Larry Ellison, billionaire CEO and founder of Oracle corporation has cancelled his $115 million gift to Harvard University.  Ellison, a college drop out, had pledged the funding to Harvard president Larry Summers in order to establish a global health foundation in his name.  Ellison is estimated by Forbes to be the 15th richest man with assets worth $16 billion. 

In late 2005, as part of an insider trading settlement, Ellison agreed to donate $100 million to a charity of his choice.  He chose his own Ellison Medical Foundation and has contributed $5 million to it, according to an Oracle spokesman.

• LA Times: Oracle's Ellison …

OK, anyone who's done any web development has eventually come across the choices one must make regarding how to handle sessions in your web applications. While there are a variety of methods of handling session interaction, file and cookie-based session management eventually reach a limit in the number of users that can be supported, as well as limitations involving web server farms, load balancing, and state management. To achieve scalability in session management, especially across a web server farm, a database is often used.

Jimmy Guerrero, senior product manager at MySQL, is giving a webinar tomorrow on scaling session management with MySQL Cluster. I, for one, am going to be attending, and I hope to see a number of community folks in the list of participants. It shoud be …

I recently was given a copy of O'Reilly's Baseball Hacks and have really enjoyed digging into a deeper level of understanding baseball. Yes, I watch a fair amount of baseball, but I'm only beginning to understand some of the strategies that come into play during the game (e.g. pitching to a batter or positioning the players on the field).

A few hacks of note:

• Hack #1: Score a Baseball Game - I never knew how scoring a game worked, very usefull to know how the stats are recorded.
• Hack #4: Follow Pitches During the Game - this is a great introduction to learning what goes on as the pitcher faces each batter, the hack also includes ways to identify the various types of pitches and pitch locations.
• Hack #8, 10, 16, 18 20 and many more - use MySQL to import, store, crunch, query and present your baseball data.
• Hack #13: …

So, I've been doing a bunch of coding on MySQL Forge over the last week, and I've added a number of new features to the Forge application. Some of the new features/changes include:

• Ability to add a project, with categories, and tags, in a single step, making it easier than ever to add new projects to the directory
• A whole new interface for tagging projects and code snippets, including the ability to remove existing tags and a review process which attempts to standardize the tags to remove redundancy. (NOTE: You now must be logged in to add tags to a project.
• A new tabbed UI for viewing project and snippet details
• Ability to copy snippet code source directly in the interface (yes, that's for you, Roland Bouman! )
• A project membership approval process. This replaces the flawed contributor implementation I devised before, …

I can not picture what $31 billion dollars means for one individual to have. I've done enough budgets in my life to understand millions of dollars, and I can grasp how entire companies run on billions of dollars, but $31 billion dollars resting with one individual is not something I can easily wrap my brain around. One decision with that much money, spend here, invest there, pull money from this account... can cause thousands of people to shuffle about.

Adding that sort of wealth to one foundation will influence our society in ways that today we can not comprehend. When I look at libraries, I look for the touch of Carnegie. His wealth long endures past his death and the death of the other industrialists of his time, but I believe the Gates Foundation will surpass them all. The social and economic power that this foundation wields is amazing.

I do not have anything in particular to say about the future of the …

The launch of Microsoft's Codeplex "shared source" site is merely the latest attempt to undermine and usurp the open source community via clever marketing.

There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened by open source alternatives: price compression and loss of market share.

Open source companies have a pricing umbrella in relation to proprietary vendors license fees. Proprietary vendors argue that open source alternatives lack features, are less secure, socialist and so on, but fundamentally the difference in features is likely no more than 20%. Open source products are generally 10-30% of the cost of the proprietary competitor. This means you can pay roughly 20% of the cost and receive roughly 80% of the features. This is a very appealing proposition. And the more companies who take advantage of …

When setting up MySQL replication there are some things to remember. Although the setup is quite easy if you thoroughly read the documentation on MySQL's developer site you might still hit some issues.

We have quite a large scale replication setup (MySQL 4.1.12) with several hundred slaves. Today we saw a very strange situation: All of the slaves stopped replicating and claimed that a statement had been partially executed on the master side. The exact message was

Query partially completed on the master (error on master: 1053) and was aborted. There is a chance that your master is inconsistent at this point. If you are sure that your master is ok, run this query manually on the slave and then restart the slave with SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1; START SLAVE;

The error code 1053 which means as much as "server shutdown".

We checked the master and could not …

Here’s an announcement from the Docs team:

MySQL has provided support for CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) for a long time. There’s a chapter in the MySQL Reference Manual that extensively covers MySQL character set support. Managing CJK data can be particularly tricky, though. Therefore we’ve just added a FAQ section that answers the most common questions about handling CJK contents and provides hands-on solutions to common problems. This Frequently-Asked-Questions section comes from the experiences of MySQL’s Support and Development groups, after handling many enquiries about CJK issues. The FAQ is available for the MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 manuals:
- http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/cjk-faq.html
- …

Omniture, one of the hottest companies not located in Silicon Valley, is expected to go public later this week, raising close to $100 million in proceeds.  Omniture provides online web and business analytic software to companies like AOL, Apple, eBay and Ford.  Omniture runs thousands of MySQL servers in order to scale out their business.

• Red Herring: IPO Watch Hot & Heavy

“There?s no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don?t match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience.”

I’m not sure I agree with her, just like there really is no shortage for skilled workers, there are a lot of companies that are willing to train and mentor. What’s happening is that the people who need to be trained/mentored are asking for salaries that would say they don’t need to be trained and mentored. The companies that are crying about the shortage, usually don’t pay well enough, or are in not so prime locations anymore. A company wants to pay 2001 prices for someone with 10 yrs of experience, in an area that is over priced real estate wise, or the commute to the office is horrible, this prevents the qualified, highly skilled people to not want to work.

When I lived in …