I had need to goto the Wikipedia this morning to review the terminology of something, and on the front page in Today’s featured article is Mercury. Being a tad curious given I’d heard only on the radio a few hours ago that Pluto was no longer a planet in our Solar System, I drilled down to the bottom to check references to other planets (quicker then searching). So at the bottom I found the following graphic and details of The Solar System Summary.

Well blow me down, they didn’t waste any time there. Pluto is no longer a planet in our Solar System. It is now categorised as a …

No, it’s not a bedtime story, is a serious system’s design concept and I’m amazing that people don’t know about this.
As I mentioned in If you don?t know your data, you don?t know your application I was doing a Java Code Review, and I found a clear case of a much simplier solution. How simple you ask?

Well, without completing the task 100%, I achieved in less then 1 day (and lets say for the argument 1 more day of work), what is being worked on by somebody else for a week, with an estimate of 2 more weeks to complete. So let’s add 50% to my estimate, that’s a total of 3 days verses 15 days. You do the math. and yes that was last week and that task is still being worked on the same way, even with reference to my working code. Not to mention the code is a similiar magnitude of simplicity, and simplicity means cost savings in support, people so quickly forget …

The art of data modelling is definitely lost on some [most] people, or they never found it, even though they think they did. Over dinner with good friend Morgan last night we were swapping present stories on the topic.

Morgan wrote recently about I want my 4 bytes back damn it., and interesting example storing an ISBN. Further reference can be found at Getting started with MySQL of a more impractical ISBN example.

Disk is cheap now, so the attitude and poor excuse can be, well a few extra bytes doesn’t matter. Well no! If your a social hacker and have a website with a maximium concurrent connections of 2 maybe, but much like some recent Java Code Reviewing I just performed, just because the system isn’t 24×7, …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

It might seem odd, but I've been on the lookout for a decent e-mail system with web access and shared calendaring for quite some time for our family.

I would've found it hard to believe even a few years ago, but now with two adults with full schedules, and a nearly 4-year old in preschool and other events, and an 18-month old with their events and doctors' visits, our family is beginning to have the kind of scheduling problems that only used to happen in large corporations (and thus no cheap solutions were to be had).

We tried Sunbird for awhile last year, but it kept corrupting calendars that we stored on a webdav share out on our family webserver.

We've since switched to Google Calendars, which works great, other than the fact that we don't "own" the data (in fact, I've been backing it up every hour, "just in case").

I'm going to try out Zimbra, since it seems to foot the bill, and it happens to …

So, FireFox have come up with a novel idea to promote it’s product. Check out Firefox Day.

The official blurb: Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you?ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.

You can even choose how to link your names together on the “Firefox Friends Wall”. Examples like ‘my name’ Informed ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Empowered ‘your name’, or ‘my name’ Liberated ‘your name’.

Perhaps MySQL can leverage this idea for some what to promote future download!

Since OSCON, most of my time has been focused on editing a book, which is about to be finished. As I’m getting my commutes back, I have been reading up on what I’ve missed on Planet MySQL (which I affectionately call “The ‘planet.”

Y’all are prolific!

Jeremy’s On Open Source Citizenship got me thinking about the whole movement. I think there’s still a place for proprietary software in the world, as much as folks tout that “open source is ALWAYS better, because more people see it, therefore more people can help change it.”

Whenever anyone suggests a monolithic solution, I cringe. This all ties into the patent issues that are strongly debated these days. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about everything.

Jeremy’s article talked about how Yahoo! (as an example) couldn’t just open up all the source, …

Some people might have lives, but I have a webserver.

I think I’ve now upgraded just about everything (software-wise) that’s upgradable on this machine:

• Apache 1.3.33 -> 1.3.37 (Thanks for hiding the win32 binaries under “Archives” when the *nix version is out in plain view, guys)
• PHP 5.0.3 -> 5.1.4 (This required ditching my old php.ini file and doing a new one from scratch)
• MySQL 5.1.8 -> 5.1.11 (Dead easy, even on Windows - yea, TEAM!)
• Perl 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8
• Python 2.3.2 -> 2.4.3
• Tcl 8.4.12 -> 8.5.0
• BlogCMS .3.4.6 -> WordPress 2.0.4 (The RSS feed was broken, I was getting tired of seeing my posts quoted elsewhere sans formatting, and every time I tried messing with the code, it just got worse)
• Singapore 0.9.11 -> 0.10.0 (The one part of BlogCMS that I still really liked after switching …

I’ve recently completed a contract and I’ve been in discussions with agents and other employers for further work. Having had one of the worse experiences in my previous work, I’ve been extra careful to ensure what I’m told at the interview/meeting stage is indeed true and accurate (in my last case it was not). I’ve also not made the assumption that an organisation that is dependent on software has placed a certain level of value on what’s in place. (in my last case I did, simply due to the size of the organisation and volume of business).

So, when being asked by people what I’m seeking, outside of the technical skills and compendencies, I’m seeking an organisation that places value on it’s existing software, it’s software quality, it’s software improvement and most importantly it’s software developers. It was unfortunate that for an organisation that lived in software, and would not survive long (especially at …