Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

In order to communicate with the MySQL database server from a PHP application, ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and the PDO MYSQL driver rely on the MySQL client library, libmysql - that has the required implementation for the client-server protocol. The MySQL native driver for PHP (will simply be referred as mysqlnd from this point), is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or later versions. mysqlnd is a replacement for the MySQL client library, libmysql; and it is tightly integrated into PHP starting with the release of PHP 5.3. That is, from PHP 5.3 onwards the developers can choose between libmysql and mysqlnd when using mysql, mysqli or PDO_MySQL extensions to connect to the MySQL server 4.1 or newer. Due to the tight integration into PHP 5.3 (and later), mysqlnd eliminates the dependency on the MySQL client programming support when the database extension(s) and the database …

In order to communicate with the MySQL database server from a PHP application, ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and the PDO MYSQL driver rely on the MySQL client library, libmysql - that has the required implementation for the client-server protocol. The MySQL native driver for PHP (will simply be referred as mysqlnd from this point), is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or later versions. mysqlnd is a replacement for the MySQL client library, libmysql; and it is tightly integrated into PHP starting with the release of PHP 5.3. That is, from PHP 5.3 onwards the developers can choose between libmysql and mysqlnd when using mysql, mysqli or PDO_MySQL extensions to connect to the MySQL server 4.1 or newer. Due to the tight integration into PHP 5.3 (and later), mysqlnd eliminates the dependency on the MySQL client programming support when the database extension(s) and the database …

In order to communicate with the MySQL database server from a PHP application, ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and the PDO MYSQL driver rely on the MySQL client library, libmysql - that has the required implementation for the client-server protocol. The MySQL native driver for PHP (will simply be referred as mysqlnd from this point), is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or later versions. mysqlnd is a replacement for the MySQL client library, libmysql; and it is tightly integrated into PHP starting with the release of PHP 5.3. That is, from PHP 5.3 onwards the developers can choose between libmysql and mysqlnd when using mysql, mysqli or PDO_MySQL extensions to connect to the MySQL server 4.1 or newer. Due to the tight integration into PHP 5.3 (and later), mysqlnd eliminates the dependency on the MySQL client programming support when the database extension(s) and the database …

I am happy to announce Wordcraft 0.7.  There are two big changes in this release.  On the front end, I added a simple search.  It just uses a LIKE clause.  But, I figure a lot of blogs never reach 1,000 posts.  Even at 10,000 posts, a LIKE would not be too bad.  On the backend, I have switched the post editor to TinyMCE. YUI's editor is decent, but it needs polish.  Perhaps my time with Wordpress just made me more familiar with it.  TinyMCE does save XHTML.  I put some code in the PHP side to use Tidy if it is available to convert it to HTML 4.01, which I prefer.

Also in this release:

• Fixed an XSS issue in tag.php.
• Fixing a parsing issue with anchor tags when doing pingbacks.
• Fixed an error when the remote site …

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Recently, my company has decided to go full (or mostly) open source by moving away from Microsoft technologies. This is a particularly exciting venture to be part of, but in order to explain what I mean, I need to go back a bit and explain the history of the company.


History

Since its inception, the company has been a traditional LAMP stack. Over time, some internal business applications were needed to be developed. The initial platform to solve this requirement was Microsoft Office and specifically Access database and some Excel sheets. Later on, more and more VBA programming was added to the Access database. At some stage, a decision was made to move to VB.NET and port the VBA/VB6 code to it.
So far, this story is …

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a …

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you! I just returned from my Christmas vacation two days ago, which I spent mostly at home and with my parents-in-law in St. Radegund, Austria. Now I am busy catching up with what has piled up during my absence (I managed to resist the temptation to check my work email during the time off).

Some MySQL-related news that came up in the past weeks and are worth sharing:

• My talk about MySQL HA solutions has been accepted in the main FOSDEM conference track
• The FOSDEM organizers also accepted my lightning talk proposal about Bazaar - it will take place on Saturday, 14h20 (tentative)
• MySQL will have a …

Jeremy has a great post about why DHH’s article on Sharding is….dumb, i mean flawed.

If you’re a startup, and think you’re about to experience tremendous growth, listen to Jeremy, not DHH. I’ll let Jeremy and the other tech heavy hitters handle the technical flaws with his article.

I’m not sure about his definition of “reasonable” is, but I can’t find a single system with 128GB of RAM within my definition of “reasonable”. Secondly, the whole notion that bigger/better/faster is the solution is absurd. That’s like saying we need a bigger land fill because the one we have currently is full. Sure, that’ll work, but how do you install said landfill into place? do you dig under the current one? do you use “bolt on” land …

Due to the efforts of Brian Moon and Michelangelo van Dam, I've been sucked into a meme started by Tony Bibbs. My initial reaction to this unfortunate event was ... (envision Steven Colbert, hands raised...) "Noooooo!!!" But I got over it. Hey, it's the holiday season, I might as well be a good boy and fulfill the modern-day geek's equivalent of a chain letter.

So, without further ado, here is my list of seven things about me you probably could care less about and will skip over to see if you are on my list of tagged people. (Yeah, you know you will.)

• My real name is not Jay
• I have a twin brother, …