I’ve worked for two Internet startup companies, both around 2 years each, both now long dead. The first was due to eventual lack of new VC funds, the second gross financial managment in the second year (apparently, when we were told there was no money December one year to pay us, the company that made large profits every month for over the first year, then had made losses every month for the past 12 months, but nobody knew about it. There were 5 Directors from 3 countries and nobody knew. Yeah Right!)

I’ve learnt a lot of non IT street smarts in this time. The first startup took the VC route, and after 3 rounds while I wasn’t involved in the process you pick up things. The single biggest tip here is the Bell-Mason Diagnostic. Here a few introduction references worthy of a quick review ( …

I had need to goto the Wikipedia this morning to review the terminology of something, and on the front page in Today’s featured article is Mercury. Being a tad curious given I’d heard only on the radio a few hours ago that Pluto was no longer a planet in our Solar System, I drilled down to the bottom to check references to other planets (quicker then searching). So at the bottom I found the following graphic and details of The Solar System Summary.

Well blow me down, they didn’t waste any time there. Pluto is no longer a planet in our Solar System. It is now categorised as a …

Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …

OK, so next week is OSCON, in case you hadn't heard... I will be presenting a tutorial entitled Maximum Velocity MySQL on Monday morning, from 8:30am until noon, in room Portland 255. The tutorial will cover advanced SQL, schema and index strategies, and performance tuning topics, with lots of code examples and demonstrations. It should be a great time, and there'll be lots of giveaways, so be sure to check it out.

Additionally, there is a MySQL BoF session scheduled for Thursday evening from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll be providing pizza (and probably beer if we can get our hands on some). I will be there along with Arjen and likely Brian as well. We hope to have discussions with …

OK, so today, I was following up on a headline about the free wireless network project called CUWiN. The project looks pretty awesome; check it out to see how a few people are creating a wireless network mesh from commodity (I mean, really commodity hardware - think 486!). I have no idea whether MySQL could be ovf use for the project -- perhaps, not sure... I might follow up on that at a later date once I find out more information about the project.

However, in perusing the CUWiN website, I happened to come across a really cool web page that maps the CUWiN local area network. So, I tracked the mashup project that is used to display this page through the link on the bottom of the page to the …

So I did one of those decadent actions I do every so often. I went to bed last night, started a book, got some sleep, and then finished the book this morning. I received Connie Willis's Bellwether in the mail on Friday (thank you Michelle!), and decided to just read it. This is the first time I knew someone who used my Amazon Wishlist. Normally I just get books from strangers who are thankful for source code I release (mod_layout seems to be the software that people are most thankful for).

I liked the book though it was a bit outside of my normal definition for Science Fiction. There really wasn't much of a science fiction angle to it. The math was all statistical in nature, and the comments on chaos theory weren't all that profound. The main character rattles off facts constantly, and about midway through the book I was waiting for the plot to get going. Willis could have shortened the beginning and spent more time on the main two …

What is Web 2.0? Well the definitions out there aren’t clear and precise. Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Publishing has a detailed description at http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228. (More notes from this below) His compact description is:

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web …