My prayers have been answered.

We have found a worthy replacement for Jay Pipes: Dups.

• Dups joined MySQL in July 2007.
• Dups until recently was in the MySQL Web Team, and has joined us now.
• Dups comes from Canada (Newfoundland).
• Dups even lives in Canada (Montreal).
• Dups will roam the North American continent to serve the MySQL community, to learn from it, to explain Sun to the community, and to explain the community to Sun.
• Dups is sometimes mistaken for Colin Charles, because of similarities in physical appearance.
• Dups has a somewhat challenging name, Duleepa Wijayawardhana.

I’m very happy we got Dups as our Jay clone, because

• Dups is a MySQL user since last century.
• Dups knows MySQL very well.
• Dups is an excellent communicator: he structures his thoughts clearly and writes an enjoyable …

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

Mandy and I were working together on some accounting for Foo Associates earlier today. We were scratching down notes in an old notebook when I ran across some old bits and pieces from my days at MySQL - random lists of tasks, flight schedules, doodlings and this little snippet of text under the hotel address for OSCON 2002:

Flying into Salt Lake City is amazing. The terrain looks unfinished, like the surface of a moon recently given life. The Great Salt Lake spreads out past the horizon and, when low enough, you can see the weird and wonderful patterns formed by salt, evaporation and algae spreading out like plumes of gas boiling off a star.

Later, driving past the lake with an acquaintance, I remember being nearly equally amazed at the “dead sea creature in the hot sun” smell that rolls off of it.

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My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

While chatting with a few SVN hackers at OSCON, it occured to me that MySQL is the Perl of RDBMS. Discuss among yourselves.

I wonder how many people will attend a session at a tech conference where the start of the description reads as follows:

Hey You! Yes, You! Manager, marketeer, sales professional: are you tired of 98lb weaklings kicking silicon in your face?

I am thinking this way because my friends at MySQL AB are putting on another MySQL User Conference - this time from April 23 - 26 in Santa Clara, California.

The Call for Participation went live a few days ago and, as always, I am proposing a session. I don’t really need to go, but I definitely have a soft spot for the event, as I chaired the first two MySQL UCs. Also, I had a good deal of fun working on the …

The organizers of the PHP Québec Conference were gracious enough to give me an unedited copy of my Copyright, Contracts and Licensing for PHP Developers session.

I cleaned the audio up last night, stripping out some of the more odious filler words (I seem to say “Umm” rather often), shortening pauses as I switched slides, removing redundant asides (like asking if there are any questions, when no questions then follow) and excising the introduction and applause.

After a good deal of consideration, I did chose to leave the errors and other flaws in the content presented. These flaws were presented to the audience and they should stay in the recording.

Of course, I don’t want people to be mislead by any of the flaws; to prevent this, I am transcribing the entire talk, …

Slides from my presentations at the PHP Québec Conference are below:

• Copyright, Contracts and Licenses for PHP Developers (PDF, 650KiB)
• SQLite: A fast, transactional DBMS embedded in PHP 5 (PDF, 55KiB)

I will make the audio of the licensing session, along with a transcript, available as soon as possible.

Update:

Transcript now available.

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