Did you realise that... having fewer slides for a presentation actually is more difficult than having lots of slides?

Difficult in the sense of more work also... and I notice that most speakers are lazy; hence you get to see slideshows where people read from their own slides slower than you do. So I always wonder what such speakers are actually doing there... if I get those slides anyway, they're not adding anything, are they? Perhaps someone could record it and make a podcast, but no need for the audience, really.

I have a few talks that are less than 10 slides, including first and last pages. I always use the first page to introduce the topic, my name and such, and possibly the event - and no, I don't even need to look back at my own slide when I say "hi, I'm Arjen..." ;-) The last page wraps things up asking for questions and such, possibly some more contact info and resource links.

Such a small deck …

Followers of MySQL AB know that we strongly oppose software patents. We have concluded that software patents are harmful to the software industry at large. This is why we support those who work for an abolishment of software patents. We also work with other companies and groups to build a joint defense against software patents.

MySQL AB as a company, and I myself as VP Community, were heavily involved in Florian Müller’s NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign 2004-05 in Europe. We were involved both as sponsors and advisors.

The story of this David against Goliath campaign is now available for all as a book. Florian Müller’s memoir-style book

has been released under the Creative Commons license this month.

On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the …

So,

http://www.mysql.com/training/certification/candidates.php?exam=core

has 233 names for the core exam, which has been out for a few years now. I passed it in 2004, and sure enough, my name is one of the 75 in the US. Are there really so few people out there, or are they just not taking/passing the exam?

I did notice at the MySQL Users Conference that only 1/4 to 1/3 of the exams earned a passing grade, and given that you have to pass 2 exams to receive certification, the chances of passing are not in your favor. Granted, studying helps (as does experience), which is how I passed the Core exam in 2004 and then both 5.0 DBA exams in April (2006).

Like much of the rest of life, it’s not difficult, you just have to work at it a bit. Read the certification guide, and study, and use MySQL, and you’ll pass.

I’m quite amazed at the low amount of people who are actually certified. I guess it’s better …

GPLv3 was the theme of the presentation in OSBC Europe in London this Tuesday, where I was on a panel together with Dietmar Tallroth of Nokia and Eben Moglen of the FSF.

I stressed four key topics:

1. Ubiquity: We need a GPLv3 that not only achieves the same level of ubiquity as GPLv2, but goes beyond it.
2. Software Patents: We need a GPLv3 that goes as far as possible protecting the industry from the adverse effects of legislations that allow software patents, without sacrificing the goal of ubiquity.
3. Dual licensing: We need a GPLv3 that supports the proliferation of companies licensing their products both under GPL and under commercial licenses, as this further expands the universe of GPL software and encourages the …

If you are using replication and you have defined binlog-ignore-db options on your master configuration, pay attention to the fact that "if you have an application that issues qualified notation queries without a default database defined (e.g. USE mydb), that queries will never replicate".

According to the explanation on the manual at "5.12.3. The Binary Log" in the case you have options like binlog-ignore-db a query is written on the binlog only if you have specified the default database before. If not, sorry, your query don't replicate on the slaves :-(

I faced the problem when one of my applications didn't replicate updates. I thought that was a bug and here you can see my bug-report, but I discovered soon that it wasn't. It's not a bug, it's a …

Echunga

If there's one thing that inflames the passion of programmers, it's indentation style. I've been working out my own for some years, since before the advent of the C programming language, so it's not surprising that it's at variance with other indentation styles.

I started programming in Algol 60; an early program of mine, written in 1971, included this function (sorry, procedure) declaration:

     'PROCEDURE' CHECK M AND NU (A);
     'VALUE' A; 'REAL' A;
     'BEGIN' 'REAL' B;
     B:=K(A); NU:=H(A)*DELTA X/B;
     'COMMENT' IF THE PARAMETER NU HAS CHANGED IN SUCH A WAY THAT       00018820
     M < 2*NU+2, THEN THE SOLUTION IS NO LONGER STABLE: MAKE M          00018830
     EQUAL ARBITRARILY TO 4 OR 2*NU+3, WHICHEVER IS THE GREATER, AND    00018850
     RECALCULATE DELTA T;                                               00018870
     'IF' M < 2*NU+2 ! M<2 'THEN'
          'BEGIN'
          M:='IF' NU> .5 …

Roland Bouman, MySQL community extraordinaire and all-around top fellow, has officially joined MySQL AB as a Certification Developer. I couldn't be happier. Roland joins with Marcus Popp as MySQL AB continues to gobble up talented developers from the MySQL community.

Roland, a very warm welcome to you!

Well, I'm MySQL 5 Developer certified!

But on the official site at the certification pages there's not yet the "Certfied candidates" list of the 5.0 version.

Am I the first one ?

The type of questions that we get on the forums with regards to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) has been shifting lately from this type of question:

How do I read data from database type xxx

going to this type of questions:

I want to read a list of e-mail addresses from a database table, set a variable and send the warehouse log files off to all these people.

That’s quite an evolution that’s been going on. It’s obvious that people are starting to find the obvious solutions to the first type of questions so now they just get stuck on doing more complex things. I guess that’s to be expected, really. It’s nice that for the most part, I can now say, “yes, with the new 2.3.0 release, that is most certainly possible”
However, IMHO, often there is something missing at the implementers side of the story as well. I guess what I’m saying is that all too often these …