I was finishing up a business trip in Madrid yesterday and heading back to the airport while making sporadic calls into our conference calls that were going on. The Sun acquisition is now closed and we are part of the worlds biggest Open Source company. MÃ¥rten Mickos is heading the Sun Database Technology Group the Sun Database Group, which in addition to MySQL includes some happy Norwegians (they are always happy) of the Sun owned Clustra Systems, known as the Database Technology Group, who also sing drinking songs in their own language :-) They also work on the Apache Derby project. However, there was no mention of any Postgres developers falling under MÃ¥rten (caveat: I wasn't able to hear everything). I think it might be best so :-)

Here is the funny video of today, it is a documentary of the evolution of the species known as Sun Sales Engineers (I'm a Sales Engineer):

In December 2007 I was invited by www.re-public.gr to participate in a debate on the social web. While I like writing and the topic was good for me, getting a grip on the topic proved to be surprisingly difficult. In the past months I've had the privilege to hang around academics who study the phenomenons of Free Software, Internet or as one group calls it in the broadest possible way, peer-to-peer production. Listening to and reading some of the academics has been quite difficult, as socio-economics is not something I would know much about. Yet the setting of the re-public.gr discussion seemed to belong to a category I've had especially difficult to relate to. Thanks to my friend Michel Bauwens I've now learned to categorise these contributions as some kind of leftist socio-economical school of academics.

The basic framework seems to be that no matter how much progress we've had since the 19th century, and no matter what phenomenon is being discussed, somebody somewhere is being exploited!!! With this realisation I was able to scribble some kind of very non-academic reply:

There is a japanese karaoke bar here in the Dolphin and Swan hotel (where we are finishing the the MySQL All Company Meeting).

So I worked with MySQL for a full 2 days, basically one day on an airplane and another day in the new employee introduction we had in the Orlando meeting.

So I managed to answer all those questions correctly and the US Border Control officer kindly let us into the country. It was easy since the questions were the same as the last time I visited the US in 2000. Filling this sheet is always a fun time, it makes me wonder wanna know wether there exist any statistics on how many terrorists and drug trafficants get caught by accidentally filling in the wrong box :-) Then of course there are some tricky questions, what if you are traveling to the US to engange in immoral but legal activities. From what I know sitting naked in the sauna would already be suspicious here ;-D

Wow, this is shocking...

Some time ago we had a discussion on the p2presearch mailing list about the deletionism movement that is rampant on Wikipedia. This led to Michel Bauwens spending a few hours finding out more about the topic. The results - posted on his blog - were shocking. (Also the comments to the article are good, some my own of course :-)

Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY

I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.

All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:

I didn't blog about it, but I'm sure you read it in all the other blogs, that the band Radiohead did a revolutionary thing in October of 2007. They released their new album for download on the Internet. Fans were able to pay a price they could determine themselves. This is great news for those of us who believe the old and stagnated recording industry has got it all wrong. We need people like the Radiohead guys to prove them wrong.