Has MySQL lost the plot?

Ever since 5.1 went to release candidate status some months ago, we've been keenly awaiting GA status so we can deploy on our production servers with some more confidence. Truth be told, we would probably have deployed one of the beta releases were it not for some of the truly scary bugs listed in the change log - I mean come on guys, how on earth can you let a database get to release candidate status when it gets DESC and ASC mixed up when ordering results? That really threw me and then reading the change logs you see a whole host of issues that do not inspire confidence and make it seem as if the engineering team is trying to do to much at once - Maria (wtf did that come from), Falcon, 6.0 alpha, keeping 5.0 stable, moving federated tables in and out of the release ... it all looks a bit out of control to me and I wonder if this is a consequence of the loss of innodb to Oracle, Sun's involvement, Monty's imminent departure, ... it doesn't bode well for the future.

If I were Sun right now, I'd freeze ANY work on anything other than 5.1 and actually get it released. I'd maintain the freeze on anything else for 3 months to ensure that 5.1 bugs that crop up are nailed quickly and during that time I'd be having a lot of strategy discussions about where MySQL is going and why ... and then I'd streamline the development so that they're focussing on one problem at a time - and not dozens.

It all smells a bit like FFMPEG, a truly great (potential) video decoding / encoding engine that is ruined by poor project management and the inability of the group to focus on fixing bugs instead on building codecs that no-one really needs. Heck they don't even do formal releases now and have basically given up on any degree of control. It's a crying shame, if those in charge got together and said, right, for the next 6 months we implement no new features, we just concentrate on making what we have now work properly, they would have one of the best open source projects on the web - as it is, FFMPEG seems doomed to wallow in the backwaters of things that are great for hobbyists, but of little use elsewhere.

Hot news from Cooliris

Have you tried Cooliris out yet? Maybe you know it as Piclens ... the uber cool browser plug-in that lets you browse rich media on a 3D wall.

I've been adding support for it to ChilliVault and ran into a problem with video - although it claims to support flash video, sadly it's only .flv media and not the more modern h264 encoded flavour that Adobe's flash has been playing back since last December :(

Well hot news ... according to the developers at Cooliris, h264 flash video support is due by the end of September 2008, Yeeeeeeesssssssss!!!!!

Welcome stranger

So here it is, my first blog under my real name. No pen names, pseudonyms or anagrams, I am who I say I am and there's no hiding from it now.

Today is Thursday, and right now I'm sitting in front of a pair of laptops, one of which is running trading software and the other (the one these words are being typed on) is SO SLOW that it is doing my head in. How can it take any modern computer (for this one is just 3 years old) over 30 seconds to decide what I can do when I right click on a file. I mean COME ON M$OFT, this just isn't on and if things don't improve soon, I think I'll abandon windows altogether and turn Ubuntu.

Trading ... did I mention trading?

More of that in a later post ...