Colin Charles Agenda

The MySQL User Guide is worth looking at. Its not the reference manual (which is excellent - kudos to our Documentation Team). Its target audience are users that are new to databases or users that are new to MySQL in general.

What’s really interesting about the MySQL User Guide is that you can help shape it. You, the community, can participate in writing it!

I for one, know that this is the easiest way you can start contributing to any open source project. Documenting it. Soon, you will realise that you’ve become an expert (writing documentation, or giving training, will always keep you sharp). Some move on to then delving in coding, some go on being consultants, and some end up being hired by the company that sponsors the project ;)

The URL again: http://userguide.forge.mysql.com/

Happy writing!

Technorati Tags: mysql, community, documentation, forge, user guide, contributing, open source, advocacy, mysql user guide

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really quickly, so I hope the Q&A is a good reflection.

But what does this all mean for me? Its too early to tell, right? Besides, I do know the Sun community quite a bit, having spent quite a few years working on OpenOffice.org (from the unofficial FAQ, to being a community marketing contact, to PowerPC and OS X porting work - heck, at the 2005 linux.conf.au, I was the Sun Regional Delegate, nationally within Australia which tacked on a great prize of going to OLS, and my first time meeting Simon Phipps), so I should be stoked, in general ;)

Thats not to say, I didn’t ask my colleague Lenz, seated next to me, if this was some kind of joke. He reassured me, it wasn’t. On internal IRC, Kaj then posted the link to his blog post Sun acquires MySQL, and at that point in time, I realised, it was all true. Monty was positive about it on internal IRC, and if its OK for Monty, it must be OK for the rest of us.

Here’s to the next chapter in MySQL’s story.

Technorati Tags: writing, mysql, sun, q&a, interview, marten mickos, video, youtube, sun meets mysql, mike lischke

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.

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

A recent edition of Business 2.0 had the cover story titled Blogging for Dollars. It seemed to highlight how advertising dollars was bringing in money for bloggers. I’ve known people say that they’ve become “full-time bloggers” just by writing product reviews (of products they don’t even own/touch - so they just lift off Gizmodo, etc. and add opinions), and say that AdSense (or similar) pay-offs is all you need to survive.

This is what led me to try ReviewMe. It calculates a blog’s worthiness by a mix of Technorati rankings, Alexa ratings, and estimated RSS feed subscribers (probably taken via the Technorati rankings? Or maybe blogs that have a FeedBurner ranking might help?). Once its given you a ranking (via stars), it gives you a price tag as to what your blog is worth.

Assuming your blog is worth $250, the moment an advertiser decides to “hire you”, ReviewMe gets to keep 50% of the earnings, and you, the blogger, get to take the remaining 50%. Thats $125 richer you can be, just for writing a review. All for anything over 200 words.

Thats a range of 10-62.5 cents per word! Way more than struggling newspaper writers are expected to get. But that’s not what interests me. I’m interested in if this entire idea itself can work.

So I took a gander to find the rather (once-famous) Ubuntu Blog. Its got high Technorati rankings, not so high Alexa rankings, and the ReviewMe algorithm decides its worth $250. However, this blog in itself, has not been updated since the end of September 2006!

How does an outdated blog get such high rankings? What about potential advertisers that don’t perform sufficient due diligence, and trust ReviewMe’s ratings? The Ubuntu Blog is a clear example that its statistics might be a bit skewed, as blogs tend to lose readership if they’re not updated frequently.

And Googling for information about increasing one’s Alexa rankings are suspect at best. Everyone that has something to say about it, says you need to install the Alexa toolbar. Which ironically, only runs on Internet Explorer. Why doesn’t the Google PageRank play into getting a higher blog rating, then?

This world of search engine optimization (SEO) is an interesting one. More interesting, its great to see people getting to sit at home in their underwear and blog, podcast, videocast, and experiment with new media, and get paid for it.

And the ReviewMe way is very much like how Zooomr tried to get customers - by giving away 2.5gb account to bloggers. Who wins the game? Its hard to say, but I’m still a Flickr user. This ends my paid experimentation for now; more thoughts to come, I’m sure. (yes, ReviewMe are paying people who have blogs to review them.)

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, media, newmedia, reviewme, seo

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.

Red Hat Magazine this month (well, okay, last month, I’m clearing out my tabs), has a feature on Linux and Asia. Of interest were:

• What does open source mean in India? - an interview with Javed Tapia (Director, Red Hat India), showing why India finds OSS important (software costs too much), how localisation works, and a bit about Red Hat India.
• Asia, the questions we ask - a great read, written by Michael Tiemann about his experiences in Asia. A question of interest: “What will be Singapore’s role in the technology industry of the 21st century?” I think thats the question most countries want the answer to, be it Malaysia or Australia. Its interesting to see what he has to mention about Sri Lanka (a place thats great for outsourcing, and has heaps of OSS contributors - look at the Apache project).
• Open source for non-profits - by Matt Frye, Fedora contributor, and NGO saviour. He talks about making the Healing Place of Wake County, a place for homeless people with alcohol and drug addictions to recover and rehabilitate, running Red Hat Linux, Apache and MySQL, with a PHP based web interface.
• The open source movement in Malaysia - </shameless plug> Written by me, it is a positive overview of the Malaysian OSS movement. At some stage, we’ll concentrate on business use of it, possibly in the following month or two.
• Red Hat Interns - this was actually a pretty cool video. If time permits, take a gander, just a little disappointed I didn’t get to see the Fedora contributors Luke Macken and Jack Aboutboul, who both interned at Red Hat last summer (?).

• Meet Fedora Core 4 - Red Hat Magazine article. Go read more about our amazing FC-4. Which incidentally released earlier this week
• So I spoke to a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while, and Malcolm is no longer free software/Apple hippie, but Microsoft employee working on Transactional NTFS that we’ll see in Longhorn. Well, at least he had finished installing FC-4 when he spoke to me.
• Caught The Dreamers. It was, well, truly not something for kiddies. Finished all my One Tree Hill, Season 2 bits.
• Been having the usual troubles sleeping, and Ditesh found me the best path to sleep. I guess those Slashdot gems really do exist.
• S3 sleep on my R51 does drain power - about 12% of the battery went away during a 24 hour period. It was nice to reboot into FC-4 today (having only gamin, and the kernel change).
• Dinesh was here on Friday. Well, he was here all week, just so happens that it was a good time for all of us to have a binging session, at Crown. Saw Gopi, and Tirath after ages as well. Good discussion, and good Hoegaarden’s.
• domU images for Xen are useful raw disk images. Pity they lack FreeBSD ones…. 5.3 setup of Xen notes.
• 
  To live up to changing my hair-style everytime I enter the States.
• So my scratchbox on Fedora issues? Solved not by turning of /proc/sys/kernel/exec_shield, but by going after /proc/sys/kernel/vdso.