So I am trying to finally listen to the I, Cringely shows that PBS created. At the moment I am listening to the show on Anina. I had no idea who this person was, ten minutes into the interview I still don't. All I know is that she is a model who has figured out her cell phone. Which is interesting since I live out of my cell phone, but it is still not that interesting.

Anina starts talking about what it is like to travel with a cell phone. I hear her pain, I deal with this stuff constantly. Just because its a phone doesn't mean its going to work in every country.

Somewhere in this discussion of "why foreign carriers suck" she starts to explain how she started hacking her phone. It all started because she found out how to get to the filesystem on her phone. From …

So what's the connection between the newly released King Kong movie by Peter Jackson, and MySQL?

The answer is Weta Digital, who did the special effects of this movie, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Narnia, I Robot, and others. Weta uses MySQL to track its "assets" (hundreds of millions of files) across thousands of machines during productions, and for many other tasks.

Milton Ngan, CTO at Weta, is an excellent speaker and he has agreed to do the closing keynote at our MySQL Users Conference. He'll talk about how Weta uses MySQL, and of course (and that's why you'll all want to hang around on Thursday afternoon!) show off some of the movie magic!

So what's the connection between the newly released King Kong movie by Peter Jackson, and MySQL?

The answer is Weta Digital, who did the special effects of this movie, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Narnia, I Robot, and others. Weta uses MySQL to track its "assets" (hundreds of millions of files) across thousands of machines during productions, and for many other tasks.

Milton Ngan, CTO at Weta, is an excellent speaker and he has agreed to do the closing keynote at our MySQL Users Conference. He'll talk about how Weta uses MySQL, and of course (and that's why you'll all want to hang around on Thursday afternoon!) show off some of the movie magic!

I'll have a couple free hours over the next few weeks, so I have decided to upgrade my Linux box at home to RedHat Fedora Core 4. The software on it was really out of date (Firefox 1.0.4, Thunderbird 0.9, MySQL 4.0, OpenOffice 1.0, etc.), so instead of updating everything I figured I'd go the extra step and do everything. Tonight I am spending a couple hours downloading ISO images and burning them to CD. Stay tuned for the progress...

in an o?reilly network article, matthew b. doar asks, ?bug trackers: do they all really suck??

my answer would be yes, but i love tinkering with them anyway. we?re still using a hacked up version of the bugs.php.net code at bugs.mysql.com, despite periodic threats to move us over to bugzilla. some things that block the migration are that we?ve added various bits of workflow and bitkeeper integration into our bug tracker that someone will have to re-do for bugzilla, and someone will also have to figure out how to integrate it into the login infrastructure (and user database) for our websites.

meanwhile, i hack new features and fields into the existing bugs …

In Is MySQL simple or complex (or both)?, Mike Kruckenberg asks: So the question is . . . What happens to the people who really just wanted a simple, no frills, easy to use database. Based on the message, MySQL is no longer the database for them. Right?

MySQL 5.0 has gained a lot of features, and some of these features such as the procedural extensions, are as often a benefit for a project as they are creating problems for a project due to feature abuse. Having more features makes the product larger and more complex as well. So, yes, 5.0 is a lot more complex than older versions, and it carries around a lot of baggage that many traditional MySQL users don't need - and yet the same features are crucial for others.

This dilemma one reason why I look forward to the beginnings of modularization that we see with 5.1 - loadable …

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How does Peter do it? Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid (great company), already has his own infomercial, courtesy of Steve Hamm, in BusinessWeek. The gist? That Java is dead and LAMP is manna from heaven.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a LAMP fan and flogged that horse for years at Novell, and continue to do so at Alfresco. We're Java-based, but have an interface that makes it easy to extend Alfresco with scripting languages like the uber-trendy Ruby and P-languages (Perl, Python, PHP). So, I'm fine with wherever the market wants to go. And I think the world of Peter and ActiveGrid.

The problem with Steve's analysis, however, …

O'Reilly Network has a nice article by Robert Daeley on managing MySQL on OS X. Robert starts with getting MySQL running on OS X and then does a brief overview of several tools for OS X. These include MySQL Administrator, YourSQL, phpMyAdmin and the mysql> command-line client. A good introduction to the tools available to folks using MySQL on their Mac.

I had dinner with Dan Woods, CEO of EvolvedMedia Network and author of "Open Source for the Enterprise" along with a few other folks from the Eclipse foundation and Stephen Walli from Optaros at the Gartner Open Source conference in Orlando last week.  Dan gave the closing keynote presentation at the conference.  Not only was Dan the best dressed presenter (admittedly, not hard to do at an IT …