On April 14-17 the MySQL Users Conference will be held in Santa Clara, CA again. Vlad and I will represent the MySQL Developer Tools Team.

Vlad is going to host a tutorial session about Workbench scripting and I will do two talks about Workbench in general. In addition to that we will do BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions.

If you are in the area, please come by we will have lots of fun as usual and you get to check out the latest about MySQL Workbench.

MySQL UC
What's BOF?

Ronald, a MySQL buddy, took a three day break from his vacation in Germany and joined me on do some skiing/snowboarding action at the infamous Hochkar last week. The weather was beautiful and we were hitting the slopes Monday to Wednesday, staying over at Gerti's.

On Tuesday Claudia and Andrea joined us and we had lots of fun until Claudia made a wrong twist on a high-speed slope. That resulted in a rather violent "French kissing the
ice plate" as she would described the accident later on.

My heart stopped for a moment when she was just laying there - motionless - without any vital signs. I have not see such a violent accident before - it was really a scary. She was dazed for some time and her pretty face was looking like she has been beaten up real bad. After getting her to a doctor she returned heavily covered in band-aid. It took a few days till the pain was gone and she was feeling better again.

On the last day Ronald and I took some pictures with his new Canon. Today I finally finished a multi-shot composition of me making a carving turn.

All told those have been exciting days and if it was not for Claudia's accident it would have been a very cool vacation.

Just before the accident
Snowboard Multi-shot
Hochkar

The cam arrived yesterday morning at Vienna airport. FedEx called me at 7:30 because they needed some documents signed for customs. Luckily they were able to accept them via email which meant I could send them back immediately without driving to the office and use the fax machine.

Since all trucks had already left the station once the custom declaration process was finished I drove by and picked it up myself (btw. that was the first time my new used BMW 320d touring I got this week payed off - I would not have been able to get those boxes into my old Mazda 121 Baby).

Today I started unboxing the cam and putting everything together as well as making the first test shots. The cam is much bigger in size than I had imagined. And fully configured it is very heavy. I am looking forward to the Nikon mount since that will reduce the total weight a lot - those Cooke lenses are really heavy!

Red One Unboxing Pics

Finally! After waiting for about two years my Red One Digital Film camera is finally ready to ship. It was very interesting to follow the complete development cycle of this product - from the very first designs to the first pre-beta cams to now the final production cameras.

I am going to resolve the last complications with the order process today and will expect the camera end of next week or beginning of the week after.

These are exciting times!

After finally releasing the Workbench Beta on Monday it was time for some snowboard action yesterday. And what a perfect day it was! We arrived at the skiing region at 9am and the sun started to break through the clouds. All slopes were in perfect condition and all ski-lifts operating. This is nothing unusual if it wasn't for the fact that only a handful of people were there and it felt like the whole region would belong only to us - the advantage of going there on a normal working day.

The temperature was extremely warm and during noon the snow become somewhat gluey. But the fact that the sun was covered within clouds again helped.

In the afternoon we were feeling quite exhaust but overall it was the perfect start into the winter season.

Workbench Beta Blog
HochKar

I have not made a blog entry about MySQL Workbench in a while. We have been extremely busy on getting the tool towards the beta state and last Friday we made the last internal release before the public beta release.

The reason why we are not releasing alphas this time is that we already put out a "technology preview" more than a year and a half ago but were forced to work on other projects and could not continue with that. That means that this early alpha was not in a state that made it really usable and people have been complaining about that. So, to restore their faith in the project I decided that the next thing we are going to release has to be in much better shape.

And now we are on a good track of achieving that. The last 10% are always the hardest to get done - but with 95% of the feature set already working and the work of our dedicated QA guy I am confident that we can do it.

My bro just pointed me to this little PS3 game, Little Big Planet. The video starts a bit boring when they show how to design the levels but really becomes fun when the four guys start playing a level.

This looks so cute and funny, I really want to play this :) I especially like the guy with the long scarf.

And the graphics looks so good, almost rendered.

Little Big Planet

Yesterday evening I returned from the MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg. It was a very productive meeting and also a good time to brief the other teams on the progress we make with the MySQL Workbench project.

Apart from work we had a lot of fun and it was good to see everybody again.

I am now the proud owner of an 8GB iPhone for $399. Unlocking took me two nights because there was a problem with the baseband modem firmware. But after flashing it the anySim app patched the phone without problems.

The horror stories published my Apple that an unlocked phone has a "permanently damaged" software is BS of course, because you can always reinstall the original software. A tutorial how to do this is already being worked on.

The UI of the iPhone is really good but I yet have to get used to the iPod interface. The only annoying thing is that Safari will not store your passwords for websites, so you have to enter them again and again if these sites do not support cookies.

Ok, now that they have lowered the price to $399 and it can be unlocked to work with e.g. T-Mobile SIM cards there is no reason for me not to get one.

I wanted a Smartphone for years now but there never was the optimal device I wanted to spend hundreds of Euros on. And the iPhone brings it all together.

Getting the US model has some limitations of course - like no UMTS/HSDPA and only 8GB (and the upcoming models seems to have 16GB). But they are going to charge premium for that again which I am certainly not going to pay.

What a nice coincidence that the MySQL Dev Meeting is coming up and Mark is so kind to bring one from the US.

iPhone
iNdependence
iPhone Dev Wiki

Got my new Apple Keyboard and AirPort Extreme today. The Apple Online Store listed a delivery time of 1-2 weeks but they actually sent it out on the very next day.

The keyboard is extremely cool, ultra flat. As I do not have my MacBook Pro yet I've connected it to my XP machine and it works smoothly. Same on my old Powerbook after installing the software update.

Setting up the AirPort was trivial and it is doing what it is supposed to do. Have not yet tried to connect a USB harddrive to it to make it a network disk.


Hannes has found a few other small tools for OSX that make your life easier. Geektool allows to show various things like the system log directly on the desktop. StartupSound.prefPane allows for turning off the annoying Mac startup sound. The iSlayer apps displays nice stats in the menu bar and on the Dashboard.

New Apple Keyboard
GeekTool
StartupSound.prefPane
iSlayer
LittleSnitch
Flip4Mac
WhatSize
Disk Inventory X