ucantblamem

• Quite a nice little virtual host offering.
• SM2 is yet again looking for full time staff to come on board with an exciting year of big projects ahead
• XHTML is just XML remember - so learning XML really should be a required lesson before you’re awarded a diploma in web-design in my opinion. Here’s a free video course on XML from UC Berkeley
• I started reading this not knowing it was a (fictional) story - brilliant piece though
• Yet another great article which confirms my theory that formal education basically equates to diddly when measuring a programmer
• I’m going to go out on a limb and call this the best website design of 2007
• This is somewhat of an in joke (for web-designers), but it’s funny
• It’s about to be a big month for Musicadium - hope to see you at the party!

One of the things that I’m continually doing is figuring out sneaky ways of making websites display in ways that CSS doesn’t really do too well (yet). One of those things is making multiple elements have equal height, the way that tables do. (more…)

MySQL announced yesterday that they have been acquired by SUN Microsystems! It’s pretty significant news for a lot of people as it’s probably the most popular Database system on the web and makes up the “M” in LAMP.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with the acquirer; SUN is the biggest contributor to Open Source of any corporate and should bring plenty of technical expertise to the MySQL table.

Of course, there have been no solid roadmap announcements from SUN in these early days, so any commentary on the direction for MySQL, at this stage, are relatively speculative. But, Jonathan Schwartz, SUN’s CEO/President made a fairly informative post on his blog about the acquisition and also some insight into what he envisages in the future.

He suggests that many CIO’s want access to the source code, yet also want enterprise class support, which is something SUN is well known for (at a hefty price I might add). He also mentions wanting to add support for ZFS, SUN’s incredible file system and of course, their mainframe servers which I guess 0.0001 of MySQL’s market might be interested in??? Finally, he mentions wanting to “water the trees” - by investing in [read: gifting to] universities and other academic institutions.

I really don’t think anything earth-shattering is going to come out of this, as MySQL AB was a corporate company as is SUN. We should see some interesting innovations in the future and probably in the meantime, plenty of FOSS purists crying wolf. :P