Today my TV told me to be scared, I had a good (late) sandwich for lunch. Some nice local beer (no big brewery), a salad and the most scary looking pasta for dinner. Also hung with people. Now sleep.

It has been a long time since i wrote anything. Actually there has been nothing to write about, since nothing has happened. So, i thought why not share some knowledge about mysql. HE HE...

I came across mysql in my college days during a summer project that we did at ORG-MARG India now known as Ac Nielson. It is now the third largest market research organization in the world. There is a person over there in the IT-Department known as Mr. Sanjay Bhatia who was very enthusiast about linux. And he asked us to develop a small site. It was more of a DB entry and retrieveing information type of work. The challenge was that we had never had any experience on using linux for web development. We started by choosing apache-tomcat, jsp and mysql for developing our application. Everything gor set up fine, except we were unable to use JDBC to connect JSP to MySQL and so we gave up on mysql at that time. And shifted to PostgreSQL.

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For those who can’t wait for next week or who won’t be at the UC, I’m posting a flash recording of a rough practice run of my Sakila DB session that I will deliver next week. I wanted to get a feel for duration without audience questions or closing activities. I came in at 30 minutes so I am comfortable that with audience questions it should be good.

Feedback is of course appreciated.

See it at http://www.openwin.org/mike/video/sakila.html

I'm halfway back from Costa Rica and was just astounded to learn that Peter Fenton (who did the JBoss deal and is, in my estimation, one of the top "open source VCs" on the planet) has left Accel Partners to join Benchmark, a rival Silicon Valley venture firm.

No big deal, you say? It is a big deal, mostly because VCs rarely leave their firms to go to rivals. It just doesn't happen very often, for a range of reasons.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Peter's board seats (JBoss, Wily, etc.). Even more interesting will be what the Fenton + Kevin Harvey (Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL, Qlusters) duo will cook up. Harvey is another top open source VC, and razor-sharp smart. …

It took me just under five minutes to signup for a T-mobile hotspot account, so I could send my mail. Username already chosen, form resets itself. Find credit card, re-enter information. Submit. Need to fill in the expiry date (which displays fine). Form resets. Repeat.

Funny that the immigration official today at SFO had heard of both Linux and MySQL. He’s apparently some form of online gamer, and has written a few PHP apps himself. I was, to say the least, highly impressed.

Something I noticed as funny. All the baggage carousels had Oracle ads. Must be something Oracle related happening here…

Anyways, I’m still waiting for Arjen to come out. Stewart I know is already at the hotel, and JD should arrive in due time. In the meantime, I’ll attend to mail, and upload Flickr photos at 250KB/s (yes, a marked improvement from the 30KB/s cap I have …

So, here’s the rough plan of what I will attend next week:

Monday AM:

Secure Your PHP and MySQL Web Applications, Laura Thomson

Monday PM:

Data Warehousing with MySQL, John Paul Ashenfelter

Tuesday AM:

Welcome!, Arjen Lentz

State of the Dolphin, Kaj Arnö, David Axmark, Michael (Monty) Widenius

Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins, Mike Hillyer, Arjen …

A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin’s two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin’s company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for ‘passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.’ Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 [...]

I know that it's a risky thing to run a MySQL version from the development source tree. But a lot of work has been done since MySQL 5.1.7 and I have experienced that the latest development version runs better than the most recent released version 5.1.7, so I dared to update MySQL 5.1 to 5.1.10-beta.

Maybe it's a little consolation for those who cannot participate at MySQL Users Conference, so you can in the meantime try all the new features at the very latest state of development. But be aware that there can be bugs that can usually not be found in a release version.

So take good care of db4free.net while I am trying to collect new experiences at the Conference, that I will certainly be able to use to make db4free.net even better :-).

Yet another funky dns problem :)

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Initializing MySQL database: Neither host 'DB-A' nor 'localhost' could be looked up with /usr/bin/resolveip Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct hostname. If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script with the --force option

It's unbelievable how fast the last five months went by. In November, there was that huge surprise when I (together with Roland and Beat) won the MySQL 5 Contest, but it seemed very unreal and very far away.

Now, I'm 15 hours away from leaving towards the MySQL User Conference, and even though it still looks a little bit abstract, I am slowly starting to realize that the most exciting week of my life is right ahead of me. And it's a big challenge, too. It's the first time for me at all to leave Europe.

I'm really looking forward to meeting all of you! I used to have contact to many people by email and I have seen photographs (and from some even videos) from many of the attending …