Archive for September 2007

Leaving Heidelberg

As I sit in the lobby, taking a break, waiting to leave to the airport for my next destination, I just think about what a great week I’ve had. Its been packed, with just far too much to do. Mornings starting at 4.30am and nights ending at 3am just seem so normal. I’ve taken a ridiculous number of photos, which I hope will make their way online slowly, but expect to see them even in the following month.

Heidelberg DevMeeting
At the team exhibitions…

One of the great things about the Heidelberg DevMeeting was being able to interact with my team a lot. Being in a distributed environment, I must say this is the most face-to-face time we’ve had just to hang out, talk, eat, get stuff done, drink, walk around, socialise, etc. Its highly amazing. Really. Don’t even think about doing so at the Users Conference in Santa Clara – everyone’s too busy, and the mandate is to interact with as many non-MySQLers as possible.

So today, as I said goodbye to everyone in my team (and the few stragglers all around the Old City of Heidelberg), I actually felt sad. Knowing that the next time we will all see each other will be months away.

Heidelberg DevMeeting
Stand up, reduce meeting times!

At least I’m all pumped up to go back and Get Stuff Done (I wonder if that’s trademarked?)

Zack says it best:

But man cannot live by email, Skype, and IRC alone. So every now and then we get groups together for meetings.

This was really our first team gathering, in (and for) a long time. And interacting with the other teams. Just amazing. Kudos to the organisers. The program was just amazing. And yes, human and team interaction is really important.

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Tagging differentiation

Standardisation is important.

Tagging in Uploadr involves writing tags in the format such that its:
    australia victoria melbourne “notting hill” clayton

Tagging in ScribeFire, involves writing tags that are parsed in a different way (for Technorati):
    australia, victoria, melbourne, notting hill, clayton

Notice the commas (“,”)? Without them, your tags are all lumped together. I’m wondering if I should change Uploadr to similar behaviour as ScribeFire (or vice versa)? What do other applications do for tagging in a field?

It should be trivial to make this change, the question is if my patch will be accepted upstream. I’m already using a patched version of Uploadr, as I await the author to implement my patch (which adds a description field, which the Flickr API supports). Incidentally, PyGTK is pretty easy to get around with, with superb documentation making it easy for anyone to get on the bandwagon. More on pygtk programming later…

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Multiple pop-up dialogs

Surely there must be a better way of handling this:


gnome-obex-server receiving lots of images from the phone

So, is this a bug or a feature? I need to see if OS X or Windows handles it differently? The smart thing to do would be to group it together, rather than having these many dialogs. Or maybe, just use the notification infrastructure and automatically accept it to a path of your choice (currently, it defaults to ~/Desktop so a quick mv operation has to happen later). The maintainer listed has switched to a Mac, so I wonder if this software is being enhanced further…

My take on the Enterprise Monitor

MySQL has had this Enterprise Monitor around for a while, but I’ve not had the chance to try it. Well, all this changed briefly in July, when I was doing my APAC tour, and folk wanted to see Enterprise Monitor at work. Back then, I showed them some canned screenshots, and in Singapore, Kim Seong (famous on #mysql) from our partners Global Link, had some kind of special login, so they demoed it. It wasn’t until this week that I actually tried it (besides, it wasn’t until the UC-J that it was re-launched with new features), and found some time to play with it. And I was blown away.


An excessive table scan, you say?

With new features for replication monitoring, personally what I find most useful are the pretty graphs (you may not find it useful with one or two machines, but in an enterprise-level install base of databases, graphs are not only pretty, they are useful). On top of the graphs, there’s also advisors, which save you time, so that you can avoid reading the documentation, or finding pain points, yourself. I think this is what Brian really referred to on saving your Jedi’s time. Advisors, are crucial, and I think that’s what differentiates this product.


How to fix table scans… and links to the manual!

The UI is impressive. Its all very modern, looking very Web 2.0. Its Tomcat based on the backend, so the install file is a tad large, and the usual requirements that come with Java applications are present, but I’m pleased to say the server I’ve had access to play with is an under-powered AMD machine. You can set it to auto-refresh in your browser, which can be useful for maybe displaying it on a dedicated screen (think of being in a air traffic control tower, maybe?).


Shiny! Pretty graphs… showing useful information

Installation is somewhat easy (it could be easier, like maybe via apt-get or yum). Support diagnostics are interesting enough, it really does remind me of the sysreport utility in Red Hat/Fedora. It talks to 5.0.x and 5.1.x seamlessly, it doesn’t care what OS they’re on, and I’m unsure if the agent runs against say an older MySQL (though I don’t see why not).

Replication monitor (click for larger image)

The marketing materials on the Web don’t do enough justice for this useful tool. I wish there was an online demo of sorts or maybe the user manual was placed online, or just way more screenshots. Failing which, give the 30-day Enterprise Trial a go. Yes, Enterprise Monitor is not free :( I signed up a couple of days ago, spent about five minutes signing up (three email exchanges! Highly complicated), and got access to everything Enterprise-y.

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MySQL University at the DevMeeting

I don’t know about you, but the idea behind MySQL University is pretty amazing. It is truly a great way to come learn with us. The sessions are normally done via IRC and voice streaming, which is also recorded, however, seeing it in person at the MySQL DevMeeting, was just fabulous.

There are obviously so many more Uni sessions that I wish I went to, but I’m lucky in the sense that they’re all recorded, so expect to see them online soon. Kudos to the scribes!

I attended a few interesting sessions yesterday:

  • How to Create a Test Case by Omer and Matthias – this was highly interesting, as I got a deeper understanding of our test framework. More importantly, I’ve found out that this is obviously an extension to mysql-test, and isn’t online yet, so I’ve pestered Omer to ensure that it reaches mysql.bkbits.net in due time. Of course it can’t be merged as part of MySQL, because it isn’t part of 5.0 or 5.1, but its impressive that you can run tests that help you move from 5.0 to 5.1 and so on. Tests for minor version upgrades are also obviously supported, all in all, cool stuff.
  • Following a Query Back and Forth in the Server by Sergei – amazing, seriously. Good explanation, great images, and if you need to grind all the performance out of your queries, you can see where you might find pain points, when they do occur.
  • MySQL Proxy Overview by Jan Kneschke – now, all I want to do is play with the Proxy. Its ultimately cool stuff, and if you haven’t been enthralled by it yet, consider taking a look at it now. Its easily scriptable in LUA, which is a language I attempted to learn last night, by reading the Blue PIL book (sounds nicer when you say it :P). Consider checking out Programming in Lua, which I wish was available on my Safari subscription, however, the older version is online…

As an aside, that isn’t exactly MySQL University based, but LUA seems to be the embedded language of choice at MySQL now. Proxy, Enterprise tools, and so on. Looks like its well worth knowing.

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On voting…

Via Khairil:

There is enough of us in the younger voting generation, that can say enough is enough, and it’s time to now shape Malaysia for us and not simply accept the corrupt racist system that is in place.

He’s so right. Even if you are overseas, you can still vote (postal votes, to your nearest consulate). I encourage you to read his entire post, because, he is definitely a forward thinking Malaysian. (notice, I didn’t care about his race?)

Register to vote. And just vote the opposition. Denying a 2/3rds majority is what needs to happen. And if what needs to happen again is the May 13 Incident, then so be it. The racist NEP must go. The mentality that half the population must limp on crutches with hand-outs from the government, is dated – a lazy Malaysia, be-gone.

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