I realized earlier that having the MySQL Camp Free Ride offer open for only 24 hours is a bit harsh, and needlessly short. I’ve extended the deadline to midnight, Friday, October 20 to give everyone a chance.

I’ve also clarified that the offer is open to all, not only to students.

Good luck!

So a bunch of stuff has happenned (or happenning) that I’ve been wanting to blog about for a bit. Some stuff had to wait, others it’s just been me being slack.

Anyway, anyone who hangs closely around the MySQL circles probably now knows about MySQL Enterprise. There’s been a fair bit of talk about this internally for a little while now. When it was being talked about a bit wider within the company some of the initial communication was (in my mind) rather unclear. So I took the “what’s the worst way somebody could interpret this” viewpoint and replied with my thoughts. The idea behind this was to simulate what some of the loud-mouthed trolls of the non-shifted question mark e on a qwerty keyboard mapped to dvorak kind may do.
After a few phone calls (some at strange hours) my worst fears were not realised - we were still not being …

As email is *sooo* non-”Web 2.0″, i reply in blog form….
Rusty’s Bleeding Edge Page talks about a “Writing an x86 hypervisor: all the cool kids are doing it!” session that sounds really cool (better not be on at the same time as my talk… :)

I don’t (currently) intend to be one of the cool kids though.

He also mentions a session entitled “First-timer’s Introduction to LCA”. A couple of possible suggestions (or thoughts, and stuff I’ve seen):

• be careful if you intend to bitch endlessly about a piece of software - it’s quite likely you’re talking to the person who wrote it (or a chunk of it)
• sometimes it can be really good to just listen and ask a few good questions to understand. there are a lot of really smart people about
• you will (at some point) ask a really dumb …

I don’t normally blog about events that I’m not going to be attending, but this seemed like too cool an offer to pass up. Proven Scaling will be offering one free ticket to MySQL Camp - thats free airfare and hotel, for the rather cool MySQL Camp un-conference.

From what I can tell, there’ll be a lot of rather cool people attending, its from the 10-12 November, at the Google campus (yes, you get to tour that place, and eat free food). And maybe if you’re super nice to Jeremy, he might be flexible with the flights, and you might also want to go to the Mountain View Ubuntu Summit. Having been to one of these before (Ubuntu Down …

Josh Greenbaum at ZDNet suggests that the war of the ecosystems is on, and that Oracle is looking weak. I don't agree, but think Josh's commentary is interesting:

The partner front is the new flash point in the battle of the ecosystem. When it comes to IBM vs. Microsoft vs. SAP vs. Oracle, it turns out that a large coterie of happy, incented, and otherwise engaged partners that are out legitmizing an ecosystem vendor's ecosystem -? and selling the products and services they develop that fill in that ecosystem's white spaces - has become a major competitive weapon. And SAP is absolutely committed to making the most of this weapon in their four-way fight against their partner/competitors IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.True enough, though I think each of the big ecosystem vendors is missing out on the most important partner for the future: open source.

Oracle is in a …

Have you heard of MySQL Camp at Google HQ in Mountain View, California, November 10-12?

Want to go? Can’t go because it’s out in sunny (ha, ha) California, hundreds or thousands of miles/kilometers from where you live?

Maybe you’re a bright student, or maybe you’re currently unemployed, or maybe you’ve got a job, but you just can’t afford to jet out to Mountain View for the weekend. Maybe you contribute code, bug fixes, tools; maybe you run a MySQL Meetup, and just can’t bear the airfare.

Proven Scaling would like to sponsora one such person to attend MySQL Camp! We’ll pay for your airfare and hotel—meals and transportation are on you. If you think you are qualified, you live somewhere in the USA or Canadab and you …

If you can remember back to mid ‘05 when MySQL 5.0 was being released there was something missing. I have been thinking about writing about MySQL 5.0 being released too soon but I don’t think that was the case. Was 5.1 released too late? Maybe. Was something wrong with the 5.0 -> 5.1 schedule and feature set? Oh yeah.

Looking back at the change logs for 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1 I noticed something that I hadn’t though about before. I knew there was a difference in the release dates for 5.0->5.1 from 4.1->5.0 but I didn’t realize how drastic the difference was until I drew it out (on paper, sorry) today. Here is a summary of the major milestones from 4.1 Alpha to today:

• Apr 03 - 4.1 Alpha
• Dec 03 - 5.0 Alpha
• Jul 04 - 4.1 Beta
• Aug 04 - 4.1 Gamma
• Oct 04 - 4.1 Release
• Mar 05 - 5.0 Beta (Where is 5.1 Alpha?)
• Sep 05 - 5.0 Gamma.
• Nov …

I greatly admire the works of the Dutch literary author Gerard Reve (1923 - 2006). On many occasions, he was asked whether his stories were real-life stories, and he always answered like this:

If you mean "did this sequence of events factually take place?" then I can be brief: No. And that's a good thing too, because if a writer would describe reality, the result would be very hard to believe, if not completely inconceivable. The course taken by real life is just too crazy. A true description is bound to be seem like a constructed mannerism and no reader can be expected to believe even one word of it.
However, as far as the single events are concerned, I exclusively use only those things bourne from reality.

If you ever read The Daily WTF you will probably agree that this point of view …

MySQL Enterprise — Double your DBA Staff without Adding Headcount, MySQL (Press Release)

Ingres Opens Its Doors in India to Satisfy Growing Demand for Business Open Source Software, Ingres (Press Release)

Free Standards Group Teams with O?Reilly Media to Offer Linux Developer Services, Free Standards Group (Press Release)

Hyperic Enhances Enterprise-Class Software Security, Hyperic (Press Release)

Zimbra Soars Past Four Million Paid Mailbox Milestone, Zimbra (Press Release)

…

There's a slightly humorous interview with Steve Jobs in NewsWeek by Steven Levy about the success of the iPod.  Jobs does a good job providing some insight into what makes products successful.  But his comments on Microsoft's forthcoming Zune portable audio player sound like like's giving dating tips:

Q. Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off …