Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend yet another WebMontag session in Nürnberg this time. Somehow I'm getting a taste for it. The venue this time was not a concert hall, but a meeting room at NIK (de), an organization helping businesses and start ups (it's more than that really). Free drinks, beamer, and a good crowd!
The show started at 18:00 and people were already discussing stuff. I thought I was to late, but at 18:45 we started with a welcoming speech and going around the big table so everyone can introduce himself.

The first presentation by Tobias Lampe was about a new idea: …

We have just officially released the WB 5.0 RC3 build and are planning the GA build to happen soon. One might ask, what is our criteria to call something GA? Well, it means that there must not be any known and verified P1 (crashing) and P2 (very serious bug with no workaround) bugs. Does it means that there are no bugs left or that we have implemented every feature request? No.

Therefore our efforts will not stop after the GA build. We still plan to get a new release out every 3rd week including all fixes and improvements that are necessary. This is a first list of things we are planning to release in a future GA release.

• Bug fixes
  Most important are bug fixes of course. Please keep reporting bugs, you did a great job in the past - and if you do so, we will keep closing those bug reports as fast as we can.

• Enable connection-end points dragging/reordering
  This has remained one major …

I drafted some blog entry about last week's WebMontag (de) session in Frankfurt am Main but somehow I managed forgetting posting it.
It was my first experience with the WebMontag events, so I didn't really know what to expect. However, I'm happy I attended and talked there!

The venue, Brotfabrik, is already worth mentioning. Picking up Pierre Kerchner (de) by car, we bumped into Dirk Friedenberger (de) arriving: always good to know people first time going somewhere.
The planned presentations were:

• Andreas Demmer …

I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:

Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?

With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.

The …

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

• Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the …

Now that the GA (General Availability) release of MySQL Workbench is coming up it is a good point in time to discuss what the commercial Standard Edition subscription will be all about and what will be covered by it. While I am not a lawyer I will try to explain the ideas behind the concept. Please make sure to read the subscription details when you get it.

Key points:

• USD 99
• Single seat license (license packs for a large number of seats (>30) possible)
• Software never expires
• Includes all updates of Standard Edition for a full year

The Basics

After the official launch you will be able to buy subscriptions in the MySQL Online Shop. Apart from payment with standard credit cards it has been updated to also allow for PayPal payment. A subscription will cost USD 99 (good for people in Euro countries, I know) and is valid for a single seat. If you are a bigger …

A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:

• Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or …

Recently I acquired Sesame Street Volume 1, and on the third DVD in the set I came across one of my favorite Sesame Street songs: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”

Here’s a sample of one such skit, if you are not familiar with it, or if you want a bit of nostalgia http://youtube.com/watch?v=B9lpUjQvToY (note, play will likely start automatically, so tune your volume appropriately before clicking).

The refrain is “Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day!” I live in a city of 34,000 people just 6 miles northwest of Boston, MA. I know exactly one neighbor, across the street, whom we met because I sent my husband over to get her live band to stop playing loud music at her party at 2 am. I do not know many of the local business owners. I do not know who lives in my neighborhood, yet people live around me. Saying I …

Past Tuesday we had our 5th Belgian MySQL meetup with around 12 attendees, and it was great! I hoped for a large audience, but the spirits were good and we had some fun and good chats. I started out giving a brief history of MySQL and ending with Sun buying us. Important was to get the message out which Kaj explained us last week in Munich (Germany).

The main topic was Performance Tuning best practices, but I didn't go intensively deep on it. This is something we should do again in a large group and just that presentation.
After that, we talked about communities and more importantly growing a PHP UserGroup in Belgium. Michelangelo and Felix are really doing great and it's probably going to be a hit. I, and probably the whole MySQL Community team, would definitely like to help out to get it started.

I had some people commenting about doing these meetups during the day, during working hours. Yes, this would be nice, …

As Kaj already pointed out, the Sun/MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour will also make a stop in Munich, Germany this Friday. I will be there as well, we will meet at 14:00 at the Hilton Munich Park Hotel. Kaj and some other Sun people will join us a bit later. If you are in the area, make sure to stop by!

By the way, the Meetup Mashup Tour will make at least one more stop in Germany - I am organizing an event in Hamburg, Germany which will take place on Monday, April 7th (19:00). This was initially planned as another regular MySQL Meetup, but I offered to expand the scope a bit. We will now meet at the Sun offices, Sun will sponsor some food and drinks! In addition to …