As of late yesterday, I once again look like the photo on the Open Sources blog masthead. (That's me on the right hand side with the glasses.) For those who may not have noticed, I was growing my hair for the past two years. As I explained to my boss Marten Mickos (and to the MySQL board), late last year, it wasn't a mid-life crisis. Rather, I was growing my hair to donate it to Locks of Love, a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to children in the US and Canada suffering from long term medical hair loss, often... READ MORE

In the grand tradition of April Fool's stunts at Sun, the MySQL team decided to drape the Sun Menlo Park campus with inflatable pink and blue MySQL Dolphins! Marketing communications guru Steve Curry came up with the idea and we assembled a crackerjack team of local MySQLers to inflate 500+ dolphins late into the evening, with one dolphin for every member of Sun's Database Technology Group. Then we put on our all-black ninja wear (complete with Groucho disguise glasses) and we split up into teams to strategically place dolphins all around the Menlo Park campus well into the early hours... READ MORE

This post is mostly off topic, but I do no know there are quite a few runners in the open source world. We have a modest-sized running club at MySQL with many marathoners, and there's also guys like Marc Fleury, Matt Asay who have also run marathons. (The SugarCRM guys seem to be avid cyclists, and once in a while I ride with them in the hills around Cupertino, but for me it's not the same thrill as running a marathon. Call me weird.) At any rate, I went to see the movie "Spirit of the Marathon" the other night.... READ MORE

As a follow-up to my earlier blog, I happened to get 15 minutes hands-on use of the Amazon Kindle, their new portable eBook reader. As it happens, Amazon's Lab 126 development team is located in the same building as MySQL's US headquarters, and so when I happened to spot a team of folks with a Kindle in hand at a local restaurant for lunch, I dove in and asked if I could try it out. First point to note: the display is fantastic. To me, it's as easy to read as a book. While you can argue that the text... READ MORE

Last week, Hyperic hosted a gaming party at their offices, with plenty of open source people there from MySQL, MuleSource, JasperSoft and others. Ross Mason, co-founder of MuleSource, flew in all the way from Malta, just to play some Wii Tennis. (Ok, maybe he did have some other meetings in town, but I'm sure this was the highlight.) While I was quickly eliminated in the Wii Tennis matches, I had a good time playing the latest version of Guitar Hero III. Not as good as Javier, who obviously is not busy enough given his 200 note streaks, but still respectable... READ MORE

When I joined MySQL four years ago, there was quite a lot of debate about product management. We didn't actually have any product managers and the view in Engineering was "we don't need 'em." The rationale was that we were so far behind in implementing features requested by customers that there was no need to have another opinion. "We already know exactly what we need to do" or "The Community tells us what we should focus on" were typical responses. It took me a while to convince people that product management could add value in helping to prioritize things and... READ MORE