Hmm. Planet MySQL was close to unreadable for me this morning. Also, I had a technical discussion on writing style with a colleague just a few weeks ago, so I might as well take what I explained to him and put it into a form suitable for Planet MySQL. Please note that this is how I see things. This may or may not coincide with Arjen's view or the view of MySQL AB.



If you write blog entries for a blog that is being picked up by a planet, you are writing for a larger audience that for your own blog, and that audience may have other goals and intentions than regular readers of your blog. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Regular readers of your blog are coming specifically to you because they share a lot of interestes with you regarding the topics you cover. You can go into a lot of depth and you can assume a lot of context.

When your blog is being picked up by a planet, things are …

Kai Voigt was making jokes about the secret MySQL underwear. Carol made it real: From the Sakila's Secret Shop we bring you the MySQL Boxers ($10, Cash only).

Back in the days, when the middle "C" in "CCC" still stood for "Communication" and not for "Commerce" and the annual Chaos Communication Congress still happened at the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus in Hamburg, such improvisation was common and necessary.

Hartmut hijacking one of the conference information system hallway monitors for his hackfest session, since a projection unit was unavailable.

(Flickr Photoset)

A few days ago I had a series of meetings in the European Parliament, and I heard that Microsoft and SAP are already lobbying politicians to support the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA).

There are still three days left to answer the European Commission’s patent policy questionnaire, but it’s a foregone conclusion that the pro-software patent camp wants the EPLA more than anything else.

Let’s forget about the community patent for the time being. Yes, officially it’s the priority of the EU, but it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. There is too much resistance against it. The FFII and I will keep an eye on developments concerning the community patent, and you’ll hear from us if anything important happens on that front, but my recommendation is that most of us take it off the radar screen.

European Patent Litigation …

A couple of really nice articles mentioning my forthcoming book, No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union, have been published during the last several hours:

Jay Lyman wrote a very comprehensive and competent review for NewsForge.

W. David Gardner wrote that the book “foretells a new crusade” against software patents in Europe. Dave’s article, which succeeds in putting my book into the current political perspective, first appeared on TechWeb, then also on ITNews.com.au, an Australian site that belongs to the same network (CMP), and on …

This site already went online a few weeks ago to launch this blog. Now, finally, it contains information about my forthcoming book “No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union”. For your information, here is the related press release:

Florian Mueller’s book “No Lobbyists As Such”
tells the story of the successful resistance
against the EU software patent directive

Starnberg, Germany (March 28, 2006) — Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has announced his forthcoming book, No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union. On approximately 380 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive. Pre-orders …

Hakan vs. Andrey at the Devcon 2006

Less lemons! Right now all of your MySQL Developers are busy at MySQL Devcon 2006 in Sorrento. Each day is bracketed in the early morning and evening by the ritual of "Showstopper Bugs review", wherein the remaining showstopper, P1 and P2 bugs are reviewed, verified, assigned and the progress on their elimination is being tracked.

So far we are seeing a lot of progress - long standing and neglected bugs are suddenly going very easily, because people here can see each other and just talk about the problems they are seeing.

So more Sorrento means less lemons for all of you!

When you are a road warrior, you will be using a lot of different internet connections from a lot of different providers. Sending your mail can be an adventure, because more and more services block outgoing connections using port 25 in order to prevent infected machines from sending spam.

Fortunately, there are alternatives, and I am not talking webmailers here. Most company mailers and freemail servers now offer their services on ports 587 (submission) and 465 (smtps) as well.

Submission is basically SMTP with AUTH SMTP requirement moved to a different port. Very often it is combined with STARTTLS for encryption to protect the passwords transported in authentication. You can test submission manually using the openssl command line client, if you are using openssl 0.9.7 or higher: $ openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect …

This is my first posting in my own blog. Previously I posted a few comments to my Slashdot Journal, but other than that I’m a newbie WRT blogging. I also have a German-language blog (accessible via the German-language section of the Web site, which has its own URL).

The Web site will soon be fleshed out with a lot more content. In a few weeks I’m going to a announce in greater detail my forthcoming book No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union. I decided to start the site and this blog on a preliminary basis because, within a matter of days, I’m going to publish a position paper here in reply to the European Commission’s questionnaire on patent …