MICROSOFT IN EGYPT (CAIRO)

Soon Microsoft will be in Egypt, interviewing interested and qualified candidates for software development positions here in the USA at our corporate headquarters working on our major products.

If you know of anyone who might be interested, or a bulletin board where it would be appropriate to post this, please forward this email. There are multiple positions open and candidates will be in competition with themselves, not each other. Please send your resume/cv to egyptres@microsoft.com

What is a qualified candidate?

* Someone who has (or will be completing this year) a bachelor's (four year or more) degree in Computer Science or a related field

* Someone that has very strong abilities to write code …

A few week ago we switched kruckenberg.com over to a new server. With the move I lost all of my procmail filtering rules which were responsible for automatically moving incoming mail to various folders on the server (mail must be filtered on the server so my Blackberry and webmail will get the same filtering).

Anyhow, one of the things I'd been sticking into a folder and looking at occasionally (meaning once a year to purge) is the messages from MySQL source commits. Anyone can subscribe to the list on the MySQL mailing lists page and get these messages which essentially contain the notes and diffs from when something is checked into version control. Most of these commits are for the database application, but there is also a steady stream of documentation changes coming in. Since I haven't gotten around to redoing the server-based …

Spent a bit of time over the weekend looking at Asterisk Now.
http://asterisknow.org

I downloaded the ISO last week and was finally able to make some time
to take a look at it over the weekend. From the start I found myself
a bit annoyed with the project because of the download website. First
problem was that I had to register to download a binary. Required
"signups" remove my "get it now, try it" nature. I use greylisting
for email so it could be up to half an hour before I get back my
registration to any new site. That is enough time for me to go off
and work on a new project. Required downloads just lead to bogus
signups that just makes Sales job more difficult since they have to
sort through bogus logins to find good leads.

Second annoyance? I couldn't read the forums before I downloaded. …

We’re having a discussion with a new client about how to scale the database back end. Really, we’re not too worried about performance — we don’t see that being a limiting factor at this point. What we absolutely need is reliability. If the database server goes down, the site goes down. It’s a single point of failure. So how does one stop it being a single point of failure with a Rails application?

We’re currently using MySQL and, before I got involved in the project, they were trying out MySQL replication and clustering. And having very little success. I haven’t actually looked at the setup in any detail yet, so I don’t know what’s going wrong, but I’m wondering if these are the best options to persevere with?

I’m not particularly wedded to MySQL, but we don’t particularly want to go down the route of Oracle if we can avoid it. (Mostly because it sounds big and scary and the only places I’ve …

Sometimes you're so involved in the details, you forget the bigger picture--until something reminds you again.

Today I realized that our payment gateway processor (who shall remain nameless) does not support the Discover card correctly. When you authorize a credit card charge, the credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover) performs an "address verification service" or AVS, to guard against fraud. This means matching the billing address on file of the cardholder against the address provided for the transaction. If the address and the zip code both match, AVS returns a "Y". If only the zip code matches, AVS returns a "Z". If neither matches, you get an "N", which in turn causes the gateway processor to reject the credit card.

It turns out that Discover returns an "X" if there is an exact match between the address provided and the billing address on file. Since Visa, MasterCard, and American Express do …

Well, it’s later than I’d wanted, but it’s here! Be sure to download it right away, as the news is time-sensitive (the rest of the segments are relatively timeless).

The feature of this podcast is “Backups, Backups Everywhere”. The show notes can be seen at:

Check out the show notes at:
http://technocation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=29

The podcast can be played directly at:
http://technocation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=29

Subscribe to the podcast at:
pcast://technocation.org/index2.php?option=com_podcast&feed=RSS2.0&no_html=1

OurSQL: The …

• Ruby on Rails Plugins - Agile Web Development Ruby on Rails Plugin directory. (tags: rails plugins ruby development rubyonrails)
• Test-First Development :: PeepCode Ruby on Rails Screencasts A new screencast from Topfunky on Test- (or Behaviour-) Driven Development with Rails. Hopefully there shouldn’t be much new content here for me, but I guarantee I pick up something interesting. (tags: …

MySQL AB today announced that Tellme Networks, Inc is benefiting from significantly reduced database-related costs by using the open source MySQL database. Tellme employs MySQL to power mission-critical enterprise and carrier applications on the world?s largest open platform for the phone.

9 years after X'97 I ended up at TUE again this time for T-Dose.org A whole different sight, last time there were a couple of hundreds geeks sitting around writing demos, compsing music etc this time almost 10 years later we just abused the auditoria and were sitting there quietly listening to people giving talks, one thing was sure.. this time I booked a hotel, no need to sleep under a table or try to sleep in my car on the parking lot :)

Altough I had no other plans this weekend I still was late for the keynote and most of the morning talks. The first talk I ran into was by "Martin WebHuis", he was talking about migrating away from Exchange to openXchange, somehow I didn't expect this kind of talk at this event, but then again I didn't expect a using Samba talk at last year's LinuxKongress in Hamburg. He mentionned openITIL which I should take a closer look at .. some day ..

What strikes me is that we in Belgium have the idea that …

With great pleasure I today noticed that we finally have daily snapshot builds of all current versions of the MySQL server source trees (4.0-5.1) available on http://snaps.mysql.com/ again. Unfortunately this has not been the case for quite some time - a few issues that caused the 5.0 and 5.1 snapshot builds/tests to fail have now finally been resolved. I also made some changes to the build script that performs the snapshot builds, e.g. to use the Perl-based test suite where available instead of the Shell-based one, which is going to phased out in 5.1 anyway. Let's hope that from now on the snapshot builds will now be available more frequently again, I'll keep a close eye on that.

Sorry for the long delay, I know that some of you depend on receiving updated source tarball snapshots on a regular basis instead of having to use the free BK client...