Yesterday we finally released RC2. It took much much longer than I had hoped. Several reasons played a factor here. For one it seems like people needed a bit of a breather after RC1 to work on other stuff. More importantly we found two large problem areas, one of which is hopefully fixed, the other one patched with a hack for now. But given the large amounts of other fixes and the fact that TestFest is running in full steam with several European User Groups set to meet tomorrow, it was high time we put RC2 out there. I am really happy that TestFest is continuing this year. More importantly when Zoe took over the leadership she made sure that we learned from last years mistakes. Things seem to be running much smoother in her hands than they did last year in mine. All the User Groups have also given their input and so its clear that this years TestFest will be bigger and more productive than last years by far! Obviously the commitment from each of the User Groups is vital to the over success.

In my quest to become the best DJ in the world .. ok lets say in my quest to have fun DJing .. I got engaged in the DJTT community and want ti give back a bit for all the help, advice and most importantly motivation I got from these guys with a bit of coding. I have 3 tasks I want to complete. Two of them deal with additions to the forum and the other one to encourage more blogging in the scene to share ideas and tipps.

To me this is quite boring news. I already felt more distant to MySQL when it got scooped up by Sun and this sense of distance is the same now. Note this distance is still quite "travel-able" .. it just feels a bit like flying to another continent. Also I have essentially zero worries that Oracle will (try) to kill off MySQL or cripple it. MySQL is complementary to their current offerings. One thing I could see however is Oracle pushing for killing off some of the past cruft (and in the process beefing up Oracle compatibility). This last aspect brings me to something I consider much more interesting news.

A while ago I have hinted at some big news for me. Well its finally time I announce them: I have reduced my workload at Liip to 80%. Since all I really spend money on is Frisbee tournaments (which are not that expensive), I have decided I can afford myself this luxury. However playing even more Frisbee is not something my body can take and without a new hobby I would surely just end up sitting in front of the computer coding. So I have thought about the things I have enjoyed in recent times but did not get the time to follow up on and then I realized that I always had a lot of fun filling in as a DJ (even if just using my cellphone) at Frisbee parties when the DJ went home too early or bored the crowd with non danceable stuff.

I was just reading through the various blog posts on this topic on the tram (yeah catching up from a long frisbee weekend). So this blog post is essentially an idea I actually wanted to implement in a recent project, which unfortunately the client did not prioritize high enough to make it out of the product backlog (scrum lingo). Anyways it seems to offer a solution to the problem at hand as well.