In my role as Web Developer for mysql.com I have always tried to advocate open web standards, and to adopt good new web technologies as early as possible. And I believe that an open source product like MySQL owes the World Wide Web open web technologies, rather than content which requires proprietary plugins. Which is why it’s a pleasure for me to tell you that demo videos which used to require Flash have been replaced by new demo videos which work with HTML5 video (and using Flash only as fallback for old browsers).

Take a look:

… or even better, take a look at the real thing at …

db4free.net is joining the protest against SOPA & PIPA and will stay down for 24 hours, starting January 18, 2012 at 02:00 UTC.

Learn more on what this is all about at americancensorship.org …

… and why the WEB GOES ON STRIKE …

… or watch some of the many videos related to SOPA on YouTube.

A few months ago I wrote about how to do language detection correctly, to respect the user’s preferred language setting in his/her browser, aka the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header.

Now, finally, db4free.net has received exactly this implementation. Took me a while, but now it’s there :).

Especially German speaking people will notice the difference. If German takes priority over English in the browser settings, the German version of db4free.net will be loaded by default. No more need to click the German flag. If neither German nor English is set, the site will default to English.

However, the English and German flags are still available, to change the language if a person chooses to. This allows for maximum flexibility.

Noticed the new navigation item in the MySQL Developer Zone?

Sarah Novotny and Sheeri K. Cabral have picked up the OurSQL Podcasts again which were on hiatus for a while (well, they have now been back again for a while as well). The Podcasts are available on several resources:

• The OurSQL Podcasts page
• Technocation, Inc.
• iTunes
• …

Recently I wrote about detecting the preferred language or locale of a web site visitor, using Zend Framework.

Well, I have to start with one correction. In my last blog post about this topic I talked about the User Agent String, but since I wrote the article, I figured out that the User Agent String doesn’t play any role at all. Neither in the Zend Framework variant that I blogged about earlier, nor in today’s code. And that is good so, because both Internet Explorer and …

Sometimes I find Google annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of the many Google haters out there. They have done amazing things and especially since they have released WebM as Open Source and royalty free video format, they have earned a bonus in my attitude towards them. And even though Google Chrome is not my personal favorite, I have to admit that Chrome has brought a great momentum into the development of web browsers (and therefor the WWW as a whole) which users of any browser benefit from. Last but not least, I use a lot of Google’s services and they do their job quite well. So all in all, Google’s record from my point of view is pretty good.

But one thing really sucks. I use an English operating system. I use an English Firefox (locale en-US). All the language preferences in the Google profiles of my …