At 1:30pm EST today, I am giving my much-anticipated talk on Using Open Source Projects for Personal Profit at the first annual HabariCon, which is a celebration of uniting the user and developer communities in friendship and collaboration. I am expecting 80-120 people to show up for my talk, which focuses on how you can contribute a bit of code early on in an open source project's life and claim to be a valuable member of the committer society, thus increasing your overall karma in the open source community and landing you a higher-paying job. It's must-see learning for anyone interested in the economics of Cabal-coding. See you there!

Feel free to join the Habari Cabal and others on Freenode #habari and learn invaluable tips from some of the best open source community leaders in the world!

For those of you who have been stuck under the proverbial rock for the last couple months, the MySQL Conference and Expo is just around the corner. The conference's tutorial day is April 14th, which means if you haven't registered yet, you should definitely do so. For a 20% discount, email me at my first name at mysql dot com. Register soon because tutorials are already selling out or entirely sold out.

Hitchhacker's Guide to the MySQL Conference PHP Developer's Edition

This blog post marks the first in a series of guides to the conference that we'll be publishing in the next couple weeks leading up to the conference. The guides are intended to help a specific audience find the sessions that will likely be the most interesting for them. The first edition of the Hitchhacker's …

My CouchDB presentation at Mailtrust earlier this month got recorded. The video is now online at Yahoo Video. Enjoy!

Update 29.03.2008: Here are the slides. What I said in Some Context still applies.

And while we are at it, these are the slides from my Mountain West Ruby Conference Presentation. Again, Enjoy! :)

My CouchDB presentation at Mailtrust earlier this month got recorded. The video is now online at Yahoo Video. Enjoy!

Update 29.03.2008: Here are the slides. What I said in Some Context still applies.

And while we are at it, these are the slides from my Mountain West Ruby Conference Presentation. Again, Enjoy! :)

My CouchDB presentation at Mailtrust earlier this month got recorded. The video is now online at Yahoo Video. Enjoy!

Update 29.03.2008: Here are the slides. What I said in Some Context still applies.

And while we are at it, these are the slides from my Mountain West Ruby Conference Presentation. Again, Enjoy! :)

While recently migrating Tschitschereengreen.com from Symfony to Django plus changing the database backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, there were mainly two tasks more time-consuming than I’ve had thought beforehand:

SQL dump

The old database used a latin1 encoding for the database fields and utf-8 as the server and client connection encoding. With these settings, even trying to get a correctly encoded database dump from phpMyAdmin is a bad idea.

Using mysqldump with an explicitly specified character-set is much better:

mysqldump ? ?default-character-set=latin1 …

Tonight’s New York PHP community meeting was a talk by Philip Antoniades the MySQL Systems Engineering Manager.

With an interesting topic opener “A New Hope” I could not resist to hear Philip’s official MySQL presentation.

Some small points I took away from the presentation.

• Sun is committed to Postgres with Josh Berkus and a team of 20 people.
• Solaris.next is the next version of Sun, I thought that was a cool internal name, be it obvious
• A marketing slide of the highest traffic websites listed Meebo, yousendit, alexaholic, techcrunch, feedburneer, istockphoto and vimeo as reported by Pingdom. Not sure were they get their data, but Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Fotolog are sites I think of as high traffic. Indeed 3 of these listed sites I’ve never heard of. …

As Giuseppe and Kaj have blogged about, the student proposal period for the Google Summer of Code is underway from today through March 31st.

The new MySQL Forge has a wiki page with suggested MySQL-related GSoC projects that a number of MySQL engineers and community team members have proposed. The projects include C/C++ projects in the MySQL server as well as other projects for the non C gurus among you, including some projects in Lua for the MySQL Proxy.

PHP Hacker? Know MySQL? Hack on the …

FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on August, 23th and 24th 2008 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their …

Dear Readers,

I have a favour to ask. Please register for the first hands-on workshop about programming CouchDB.

Here is the story:

With my slight NADD infection I have, of course, set up a Google Alert on CouchDB. A few weeks ago, an alert came in that surprised me. Fortunately in a good way. The call for papers of the 2008 edition of XTech, a (duh) tech conference in Dublin, Ireland, asked specifically for CouchDB related submission.

How cool is that?

I sent in a whole bunch of proposals, just to make sure one gets through and it …