In my previous blog article, I mentioned the fact that Red Hat’s deputy general counsel, Mark Webbink, lobbied in the European Parliament on July 5, 2005 (the day before the EP’s decisive vote to reject the software patent bill) to keep the software patent directive alive.

I had not anticipated the kind of Internet debate that this statement would trigger, including some insulting emails that were sent to me, and least of all I would have expected Mark Webbink to call into question the “veracity of [my] statements”, which is what he did in the discussion below this LWN.net article. He knows exactly what he did.

The word “motivations” also appears in that posting. It’s really simple: on the occasion of a patent suit having been filed against Red Hat, I thought it …

linux.conf.au is one of the best technical Open Source conferences on the planet (not just Linux). Speakers such as Andrew Tridgell, Alan Cox, Eben Moglen and Van Jacobson are there. Even Linus sometimes shows up. But apart from those famous faces, there are so many excellent people there every year - it's fantastic. Plenty of time to talk, discuss new ideas... it rocks.

The conference travels around Australia and New Zealand, coming year the event will be at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, January 15th-20th, 2007

Members of the Linux and open-source community (that's all of you!) are now invited to submit papers and proposals for presentations, tutorials and miniconfs.

Key dates:

• Submission deadline: September 1, 2006
  
• Notifications by …

Last week I scribled some thoughts on presentation slides, and got some very good comments. Thanks!
One comment referred to Guy Kawasaki and something he wrote blogged last year: The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint:a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
He also writes:As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a "patent pending," "first mover advantage," "all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product" startup. These pitches are so lousy that I'm losing my hearing, there's a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.I'm not a …

MySQL and InnoDB expose lots of information about their internals, but it's hard to gather it all into one place and make sense of it. I've written a tool to do that, and you are free to download and use it. This article introduces innotop, a powerful text-mode MySQL and InnoDB monitoring tool. It has lots of features, is fast and configurable, and it's easy to use.

Just as a reminder that the MySQL meetup will be happening this Monday at the Elysian.

Directions to the Elysian can be found at:
http://www.elysianbrewing.com/Elysian.html

Our normal range of topics will be covered... aka we talk about MySQL for about half the evening, and then we spend the rest of the evening geeking about other Lamp projects and who has tricked out their MythTV in the last month :)

MySQL and InnoDB expose lots of information about their internals, but it’s hard to gather it all into one place and make sense of it. I’ve written a tool to do that, and you are free to download and use it. This article introduces innotop, a powerful text-mode MySQL and InnoDB monitoring tool. It has lots of features, is fast and configurable, and it’s easy to use. Note: VividCortex is the startup I founded in 2012.

This week, and specifically today, marks a minor milestone in my employment at MySQL?I?m finally a full time employee, no longer on probation. It has also been probably the busiest week since I started at MySQL, except for the week spent at the developers? conference in Sorrento.

Why so busy?

Because I?ve spent many hours deep in the build process that actually generates the documentation, partly to address some existing errors, but also to improve the documentation after some new content was added. In summary, the following major steps were made this week:

read more

As many of you know already, I’ve decided to leave Yahoo!. Today was my last day. I’ve had a great time at Yahoo! and worked with a bunch of brilliant people. I will miss you all!

Where am I headed? That’s actually a complicated question. I’ll be working part time at Pivot3, a mature startup that’s doing great things in the storage industry. Contact me if you’re interesting in cutting storage costs, getting some amazing management tools, and some awesome performance. I would love to tell you more! MySQL will absolutely rock on this platform.

Yes, I said part time. I have a startup of my own, Proven Scaling, providing advanced MySQL …

I have been knowing that Roland Bouman is about to join 
Carsten Pedersen's MySQL Certification team for quite a while, 
but now - as of 1st July - it's official and time to wish him all the best 
and much fun in his new job!

Also Frank Mash has recently moved to New York and started
a new job as MySQL DBA (I hope, I remember everything
correctly). Also my best wishes for him!

MySQL not only rocks as a database server, but also for great job
opportunities! And the best thing is - MySQL is …

A few weeks ago, I blogged about an adaptive firewall on my NetSec blog.

While casually checking through the access logs, I noticed that someone had tried to get admin passwords of my wiki site using SQL injection.

Here is the actual hacking attempt:

41.250.10.3 - - [28/Jun/2006:04:42:14 -0700] "GET /tiki-usermenu.php?find=&offset=[SELECT%20uid%20FROM%20admins%20WHERE%20login=''%20OR%20'a'='a'%20AND%20password=''%20OR%20'a'='a'] HTTP/1.1" 200 123 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4"

Someone from Africa (looking at the IP number), trying to get the list of admin accounts without passwords.

So, it occurred to me, that you could easily add a few more regexp triggers to an adaptive firewall, to catch SQL injection attacks, and thus either block …