Are you a user of Microsoft Windows? Are you a user of a non-licensed copy of Microsoft Windows? Does it happen to be Windows XP Professional? Have you seen “blackouts“?

Apparently, from about the end of last month (August 27 2008, to be precise), users of pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional that also happen to be connected to the Internet will see their screens go black, and have no icons visible.

The esteemed folk at Microsoft Malaysia seem to think that there are 8.6 million users of Windows XP Professional in Malaysia (seems like a huge number, considering the population), and about three million will suffer from these “blackouts”. Only 35% of Windows XP Professional users are pirates?

Its a most interesting tactic. Annoy the user by allowing them to change their …

For those people starting with Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) we created a Getting Started page on our Wiki.

Since I realized that for some people, simple and easy can never be simple and easy enough I created 8 mini-flash demos :

• Create a new transformation - create a step (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a hop between 2 steps (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a database connection (flash demo, 0′45″)
• …

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This month’s (September 2008) edition of Linux Journal has an in-depth review of Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL (written by Alolita Sharma a veteran of Open Source). Oh, and we made it on the cover as well! If you are browsing Magazines section of your local bookstore, do look us up..

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I had a sad time this year when I missed the MySQL conference, since I had much fun last year in Santa Clara. I can’t miss it next year.

As a MySQL partner, and after almost 2 years doing MySQL training, I sure have interesting things to tell in the conference, but I’m not sure about what.

I will be thinking about this in the next weeks, but I’d appreciate some help. What topics are you interested in?