A few days ago, I tried to use an opensource mailing list manager program, it had great reviews and seemed to have the features I wanted. So, I tried it out, to my dismay just the installer alone had issues, when I went to the install page (thank you for making one in the first place), I was presented with lots and lots of PHP on screen..obviously, I was confused, this is PHPcult.com after all, and the server is configured to parse .php, .php3, .inc. So, I had to do some digging as to what was causing the problem.. the programmers used short open tags for PHP. So, I thought, I need to make a list of things that people do, that may come and bite them later on down the road. Here goes:

• Register Globals : This has been discussed more than it should be, it’s a simple concept, just take it from the more experienced programmers, this is bad.
• Short Open Tags: This is when you use …

I'll be giving my "usual" PDO talk at both MySQL Users Conference 2006 and OSCON 2006 (the MySQLUC version of the talk will have a MySQL focus).

If you're interested in PDO and haven't had the opportunity to see me give this talk yet, please consider trying to get to one of these conferences. My talk covers the design decisions behind PDO, suggests some best practices for using it, highlights portability concerns (particularly because PHP programmers have been "dummied down" by the older mysql client library API) and more.

As usual, I'm always open for questions during the talk (I'm there for your benefit after all) and I try to make myself more generally available during the conference, so if you want to ask me questions, or even just have a chat, then feel free to approach me.

A few days ago, I tried to use an opensource mailing list manager program, it had great reviews and seemed to have the features I wanted. So, I tried it out, to my dismay just the installer alone had issues, when I went to the install page (thank you for making one in the first place), I was presented with lots and lots of PHP on screen..obviously, I was confused, this is PHPcult.com after all, and the server is configured to parse .php, .php3, .inc. So, I had to do some digging as to what was causing the problem.. the programmers used short open tags for PHP. So, I thought, I need to make a list of things that people do, that may come and bite them later on down the road. Here goes:

• 
  
• Register Globals : This has been discussed more than it should be, it's a simple concept, just take it from the more experienced programmers, this is bad.
  
  
• Short Open …

Today, I updated my development tree installation of MySQL 5.1 (which is already at 5.1.10-beta) and tested Event Scheduling again. In MySQL 5.1.7 there were still a lot of rough edges, but now a lot is much smoother.

Take for example this event:

DELIMITER //


DROP EVENT IF EXISTS copyGeneralLog //


CREATE EVENT copyGeneralLog
ON SCHEDULE EVERY 1 MINUTE
STARTS '2006-04-08 01:44:00'
ENDS '2006-04-08 01:50:00'
ON COMPLETION PRESERVE
ENABLE DO
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO test.general_log
    (event_time, user_host, thread_id, server_id,
     command_type, argument)
  SELECT event_time, user_host, thread_id, server_id,
         command_type, argument
    FROM general_log
    WHERE command_type='Connect';


  TRUNCATE TABLE general_log;


  SELECT 1, 2, 3;
END //


DELIMITER ;

In 5.1.7, it was not guaranteed that …

If you have been reading my previous entries the answer you will think is ‘not bloody well’.

After about 3 days of tuning we doubled the throughput, and got a much nicer picture, outperforming a x86-64 machine by 2.5 times in one case.

Thanks to Luojia Chen (Jenny) from Sun, Peter Zaitsev from Mysql, and Colm MacCárthaigh & Mads Toftum from the ASF.

oh.. the benchmark.. I nearly forgot ;-)

(Oh people..please link to the blog entry, and not the paper itself.. Thanks)

update: people were having issues downloading the PDF. so I placed a mirror of it here

JBoss is going to get bought.

It's no secret that Oracle wasn't the only one sniffing after JBoss. Red Hat has talked about buying JBoss (though it's hard to see Matthew and Marc getting along well :-), as has IBM.

But Novell is the best fit.

Disagree? You think JBoss + Novell = NoBoss? Think it doesn't make sense, or won't happen? I think you're wrong.

Why Novell? Let me count the ways...

1. Novell has lots of cash. Too much cash, comparatively. (See right.) Marc Fleury wants cash. (Who doesn't?) Perfect match.

2. Novell has struggled to convince enterprises to move from NetWare to Open Enterprise Server/SLES, though results have been improving under Ron Hovsepian. Still, the needs something else to attract and hook would-be customers. …

In my previous job at Sifira A/S, I developed the first version of chan_ss7.

Chan_ss7 is a module for Asterisk, which interfaces Asterisk to an SS7 network.

So what is SS7? It is the network that runs the worlds telephone network. Chances are that as soon as your phone call reaches the local central (analog/ISDN) or base station (cell phone), it is transported over SS7. SS7 is the domain of big telephone switches from Nokia, Ericsson, and others, and a lot of very expensive and proprietary equipment.

So how does that fit with the world of cheap IP-based telephony and Free software? As it turns out, not bad at all!

Since my …

Shai Agassi, president of SAP's products and technology group said yesterday that he expects MySQL to be certified to run SAP applications by the end of the year.  This is an excellent endorsement not only of MySQL, but of open source technology in general.  SAP R/3 is the benchmark when it comes to the most sophisticated and demanding enterprise application and the testing process is exhaustive (if not exhausting!)  And even for users who may never need to run SAP, it's good to know that MySQL will be able to standup to all the testing.

It's something we've been working on for quite some time with SAP and it's nice to see that the top execs are aware and supportive of our efforts.  Agassi has sometimes been misunderstood in his comments on open source, but in our view, they've always been a huge supporter.

• …

In general, information_schema is a great thing - you can get all kinds of information out of it in quite a simple way.

But it has a downside - on a server with lots of databases and tables, it can be very slow. However, more and more applications rely on information_schema, and that can be a problem.

I just tried to update phpMyAdmin for db4free.net from 2.7.0-pl1 to 2.8.0.3. The update itself was a smooth thing, but when I tested the new version and tried to open a database, phpMyAdmin just couldn't make it.

So I looked for the cause, and I found it quite quickly. I searched the whole phpMyAdmin directory for the string "information_schema" and there were quite a lot of results. When I did the same for the directory of phpMyAdmin 2.7.0-pl1, there were no results at all.

So while …

On May 3 and 4, 2006, the European Commission and the European Patent Office will jointly present the European Inventor of the Year Conference & Gala.

There is no question that the world in general needs innovation, and so does Europe. I am all for honoring true inventors. However, this particular award series and event looks, at least in part, like an attempt to reinforce some common misconceptions and fallacies concerning innovation policy.

The involvement of the European Patent Office and the selection of nominees based on the patents they received makes a connection between patents and inventiveness that is only half-true at best. While the official and original idea of the patent system is to protect and reward inventors, the reality of more than 180,000 patent applications filed at the EPO per year (and that number is still growing) suggests that the fewest patents …