Colin Charles Agenda

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.

Ruby on Rails is hot technology. Its got the essence of Web 2.0 written all over it, right?

Seeing that it supports MySQL out of the box, we like it. We of course want to enhance our support of the Ruby on Rails team, and make sure the RoR users have a rocking time.

As a consequence of this, I’ve been playing with RoR, and will definitely write up more thoughts here at some stage. This is just a quick note to mention that I’d be going to the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, from April 22-23 2006. Anyone else plan on being there?

No, we didn’t forget about Make MySQL 5.1 Rock contest. We were just migrating our bugs database, and going through a little teething problems everytime a Monday hit! (yes, I’ve not been taking them for myself in the last two weeks!) The good news is that, you get an additional fortnight to win yourself an iPod Nano.

This week’s winner is none other than Mike Kruckenberg. He’s submitted a bunch of bug reports, in relation to MySQL Cluster (another hot topic these days), and one that caught my eye was a critical server crash (mysql#18603). He also blogs about his day spent with MySQL 5.1, which is a fun read.

If that’s not enough, Mike is also an invited member of the highly esteemed MySQL Guilds, and he’s co-written an excellent book: Pro MySQL. If you haven’t already read it, go buy it already.

Thanks for making MySQL 5.1 rock, you deserve the iPod Nano!

I spent a bit of time today organizing myself for a bunch of trips next month.

Contrary to my blog posting earlier, I will be at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, which is on the 24th-27th April. But I’m getting into San Francisco in the week before, so if you’re up to meeting me, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I have a feeling that I’ll actually be staying in Santa Clara as opposed to San Francisco proper, but there should be public transport, right?

I should also be with my colleague, Arjen, who’s speaking at the Free OSS Forum Day, organized by Open Source Tasmania. He tells me that Pia should also be there, which should rock. So Hobart, here I come on the 6th, and possibly there’s a TASLug meeting on the 7th (is there?).

Yes, MySQL 5.1’s new Partitioning feature definitely is a hot topic. Last week’s iPod Nano winner won thanks to interesting partitioning happenings, and this week’s one wins for the same reason.

With that, here comes a hearty congratulation to Jeremy Cole, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Jeremy’s been a long-time MySQL user, a one-time employee, and a great help on the mailing lists. In trying out new features in MySQL 5.1, he stumbled upon several bugs, one of which has been fixed. Again, the idea of repeatable bug reports is tantamount to how quickly a developer can fix a problem. (mysql#17541) Don’t forget to read his engaging blog, jcole’s weblog, which is already fed to Planet MySQL.

Want an iPod Nano next week? Its simple. File a useful, reproducible, non-duplicated bug report. Blog about it. That second step, is seemingly important. And I’ll notice it when I do my weekly bug hunt ;-)

In other news, if you want to meet Jeremy Cole, he’s presenting quite a bit at the MySQL Users Conference 2006:

• Tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability
• MySQL GIS: Overview and Tools - fairly hot topic GIS is, there’s also talk about getting it going with PHP
• A HackFest on Creating UDFs along with and a panel titled Scale Out

Conference time! While I understand Frank’s feelings, there’s always hope that there will be some great “blog reports”, amazing IRC, and if at all, some form of podcasts.

However, if I was going to the MySQL Users Conference 2006, I’d probably attend things in this order:

• Monday - Arjen’s Optimizing MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture because this is important stuff all folk should learn about. Performance being the name of the game these days, it’d be silly to miss MySQL Performance Optimization that our very own performance guru, Peter Zaitsev will be giving.
• Tuesday - Mono is hot, right? Might as well listen to Creating .NET applications with Linux and MySQL. In the VoIP and telco industry, it would seem that The Case for Carried Grade Linux in Telecom would rock. Go for Jay’s Performance Tuning Best Practices (his last webminar rocked!). Come 4.30pm I get torn between Embedding MySQL, MySQL Partitioning, or the Sakila Sample DB. Again, back to performance, Peter runs the 5.0 vs. 4.1 review - these results will be really interesting.
• Wednesday - How do you choose between Speeding-up Queries or a talk on Backups? Or an Asterisk talk versus Security by Example? Heck, even at the tail end of the day there’s competition - Tuning Stored Procedures or a more “in this world” talk by Alcatel on Building scalabale Telecoms databases on MySQL. This is a talk I’d love to see in a Webminar so everyone else can watch.
• Thursday - I haven’t mentioned any of the keynotes per se, but I suggest all wake up and attend Mark Shuttleworth’s talk on Ubuntu (and MySQL). I’d then hit Plugging Your Applications into the MySQL Storage Engine Layer by Brian Aker (even though there’s a .NET session that looks interesting). Technical talks like Optimizing MySQL on Source Code Level will definitely be worth your time, as will the Django talk. Heard of ipTel? Their real-life large scale VoIP deployments should be interesting.

Well, that pretty much sums it up. The MySQL Users Conference looks like a little week of lots of learning. If you can go, be there.

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me 4528@sip.mysql.com or via the MySQL phone number at that extension. On OS X and Linux, I’m using X-Lite. I haven’t tried linphone/kphone yet, because last time I fiddled with it on PPC, it had some endianness issues.
• I’m actively reading the PHP Manual; its very cogent.
• Those mysterious Powerbook vibrations of the screen. I’ve seen them. They really do exist. I wonder if Apple’s gonna fix them, or if my screen dies, I have to take it in. This ultimately, isn’t good.
• Caught Ditesh & Dinesh last-last night for food, then hit Backyard. Was trying to use their wireless to no avail. Ow’s bachelor party dinner thing was last night… small crowd, but fun nonetheless.