Bill Gates, the largest shareholder of Microsoft Corporation has said that he will retire in 2008 from the company he founded 30 years ago.  Gates, who has an estimated net worth of $50 billion, says he will retain the Chairman title at Microsoft but plans to work full time for the non-profit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which he started in 1995.  The foundation has an endowment of $29 billion, making it the largest charitable foundation in the US.  The foundation has committed more than $10 billion in grants, mostly in the area of global health care and education.

Gates stepped down from the CEO role at Microsoft in 2000, turning over the reigns to long-time friend and colleague Steve Ballmer in order to take on the role of Chief Software Architect. Ray Ozzie, author of Lotus Notes …

I was just reading a text on effective communications, and there was something interesting I noted. With different values and backgrounds all over the world, a lot of things happen (use of colloquisms, etc.) with regards to people understanding each other. When there’s face-to-face meetings, there’s also non-verbal communication to keep note of.

It turns out in South Africa, they call it Ubuntu (we’re much more familiar with its “humanity for others” meaning by now, for sure). They value collective efforts in solving issues that impact the members of the community. And if you’re ever face-to-face with a South African, limited eye contact often shows respect and humility (this is similar with Japan, its polite). In the Western world though, we need eye-contact for confidence purposes, and to show that we’re sincere.

Its also worthy to note (yes, this post had a point) that on the …

As anyone who has been tracking my blog knows, I spent last week in Korea at the LinuxWorld which was hosted there. Korea is an amazing place to be. On the one hand you have traditional ways and on the other you have one of the most wired societies on the planet who is adopting technology at a fascinating rate.

Talking to one of my hosts gave me a great view into their society. They have media being piped in from the West, which is causing a very large shift in their way of thinking. There are obvious generation gaps, and what is amazing is to see how cognitive they are of this. One of their popular shows is "Sex in the City"; just imagine its effect on a tradition dominated society.

On the technology front there is quite a bit of MySQL in use and it is showing up in the same pattern it did in the US and Europe: non- traditional sites and in projects that are under the radar. Adopters are frequently the innovators. …

There is a bug in MySQL that causes an UPDATE to fail with a unique index violation, even though the statement doesn’t create duplicate values. In this article I’ll explain when this bug can happen, and how to work around it. The bug This is easiest to demonstrate with SQL: create table t (i int not null primary key); insert into t(i) values (1), (2), (3), (4); update t set i = i + 1; -- ERROR 1062 (23000): Duplicate entry '2' for key 1 The bug is caused by MySQL’s method of updating the values.

Garvin Hicking has released Serendipity 1.0 today.

Congratulations to Garvin and his contributors! Thank you for the best blogging software there is!

Garvin Hicking has released Serendipity 1.0 today.

Congratulations to Garvin and his contributors! Thank you for the best blogging software there is!

For those interested, there is now a Spanish translation of the MySQL Reference Manual online:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/es/index.html

In addition, the Connector/ODBC documentation has been re-worked, you can see it at:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myodbc-connector.html

If you happen to use MySQL and live around Hamburg, Germany, here's your chance to meet with other MySQL users, developers and DBAs: I am happy to announce the second Hamburg MySQL Usergroup Meeting, which will take place on Monday, 3rd of July, 19:00. The location will be the same one as last time, the chinese restaurant Ni Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek.  The food there is quite excellent and they will provide us with a separate room and video projector again. I'll try to arrange a presentation about MySQL and there will be plenty of time for chatting and discussing. If you'd like to join us, please RSVP via our event page on meetup.com and join the mailing list for further details! Looking forward to meeting you! Some pictures of our last meeting are available …

This might be handy

Jeroen Swart, one of the most capable and knowledgable Microsoft .NET Professionals I know, provided me with a pointer to www.connectionstrings.com. This site lists connection string formats for a whole bunch of databases. Of course, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL are there, as are Postgres and DB2.

But what about Mimer? Lightbase? Right, that's why you might visit them.

Actually, there are also some products missing, like HSQL and SQLite and what have you. And they could pick a nicer Icon for MySQL. Otherwise, handy site.

I'm continuing my experiments with different OS and today I tested FreeBSD 6.0 on my box.
(more details about box and benchmark see here http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/06/13/quick-look-at-ubuntu-606/).
Initially I was very pessimistic about FreeBSD, as results were (in transactions/sec, more is better.
for comparison the results from Suse 10.0):