David Kaefer, the director of business development for intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, is on the record as saying a rather curious thing:

We've been very clear from the outset, and the financial realities of the deal underscore this, that Novell's patents have value. One need only go back to the late 90s with Novell's leadership in the directory space to recognize the benefits of much of the research and development that they conducted at that time.I'm sure this is true; at least, I'm sure it's true (in fact, I know so) that Novell's patent portfolio is significant. Not nearly as extensive as Microsoft's, but significant in its own right.

But let's assume David is telling the truth. If so, then Microsoft, not Novell, …

Ubuntu Wins Most User Friendly Linux Distribution Award, Canonical (Press Release)

IBM sees Novell/MS deal benefiting Linux, Linux-Watch, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Article)

Good karma for Red Hat, iTWire, Sam Varghese (Article)

Microsoft-Novell Honeymoon Ends, LinuxInsider, Jay Lyman (Article)

Enterprise Open Source, Line56 E-Business Blog, Simon Phipps (Blog)

Patent peace for our time?, …

BuilderAU released a recent article titled Developer skills outlook 2007: What’s hot for employers. There are a few things to take away from the article, that seem to apply not only to Australia, but elsewhere.

“The biggest issue that we see generally speaking is that the overall skill level of the developers is not where it needs to be,” said Jeff Pope, Asia Pacific vice president for Agitar Software.

The general idea of skills shortage. And its not that there’s a shortage of people in the market, the universities and TAFEs are churning them out by the dozen; its the lack of highly-skilled people. So where should aspiring IT people aim to spend their passion and hone their talents and ambitions in 2007?

It would seem that it’s in the Java and C# …

I often find links to my own stuff when googling for one thing or another - particularly when googling for ODBC stuff. Today I found an old Linux Journal article I did 7 years ago. I recall being upset about the fact that they printed the draft - but it seems to be mostly fine.

It makes me realize how fast time zips by but also how far ODBC on non-Windows platforms has come since those days. We can now deliver a good MySQL Connector/ODBC solution on all platforms where the MySQL client library is available - and that is a dizzying list of platforms!

I think nobody would argue today, that search engines are most import sites in todays Internet. There are lots of information sources in the Net today, and every day they are generating lots of useful content. One of major parts of this content is generated by forums aka bulletin boards. But Google - most popular search engine is not to efficient on this side of search - if you try to find something using Google, you can find information on some public forum, but Google SERP is designed for generic pages search and search results will be not so clear. That is why more specialized search engines are so popular. Technorati, Google and Yahoo blog search engines, etc are really popular today.

Just few days ago new search engine was released. Its name is Board Reader. IMHO, its major advantage of this search engine is specialization on search by …

Is it possible to run Stored Procedures on MySQL 4.x? Yes and no - of course the feature is not available directly in MySQL 4.x, but if you have a MySQL 5.x server with the FEDERATED Storage Engine available, it's no big deal to accomplish that.

Here's how it works - we start with this on a MySQL 4.x server:

mysql> SELECT version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 4.0.18-nt |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE tt \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: tt
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `tt` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `val` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `ts` timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) TYPE=MyISAM
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM tt;
Empty set (0.03 sec)

The next step …

Kynan and I came along to the MySQL camp, and thru a quirk of fate pretty much ended up running it (the person who was meant to be running it got injured on the first day and had to go off to hospital). In return we wrote the Google Code blog post about the event. Pretty cool, huh?

Tags for this post: mysql user camp google code blog
Related posts: …

Goal of a MySQL system administrator is to have regular, consistent backups of the
databases with minimal impact on the database application. The backup process should
also limit the use of CPU, memory, network resources so that application is not impacted.
Optimal backup method must be choosen to keep the backup window as small as possible.
The backup parameters depends on various factors - number and size of databases, number
of MySQL servers, MySQL configuration, data security.

ZRM for MySQL provides consolidated backup and recovery for MySQL databases. ZRM
for MySQL provides extensive list of options to tune the backup process for the user
environment. It also tracks lots of backup parameters that are available to the administrator
to tune the backup process.

…

Mark Webbink, Red Hat's deputy general counsel and secretary, looks at the Microsoft/Novell agreement through a historic lens...

As a history buff, reading the Novell and Microsoft open letters this morning conjured up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain standing in front of 10 Downing Street in 1938 and declaring: "My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."

We all know how well that turned out.

...and discovers that all that glitters is not gold:Microsoft's principal objective in this exercise was to get someone ostensibly from the free and open source software community to acknowledge the tacit validity of Microsoft's patent portfolio. And despite Hovsepian's protestations to the contrary, …