The biggest (geeky) news of today was that Apple have finally opened the Australian iTunes Music Store, an online store using the iTunes program that allows Australians to legally purchase and download music. It's about darn time, as we have been devoid of such a store for too long. A single track is priced at $1.69 and most albums at $16.99, which is far, far cheaper than buying most CDs.

However, it seems that the Sony-BMG record label is still holding out putting their catalogue and their artists on iTunes. It'll only be a matter of time though, after they realise how much money they're going to missing out on. Sony has been faced with a dilemma: it produces and releases music from artists which should be sold on iTunes to make them more money. But music purchased iTunes (without modification) can only be played portably on an Apple iPod, a product that the Sony's portable music player arm is in direct competition with.

I have just bought my first track from the new store, one that I have been trying for ages to get my hands on: Disillusion, by Badly Drawn Boy.

In other geeky news, it seems that in the last few days MySQL version 5.0 has been released as Generally Available. MySQL is a free Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that is used by most websites, including mine. This new release scares me because i'm pretty sure that this blog, which runs off a MySQL 4.1.x database, will not work under the new version. I'm not sure if/when my web-hosting provider is planning to upgrade the servers to the new version, but i hope it isn't soon as I really haven't got the time in the near future to revamp this blog script to make it compliant with MySQL 5 (I do have a wedding to plan!).