I managed to get my hands on a fairly cool device, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.  The picture above doesn't do it justice, but it's a small Internet tablet with built-in WiFi and a beautful crisp screen running 800x480 resolution. It weights just 8 ounces (230 grams) and can be easily carried in a jacket pocket.  Since the device is from Nokia, you might guess that it has basic phone capabilities or GPRS based web surfing, but it doesn't.  However, if you have a bluetooth enabled phone, you can surf via your phone. 

After a couple of days experimenting, I don't think this will replace my existing Palm Treo phone or Sony Vaio laptop, but I'm still impressed with it.  It offers the …

?So you mean they will network all of the computer?s in my car together??

The place is a club and I am talking to a recent friend I made named Ben who is telling me about the latest in automotive wonders. You see I am a gear head. I grew up working on cars, and I still retain some interesting in them. They have progressed far beyond anything I worked on as a teenager, so I am strictly an observers these days.

His sentence made me flash back on an episode of Battle Star Galactica where to solve a problem the crew had to network the ships computers together. Of course the Cylons use this network to hack the ship's computers. The creation of the network is what allowed them to inject their virus, and while this may seem far fetched it really is not.

I leave my bluetooth on my phone and laptop on so that I can instantly connect the two together. For …

It seems like Markus was doing something similar to me this weekend. We both were dealing with unwelcomed (and scary) nightmares. His ordeal was related to PostgreSQL and MySQL, mine was a bit scarier. In other words, while he knew exactly what went wrong from the start, I did not have that luxury.

It happened right about midnight. I was working on finalizing Lucene integration with my new community project when suddenly the server went down for automatic reboot due to heavy load (someone was trying a brute force attack). It wouldn't come back up.

After hours of communicating with my unmanaged hosting provider, the server was still not back up.
…

Following up on my post from last week... http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/63376.html

Looking at the comments, I think people got the point. It's not a nice design.
And yes, the large varchar id fields are in fact used as foreign keys in the overall schema, so the result is very inefficient in terms of storage, disk access requirements, use of memory buffers and query performance.

One person wonders what the problem is, if performance is not an issue.
But who decides that it isn't? The Horde family of tools can be used to provide web mail, file management and other functionality to a company or a web host. If it's a bigger company, or a web host serving many virtual domains, I'm pretty such that performance matters. You don't want to waste any resources.

Interestingly, this person is also the very one I sometimes …

In SQL RDBMS land, people often talk about relations when they actually mean relationships. Sometimes the meaning is clear from the context, but that's not always the case; so I thought it might be helpful to know which is which and why:

You may be surprised to learn that: relation = set = table. It's just the mathematical term for it. The letter R in the RDBMS acronym therefore simply means that it's a type of database that stores its data in tables. Nothing more.

A relationship, on the other hand, are about two or more tables having a field with common data (generally of integer type, if the schema is decently normalized) used for joins. In its simplest form that's an implicit relationship, and the database doesn't worry about it one way or another. You can make relationships explicit by defining foreign key constraints.

A join will work without a …

MySQL AB today announced the addition of two well-respected database veterans to its senior engineering management team. Relational database pioneer Jim Starkey, the creator of InterBase, has joined MySQL AB as Senior Software Architect. In addition, the company has appointed Mr. Taneli Otala as co-Chief Technical Officer.

Some time ago on the MySQL Forums I answered one of the typical beginner questions on how to solve many-to-many relationships. There was only one special thing about the question: The relationship actually involved two steps (a many-to-many-to-many relationship). Just hitting the Post button to my standard answer I realised that (albeit correct from a database design point of view) it would probably not give the users of the system the expected results. The simple answer was not enough.

The original question asked for a schema to manage sound files grouped into themes. The poster mentioned an example of a theme BEACH with sound files such as waves.mp3, wind.mp3 or dog_barking.mp3. So any theme can include an arbitrary number of sounds …

Arjen (and the rest of the MySQL Users Conference team) have finally posted the session grid for the conference.

It looks quite good - over a hundred sessions, with a broad and strong technical focus. To see the grid, visit http://www.mysqluc.com/pub/w/45/grid-All.html.

When I set out to develop the content for the OSBC panel "Marketing to Dilbert: Marketing Methodologies for the Open Source Crowd" I was fairly certain that something would get lost in translation. The topic itself is just so broad that I tried to refine it to what I considered the most important aspects. Therefore I focused on market research, communicating with developers and learning from other marketers. The thing I think most people continue to forget is that marketing is much more than brochures and websites. It's also pricing, brand positioning, communications and more.

In the presentation, the slide that I thought could easily make me less friends was the one about what companies are doing a good job and what companies are close but not really succeeding. Oddly there wasn't much disagreement from the audience though at …

CIO Magazine's Christopher Koch has a great matrix of Open Source business models in this month's issue as part of the cover story Free Code for Sale: The New Business of Open Source. The text is pasted below for posterity's sake. All credit to Chris and CIO Mag.

Open Source + Service
What it means: Companies sell support and services around open-source software.
Who’s doing it: Compiere (ERP), JBoss (middleware), Red Hat (Linux)
Advantages for CIOs: You pay only for support, not software. The cost to switch providers is relatively low because the source code is available to anyone.
Startup challenges: Difficult to build businesses because switching costs are low, …