The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle’s lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory. Oracle on Friday offered a beta version of the new database for Windows and Linux on its Oracle Technology Network Web site.

This is a good move on Oracle’s behalf. Many open-source engineers and programmers use MySQL or PostgreSQL merely because Oracle is cost-prohibitive. They never have the opportunity to learn or use it at all — whether or not the performance justifies the cost of the full-fledged product. This could go a long way towards helping Oracle lure back some of the market share currently being eroded by the OSS RDBMSes out there. But will it be able to compete with them? MySQL 5.0 was just released with an impressive list of added features that narrows the gap between MySQL and what Oracle has to offer.

• PPTP support in the kernel
• FUSE (userspace filesystem) support has been merged
• ipw2100 and ipw2200 (the wireless card my laptop uses) have been merged in as well

Check out the human-readable Changelog.

Microsoft has taken a new approach to security in particular in the enforcement side. They took a clean computer. Infected it with a common malicious code. That code turned the computer into a Spam zombie. A Spam zombie is a computer that is connected to the Internet that has been infected and checks in with the zombie controllers to let them tell it what to do. Microsoft documented 5 Million connections used to send over 18 million Spam messages in less then 3 weeks. This was just one computer. There are reported to be thousands of Spam zombies out there. Microsoft cordoned their Spam zombie off the net so it could not be used to actually send the Spam. Microsoft filed a lawsuit and contacted ISP’s to try to discover who is really sending the Spam.

Why didn’t I think of that? Oh right, I don’t have the millions of dollars to buy resources and file lawsuits. I just hope that Microsoft is investing as much in securing their operating system as they are tracking down these zombies — after all the zombies wouldn’t exist if their operating system weren’t so easily targetted by them.

I have mixed feelings. I hope that it won’t add to Opera’s increasing bloat and memory profile, but on the other hand, I think bittorrent is a great technology that more people should use.

Check out the AT&T breakup on wikipedia, which has a rather hilarious disclaimer at the moment:

This article has recently been linked from Slashdot.
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.

You can’t take those slashdot kids anywhere.

The Zend PHP Framework represents a standard way of doing things. It will also be a solid codebase from which we can base our solutions without having to maintain thousands of lines of supporting code. The bulk of our revenue comes from “billable hours” and no client should be paying us to create a DB package that is flexible enough for us to use on every project. My hope is that the Zend Framework will limit the number of non-billable hours that we spend writing PHP code. It will also make it easier for us to cross-train developers on the different applications that we develop and support.

These are some of the reasons that I am thirsty for more information about this framework and what it will provide. Today I was able to glean from Wez’s post that the Zend PHP Framework will be somewhat similar to a Ruby on Rails type solution for PHP. There will be front controllers, page controllers, Active Record database models, templating, URL creation, and integrated logging. Input filtering and search are two features I am hesitant to speculate on, but that I am very interested in. I hope and imagine there will be facilities to easily publish web services APIs and create reusable components. I hope there will be some provided components like a data grid and a form package. There is currently little information other than speculation (which I am adding to).

Technically I expect it will be a modern architecture that facilitates agile application development. That will be important since it will help us consistently develop application faster. Having a set of documented standards with a consistent code base will also make it easier for use to develop and maintain multiple applications at once.

As a project manager I look forward to the consistency the framework will afford us as well as the quality I expect from a Zend supported code base. This is something PHP has needed for a long time and it has become apparent that while small groups of independent developers can create a quality PHP framework, for some reason it seems the PHP community is incapable of rallying behind a project the way the Ruby and Java communities have behind Rails and Tapestry (and others). Kudos to Zend for getting this ball rolling.

I haven’t found any good answer to the problem of compressing and archiving mail server-side, however (although they have discussed it on the dovecot dev list). Probably because this requires cooperation on behalf of both the MDA (i.e. the MTA or something like procmail) and the mail-reading protocol (IMAP, et al) to both agree to read/write gzipped/bzipped data.

One hack I do think would be relatively easy to append to the IMAP RFC would be something similar to HTTP’s “Accept-Encoding” header. It would be trivial for an IMAP client to hack in gzip/bzip support and send “Accept-encoding: gzip” and likewise trivial for any IMAP servers to recognize it and deliver gzipped data. This wouldn’t help the problem of storing uncompressed data, but it would help sending it over bandwidth-constrained paths.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

* Description of your party planning service
* Articles on current events from your website
* Listing of your used car for sale
* Database of protein structures

It’s a pretty nebulous idea that has ramifications elsewhere, but you can’t help but notice the parallels in the use for this and the current popularity of things like ebay/ebaymotors, craigslist, etc.