MySQL has gone GPL. How about that?

Vaya con dios, Elian.

My author interview at Amazon.com has finally been posted. Reading it, I realized that it’s pretty dull, but I’ve never had a knack for self-promotion.

I’ve read few articles that disturbed me as much as Michiko Kakutani’s selective survey of the “cyber-lexicon” or whatever else the writer chooses to call it. She paints a stereotypical and almost entirely inaccurate picture of “geeks”, using terms she mined from various dubious sources (quoting axe-grinder Paulina Borsook on just about anything is a sure sign that you’ve got an agenda). I’ve never seen most of the terms she cites used in online conversation, much less in real life. Her unnuanced analysis should be an affront not only to the people that she insults directly, but to any thinking person. She totally misrepresents the usage of the terms that actually are in common parlance, completely missing the self-efacing manner in which they’re often used. I could go on a lot longer about specific problems with the article, but I’ll just close by saying that it’s really a shame to see this kind of hit and run writing in the New York Times. Of course, ESR’s rebuttal in Salon isn’t really any better. News flash to ESR: there are plenty of geeks and hackers who aren’t libertarians.

How do you define megalomania? Eric S. Raymond gave a 5 hour The Cathedral and the Bazaar rehash as the keynote speaker at the MacHack conference. The worst part is that the keynote begins at midnight, so he pontificated until 5 in the morning.

The Register has a better article covering C# than anyone else so far. They answer the burning question in my mind with the answer I expected: C# was designed by people Microsoft poached from Borland.

The New York Times article on the announcement of the completed map of the human genome (which isn’t really complete) provides a useful historical perspective on the rivalry between Celera, a private company, and the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Everyone talks about Celera trouncing the HGP in the gene race, but Celera couldn’t have finished without borrowing lots of data from the HGP. On the other hand, the HGP wouldn’t be halfway finished if not for Celera’s lighting a fire under them.

This week’s JDC Tech Tip includes a quick overview of XML, and more usefully, contains code examples that use the SAX API and the DOM. Now I understand what SAX is and how it works.

Depressing news for the browser market. Microsoft has pretty much attained enough market share to completely ignore the Web standards process. Mozilla continues to progress very slowly, and at this point, I doubt we’ll see them release a browser in 2000 either. If you care about competition, these are pretty dark days. I used to hold out hope that wireless devices would demand that people adhere to the standards process, but with WAP getting so many headlines, I think that we may just see a fork there. I’m depressed.

I’ve been kind of fixating on C# for the past day or so, and I’m feeling news starved. I realized that I have no idea where Windows developers get their news and gossip. I checked out MSDN magazine, developer.com, and a bunch of specialty Windows magazines on the Web, but none of them have any timely news on C#. If this were an open source project, I’d have the full scoop already, but I’m coming up with nothing here. I’m looking for things like interviews with the creators, quotes from Microsoft developer relations people, and that sort of thing. Anyone have any ideas?