Keeping It Simple
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PDO v2 CLA issues
Wez Furlong posted a request for discussion regarding the future of PDO and they proposed to adopt a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) to manage contributions to the project. Some questions have come up indicating some misunderstandings about how CLA’s work. As you may know, I worked for about a year as the project manager of…
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MacBook Air – Almost as Thin as a Sinclair ZX80
I just watched the photos and text from today’s keynote at MacWorld. Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, described as the world’s thinnest notebook computer. I suddenly recalled being at a computer graphics user group at UCSC, circa 1982. One of the hobbyists in that group had a Sinclair ZX80, a kit computer from the…
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“Pure” mysqlnd interface feedback
After I posted my idea about a pure PHP mysqlnd driver, I received an email from Ulf Wendel from the MySQL AB team who works on the mysqlnd driver. He told me I could post his comments since he doesn’t have a Blogger account. I’ll include his comments below in blockquotes and then I’ll comment…
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Idea for “pure” mysqlnd interface
When I first heard about the mysqlnd project at the MySQL Camp in 2006, somehow I thought it was going to be 100% PHP code. I can’t remember now if I was making an incorrect assumption or if they planned to write it in PHP but changed their mind. What we have today is a…
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How to Save $100 Million
Last night I listened to an interesting interview on public radio, relating a story from the New Yorker magazine about Michigan Dr. Peter Pronovost saving millions of dollars and hundreds of lives of patients. How did he do it? He taught doctors and nurses to use checklists to avoid mistakes in the intensive care units…
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In Support of the Relational Model
Every few years, a wave of people claim that the relational model falls short of modeling data structures of modern applications. This includes some really smart people recently such as: – Jim Starkey– Brian Aker– MIT researchers This trend of criticizing the relational model started almost immediately after E. F. Codd published his seminal paper,…
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Less code vs. good code
Alex Netkachov, Vidyut Luther, and Richard Heyes discuss the pros and cons of writing code that is short. Here are some thoughts from me. In general, I don’t think turning three lines of code into one line makes an application better, or more readable, or prettier, or whatever is your goal. The logical extension of…
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Enabling the Success of a Software Team
There are three “must haves” for excellent managers, which I look for when I work for a manager, and which I try to live up to when I work as a manager. I thought I’d write down these thoughts, after seeing Jeremy Cole’s blog this week with some great advice about ways to attract, motivate,…
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Proposals for MySQL Conference
I submitted proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo. SQL AntiPatterns III thought it would be a no-brainer to do a sequel of my 2007 talk, “SQL AntiPatterns”. That talk was very well attended, thanks to Jay Pipes’ endorsement in his guide to the conference. It’s not hard to come up with all-new content for…
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Leaving Zend
I’ve worked at Zend for the past 13 months, heading up an open source project called the Zend Framework. Zend Framework is a library of PHP 5 classes providing simple, object-oriented solutions for most features common to modern web applications. I was the project manager as well as developing a lot of code, tests and…
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