Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November. The short summary is that the examples are very well chosen (while a bit light on the Javascript side), the writing style is very good, the examples are riddled with minor to major oversights and formatting errors. I will send a long list of the errors I found to Pakt, so be sure to keep the errata handy once one is released while looking through the code examples.

This was the title of an article back in 2002 by Shelley Doll and other articles with more or less the same concerns including the secretary of the ANSI database committee. In my recent blog post I made the point that I do hope that MySQL AB tries to follow the standards as much as possible (while retaining the freedom to add things as deemed necessary .. LIMIT and friends). In a chat conversation with Jan, he asked me what my thoughts are in regards to the SQL standard in particular. Most people will for example agree that standards compliant SQL routines are no fun to write. Unfortunately I had to agree with him that SQL today isn't what it should be.

I did not attend the talk Monty gave at OpenMind 2007. I only have Zak's recollections to go by and among various interesting tidbits I found the following note by Zak: "DBMS implementations must change. FLOSS DBMS will be able to react most quickly to changes in what people want and what hardware offers. They can react quickly, because FLOSS DBMS focus on serving users first and worrying about standards, marketing and so on afterwards."

Just a quick FYI. I got annoyed enough for having no mechanism to see new comments that I finally hacked this feature into my super charged news module gone blog software. The rss link that most browsers will display in the URL bar has already been updated. All that you need to do is add "?MAIN[full]=1" at the end of the current feed you may be subscribing and you are all set. So both the old and the new feed are ready to serve your reading cravings :)

Some of you may remember my blog post about why I missed the Vikinger Unconference. KLM failed to fly me to Norway in time, instead they left me stranded in Amsterdam for a night. Well I dropped of a letter with my complaint a week later when I was in Amsterdam for the Dutch PHP Conference. What then happened was a nightmare with a happy end.