Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Sun was initially thinking of a commercial fork for MySQL with some enhanced things like encryption and compression backup for commercial users. Obviously this created some outcry. It appears they’ve now reconsidered and those features will be open source. To quote Kaj Arnö:

…expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and [...]

Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective:
Adium

Data Detectors for Adium

Dojo Foundation

Native cryptography API for Google Gears
Dojo-Charting improvements
Dojo GFX Enhancement

FFmpeg

AAC-LC Encoder
MLP/TrueHD encoder
Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg

Gallery

Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging

Inkscape

SVG Fonts

Joomla!

Multi-DB support, and Database abstraction layer implementation for Joomla!

The Mozilla [...]

This is a great page on RAND() in MySQL. Very nice breakdown of how to gain performance with one of the biggest “it should be simple but it isn’t” problems in DBMS’s.

So my dev instance of MySQL crashed with some InnoDB corruption (as in service won’t even start). Still no idea exactly what caused it, but I don’t really care. The only database using InnoDB wasn’t anything I actually used, just junk that should have been cleaned up anyway. The downside is that [...]

The PHP development team is proud to announce the official release of PHP 5.
Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
A new [...]

Due to a server move at the end of April/early May, the blog was broke due to an inconsistency between the version of Berkley DB on the old and new host. Now running on mySQL, it’s back up and running!