Nick Halsey and I shared lunch at Novell's BrainShare conference yesterday, and fell to talking about the benefits inherent in an open source business model, real and imagined. One cherished benefit? Significant savings in sales and marketing costs. (Larry Augustin drove this point home at OSBC 2005, and John Roberts preaches this gospel frequently, in his OSBC 2006 keynote and elsewhere. I've said it, too.

Question: Is it true?

It's certainly true of open source companies at a certain stage in their existence. Alfresco, today, manages to sign marquee customers without stepping …

I've always been interested in refactoring code, but one thing that is always a little harder is refactoring databases... there isn't enough documentation available on it.

I was quite excited to see a new book published this month. I've started reading it through my Safari subscription.

I've inherited a fair bit of bad code in the past. Sometimes you can see that things don't work, but you don't know what to fix. The refactoring process is all about 'smells'. A smell is a particular design pattern that might have been a bad choice.

I'm particularly fond of this 'smells' term (commonly appearing refactoring books). It makes me think of food; if it smells, it's probably bad, or rotting. That's not *always* true though, …

At MySQL we've made a signficiant investment in expanding the community team.  This team is led by intrepid VP and multi-linguist Kaj Arno, and includes people on 3 continents who go out and spread the word of MySQL, help energize open source projects using MySQL, organize meetups, write occasional articles, and otherwise help make MySQL ubiquitous.  But there's always more that we could do.  Since we don't always know the answers, we thought we'd ask the community!

So here's an opportunity to influence things by letting the community team know your priorities.  There's a new quick poll on the MySQL developer zone asking quite simply: "What do you think the MySQL community team should focus on?"

• MySQL: Quick poll

Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend Technologies, and others are now presenting the PHP IDE Eclipse plugin, which, announced last October, is one of the best potential tools on the horizon (the near horizon) for the 2.5 million PHP developers out in the development world. As many of you may know, Zend has the Zend Studio software, a PHP-centric IDE built on Swing. Zend made the decision to get involved in the Eclipse project because, according to Andi, of the enormous and thriving Eclipse community.

Sure, Eclipse developers are currently mainly Java developers. With the new PHP IDE plugin, PHP developers will have native debugging, syntax highlighting, and, eventually, support for MySQL and other database support directly within the Eclipse IDE.

Whereas the Eclipse project isn't "all about the IDE", as I've been told many times since coming to the conference here, the PHP IDE project is definitely IDE-centric. Currently, I'm not sure …

OK, just about to go into a long session comparing the Eclipse project with the Apache project; how it's management and code submission guidelines differ, and other things. I just have to say that EclipseCon is pretty darn cool. I have already met all the developers and key project leads from the Eclipse Data Tools Project, including John Graham and others from Sybase and IBM. Very sharp folks who are really excited about having MySQL's involvement in the project and committers from the MySQL development team working on key parts of the DTP framework.

Everything here at EclipseCon is about frameworks and extensibility. The various frameworks with the Eclipse platform serve as the foundation for all the building blocks (including the DTP and its various components) that compose the Eclipse universe. There is a focus within Eclipse on solid, extensible, open coding techniques, and the …

MySQL 5.0.19 was announced on March 10th and the developers have been very busy with resolving many of the bugs that were reported. Something that did not really get much attention because of all these changes was the fact that we now provide binaries for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 (AMD64/Intel EM64T) as well!
If you run the 64bit version of this OS, give these binaries a try and let us know how they fared for you! Kudos to the build team for making these happen.

Glanced at the program of annual conference "Corporate Databases 2006" and discovered that this year there is no MySQL session. Interesting, did Sergey Kuznetsov simply forget about us? Dmitri's feedback from the last year's conference (he was presenting) doesn't fill me with enthusiasm to try to submit a new talk. In short, attendance sucks. The idea is rather muddy too, as right now it's basically trying to gather competing vendors together and have them present their products one after another. No need to be a salesman to understand that it doesn't work.
There is no conference in Russia dedicated to database research that I'm aware of, otherwise I would attend one.

Time seems to be racing - in exactly one month I'll be on the way from Vienna via London to San Francisco and then to Santa Clara to attend the MySQL User Conference.

That's all extremely exciting for me. Actually, it's the first time in my life that I leave Europe. It will also be my first flight in 11 years (after leaving school, I travelled to Tenerife with my school mates - no big trip since then). It will be a great new experience.

I have rented a car in San Francisco for the whole duration of my stay together with a GPS system, so I will be able to drive around to see a bit of the location around San Francisco. I'll have a complete day for that until the Conference starts, and also a little time after the Conference. That's another exciting aspect of my trip.

But the most exciting thing will be to meet all the guys that I had contact to via …

During a life with computers, you sometimes see very strange things - such as this:

I have a little server at home that connects to the Internet via ISDN, and all other PCs in the network get their Internet connection through this server, which was running SuSE Linux 9.0. Everything worked absolutely fine.

Last weekend, I re-installed this server and updated to SuSE Linux 10.0. I set up the hardware settings in the same way as with SuSE 9.0 and generally, it worked again - but not always. Sometimes, I couldn't connect to the Internet anymore (while sometimes, it still works), but I found out a funny solution how to work around this problem.

I have also set up a fax server with capisuite. So if I call the fax (e. g. with my mobile phone), I can connect again right afterwards. I don't know why, but it works.

Of course, this solution wouldn't be very satisfying for the long term. But xDSL is …