I often get accused, especially by my European friends, of not being a true geek for two reasons: I don't carry an expensive camera with me at all times — nice Fisheye lens, Kaj! — and because I don't indulge in video games. Well, for all you Jay-ain't-a-true-geekers out there, I offer two photos today to prove my geekhood.

As some of you know, I live in Columbus, Ohio, with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and my lovely wife Julie. Last night, we got hammered with the most snow we've seen in March in over 40 years. By my estimation, there is about 18 inches of snow on the ground. The photo to the right was taken this morning, while the snow was still coming down, from my back door. You can see my garage and the ground covered in snow, but the most telling part of the photo is the amount of snow on the table on our back deck. …

OK, so I returned from vacation late last night, after putting almost 1700 miles on my car this past four days. A friend of mine had his Master's thesis show (in furniture design) down in Savannah, Georgia. It was a fantastic time, and Ezra's work is truly astonishing, but I was quite exhausted after the long drives to and from Columbus, Ohio.

You may remember that I have been helping my twin brother learn PHP and MySQL programming. I'm pleased to say that he is progressing quite well! Every time we Skype chat, he seems to have picked up more and more programming vocabulary and is understanding some of the trickier concepts fairly well. My teaching is ongoing. I have advised him to try and learn five new PHP functions every time he sits down to code, and to practice the functions by using them in his work. For instance, …

Read a NewsForge article today about how the two lead developers of the GPU Gnutella client have amended the GPL to include a provision that bans the software's use by military organizations. Specifically, provision states:

the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.

Interestingly, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, doesn't think distributors have the right to restrict the software user's activities by restricting the software's use in this way, though he said "Nonetheless, I don't think the requirement is entirely vacuous, so we cannot disregard it as legally void." It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, as it has further-ranging …

First, the reason I haven't been blogging as much

I haven't been blogging nearly as much recently because my blog software has become almost unusable. I have been getting on average 500 spam comments and trackbacks per day, which makes actually posting comments to my blog pretty much useless, since they get lost immediately (damn those spammers!)

I plan on switching over to a new version of Wordpress in the coming week or two (hopefully before OSCON, but no promises). If anyone has read this blog for a while (over a year), you'd know I have gone through a number of blog software solutions, including Wordpress, Seredipity, and my own home-grown solution (a miserable failure in terms of functionality). I am going to try the new version of Wordpress and see if it helps. I mean, the purpose of blog software should be to enable the writer to write, as easily as possible, with few distractions (like spam). Hopefully the …

I hope everyone will join me in welcoming the newest member of the Kruckenberg family, Saul Adams Kruckenberg, who arrived in this world this past Wednesday. Another cute kid for the Kruckenbergs. Man, they are blessed!

In case you haven't heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.

Now, I'm by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in …

OK, so I was up in Cleveland visiting friends for the holiday and got into a discussion with a writer friend of mine who is unabashedly disinterested in the blogging world. She asked me how I had time to read all the blog entries from the feeds which interested me. I answered that it was oftentimes difficult for me to get to all the entries which I found interesting, but that I had a fairly simple system set up to help me.

In a nutshell, here's my system (screenshot below, click for a larger image). I use Thunderbird's built in RSS reader functionality to subscribe to the blogs and aggregator services, like Planet MySQL and Planet GNOME, that I find to be good reading. I have tried different applications, most notably Liferea, but have come back to using Thunderbird …

I found it strange that MySQL was notably missing from an InformationWeek DatabasePipeline article today about growth in market share of both Oracle and Microsoft. At first, I though perhaps IDC had some strict criteria on which they decided what was "a relational database system" and what wasn't, but when I saw no mention of MySQL and yet a mention that NCR's database server held down a 3% market share, I was a bit perturbed.

When is MySQL going to get the recognition it deserves in the database industry? Why hasn't it already, with large companies already relying on it for critical applications? Has the fact that MySQL is open source been a limiting factor to its industry acceptance?

Let me know your thoughts

First announcement on this site about my upcoming book, entitled Pro MySQL, published through Apress. Really excited so far. I'm co-authoring the book with Michael Kruckenberg, out at Tufts University.

Been a bit of a roller-coaster ride so far! Between clients and all the other projects we've got going in, finding time to write hundreds of pages on MySQL internals and SQL development is tough. But, I'm very happy with the work so far. I've been concentrating mostly on the development end of things, and Mike's been digging in hard for the adminstrative end of MySQL and many of the newest and most exciting features of MySQL 5.x.

It should be published in mid 2005, and covers a broad range of topics, from the internals of MySQL to clustering and replication for high-volume applications.

You can see the "preview" page …