I just uploaded my slides from my Open DB Camp / Froscon talk to Slideshare:

Last week Monty Taylor wrote an interesting blog post Oracle do not, in fact, comprise the total set of MySQL Experts where he protested against the title of Oracle's new podcast series Meet The MySQL Experts. Now, when I say "interesting" I'm not really referring to the factual argument he is making...

What was interesting about this was to see Monty burst out like that and express some true human feelings. Through all the controversies we've seen around MySQL, the Drizzle team has made a point of staying out of such discussions and just working on cleaning up their code and adding cool new stuff (added as plugins, of course). And if anything, I would have expected it to be someone like Stewart to finally break and start ranting about something, if it were to happen...

Just to be clear: I do not actually agree with Monty on the factual topic he is raising. We are of course all very geeky and arguing about English grammar is a good way to relax, but as far as I'm concerned it is quite common for titles of podcasts and such to be shortened versions of the full, grammatically correct sentence whose meaning the are conveying. After all, it would be silly to have a podcast called "Meet the MySQL experts who work in Oracle's R&D department, but excluding those experts that do work at Oracle's support or consulting organizations, even if they are great minds too, and also excluding anyone not working for Oracle at all."

I will be using this picture of the famous Korv Göran kebab grill in my talk at OSCON next week. They recently launched a new slogan "Bigger is better". I think they are on to something, at least when it comes to the kebab business.

Did you know that...

Below is my talk from the International Federation of Computer Law Associations conference banquet that took place in Helsinki last week. (It is post-edited to match what was actually said.)

I have to say I was quite honored to be asked to speak. I was preceded by Finlands Minister of Justice Tuija Brax and later in the evening followed by imho Finlands funniest magician Martti Vannas. The dinner was set in the old stock market building of Helsinki, an exquisite restaurant now. I'm happy to say the talk was well received and many of the lawyers came to thank me afterwards.

I visited the London installment of our MySQL European Customer conference on Thursday. In a lecture hall of 250+ attendees I found an empty seat next to a man who turned out to be Patrik Pada who is the webmaster of HSS Media. Tick, tick, tick... [sound in my head thinking there is something familiar here...]

First day of the Peer production seminar in Nottingham university is over (though I'm posting this the next morning). I have to say it exceeded my expectations, so I'm really glad I was able to attend. There are several characters with a strong Free Software background here mingling with academics who are sociologists or whatnot. It creates a good mix of people on the one hand being able to give very concrete examples of how Free Software projects do stuff and on the other hand the academic minded people being very intelligent about analysing and generalising the concepts in action.

Andreas Wittel and Michael Bauwens introduced the day. Michael clearly has been thinking about this stuff for a long time, most things that we end up talking about he is already aware of and can immediately give very detailed insigths to them.

You will probably have seen this already, but as there are only a couple hours left of 2006 I thought it's appropriate to blog this here too. TIME magazine has again chosen the person of the year, and for 2006, it is YOU!!!