keynotes, case studies and panel sessions.  Zend is one of the major contributors to PHP and they have also developed a great framework that greatly simplifies the …

mysqlreport v2.7 has been released. This version sports the following changes:

• Option “password” in ~/.my.cnf now recognized (used to be that only “pass” was recognized)
• Options host, port, and socket now recognized in ~/.my.cnf
• Given those two changes, the order of option precendece is such that ~/.my.cnf is read first, then command line options override ~/.my.cnf options, and if nothing else default values are assigned
• –all actually shows all reports now (i.e. no more need to –all –tab)
• Like mytop, mysqlreport tries to connect via a socket first, otherwise it tries via a network connection

Thank you to those who provided patches for these changes, although I wound up writing the mods myself for various reasons. To …

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Perl, MySQL and so forth, and neglecting another topic that interests me: the Web. I’m going to finish and publish some of the drafts I have on the Web before I continue with another massive database marathon. This one is about someone who read my mind and built exactly the Firefox extension I was about to build myself: an easy way to block all cookies and allow them on a case-by-case basis without nagging.

There's a funny tongue-in-cheek blog posting from a Microsoft employee on some of the features that had to be cut from the forthcoming Windows Vista release.  Originally scheduled to ship in late 2003, Vista will not be available until early 2007.  Good to see that someone at Microsoft still has a sense of humor.  Now if only they would fix remove Windows Genuine Advantage. Or maybe that's part of Microsoft's plan to drive Linux adoption. …

This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I'm sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.

I attended more talks than usual, including:

• Getting Started with Zend Framework (Mike Naberezny)
• Writing Maintainable Code (Laura Thomson)
• High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques ( …

Here is a simple function that can help coping with wrong database design, when you have a mix of NULLs and blank fields meaning the same, no value, which they shouldn't.

1. DELIMITER $$
2. DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `test`.`is_initial` $$
3. CREATE FUNCTION `test`.`is_initial` (f varchar(255)) RETURNS BOOL
4. BEGIN
5. SET @is_initial = false;
6. CASE f
7. WHEN NULL THEN SET @is_initial = TRUE;
8. WHEN '' THEN SET @is_initial = TRUE;
9. ELSE SET @is_initial = FALSE;
10. END CASE;
11. RETURN @is_initial;
12. END $$
13. DELIMITER ;

The wires are ablaze with news that some Los Angeles members of the Boy Scouts of America can earn the "Respect Copyrights" patch.  Apparently this patch is a product of teamwork between the BSA and the MPAA and involves such activities as learning about P2P file sharing systems, attend a movie and sit through all the credits and later list all the people that might be hurt by stealing the movie, along with several other requirements.  There has been a steady stream of negative comments about this story including one along the lines of "the MPAA is recruiting the BSA to do it's dirty work".

First, this story is not an attack on the BSA and so I will not dwell on my many years of service in the BSA except to say that I have been an assistance ScoutMaster and currently serve as ScoutMaster and know the BSA to be the finest club for young men on the planet.

Second, I want to say that I agree with the stories I've read …