Colin Charles Agenda

An interesting morning for me. I woke up, had breakfast at the Hilton Concierge Lounge (complimentary, seeing that I’m on the Executive floor), and decided to find my way, by public transport, to downtown San Francisco, from Santa Clara. Boy was I surprised as to how inane everything was: I spent about 2.5 hours travelling on a light rail (VTA), then a Caltrain, and finally a BART. I almost finished a book I was reading, all on public transport. Talk about a commute.

Anyway, arrived at LugRadio Live USA, registered (paid my paltry $10 in cash, since their credit card provider was wonky), and started the day with great talks. Some quick notes about the conference itself, and then my notes shall follow soon.

• Turns out its very hard to see the screen, because of all the sunlight that was coming in. The Metreon is a great place, but the light hitting the projector screen was a real issue.
• Lack of power everywhere, was a bit of a bummer. Tech conferences, laptops, one must charge one’s laptop!
• When they recorded an episode of LugRadio Live and Unleashed, they looked for the folk that came the farthest – at first, it seemed like only Stewart (Melbourne) and I (Kuala Lumpur) were standing. Then two others from Kiev and Moscow stood up. Turns out we all walked away with a copy of The Ubuntu Book as a prize. Nice :)
• Google was a major sponsor of the entire event. Kudos to them, the stuff was great.
• Saw a PostgreSQL booth (and caught up with Josh Berkus). Saw an OpenSolaris booth, and learnt a bit more about IPS. Even managed to sneak a chat with Ian Murdock, about IPS, Sun, and so on. Most interesting. Wished for a OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and even Fedora booth, which were nowhere to be seen.
• Lunch was at the food court. MySQL’er JD Duncan introduced me to some amazing pizza.
• We saw a streaker, during the Gong-A-Thong. OK, not a streaker, just a guy, in his underwear hitting the gong. I’m sure pictures of this will be online soon enough.
• Dinner? Cha-Ya. 16th and Mission (BART stop), probably closer to 18th and Valencia (by memory). Vegan Japanese food. Interesting, even the ice cream was made of soy.

All in all, great networking event. Whole day spent meeting new folk, speaking to old friends, and so on. Definitely worth the trip.

Remember the problem with public transport in San Francisco/Santa Clara? The BART/Caltrain/VTA all stop at midnight. Useless. Your only options are an expensive cab ride back, or sleeping on the street (don’t even dream of a hotel in downtown SF, they’re all booked out).

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, public transport, san francisco, santa clara, california

With moving my workload to two laptops (one for work, on OS X and one for play, on Linux), you invariably have issues with being as productive as you should be in the software that you use. I dumped Apple Mail.app after about 2 weeks of solid usage (more on that, at another time), for Mozilla Thunderbird. It isn’t free of warts, but with the excellent plug-in architecture, it surely helps. Here are some plug-ins (add-ons in Mozilla speak) I can’t live without.

GMailUI
This tool is simply amazing. Ctrl+J for Junk, Y for moving to the archive, and so much more. Its keyboard shortcuts are similar to GMail, so if you also happen to use GMail, this is a worthy tool to have. Even if you don’t, the shortcuts make so much sense, its a wonder why its not on by default.

Lightning
I certainly like having a built-in calendar in Thunderbird, and more importantly, it works with my Google Calendar. It could improve with offline support, and a bit, but for a fairly recent full review, read Lightning, Google Calendar, and calendering in Thunderbird.

Nostalgy
Need to move a message quickly? Need to copy one? Need to jump to a folder? Nostalgy provides some nifty keyboard shortcuts to change/move to/copy to folders, and it has auto-completion. Paired with GMailUI, Thunderbird becomes even more keyboard friendly.

Plaxo
Address books are a pain in the butt. On every platform (save for OS X), there are so many standards, none of which really work. Plaxo, takes the pain out of this, by synchronising with a server on the Internet. Now I can use many machines, and get Plaxo to sync my contacts. It has its limitations (3,000 contacts), but it does sync the “collected addresses” in Thunderbird (a killer feature, if I may say so).

Provider for Google Calendar
If you want to get Lightning to use Google Calendar, this add-on is required.

QuickQuote
Clicking Reply to Sender or Reply to All, now allows me to quote some text, and only reply to that quoted text. Saves me from deleting all the unnecessary parts of email. Its surprising that this isn’t the default behaviour in Thunderbird – after all, Evolution has had this for ages.

Quicktext
Templates, to improve efficiency. Need a canned email? Need to insert a file as text? This is a truly useful add-on, if you have a lot of repetitive email to write.

Remember Mismatched Domains
This is a most useful add-on, especially if you’re tired of seeing “Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch” everytime you start Thunderbird. Some mail servers have this issue (including some that I run – i.e. a machine with multiple hosts), so this helps remember the ones that I’ve “white-listed”.

Remove Duplicate Messages
Sometimes you get email in the form of a To: or a CC: and it also goes to a mailing list that you’ve filtered out. This helps remove duplicate messages, so that you only have one copy in your archives. It also helps, in the days of using POP mail (what days, I still have accounts where I POP my mail), and breaking connections – i.e. pulling down 2 copies of the same message.

Sync On Arrival
This doesn’t work with Thunderbird 2, but is a useful add-on to have (and I hope it starts working). Thunderbird has an annoying feature of not downloading/syncing IMAP mail, on folders that you haven’t clicked on. I’ve sort of worked around this by using Offline -> Download/Synchronise Now and ensuring all the folders I care about are subscribed to. I’m including this on the off-chance that the author wakes up and fixes it for Thunderbird 2 (and the upcoming 3).

While not a must-have add-on, I also have the British English Dictionary. Your mileage may vary here, as you might not be interested in said language.

These are the add-on’s that keep me productive. What add-on’s do you use?

Technorati Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, add-on, productivity, sync on arrival, remove duplicate messages, remember mismatched domains, quicktext, quickquote, provider for google calendar, google calendar, plaxo, nostalgy, lightning, gmailui

So, I’m leaving on a jet plane, to head to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008. Normally, this is a flight I make via Auckland or Sydney, but this time its via Singapore.

Singapore is a hub in Asia, so let me share a few tips:

• The airport is huge. Terminal 3 reminds me of being in one of Heathrow’s terminals. Leave plenty of time to walk from gate to gate (up to 20 minutes).
• US flights probably always leave from Terminal 3, around gates A16-A20. The gates are speculation, mainly because of the extra security available out there. (A18, for Los Angeles, A16 for San Francisco, I’m pretty sure I’m right).
• Within A16-A20, you’ll not notice any power sockets available for your laptop. Clearly, very negative for the business traveller.
• You can get free wireless, via the Wireless@SG access point. Just get your mobile phone to roam to SingTel, and enter *186. You’ll be sent an SMS back, with a username and password. Happy surfing (IMAPS/SMTPS/HTTP/HTTPS/SSH all work).

Well, that’s about it. If you have more tips about flying via Singapore, don’t hesitate to share them.

I’ve been seriously swamped in these last few weeks. Relocating (from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur) has been interesting. Not to mention that all the work that’s still around…

I should mention that I am now Sun, having signed all paperwork a few weeks back. It just dawned on me when I picked up my ID card today from the Sun KL offices. No email address yet, but our @mysql.com addresses will continue to work (they’re on my business cards).

Which brings me to the fact that I am also sporting new business cards (no direct-line number, yet – still waiting on its creation), and they have an interesting logo on the back!

MySQL/Sun logo

At the conference, if folk are still giving out “older” MySQL cards, keep them – they’re collector’s items now. Me? I’ll be bringing my new ones ;)

Technorati Tags: sun, mysql, logo

A session at the MySQL Conference 2008 that I’d have loved to attend, would have been the Adopting and Adapting OSS at Shinsei Bank. As a case study, Shinsei Bank in Japan is a great MySQL customer and use case – they’re a bank. A pretty large bank…

Sadly, the session has been cancelled. Never fear, because at 4.25pm on Wednesday, the 16th of April 2008, there are seven other great sessions.

If you’re interested in web security, then look no further than Eli White’s talk titled Help, My Website Has Been Hacked! Now What? Eli works at Digg, and might have some invaluable practical advice for you.

If you’re more the systems administrator, you have to look at Using MySQL Cluster in a High Volume Email Environment by James Blair and Paul Fisher (both from the UC Berkeley). Learn how to configure Exim to use MySQL, or learn how to get Postgrey working with MySQL, and a whole lot more. I think this could be a highly interesting talk to be at (I’m sure the UC Berkeley mail system, like any other university, is honking huge).

Need to squeeze MySQL? Best way to do so is to benchmark and monitor the server. Tom Hanlon has Part 1 of his talk, titled Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade. Talks with the words “performance” or “benchmarking” tend to usually be standing-room only crowds… Be warned :)

While Falcon and InnoDB are different storage engines, and have different end goals, if you’re currently an InnoDB user, thinking about Falcon, you want to attend Falcon for InnoDB users by Kevin Lewis (Falcon Team Lead) and Ann Harrison. Should prove to be very interesting, and I’m sure Jim Starkey (father of Falcon) will be nice and up-in-the-front of the audience…

Everyone’s screaming about Web 2.0 now… Patrick Galbraith, a member of the MySQL Alumni, decided to focus on Web 2.0 (Grazr) rather than just database code (Perl DBI, FEDERATED, mysqlslap, etc.). In Grazr: Lessons Learned Building a Web 2.0 Application Using MySQL, Patrick and colleague Michael Kowalchik tell you how MySQL scales in the startup environment, using replication, many character sets, and so on.

There’s 5/7 talks that I’ve recommended you attend. How does one split oneself? As homework, go read the schedule to find out about the two other great talks (if you use Phorum, there’s one you need to be at too).

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqluc, mysqluc2008, mysqluc08, santa clara, mysql conference & expo, shinsei bank, web securite, eli white, digg, mysql cluster, email, exim, uc berkeley, benchmarking, monitoring, falcon, innodb, web 2.0

If you haven’t already signed up to attend the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, you know you’re clearly missing out. Most tutorials in the conference have sold out, so I suggest getting to it as soon as possible. Remember, that all speakers have access to a 20% discount code, so email me if you’d like one.

Igor Babaev, is speaking on Wednesday, 16/04/2008, at 2pm, on Batched Key Access: a Significant Speed-up for Join Queries. To whet your appetite, there are also Batched Key Access Software Previews available now!

So what is Batched Key Access (BKA)? Its a new advanced technique to execute queries with multi-way join operations. The idea behind it is to accumulate several keys in a buffer, then only access the joined table, possibly changing the order of lookups, to optimise the sequence of disk seeks. Used with the NDB Cluster storage engine, it helps minimise the number of round-trips between the server and cluster nodes.

If you’re after the nitty-gritty technical details behind the BKA Join, look no further than reading WL#2771. If you’d like to try it out, there are binaries for Solaris, Linux and Windows available at the software previews page. If you need to know more, don’t miss Igor’s talk next Wednesday, on the 16/04/2008 at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008!

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqluc, mysqluc2008, mysqluc08, santa clara, mysql conference & expo, batched key access, bka, igor babaev, bka join, join, software previews, bka previews