What does Anton Ego – a fictional restaurant critic from the Pixar movie Ratatouille – have to do with MySQL 8.0 GA?

When it comes to being a software critic, a lot.

In many ways, the work of a software critic is easy. We risk very little and thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to read and write.

But what about those who give their many hours of code development, and those who have tested such code before release? How about the many people behind the scenes who brought together packaging, documentation, multiple hours of design, marketing, online resources and more?

And all of that, I might add, is open source! Free for the world to take, copy, adapt and even incorporate in full or in part into their own open development.

It is in exactly that area that the …

This is a followup from my two previous posts on php and js git pre-commit syntax check where I had mentioned how to check for php and js syntax independently using pre-commit with git.



But what if we wanted to check for both php and js syntax at same time while committing. So, I used the scripts used for both and combined them. …

What do the acronyms I18N or L10N stand for? What do they mean for developers of mobile applications in particular?

I hosted a session about localizing mobile applications at Developer Week 2014 in Nuremberg. It covers — among other things — text, numbers, date and time, images, and other localizable resources.

See the codecentric blog for slides and some more details.

The post and the slides are also available in German.

A short while ago I posted an article on the codecentric blog about why good metrics can be, but need not be equal to good software quality. As I wrote earlier, I will add links to this blog whenever I post something of interest to the company site.

The post is available in both English and German at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2011/10/why-good-metrics-values-do-not-equal-good-quality.

Winning and losing with open source. Paranoid Android. And more.

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Winning and losing
Matt Asay stirred things up with his declaration that free software has lost and open source has won. Responding to Matt Asay, Glyn Moody argued that without free software, open source would lose its meaning, while Mark Stone explained that free versus open source is not black and white - it’s more complex than that.

Matt Asay later declared open source …

Last week saw MySQL User Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, but I was not able to make time for it this year either. However, in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, it was very interesting to follow what was going on. A few things that caught my attention:

MySQL 5.1 is nearing General Availability and an interesting storage engine plugin ecosystem starts to emerge. It's this latter, but related event that I see as the first real sign of validation for MySQL's long-ago chosen path of pluggable storage systems instead of focused effort on making one good general-use engine.

Oracle/Innobase announced InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1, which much-awaited features which promise a great deal of help for daily management headaches. More than that, InnoDB Plugin's release under …

I probably don't spend quite enough time following progress around MySQL considering how critical the product is to us. I'd like to consider it part of the infrastructure in a way I treat Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ie something I can trust to make good progress and follow up on a quarterly basis. Naturally we have people who watch both much more closely, but my time simply should, and pretty much is, spent doing something else.

However, it seems MySQL really demands a bit more attention right now. Today I went and read Jeremy Cole's opinion about MySQL Community (a failure), and I have to say I agree on many of the points. MySQL simply has not yet found a model that works as well as that of Red Hat's Fedora vs Enterprise …