Colin Charles Agenda

When I’m in the USA, if I get the time, I do like to consume some television. I’m an odd person – I’m usually watching the advertisements more than the television shows themselves. And the promotions that surround shows.

Its very common for advertising for products to have several logos at the end: usually one from facebook with the page name, and another from twitter with the page name. Nowadays it seems to be getting common to offer a hashtag and this I presume is just useful for Twitter. (though it seems trending data now on google+ also has hashtags.)

Today, for the first time I saw an ad for Google Plus. Used by a television show called sullivan & son. They advertised a facebook page and told fans to “search google plus for sullivan & son”. For a google hangout! 

I searched Google for sullivan & son and ironically the Google+ page (which has a horrible URL) wasn’t even on the front-page. Google is clearly missing an opportunity here.

Two opportunities: 

1. short-form URLs (like what gplus.to provides – in fact you have the option to do profiles.google.com/username if it is not a page, but your own profile)
2. promoting Google+ profile pages in search results

This is the third time MySQL has made an entry into the Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory service. The first time, we at Team MariaDB came up with an analysis: Oracle’s 27 MySQL security fixes and MariaDB.

Security is important to a DBA. Having vague explanations does no one any good. Even Oracle ACE Director Ronald Bradford chooses to ask some tough questions on this issue. Recently we found a bug in MySQL & MariaDB and did some responsible disclosure as well. 

Security is a big deal to distributions shipping MySQL. It comes alongside having a good, accessible bugs system. Recall a discussion a while back about possibly even replacing MySQL with MariaDB (this led to a fun discussion and a long meeting at UDS Oakland to ensure choice).

These discussions always come back. Today on the Debian mailing list, the suggestion popped back up again. I’m sure it will pop up again in October when the next CPU includes some fixes in MySQL…

What is Oracle going to do about this? Will it start being more open (not with a select few folk, but with the wider community)?

I last spoke to Simon Phipps about the OSI (Open Source Initiative – opensource.org) and how they’re opening up for membership sometime on a cold february day, in brussels where we were for fosdem 2012. it seems like that time has come and yesterday I became an individual member of the OSI. I presume that if you’re asking what your $40 fee gets, realise that they’re transforming the OSI, so it is an exciting time of change. 

It is likely that all this will be announced on wednesday at oscon. Doing this yesterday I managed to grab a t-shirt. They also have OSI singlets/tank tops this time around. What are you waiting for, join the OSI.

When the mysql librarian closed, I didn’t think too much about it; it was a feature I probably never used. However this month brings the end of the mysql forge. The MySQL Forge was something I worked on while I was at MySQL so I am a little sad to see it go. 

Now for a little bit of a history lesson. We wanted some kind of “forge” back in 2005, because sourceforge was all the rage then (today, you can’t even find mariadb or mongodb listed there). We didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fees associated with sourceforge, so we investigated gforge. After studying it carefully, it would only allow us to use postgresql and changing the database structure for a rapidly developing piece of code wasn’t going to work for us; and we loved eating our own dogfood (mysql).

This meant writing our own code, and thus was born the mysql forge. We requisitioned two machines (forge1, forge2) of which I cannot remember the configuration of now. The only component we didn’t write was the wiki (we used mediawiki). What did we write? The interface to worklog (which looks like it stopped being synced in august 2011), a place to share tools & code (some 288 snippets, UDFs, scripts, etc.), and a project list (which is what the forge provided – over 400 projects that have relation to working with mysql). And the wiki had a chunk of documentation (over 600 pages). 

We launched the forge sometime in april 2006, probably at the mysql users conference 2006. Apparently since then the wiki alone has had 11,236,211 page views. We hacked the wiki quite a bit, and upgrades were always a little bit of hell, but things like single sign on, SpamBlacklist, etc. had to work. 

It seems like the new community resource is just that: community resources. There doesn’t seem to be a link to the new worklog, so its difficult for the community to comment on future worklog entries. The wiki is now hosted at oracle wiki’s, and it doesn’t look like all the content made it. For example I don’t see documentation for the random query generator anywhere… And what about all the code snippets even if the project list has gone?

All in, it was great to work on code with jay pipes, lenz grimmer, dups, and the feature driver giuseppe maxia. One regret was never having opensourced the code behind the forge.

Goodbye MySQL Forge. You served the community well for over five years.

I generally “opt-out” and head for a manual pat down by the TSA at airports in the USA. Today, I decided to try the bodyscanner at san francisco airport (SFO). I was tired from an active night of wine drinking & mingling. I cleared all my pockets and proceeded to get scanned.

Today I was wearing my Dockers Mobile Pants. This is the older model with two zippered pockets. After spending some three seconds in that machine with my hands up, I walked out to see that the image suggested I had something on me. It turns out that it picked up my zips on the mobile pants and required me to get a manual pat down. To make matters even more fun, they swabbed my hands for residue.

I told the TSA agent that the machine is broken and he said that its very sensitive and is working. It picks up zips. I asked what about the regular zip for my pants. He had no answer.

I guess there’s absolutely no point in doing this bodyscanner thing at all. I’ll continue getting my manual pat downs and pretend to enjoy it. I don’t care if they claim its safe either.

I’ve been looking to get some text going and have been paying attention to fonts lately. I was curious to see if I could find Malaysian made/designed fonts & typefaces. Here are a few resources:

• Type design in Malaysia by Luc Devroye. Brilliant list, very complete. This is the best resource out there from what I gather.
• Ong Chong Wah is a pretty famous designer. His Bookman Old Style typeface was even included in Office.
• MyFonts has a list of Malaysian Typographic People.

Found some interesting work. Conceptual work with things like “bra-fonts”. Its looking like I’ll end up with some work of Ong Chong Wah soon.