So with the emminent release of MSIE 7 and FF2 I decided it was high time I actually check the main project I am currently working on for compliance. Its an ajax intranet application that has a little bit of layout and convinience magic. Step one is to become able to test these new versions without breaking my current setup.

Ok, someone came in #oracle on freenode and wanted a query that would give him a distinct set of rows, where it did not matter if a values is in the first or second column.

I am currently in Zurich, after spending the last week in a farmers house in the moutains of Switzerland. This is a pretty relaxing time for me, although I am constantly working on tweaking my thesis paper (actually its not a thesis paper, its a german "Diplomarbeit"). I am more or less done and now I am just working on getting the kinks and typos out.

Lorenzo has startet working on better charset support in MDB2. He has added basic support for setting charsets and collations inside field definitions in CVS already. However, there are still plenty of open questions to look at. I have only limited experience with charsets in MySQL. Lorenzo has some experience with Firebird and PostgreSQL. But this is no where near sufficient to come up with a solution that would work reasonably well across all supported drivers. Check out his charset RFC on his blog. Comments are very much appreciated, even if they just highlight problems without giving a solution just yet.

After spending a good week at my parents in rainy but relaxing florida, I flew to Toronto to speak at php|works. The conference was great fun and especially my second talk Explaing Explain went as good as I had hoped. In the talk I was mostly talking about controlling execution plans with particular focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL. I spend longer than ever on this talk so I am happy it worked out so well. I will probably submit the same talk for OSDBcon with some minor tweaks. Since I only had 60 minutes several slides are marked "skip". Maybe OSDBcon can give me two slots so that I can cover those slides as well. The other talk building portable database applications suffered a bit from my magalomaniac attempt at giving the gist of 3 talks in one slot. Sorry that we did not have any time for Q&A as a result.