At $1 billion, assuming MySQL's current revenue is optimistically set at $100 million annually, Sun paid a multiple of 10 times sales for MySQL today. Optimistically assuming a 20% profit margin, they are looking at a multiple of 50 times earnings for a return on investment of around 2% per year. Optimistically.

Few people get rich making equity investments at less than half the rate of return of an average money market fund. I don't know how Sun financed the deal, but if they leveraged it at all, there is a good chance they will be losing money out of the gate with this investment.

Maybe for a company with a rock solid balance sheet and a record of extracting maximum value from their acquisitions, this deal might make some sense. JAVA doesn't meet either of those criteria.

But wait, there's more. If Sun's customers plan to extract an enterprise level of functionality from MySQL, they basically have no option but to use the InnoDB storage engine to underpin the SQL front end. And guess who owns that. That's right, Oracle, the 800 lbs gorilla of the SQL market. The rocket science ain't in the SQL parser. It's in the storage layer, and that didn't come with the $1 billion price tag.

BTW, the J2EE 6 installer blew up on us when we tried to install it on Linux x86_64, and judging by their own news groups, we're not alone. Mr. Schwartz, for a mere $1 million I'll get that working for you, and you'll get your platform back. It's one hell of a deal if you think about it.

I have about 8 years experience working in financial portfolio analytics. In that time I've gotten a peek at how the money industry works. It is a fascinating domain, and I see myself sticking with it for the long haul.

Occasionally folks ask me for investing advice. WARNING! I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR AND YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO TAKE MY ADVICE. But here it is anyway. Go to Vanguard's web site. Figure out what year you will turn 60. Find a fund called Target Retirement Fund N, where N is closest to the year you will turn 60. Buy that fund (hopefully in a tax deferred account) and add to it on a regular basis. Vanguard Target Funds offer an inexpensive mix of U.S. domestic and foreign stocks and bonds by investing passively in multiple broad market indexes. The funds automatically rebalance to favor lower risk investments as you approach retirement age.

Over a long enough period you will likely beat 90+% of all investors with almost no work.

I have almost all my personal savings in index funds and fixed income, but I do have a very small part of my portfolio in wild card stocks that I pick myself. I DO THIS FOR FUN AND DO NOT COUNT ON THE MONEY I ACTIVELY INVEST FOR THE SHORT TERM. There is a really good chance I will under perform the Target Retirement fund, and I accept this risk.

So if I happen to mention a stock I'm buying on my twitter, take it for what it is: a long shot bet that I am making to amuse myself.

I went to the DNA lounge for the first time last night. The club is owned by JWZ. Before DNA, JWZ was known for starting a battle with Richard Stallman, successfully forking Emacs (which was damn near heretical), developing XScreenSaver, writing a good chunk of Netscape, and then convincing Netscape to open source it, creating the Mozilla Foundation. There are little shrines to JWZ's work scattered throughout DNA. Linux terminals running XScreenSaver and Mozilla.

JWZ crafted a clean exit from software and went on to do something completely different, risky, yet pretty cool, and appears to be successful at it. I think there are stereotypes which box developers into narrow roles, but Jamie's writing on DNA chronicles a deft navigation of club ownership in SF. The skills required for software crossover; no doubt.

If you hang around San Francisco enough you are bound to run into technology people who's blogs you follow. And although I read quite a few blogs, there are relatively few people who follow mine which means the chances that I'll recognize somebody is higher than the chance they will recognize me. To make matters worse, they won't recognize the work I do unless they happen to work in a small corner of the financial industry.

Yesterday K and I were at the Treasure Island music festival, and we queued up for the Ferris Wheel directly behind Evan Williams (and no I wasn't following his tweets (although some 3000 people were)). I think it is fair to say that Evan Williams is one of the reasons people know what blogging even is.

Having the social skills of your typical geek, I had one of those moments where I wondered what to do. Should I introduce myself, or just not say anything? I did introduce myself, but the exchange was about as comfortable as you would imagine (not very).

To equate this to the offline world, imagine an author who hasn't gone mainstream, but who's work you admire. If she is queued ahead of you at Starbuck's. What do you say? "I love your new book?" What else is there to say?

And this isn't first time this has happened to me.

This is a new problem of the online social networked world. The long tail of fame creates people, such as Robert Scoble, who many would recognize, but are not famous. And the chances that you'll meet one of these people hanging out in the Mission District is actually pretty high.

I was stung twice in two days riding my bike this weekend. Once on the lip just before the Golden Gate (almost at the same place I had broken my chain earlier this week). And today a bee flew in my mouth and stung under my tongue. I was on a group ride with the Marin Cyclists and another rider was stung twice on the head. I still managed about 85 miles in the saddle this weekend.

I had a nice time on vacation. I went home to Western New York to visit the folks and some friends. It is the first time I've been back home in the summer in as long as I can remember, but getting in touch with my roots isn't easy while living thousands of miles away with only a few weeks vacation.

I spent so much energy trying to escape the rust belt that I've forgotten some of its virtues, and my last visit in a February snow storm didn't help. It is much more verdant in the summer than I remember. And the weather was pleasant. Although some parts of the local economy seem improved to my eyes, generally Western New York is still an economic black hole. When was the last time you heard of someone moving to Buffalo? Exactly.

I rented a bike and rode some of the lazy country roads and trails that I used to frequent growing up and meet up with a group ride at the local bike shop. The same folks who sold me skis in high school still own and run the shop, and they have done a good job promoting cycling in the area.

The cycling in Western New York is underrated. I dare say the road biking may be better than Northern California if you can live with out the soul crushing climbs. The hills are quaint compared to those in Tahoe and the Bay Area.

I also met up with Kathryn in NYC who was staying with her sister in Park Slope. It was hotter than hell, but still NY feels like a real metropolis compared to SF. My favorite part of NY are the subways. While the condition of the trains is very good these days, some of the infrastructure outside of Manhattan appears to be barely holding together. The subway is intriguingly modern and archaic, and I love zipping around subterraining New York on a network that used to be run by multiple competing companies. It is amazing it works as well as it does. I wish Muni could compare.

We saw a short play about making a TV show about making a play. While I'd call it a post-post-modern or meta-meta play, I think NYers would term it a deconstruction of reality TV. Deconstructing seems a common pastime in NY. As a software developer, I'm more of a constructionist myself which fits these post-post-modern times.

Kathryn left a day before I did, so I decided to take a walking tour of Williamsburg which is the closest approximation to SF's Mission district in NY -- fixies, burritos, and all. Ok I got a bit lost and ended up in some areas that were less than comfortable. This rarely happens to me in SF, and I'm not sure if my sense of the area was valid.

On another meta note, I disabled the comments on my blog. I really hated to do this, but my simple captcha method, which until recently worked flawlessly, is no longer a sufficient deterrent -- the spammers got the best of me.

I think Twitter is neat. The concept of aggregating brief messages from multiple sources is simple but fun, useful, and technically interesting (well to me anyway). But I have had some strange malfunctions in the past couple days. The most disconcerting was that SMS notifications were turned on in the middle of the night unleashing a small torrent of messages on my phone, waking me up.

In a stroke of good luck it turned out to be a good thing because I needed to get up and check the status of some long running processes anyway. But it took me awhile to figure out how to disable the thing (the setting on the home page wasn't working), and was on the verge of killing off my account. Anyways, I'm disconnecting for a while to go home to Jamestown then onto NYC. I'll plug back into the Matrix in a couple weeks.

If you've been following my tweets, you know that after about 6 months of trying to figure out a new side project, I've decided to teach myself Erlang.

In short, it will have you digging deep in your CS education to remember languages like Prolog and ML. And after using languages like Python, the syntax is, well, ugly. It certainly doesn't read like prose, which many developers love about Rails.

But I think there is some genius in there, and the time is right for rethinking concurrency. I spent a lot of time working on a non-blocking proxy server, and IMHO that model of development isn't going to scale to huge projects, especially in languages like C which have embedded blocking I/O into the brains of developers since day 1.

Prediction: In 10 years all languages will borrow concepts from Erlang. But they may look more like Scala.

This is crazy. This is my favorite part:

Because VS 2005 SP1 is so large, it takes a long time - typically around 10 minutes - to load the entire image into memory in order to generate a hash over the image.

Update: Now the patch is just sitting there saying "Time Remaining: 0 seconds." I think Microsoft has lost their collective mind.

I dug up a couple interesting posts from 'Al' at Folknologist (sorry, I can't find Al's full name on his blog).

First is a comment on the circleshare blog regarding Twitter's database scaling issues:

The big problem is the inserts (if the backend is a db), every tweet has to be inserted. Thus even if you have a fast messaging (in memory) the write that accompanies it is relatively slow. In such cases you need some super fast hash append system rather than a database, something that literally just writes to a log like file. (Deletes can be handle by null writes on existing keys).

If somebody has a scalable appender like this in code let me know as I could do with one, especially if I can get it working with S3

Yes indeed, if someone can produce a reliable appender in a cost effective way using S3, I'd love to see it as well. After some research into S3, I don't think it is feasible. Unlike gfs which supports record appends, S3 does not.

Second is the call for a database service for AWS.

AWS is built around an expectation that storage takes place using the highly redundant/reliable S3 infrastructure. This of course makes sense except in the case where one is using a database for storage as opposed to files.

There's the real kicker. I can't think of many significant web applications which don't need at least some database services. Even if an app can make good use of EC2, such as mass video encoding, at some point the application must store something in a database, which makes EC2 and S3 solutions to a subset of a web site's problems.