Today brings news that Sun has acquired MySQL AB, the corporate entity that develops the open-source relational database management system MySQL. I don’t have much to say about this because I’m not sure what to think. I know that MySQL AB has been slowed since Oracle acquired Innobase, a company that provided the InnoDB database engine for MySQL that featured capabilities such as referential integrity that allowed MySQL to compete against the likes of Oracle’s database offerings. MySQL AB itself had spurned Oracle’s advances before, which makes this acquisition a little surprising. I have worked and continue to work on projects using MySQL. It will be interesting to see what unfolds.
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
Side view of the new “Macbook Air”
The MacWorld San Francisco keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs came and went yesterday. I have to admit that I’m left pretty unimpressed. I haven’t watched the full keynote, but judging from the announcements that came out, nothing really blew me away. Of course, I bring higher than reasonable expectations into each keynote. Here are my impressions of the high points.
MacBook Air: This is an ultra-thin addition to the Macbook family. It’s less than one inch thick at it’s thickest point. It has a 64GB solid state storage option (for a whopping $999). It sacrifices and optical drive for space, but features an ability to “borrow” an optical drive from another Mac or PC on the network. I think the thinness is cool, but it won’t fit in my pocket, so I’d still rather spend all that cash on a loaded MacBook Pro.
iTunes Movie rentals: This idea interests me, but until I have an HDTV and an Apple TV, I really have no use for it. Given that the library already includes around 100 HD-quality movies, and I do have a new 20″ HD display on my computer, I might try this out to see if an Apple TV is really worth getting when the new TV comes (hopefully soon).
Apple TV: Along with movie rentals, they also released an updated Apple TV and dropped the price to $229.
iPhone software update: Updates are available that allow for a customizable home screen, enhanced mapping with psuedo-GPS for figuring out where you are, and multi-recipient SMS capability. Alas, no news on hardware updates, though. The new maps app is cool, but it guesses your location based on your relationship to cell towers and wi-fi routers instead of GPS. I want an iPhone badly, but I think I can wait until a 3G version comes out, especially now that AT&T has 3G in Oklahoma City, and it is really fast. Maybe 3G and true GPS are coming this year. If so, I’m all over it.
Time Capsule: This is a product that I just might buy soon. They have basically released an AirPort wi-fi base station with a hard drive in it that is capable of acting as a wireless backup disk with Leopard’s Time Machine. I’m currently in the market for two things: a) a hard drive for backup and b) an 802.11n wi-fi router with Gigabit Ethernet. This has them all. So I am definitely going to check this one out.
Those are the high points. I’m looking forward to watch the keynote to see if there is anything I missed. Overall fairly ho-hum compared to previous years, but it’s clear Apple doesn’t save everything for MacWorld anymore. So new announcements could be just around the corner.
Top: Old Design. Bottom: New design.
For almost ten years, my church’s Web site has gone relatively unchanged. The design had become dated and so had the process to add and update the content on it. Shortly after joining the church about two and a half years ago, I volunteered to take on or assist in a makeover project. It took a while for the stars to align, but after starting work a few months ago, we finally launched the redesign this week.
For the first time ever, I used the very popular Joomla! CMS. I have long been a proponent of Drupal over Joomla!, mainly due to the fact that Drupal seems more friendly to those who want to add their own PHP modules quickly. Joomla!, however, has a very rabid user-base that has produced a large number of usable plug-ins. This allowed me to produce a professional, interactive site with only a few lines of my own handcrafted PHP. This was definitely nice. While I still definitely love Drupal, I can see myself using Joomla! again in the future.
Feel free to let me know what you think of the redesign.
c|net’s News.com has posted an interview with Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor regarding the release of songs from his collaboration with Saul Williams on the album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust.” The album, similar to the Radiohead release of “In Rainbows”, was made available for $5 or free to see who was really willing to pay for high-quality, non-DRM music.
As it turns out, the answer is not very many when it comes to Saul Williams’ album. Reznor reports that only one in five people were willing to pay. The interview reveals a different side the the “music in the new Internet world” debate. Reznor comes off very defeated and not sure where to go from here.
“The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There’s a perception that you don’t pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace.,” he said.
One idea he has is an ISP music tax, whereby everyone pays around $5 extra and all music on the Web is free. If it’s an optional tax, like taxes of gasoline or cigarettes, I don’t think its a bad idea. However, I have a real problem with forcing a tax on people who “legally” acquire most, if not all, of their music collection.
Read the full article here.
Wired has published an in depth article on the iPhone development process and it’s long-term impact on the wireless phone industry. It speaks on the efforts, trials, and money that it took Apple to come out with the device. In the end it proclaims that despite some of the obvious knocks on the device it “…cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves. Consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. And, as with the advent of the PC, the iPhone is sparking a wave of development that will make it even more powerful.”
Read the full article here.
