As a prelude to the MySQL users conference,

Markus and I went to fetch Mike from the airport to do some sightseeing.

Well, it's like this, I'm from a country that's very small in every way. Apart from being small, it's also very flat. Can you imagine what a place like San Francisco does with someone that's been living for over 30 years in such an enviroment? No?

Check out what happened to us while we were sightseeing San Francisco:

Mike already blogged about us taking the cable cart....

But he didn't tell you how fast these things go:

...and what perils it faces when it navigates it's way through the other traffic...

…

Arrived at SFO at 9am this morning without event. Marcus and Roland were nice enough to pick me up at the airport with the intention of heading into San Fransicso for the day. After a slight amount of driving confusion we ended up near Fisherman's Warf. We hopped on one of the old-school, tourist trolleys and rode up (and then back down) to Union Square where we walked around a bit, had some lunch and visited the Apple store (they are also out of non-lime-green 15" laptop sleeves). The trolley ride back across town had a spot for hanging off, I couldn't resist. It was well worth the $5 each way to have the trolley experience and see some of San Fransicso.

After taking the trolley back over to Fisherman's Warf we hopped in the car and drove …

Because I've been busy with work and travel in the last few weeks, there's a lot I haven't had the time to blog about. So, I decided to try to summarize the important stuff I've missed in one rushed, disorganized post. (Maybe you missed some stuff, too.) Please feel free to add to this quick summary, and be sure to keep up with PHPDeveloper.org for more thorough PHP news coverage.

I dropped by the April meeting of the Nashville PHP User Group. It is a very cool group of people who meet at a local cafe and chat about PHP and related technologies. I had a few pints of Murphy's Stout, so I can't imagine a better meeting. Paul Jones drove up from Memphis, and it was nice to meet him in person.

The Zend Framework …

.techtalk

Photo of us looking at Patg’s talk

Ruby's getting an incredible amount of attention recently, largely as the result of Ruby on Rails.  I've played a little with Ruby on Rails and it certainly is the easiest way I've seen so far to develop  web interfaces to a back-end database.

At the same time,  I've been shifting from perl to Java as my language of choice for any serious database utility development.  But I still feel the need for something dynamic and hyper-productive when I'm writing something one-off or for my own use.  I've been playing with Python, but if Ruby has the upper ground as a web platform then maybe I should try Ruby. 

So seeing as how I've just finished the MySQL stored procedure book, first thing is to see if I can use Ruby for MySQL stored procedures.

Database - and MySQL - support for Ruby is kind of all over the place.  There's a DBI option (similar to perl) which provides a consistent interface …

You may know about the MySQL Cluster, which is a complex architecture to achieve high availability and performance. One of the advantages of MySQL Cluster is that each node is a peer to the others, whereas in a normal replicating system you have a master and many slaves, and applications must be careful to write only to the master. In this article, Giuseppe Maxia, CTO of Stardata IT, provides unique insight into circular replication (multi-master replication) with failover.

When we talk about the future of the web, we often think of web sites from the big guys, like Google, Yahoo or huge phenomena like the FaceBook, or NeoPets.  But open source is actually enabling a new generation of entrepreneurs and individual developers to create applications that are in some cases just garbage.  And I mean that in the best way possible.  Let me explain.

A few weeks ago when I was at LinuxWorld, Bill Hilf from Microsoft demonstrated a very cool site called GarbageScout.  If you haven't seen it, you really need to check it out; it's the perfect example of a Web 2.0 "mashup" that combines Google maps information with photos that people post of random …