As reported on www.valleyofthegeeks.com by Nate Orenstam

Sources inside Microsoft have reported the company will be expanding their commitment to open source by joining the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) next week at LinuxWorld in Boston. 

This appears to be part of a new strategy led by Steve ?No Socks? Sinofsky, who has recently been appointed as Senior Vice President of all things Windows, taking over from long time exec Jim Alchin who was planning on retiring when Windows Vista shipped.  Or perhaps even sooner, based on the fact that his desk is now in the sub-basement of Building 10 next to the vending machines.  ?Jim has been a team player,? Sinofsky said …

Admittedly, Monty doesn't really smoke.  But I thought this was a good picture nonetheless.  I wonder if readers can identify the other MySQLers who, ah, bared their souls for this. 

The organizers of the PHP Québec Conference were gracious enough to give me an unedited copy of my Copyright, Contracts and Licensing for PHP Developers session.

I cleaned the audio up last night, stripping out some of the more odious filler words (I seem to say “Umm” rather often), shortening pauses as I switched slides, removing redundant asides (like asking if there are any questions, when no questions then follow) and excising the introduction and applause.

After a good deal of consideration, I did chose to leave the errors and other flaws in the content presented. These flaws were presented to the audience and they should stay in the recording.

Of course, I don’t want people to be mislead by any of the flaws; to prevent this, I am transcribing the entire talk, …

This is just a short first blog entry.

I just installed WordPress, so now I’m a happy user of three different software packages that use MySQL — WordPress to handle the blog, Coppermine to handle my picture gallery and Simple Machines Forum to handle a private forum used among my friends.

I work with replication and clustering technology at MySQL, so my intension is to blog about this technology. More about this later…

I promised folks I'd put up the PDF of the slides (~401K) from the Introduction to MySQL Cluster session at PHP Quebec. The PDF doesn't capture much of the detail, and none of the conversation that comes from questions raised but it does give a sense of what was covered.

I think the session was recorded, not sure how/when that is available. I think PHP Quebec produces a CD with all of the sessions in mp3. If it's generally available I'll post it here.

I like duplicate emails in the way that everybody is thinking. This is different.

Due to a bug in offlineimap i hit a little while ago, it’s managed to make copies (sometimes even two copies) of each email in certain folders. Now, this isn’t so bad as

a) email didn’t get lost

b) it’s just using extra disk, and disk is cheap.

but it is annoying when searching.

It’s also annoying because it’s decided to do this on folders such as INBOX/MySQL/bugs which contains an email for each change to a bug report even since I joined the company. That adds up to a lot of wasted inodes and disk blocks.

So, I’ve revived this project that I have in the back of my head of efficiently storing email in a database and being able to sync between instances of it.

This gives us some nice advantages. you can use replication to keep a backup of your email. You can put it in Cluster and have high …

I haven't tagged my series of posts from PHP Quebec as MySQL because there's a lot of non-MySQL stuff that may or may not be of interest to MySQL folks. They are the previous seven posts in the "Technology" category for anyone that's interested.

A few items worthy of note for MySQL folks:

• 
  
• A *very* high percentage of PHP folks use MySQL. Based on what I saw with the developers in Quebec, you can almost assume that a person developing in PHP is using MySQL on the backend. Is that a suprise? Does that not sound right?
  
• Attended a presentation on PostgreSQL which was a pretty good introduction to how to get that database up …

Being a CVS Version Control Person, I’ve had to learn Subversion as part of Open Source Contribution. Both MySQL and JMeter use SVN.

Steps for integration of SVN into Eclipse IDE. Refer to Subclipse for more information.

Installation of JMeter via SVN

• Start Eclipse
• Help | Software Updates | Find and Install
• Search For New Features To Install [Next]
• [New Remote Site]
• URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.0.x
• [Finish]

• Tick Subclipse [Next]
• I accept Terms and Condtions [Next] …

We are now starting work on a new, specialized MySQL Certification: The Blackhole Certification. This certification will be an add-on to the MySQL DBA Certification, which is due to be released in it’s GA version in a few weeks (if you’re quick, you can still catch the much less expensive MySQL 5.0 Beta certifications).

The Blackhole certification will cover all administrative aspects of the Blackhole Storage Engine. To prepare candidates for the new certification, the MySQL training deparment will also be offering a 5-day training bootcamp. Please see the …

Ben Forta is the author of several “Teach Yourself” books, among which you may be familiar with his Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (us; uk). His new book, MySQL Crash Course, (us; …