Colin Charles Agenda

Open source projects have a lot of documentation. Some professionally written, others community contributed. One thing that community contributed documentation has going for it is the passionate users that write localized content.

Localization of documentation is important. While we take it for granted that we all speak/read/write/understand the English language, a lot of people just starting out in non-English speaking areas might find it useful to read some localized content. Hook them based on their interests, and slowly they can be weaned off to other non-localized documentation, and might contribute to the localizing cause eventually, even.

Localization is also not easy. If you tried to localize the MySQL Documentation, its recommended you start with something smaller like the GUI tools, rather than the entire user manual. This because of its sheer size. I dare say, we have one of the best user manuals for any open source project out there. Its cogent, its concise.

Tamil (Indian) Documentation
But the point of this post, was really to encourage more community contributed documentation. Of late, we’ve had some Tamil documentation, that I myself can’t review, but I’m sure the collaborative and distributed nature of the Internet will enable us to find some Tamil reading people, who can write better, and longer descriptions about what’s there.

I’m sorry its a Word document. I didn’t want to convert it to a PDF because I have no idea if the fonts will break. For what it is worth, there is a supplied font that you might find useful, if you were reading it. Now, who wants to review it?

Blogs via Planet MySQL
If you read Planet MySQL, you’ll realize that quite a lot of the content there is high-quality MySQL related content. What you will also realize is that these are on individual user blogs, and its all fed based on topic and regex searches (thanks Arjen, for this!). But content within Planet MySQL disappears from the front of the page after 10 entries.

To fix this, there are the Planet MySQL Archives. If you notice, these are actually cached on Planet MySQL itself, so the content will be preserved if you move blog host, or somehow manage to be taken off the Internet. However, this isn’t a hundred percent solution, as not all the content on the Planet are actually “article material”.

So wouldn’t it be nice if all the article material were on the MySQL Forge Wiki? This way, we would have a community-based data store, with available information for all to draw on.

What are your thoughts? Is publishing on the wiki too difficult? I’m interested in hearing your comments (or even better, tell me what your blog posting workflow is like). colin AT mysql dot com works too.

Just as Jay writes about an upcoming MySQL Barcamp, I’m all stoked to head to the 2006 inagural WordCamp. After that, I’ll be at Apple’s WWDC 2006.

There’s one thing there that interests me greatly is the My Agenda tool - you can pre-plan what you’re going for, have it printed or subscribed to in the webcal (iCal) format.

So, anyone want to catch up in San Francisco? I’ll be around from the 4th right till the 12th (though I leave later in the evening then). Drop me an email or just comment here…

Just a quick note to say that the MySQL Forge Wiki looks like the rest of the Forge, and there’s now SpamBlacklist installed. If spam still persists (you know you’re popular when spam’s abound, right?), we might have to install captchas. From an accessibility perspective, I don’t quite like this idea, so lets hope the spam stays under control nonetheless.

Maybe inflammatory, but I don’t quite remember spam on the Fedora Project wiki. Do Python-based wikis suffer less spam (or no spam) than the PHP-based ones? (otherwise known as MoinMoin vs. MediaWiki)

What kinda numbnuts are running Pizza Hut? I want to eat pizza like now, not at 1.18pm, estimated delivery time.

In recent times I’ve caught Cheaper by the Dozen 2, and on the United plane ride, Nanny McPhee, and Prime. I can recommend them all if you had nothing better to do with your time (i.e. laptop battery is dead, you can’t sleep because the chick next to you is lying on your shoulder with her mouth open, breathing out progressively smellier air, etc.).

So, it seems some collaborative notes from the recent SDForum Ruby on Rails thing is online. That should be useful, because I must admit, RoR is quite easy to get into.

Hey, hey, this is well worth a read: MySQL to Offer Linux Bundled with Database as Free Download.

So, the MySQL Forge has been announce and has been live for a while… Even the Forge Wiki has content that isn’t created by me! Ha, the community at work…

And Ubuntu, now supported by MySQL. There’s a relationship there. Mark Shuttleworth gave a great keynote, talked about the relationship with upstreams, the new MySQL relationship they have, and how he was really excited to be here. Thawte I believe, ran on MySQL :-)

If there’s one thing to take away from his talk it’d have to be the fact that he’s also a VC and a lot of people ask him for money. Don’t go to a VC and tell them, “Hey, I’ve got Project Y, and I expect it to be the next X.” Why be the next X, you want to be unique, yes?

All that aside, I guess I can mention in public what I’ve been up to for a while… Well, the press release mentioned it. Whatever. So, now all we have to do is plod on for June 1st, and thats a good one month more for me to work hard at this…

And you thought I was a big fan, tracking him almost every month, in a different country, or a different continent!
(well, actually I am :P)

“No, you can’t run a Migration BoF, and it won’t make sense without a few of our migration experts,” he exclaimed with a petulant expression.

Well, it turns out the migration BoF was actually quite good at the MySQL UC. It turns out, that everyone attending thought that it was a migration from 3.23 or 4 or 4.1 to MySQL 5. My understanding of this was that we’d actually prefer folk to come in from $database and figure they’d want to migrate to MySQL.

And fair enough, the only experience I’ve had over time was migrating from Postgresql right to MySQL. But the idea of a BoF is to let everyone talk, share experiences, and so on. So a few resources we discussed, and I think were generally useful (and hopefully now, there will be more 5.0 users):

• Upgrading from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 - from our great manual. Read it and take a gander to see if you’ll get affected.
• Upgrading from MySQL 3.23 to 4.0
• Upgrading from MySQL 4.0 to 4.1

MySQL has always recommended incremental upgrades. And its always a good idea to backup your data before doing an upgrade.

What I did want to discuss was the cool MySQL Migration Toolkit. It also has an excellent manual entry. But it seems that no one has really used it before, and I had to run away for another item… aka, the Quiz Show. All in all, good Migration BoF, and thanks to everyone attending!

If you’re at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, we’d love if you took notes and shared it with everyone… There are some cool tools like Gobby or SubEthaEdit that some folk might enjoy, since there’s a WiFi network available.

We’ve got a UC2006 Category on the wiki that you might find handy. Go ahead, create a wiki account, and start writing some useful content :-)

The name of the wine seems appropriate to MySQL and writing

If you wanna chat (for collaborative writing purposes and not for skipping out on your session!) there’s #mysql-uc on the famous freenode IRC network.

So the last few days have been randomly fun. I’ve been to Fry’s several times to grab random bits and bobs. Things I don’t need, but now have. Hung out with Mikal and Stewart quite a bit, which is always fun. Had lots to drink, and have gotten some work done!

All that aside, today was reserved mostly for our CEO’s house party. It was highly fun, there was drink, great food, and even song!

Stewart by the bar

There was Foster’s beer! Haha. Go Australian export beer. And Morgan was caught having some. I got to meet so many MySQLers its going to be hard to remember them all. I’m sure by the time the UC is over, all will be well.

Kaj, my boss. I like this “portrait” of him quite well

Anyways, a picture tells a thousand words, so view the MySQL Staff Party 2006 photoset.