To start with the Postgresql talk , I ran in just too late as the slides about slony were just finished :(

Skipped out on Nigel's Talk, after not having time to play with the OpenPower at the office I`m assuming that Macbar knows enough about it already , Then the awkard break before your own talk it's the waiting and the people dropping in one by one , It's much easier to start directly after someone else :) Ray introduced my talk as "The talk you have all been waiting for" , hmm.. he shouldn't have done that. It made me fall back into my old bad habit of speeding trough my slides in just about 35 minutes rather than the scheduled 45 I had.

I'm starting to hear myselve thinking during a talk that I gave before "Hmm.. I've already said this" then realising 2 slides later that I actually didn't say that yet during that talk but during a previous one. That really might have confused people. I really have to work on my presentation …

I just received a copy of Alex Davies and Harrison Fisk’s book MySQL Clustering (us; uk).

I had the honor of reading a few of the chapters before they were published, and this looks to be a really excellent hands-on guide for setting up your own clusters. It takes you all the way from a thorough understanding of the types of nodes that make up a cluster, hardware requirements and initial setup through security and management to tuning and troubleshooting.

This is good …

Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.

The highlighting is nicely done. The interface looks nice, although there are way too many buttons that I do not know what they do (and I assume a lot of them will never be relevant for a PHP developer).

The same goes for the settings. I looked them through a couple times but did not find such basics things as being able to show all characters including whitespace (I have become so used to this that I just cannot read code without seeing the whitespace) or changing tabs to become 4 spaces (you can set the tab width though). The #eclipse channel also seems to suffer from a huge imbalance of questions to answers.

I should probably get …

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 …