Colin Charles Agenda

I love Wikipedia. They are trying to get Wikipedia moved from the Free Documentation License, to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (commonly referred to as CC BY-SA). I’m a big fan of the Creative Commons, so naturally, I think this is an important item to vote on.

To qualify, you need to have made 25 edits or more, prior to March 15 2009. The vote itself ends May 3 2009, so don’t procrastinate. If you’re unsure, read the licensing Q&A. But I suggest you vote yes, and let the content be CC BY-SA.

Photo by vox_efx, licensed under the Creative Commons by Attribution license.

I don’t know if this is the right use of Facebook, but Malaysia’s Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah has decided that a good thing to do, is to be online, on the first and third Wednesday of every month, from 10-11pm (so he’s working nights), on Facebook, so that he can probably participate in a Facebook chat with students.

He mentions “Facebook messaging”, and its unclear if he plans to add students as his friends, to then get them chatting, or if he just wants to receive “email” via Facebook? Or is it a good way to get information about students that are griping to the minister, and mark the troublemakers out?

Who’s to say. Whatever it is, I don’t think Facebook is the right platform for this sort of thing, but kudos for trying to be hip.

This is a “first-timer’s” guide to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009. It is by no means official, but are things I think are somewhat important. Its broken down into sections: What days to attend, What to bring, Laptop, Blogging, Twittering, etc…, Be Social, The Attendee Directory, Evenings, and Did I miss something? Its long, but do bear with me — its just some friendly advice after attending this conference for quite the number of years.

What days to attend

The conference runs from Monday to Thursday. Monday is tutorial day, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are days where you have the conference proper.

Tuesday and Wednesday are days the Expo Hall is open. Go there, visit the place, learn about the ecosystem, and probably walk away with goodies while you’re at it. Don’t forget the DotOrg Pavilion, as there are plenty of open source projects that showcase their wares.

On Monday, you’ll also notice the career fair. If you’re looking for a job, this is the place to be. Bring a resume, bring plenty of business cards (make some, its not that complicated), and soak in the atmosphere.

If all that wasn’t enough, you’ve also got MySQL Camp running in parallel. On Monday, there’s a hackfest with Mark Callaghan of Google fame — if you’ve wanted to be a MySQL hacker, this should be a great start. On Tuesday – Thursday, MySQL Camp is happening, and there’s plenty of sessions. Did I mention that this event is completely free?

Know that there are plenty of events and parties, where you can enjoy free canapés, and drink – always keep the event schedule handy.

And oops, I almost forgot, there’s also a Performance Conference on Wednesday and Thursday. So keep in mind that there are up to ten tracks for you to attend on Wednesday and Thursday.

At nights, don’t forget the Birds of a Feather sessions. These happen on Tuesday and Wednesday night, and we’ve had sessions in the past go in till past midnight (2am seemed to have been the kicker, one year).

What to bring

The dress code is pretty casual. Its California, t-shirt, shorts, and sandals will suffice. Otherwise, I’ve seen folk mostly be in smart casual attire. Or just plain t-shirt and jeans. Your mileage will vary. Just remember to be comfortable, as the days are long, and you’ll want to be at your best no matter what. Seven in the morning starts, that end at two in the morning the next day is pretty overwhelming for the body, so wear comfortable clothes and footwear.

Also, bring along:

• Business cards – these can be with your company, or personal ones that you create (have your name, email address, URL, and whatever else seems significant). One of the biggest gains of being at the conference is the networking aspect of it. Think of it as social networking, in person. Make connections. Immediately go forth and add them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or shoot them an email — don’t let the business cards sit and rot.
• ID – this is America, and if you’re planning on drinking, some kind of ID will be useful. Even at the Expo Hall reception, they tend to ask for ID when you order a beer
• Laptop
• Thumb drive – you might need this during the tutorial day, and it will serve for easy exchange of stuff

Laptops

You need one. The certification exams for example, don’t have any paper this year. Some tutorials are “live”, and require a working laptop, with a MySQL installation. If you’re going to be at the hackfest, without a laptop, you’re not going to have as much fun. If you want to follow other talks on IRC or Twitter, a laptop is probably required.

Having a laptop is not a requirement, but it will make your experience a lot better.

Power sockets will be available throughout the conference, but keep in mind that they may be scarce. You may not always be plugged in. If you’re coming in from overseas, you’ll need American styled power adapters — if you’re using an international one, try not to get one that is too oversized (in where it takes about two or three slots of the power board). I only mention this because I too have been guilty of such an act!

Since you’ll be moving around a lot, try and bring a light laptop. Lugging a 17″ laptop is not going to be fun, seeing the frequency of you shifting rooms. One of those netbooks are sounding better all the time.

There will be WiFi at the conference. Remember to be careful with security when using an open wireless connection. If you have access to SSH somewhere, think about tunnelling your traffic — better be safe than sorry.

Don’t upload gigabytes worth of files. Be nice to your fellow conference attendees. BitTorrent really should not be tolerated, and just keep in mind that you’re sharing bandwidth with a couple thousand folk.

Blogging, Twittering, etc.

When blogging or Twittering, tag it, so we can find it. Heck, do the same even when you’re uploading photos to sites like Flickr. Popular tags include: mysqlconf09, mysqlconf, mysqlce, mysqlce09. If its tagged “mysqlconf09”, it tends to get picked up by our feed, and placed at sensible areas.

Don’t forget to read Planet MySQL. You might like to read it in a feed reader, because the posts just get really crazy around this time with all the live blogging and so forth.

Be social

I spoke earlier about business cards and the need to carry them around. If you didn’t print any, there are at least four Fedex Kinko’s within a four mile radius of the hotel. Get some.

But being social means speaking to people in person. Not just hanging out on IRC and chatting — or always being behind your keyboard. When you meet someone, remember to talk to them! You never know what interesting stuff you will have to share with them. Opening lines include:

• What sessions have you been to so far
• What sessions are you going for next
• What does the company do? What do they do?

Don’t talk to the same people all the time. In fact, there’s an unspoken rule that you should never find two MySQL’ers on the same lunch table. The whole idea is to spread the love, and to allow a lot of mingling.

The Attendee Directory

In the past, we printed a “Who’s who” list. People tended to lose these after going home, and you could never find them a year later. This year, you can participate in what is known as Attendee Networking. Its pretty cool, do check it out – Attendee Directory. You can setup your personal profile, comment on and evaluate sessions (we will value this stuff greatly), create a list of contacts, mark people you want to meet, send messages to other attendees, let others find you on Twitter, and so on.

This is by far, the coolest feature of the conference. It allows conference attendees to create a social network amongst themselves. Its opt-in, but I definitely think you’d be missing out, if you don’t opt-in! So far we have about 900 attendees that have already opted in. I want to see this number grow!

Evenings

Besides all the events and parties (go to the Expo Hall, you’ll find out about parties nearby even), the hotel has a bar, that serves liquor to late. But pace yourself — don’t drink more than you would normally do.

Did I miss something?

I’m sure I did. I wrote this when the Internet access in my hotel wouldn’t work. Write a comment. Maybe we’ll beat this up into a “proper” guide for future conferences.

Most of all, remember to have fun! And learn lots! Happy conference!

Coming to the Hyatt Santa Clara, for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009? Beware, that this year, the in-room Internet just isn’t so peachy.

When you check in, there’s this option of a “Business Plan” that Hyatt sells you – USD$30, for free wired in-room Internet (a $12.95/day value), free breakfast (this includes 15% gratuity, so a $20+ value), a free bottle of water (yes, otherwise its $3.95), and all the local and long distance calls in the US that you’ll need (depending on what you do, YMMV). It seemed like a good deal.

Now, for the benefit of others, which has taken about four days for me to fix. When you’re on this plan, the Hyatt rebates your Internet within an hour or so of you signing up for the deal. This tells their ISP that you’re now not able to get access to anything else, but Port 80 and Port 443 access — yes, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC and all other ports, are blocked.

You need to call 877-22-HYATT (toll free), and tell them your predicament. Their system will not see anything in the bill cycle, and suddenly realise that they can’t even recognise your IP address. The system has no recollection of the MAC address either! So what the nice support guy on the phone can do for you is to enable this for about three days, and then you’ll have to call back again, to ensure things just work.

My case number is: 267 014. Needless to say, all this is about the most unintuitive thing that can happen to someone. Lets hope it all just starts working well… Of course, next week, when the conference starts, there will be Internet at all the lobby/common areas, as well as the conference centre itself, as well as breakfast provided from 7am onwards.

So unless you like breakfast at 6am, or need in-room Internet access, give the Hyatt Business Plan a skip. And now, I can finally go back to reading and replying to the deluge of email that has hit me.

The videos I’ve recorded lately, have come out of a Creative Vado Pocket Video Camera. I considered getting the Creative Labs Vado HD but at USD$229, I thought I would give it a pass. After all, I only purchased the Creative Vado for a mere USD$65.85 (list price: $99.99). OK, I picked up a pink version, saving me $14.10 from the silver model, but who cares? Its a nifty little toy. It is all enclosed in what feels like a rubberised coloured sleeve, and the buttons are very easy to use. It almost feels waterproof. There is no optical zoom, and the digital zoom seems to be kind of useless, and the LCD screen size sure seems a tad larger than the Flip cam’s.

The whole camera feels cheap, and very light. It takes a rechargeable battery, and it recharges over the USB port (so no AA batteries here — if its flat, it has to charge via USB). There seems to be enough to record 60 minutes of video on my unit, which is more than enough. I have no idea how long the battery lasts, but I would presume I’ll get a cycle or two.

The USB port is at the bottom, and there’s this little rubbery bit for you to pull it out (the Kodak and the Flip cameras tend to have a button of some sort). Unfortunately, the rubbery bit does get a little squashed when you’re mounting it on a monopod.

Audio quality seems to be tolerable. Even from a distance of about 3 metres, I can grab the audio just fine. Projector screens at that distance of course, don’t seem to render much detail (then again, it was a projection of a spreadsheet… so not the best example).

All in all, its pretty tiny, but surprisingly feels pretty rugged, and it can definitely easily fit into my pocket. Compared to the Flip’s even, this camera seems to be the smallest and thinnest available. It is also the only camera in its class, that doesn’t come with a carrying pouch of sorts (in comparison to the Kodak or Flip offerings).

Playback on the Mac, with Perian installed, seemed to show me that with VLC, I would see the video but not hear the audio. However, if I chose to open the clip in Quicktime, I could hear audio and see the video. Wonder what codec pack I’m missing (for ADPCM), then? For the geeks, file(1) spits out: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 640 x 480, 30.00 fps, video: XviD, audio: ADPCM (mono, 14000 Hz).

Some sample video:

• Taken at face-to-face interview distance
• Taken at about 3 metres away from the subject speaking. Also notice the screen (a spreadsheet), so not exactly clear
• Audio about 1-1.5m away with a pan around the room

Will I recommend it? Sure. It seems to fit the bill of a tiny video camera that gets the job done at the price point its available at. Will I get it even if its silver, or at the MSRP? Probably yes ;-)

Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

1. Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he works on this cool stuff at NetEdge, the startup he’s currently attached to).
2. Advanced memcached use cases in where you get best practice information on leveraging memcache, a software package that all the big boys use.

Frank also says, “If you’re not coming to the MySQL Conference, you’re losing out”. He’s right. You should be there. Look at all the amazing sessions, all the amazing networking opportunities, and more? He clearly specifies that the tutorial selection this year is pretty incredible, so make sure you’re signed up for Monday! Plan your sessions ahead, otherwise you might miss out some of the important things.

The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 runs from April 20-23, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre. Don’t hesitate to register as there are plenty of interesting sessions there, next week.