Colin Charles Agenda

I have two talks in the coming few weeks, that I’m still madly writing. I’ve come to the realisation that writing talks, really does take a lot of time (when you have a deadline). Especially, if you’re doing it my style - everytime I write a slide, and find something missing in the Wiki, I go ahead and fix it. So its not actually talk writing I’m doing, but expansion of our online documentation, and keeping it in check. That takes time.

• Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology - I’m giving this talk at the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) Annual Conference 2007. Their conference is themed around “Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology & Law Reforms – The Next 50 Years” and is on the 19-20 November 2007, at the KL Convention Centre. My talk is on the 20th, as I’ll be on a plane on the 19th. This is targeted at CEO/manager level, so is lighter on tech-related content, but more concepts. Come see me in a suit :)
• Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources - I’m giving this talk at foss.in, it will have a localised title, with regards to the much hyped architecture of participation. MySQL has done some amazing things to “open up” for external contributions, and clearly, we continue to do so, and we must celebrate it, obviously. And get more contributors. I also submitted this talk for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, because I think a lot of folk attending will want to know the many ways to contribute to MySQL. We’ve done some great things, and we need to pimp it more. Targeted at the contributor, with some pretty diagrams and patches, yanked off the internals list.

The slide deck and speaker notes will be online, in due time. Part of yet another cool project I’m working on, in where we enable others to give MySQL-related talks.

Reason #257 to work at MySQL. You get invited to the company meeting in Orlando, Florida, next January. If you follow a MySQL’er on Dopplr, for instance, you might see that they’re all generally away in Orlando, during the 15-19 January 2008.

Well, the whole company, naturally cannot be there… MySQL has essential services, like support and IT infrastructure that must continue to hum along, while the rest of the company enjoys a few days of sunny Florida.

I don’t exactly know what’s planned, but one can imagine team building exercises, internal team meetings, and quite possibly teams meeting other teams (to increase team interoperability and efficiency). It seemed to have worked well at the Heidelberg DevMeeting, so I presume it’ll scale well for a much larger group. And of course fun - good dinners, great company, and plentiful drinking I’m sure will ensue.

Highly excited I am, to be heading to this event. As will be quite a number of employees, who’ve never been to such an event before! Remember, being a distributed company, in over 25 countries, makes an event in where everyone gathers in one place for a few days, truly memorable, and really important to keep the creative juices flowing. The productivity spike around the DevMeeting clearly prove that some interaction is much better than IRC+emails+voice communication only.

Technorati Tags: mysql, logos, company meeting, florida

Today’s been interesting. Its labour day here in Melbourne, so I believe a lot of people are enjoying the long weekend. I on the other hand, have been labouring over the long weekend, and we have stuff to show for it. Via the Forge Wiki:

• Google Summer of Code 2007 - we’ve applied, we’ve identified mentors, and we’ve also identified some project ideas. Last week was rather busy sorting all this out. My boss, Kaj explains it a lot better in his post, Global Warming & Google Summer of Code. Students, do apply to come code with us!
  Keep the March 14 - 24, 2007 dates (Cupertino, California time) in your mind students… Thats when the Google SoC opens up. Of course, come March 14 we also certainly hope to be a mentoring organization, with the sole purpose of making MySQL rock! With regards to the wiki page, there’s information on a lot of bugs - we’re doing this so we open the board up a little, as well. We try to be specific, but we also try to be really open about the whole thing so students can cherry pick what interests them.
• Thanks to Stefan Hinz, our Documentation lead, we have now opened up MySQL University. This is the Engineering Training Program, so why not come learn with us?
  This is still a work in progress, and we’re migrating content (there’s not much yet, so thats a good thing). In the near future, since we’re working out the kinks, this should all be run on freenode as well. In the meantime, go learn about the mysys library & algorithms. Those times are probably when MySQL University will be held, so keep them free in your relevant timezone :P

Technorati Tags: mysql university, google summer of code, gsoc, summer of code, learn, code

Well, its been a while since I dirtied my hands in the sysadmin forays. I was wondering why my system was not accepting mail for a domain that clearly pointed to it. Running host just pointed to the mailserver correctly, but when I ran it on the mailserver, there was an IP address mismatch. Thinking back a little, it seems that there was an IP change, just something I’d forgotten about. Oh how the great DNS, comes to bite you in the behind.

MediaWiki these days likes PHP 5 (5.1 being preferred). I’ve discovered why Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 might suck - they only ship PHP 4.3.9, which is nowhere near as adequate for modern applications. So if I were a corporation and wanted to run the latest greatest Mediawiki on my corporate wiki, I’d be in a bind if I’m on RHEL4. Luckily, this is where the centosplus repository comes into active play - its got a modern PHP, and modern databases.

I’ve gotten out of the Planet game. After running Planet MyOSS for a countless number of years, I’ve just decided that the final migration should happen today - and it did thanks to a Redirect 301 / http://planet.foss.org.my/. Update your bookmarks, feed readers, etc.. as Planet MyOSS now resides at: http://planet.foss.org.my/. (except I checked it just now, and foss.org.my was down… it seems to be regularly down, why?)

Those having to deal with MYNIC, keep in mind that their online forms differ if you’re logging in as the Administrative or Technical contact (the latter is where you get to change DNS servers). And no, its not instant, they say its a 24-hr waiting period.

Back to RHEL/Centos. Why does the Linux Standards Base (LSB) stipulate that servers need to have CUPS installed, to be LSB compliant? I’ll probably talk more about the recent cleanups I’ve been doing at another stage.

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as Kaj has stated. Maybe we weren’t clear enough in our communication, and we’re clearly sorry. I think Kaj’s initial announcement was clear, but maybe a tabular form might be easier to understand? Keep in mind that odd numbers equate to Community releases, and even numbers equate to Enterprise releases.

5.0.27 - Community Binary & Source
5.0.28 - Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.30 - Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.32 - Enterprise Binary & Source
5.0.33 - Community Source (sync’ed to Enterprise 5.0.32)

So while we’re not attaching a timeframe to our releases, the above might make it easier to visualize, that the next time we release a Community edition, it will contain both binaries and source. In an ideal world, you’ll see a Community release after 2 Enterprise releases (i.e. on the 3rd release), one of which will be a source release, and the other which will be a source and binary release.

This is not a roadmap, but if we see the Community Server sources show up in January, I don’t see why we won’t see the Community Server sources & binaries showing up in March. June might see another source release, while September shows up a source & binary release. And so on…

So, if you see a binary once every six months, how is that rarely released? We’re not expecting Windows users to compile away.

In fact, the reasoning behind more frequent source releases, is to help those distributing MySQL. These are the Linux, *BSD, OS X, and other distributions that many people get their MySQL fix from. We want to make sure that with varying distribution freeze dates for releases (most good ones, ala Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. work on a six-month cycle), a new source tarball is available, and that the distributions themselves can publish it. We’re saving the infliction of pain of using BitKeeper, and taking random changesets.

Back to the question of Windows users. This is a time for Windows distributors to step up. XAMPP might be a good alternative for the learning crowd (with an easy to use installer for Apache, MySQL and PHP), and if others think we should work more closely with the project, by all means, leave a comment here or write me some email.

For those still concerned, I’d like to point out to Kaj’s Community Server recap. Don’t misunderstand point #4, as that is clearly in the Enterprise context, and its something we like to use in MySQL talks to talk about differentiation. If you’ve ever been to an overview talk, there are even clever icons that basically spell out that Enterprise customers like to spend money to save time, while Community folk enjoy spending time to save money.

To cap this all off, yes, MySQL are still providing binaries. Yes, we’ll see one Community source release, and one Community source+binary release. This will follow on with just a Community source release, and yet another Community source+binary release. Repeat, rinse.

Technorati Tags: binaries, mysql, mysql binary, mysql community server, mysql enterprise server

MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2007
This implies I’m coming to linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney next January. What’s more is that during the MiniConfs, we’ve got one for MySQL. Its on January 15th, and we’ve just put out the call for participation/papers. You have about eight (8) days left to submit a paper. So submit your tales of deployment, conference presentations, and I believe we’re even willing to accept “hand’s on” hacking sessions (ala what happened at MySQL Camp). Keep the wiki page handy, and submit goodies to mysql-miniconf[AT]mysql[dot]com.

Interview with Paddy Sreenivasan
Yes, Engineering Lead at Zmanda, they’re big on AMANDA and now have the Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. Paddy’s very interested in the online backup API and we’ve been communicating for quite a while.

Connector/PHP
We give you Connector/PHP with MySQL Community Server 5.0.27 and PHP 5.2.0. In the very near future, we’ll bring you updated packages for the 4.1 series as MySQL AB is going to be releasing it soon.

Technorati Tags: connector, interview, LCA, linuxconfau, miniconf, mysql, paddy, php, sreenivasan, zmanda

Some interesting things happened today…

We released a new MySQL server a few days ago, and that consequently means we’ve got a new Connector/PHP available for download. Go get ext/mysqli and ext/mysql against 5.0.26 while its hot.

And while we do support ext/mysql, we’d rather you (and your applications) used ext/mysqli. After all, wouldn’t you like to be able to use the new, much touted features that came post MySQL 4.1, like Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Precision Math, and so on?

So to make it a complete no brainer, we released a MySQLi Converter Tool. Its also available via subversion. The tool is branched off Revision 11 (in where support for the error functions were added!), and if you wanted an easy, HOWTO styled guide for using it (i.e. the great GUI web interface wasn’t enough), here’s a step-by-step guide to getting Wordpress 2.0.4 using the mysqli converter in almost no time!

Yes, read Converting to MySQLi and do provide feedback. This is really just to whet your appetite, developer documentation will probably be next. All on the MySQL Forge Wiki, of course.

Happy PHP-ing.

Technorati Tags: mysql, php

Si Chen, lead/core developer for opentaps (formerly known as Sequioa ERP), talked with us recently, and there’s an interview available. opentaps is an Enterprise Resource Planning solution, which is rather scalable and has a lot of functionality. It uses MySQL, of course. Give it a twirl!

Do you use MySQL for your application that you develop? Want to talk about it? Drop me a line at colin[AT]mysql.com.