I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.

Wired already reported that Google Trends could have been used to find out about the Swine Flu epidemic in Mexico weeks before it was reported in the news media. Then, in anticipation of the Eurovision Song Contest 2009, the google engineers created a widget that would take Google Trends data as input (per country), and transform the search activity in each country to Eurovision points of 1 to 12. I copied the prediction to my Facebook page just when the Eurovision final was starting:

Having read a weeks worth of reactions to MySQL ending up at Oracle, I just want to say that by far the aptest1 commentary goes to Chris Powers from the Falcon team. A picture indeed says more than 1k words:

Now I know it is not the apocalypse and we probably won't be crucified either. But I do sympathise with the Falcon team, their reason of existence certainly is put more into question than us in general.

The prize to the most astonishing prediction goes to John Dvorak, writing in January 2008:

• 1is that a word?

As mentioned previously, Monty Widenius is starting his new company based on some interesting premises. With Zak Greant they have co-authored a pamflet where they outline a blueprint for Open Source companies. In many ways this could be considered the "Dogme 95" of Open Source businesses:-)

So we had a very nice dinner with Monty and the Finnish "MySQL Ab alumni". It was to my surprise augmented by Sergei Golubchick, whom I had never really met face to face and was delighted to be seated next to. Also a first for me was to meet Pekka Nousiainen, from the MySQL Cluster team. Which is funny because I kind of work together with him on IRC and email, but we had never met before "in real life" either.

Before the dinner I had asked in a rather cryptic message people to share some MySQL memories on a separate page on this site, followed up a couple days later by Kaj's less cryptic message. I printed whatever had arrived before I left for the restaurant and read a few snippets out loud. I should say that Monty liked it very much and thanked more than once for such a nice thought. He said that hearing some of the things you had written brought back many nice memories for him, and between all the Swedish drinking songs there was a sentimental moment right there. Personally I also liked the "international connection" of enabling Monty's friends to participate in this kind of virtual manner together with us Helsinki bound people that actually were there face-to-face so to speak. After all, MySQL always was an international project.

if( $name == "Monty Widenius" ) {
  STOP reading;
}
else {
  Contribute a personal MySQL memory here
  then spread-the-word!
}

So now that we have said goodbye to the old crew, I thought it might be appropriate to make some forward looking statements, as publicly traded companies say...

Kaj's talk at FOSDEM seems to be a good summary of the situation: We'll probably become a bit more integrated into Sun, there'll probably be less Swedish drinking songs1 , and other than that we don't know yet.

One observation one could make is that instead of Scandinavian drinking songs, there might be some Turkish or Persian influnce taking over. In honour of that, today's post is a favorite internet viral video from these regions:

• 1Mårten finished his last all hands staff meeting (call) as they apparently have started once upon a time, singing Helan går. (I hope I don't get into trouble now, contents of the staff meetings are of course company confidential...)

I try to limit the amount of hair-cut blog posts, but since The Data Charmer is writing travel blogs too... Here are some observations from Moscow: