At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party delivered a keynote on "Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties".

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Werner Vogels of Amazon.com delivered a keynote called "A Head in the Cloud -- The Power of Infrastructure as a Service". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#A_Head_in_the_Cloud_-_The_Power_of_Infrastructure_as_a_Service.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos delivered the "State of the Dolphin Keynote". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.

So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.

But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, …

What made Marie Digby? I’ve heard about her on the radio from time to time, while I do the unnatural act of driving somewhere. Now, I’ve been invited to an event, where the tagline says that she’s “a star born from YouTube”. I had to dig further.

Decided to watch the famous video. Its just her, sitting with her guitar, performing an acoustic version of Rihana’s Umbrella. Nothing fancy. I’m told she sat in front of her MacBook to make the “hit”.

Grassroots marketing? Bands try much harder, and still feel the pain of becoming somewhat famous. What makes her different? Beauty (she’s of Japanese-American heritage)? Sultry look?

I wonder what her tipping point was. …

Firstly, I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of:

That's right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette.

Schwartz started by saying, "enough of this free software stuff!" It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun's agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well -- particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion.

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This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

If you are part of a big company and would like to recommend to them a list of open-source and cheap commercial alternatives, I have compiled a list that I use for my company.

These options might make your company more competitive in certain markets and might let you react faster to changes.


Here is the list:

Database - DataWarehouse
InfoBright - Commercial DataWarehouse Engine (highly recommended) that runs inside MySQL. review about it

EnterpriseDB - Commercial Enterprise Scale Database that runs inside PostgreSQL

Vertica - A very high-scale, …

i completed all the paperwork to accept my new position at sun today. now i just need to drop it off at a ups dropbox or have ups pick it up. at least they didn’t ask me to fax anything.

for a hardware company trying to become a software company, you would think the process of “onboarding” would not involve writing your address on a half-dozen different forms.

i will be a “member of the technical staff 4 - software.”

yeah, they say that they are working on updating the titles and such for everyone.

… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …