I’ve had my blog at Free Software Magazine added the Planet MySQL syndication site.

Digg, for those who have been under a rock for the last year, is a technology web site that gives users the opportunity to rank news stories.  Think of it as a combination of social bookmarking and nerdly news.  Digg grew out of founder Kevin Rose's desire for a feature within Slashdot to let users vote on their favorite stories.  Unfortunately, Slashdot couldn't accomodate the feature.  Necessity (or perhaps envy) being the mother invention, Rose created Digg.com.  Digg raised $2.8 million in venture funding from Marc Andreessen, Pierre Omidyar and Greylock partners last year. 

Digg has continued it's rapid growth with nearly a four-fold increase in traffic in just over a year. It's daily page …

Documentation is a vital part of any application, proprietary or free software, as it is often the first way to communicate with users about the application or software and how it should be used. I also think it tends to be one of the areas most taken for granted; most users expect it to be there and often forget just how much effort goes into producing it.

Many users also complain about the documentation itself. Often this is because it?s been written by programmers and, as a rule, they really aren?t that great at writing documentation that is particularly human readable.

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I have begun work on the next set of features for MDB2. I just implemented a feature inspired by the popular ADODB abstraction layer. John calls it smart transactions, while I am currently planning on calling it nested transactions. However I will wait until Lorenzo has some time to look at things to see if we can fit native nested transactions in there or not. Interbase/Firedbird really shines in this department.

I have written up a little script to show the current implementation available in CVS:

<?php

$mdb2 =& MDB2::singleton($dsn);

$mdb2->setOption('debug', true);

$query = "DELETE FROM autoinc";
$result = $mdb2->exec($query);

$query = "SELECT id FROM autoinc";
$result = $mdb2->queryCol($query);
var_dump($result);

$query = "INSERT INTO autoinc (id) VALUES (?)";
$stmt = $mdb2->prepare($query);

$mdb2->beginNestedTransaction(); …

Every time I'm travelling (for a conference, or teaching a training course), I wonder how the hotel operators envisage the use of the iron and ironing board.

The problem is of course that one actually needs to plug in the iron. But finding a socket in a place near where you can sensibly place the ironing board.... it's just one of those very curious things.

We are very pleased to announce the release of the MySQL Virtual Appliance. Literally the easiest and fastest way to get MySQL running. The MySQL Virtual Appliance is just 22MB to download, and is running MySQL and PHPMyAdmin right out of the box with no configuration.

Today, will go down in my professional history as quite possibly the lowest I would ever think of a software developer. I’ve carefully avoided the term “fellow coder”, speaking of a IT industry sticking by fellow IT people, but not today.

I presently support an existing production system, some 1000+ users that’s been in place around 3 years in which I’ve had no prior involvement until recently. Integration with other external parties within the system have provided an esclation in errors being reported in this external communication, and lack of adequate feedback to the user is another topic. Email is the means of reporting administratively of user errors, again another topic of issue. Within these emails, which are almost impossible to manage due to the limited internal GUI only toolset and lack of access to actual email account files to automate scripting (yet another topic? Do you see a trend here), is some relevent information …