Today there was a recent flurry of blog posts, starting with Charles Babcock's interview of Jonathan Schwartz about Sun's strategy of targeting Web 2.0 developers. This brought to light an interesting topic about open source development communities, the perceived insularity of Sun towards the external OpenSolaris developer community, and why Linux will apparently always be more popular and technically stronger than OpenSolaris.

The initial interview led Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation to take issue, and long comments on those posts from …

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

I’m happy to announce that we are finally changing the location for our monthly meetings, from the dreaded University of Houston main campus to a Galleria location.

Alert Logic has agreed to host the monthly meetings at their headquarters (we are next to the Marathon Oil building), so hopefully this will make it easier for people to attend. I’m looking forward to having a real meeting room with projector and wireless internet for a change!

I’ll be updating the meeting details today, but our new location will be the following:

Alert Logic, Inc.
1776 Yorktown
7th …

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …

If you read my blog, chances are you are aware of this new fad called the internet, and this new language called PHP. You’re also probably aware of things like MySQL and SQL, and the importance of data to visitors of your website. So, keeping that in mind, I’d also like you to know about backing up this data.

As I grow my business, the number of clients I run into that do not do backups, astounds me. I’m not talking about end user laptops/desktops, but rather backups of their SugarCRM database, or their file server, or even their company website, which is powered by Drupal/Wordpress/CMS Du Jour. When, not If, the database is corrupted, or the disk fails, they have no idea what they would do then. They just hope that it doesn’t happen to them.

So I did some thinking, and decided I should write a post, and make available to the world, a simple script, which I believe will at least give you onsite backups. This is what the …

Velocity is the new O’Reilly conference aimed at discussing topics related to scaling web sites and applications on the Web. It seems really interesting, and I will try to attend.

Having access to some of the industry’s experts in scaling web sites will be really useful. In fact, Steve Souders is one of the program chairs of the conference, and he is also known as the creator of the very popular YSlow extension to Firefox.