I recently picked up two O'Reilly books for $20 each: "High Performance MySQL" and "SQL Tuning". I am almost done with "High Performance MySQL". Overall I would say it’s a good book. Not suprising from the original publication date it is focused on MySQL 4.1 and therefore does not cover a lot of the advances made with MySQL 5. Especially replication comes to mind, but also little things like index usage for MIN() and MAX(). It does however contain a few notes here and there about changes/enhancements to expect with MySQL 5.

I have been following the various wishlist items for PHP6 with quite some personal interest. I even compiled all the wishlist items I saw on mailinglists, on IRC or that were brought up at conferences and put it online. Much of these items made it on the agenda at the recent PHP6 core developer meeting in Paris.

I am not interest in your software patent pledges. I want you to freaken burn them, I want you to freaken stop lobbying for this crap and I want you instead to lobby to ban their very existence. So I am very much in agreement with Florian Müller's (who has been working hard in cooperation with MySQL to prevent a legitimization of software patents in Europe) assessment of the state of affairs.

I wrote a reply to Chris Zend Framework wishlist. He focused on security aspects that by and large the WebBuilder2 framework has already effectively addressed. Since I was only made aware of this post today even though it was posted 3 weeks ago I am publishing it here as well to get some more exposure and more importantly feedback.

may have already noticed this. But I changed the CAPTCHA in my blog from the rather obnoxious and very hard to read image generated by the code I picked up from the PEAR::Text_CAPTCHA sample to a fairly simple math problem. It seems to hold off spam well for now. Expect the math problem to increase in difficulty once I get spam (or stupid comments) but for now all is well. Now even Wez should be able to solve it on first try :-)