Colin Charles Agenda

I first heard of Stephen Fry when he narrated The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then, I saw him in V for Vendetta. Today, I can only highly recommend you look at Freedom Fry - Happy Birthday to GNU.

GNU is 25 years old. Wow, it has come a long way. The Hurd is nowhere to be reckoned with, but Stephen does talk about Linux being a pillar. I have no idea why he seems to mention gNewSense, as I’m sure the non-free binary blobs usually entails something like working wireless, or working video, etc. Ubuntu with is non-free blobs, IMHO, is the best choice for new users…

Its interesting to see the MacBook Air perched on his coffee table (try running gNewSense on that baby). Its also useful to note that the video is played using the Fluendo Cortado Java app.

Must watch video. And Happy Birthday GNU… you definitely shaped my professional life for the better

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

With my MacBook Air, I aim to have less tabs open… Its got something to do with having 2GB of RAM, maybe.

Yebber
Maybe I like somewhat ditsy looking girls, but if you’ve never seen Lunch with Yebber I highly recommend it. Good food within Singapore is the aim. Only complaint? I have to watch it in-browser, and not on my iPod. I find it interesting that Yebber is aiming to pay people in “Yebber dollars” for reviews. Its definitely a motivator….

At the e27 Unconference, it was asked if Wikipedia was started in Singapore, would it have been that successful? I think if the Wikipedia equivalent that is Mahalo, was started in Asia, and there was monetary gain, it will be very successful.

PDF Import in OpenOffice.org
First up, you know that OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 is out now, right? In that case, take a gander at the Sun PDF Import Extension. Its limited: no PDF form support, no editing say in Writer (it just works in Draw and Impress), but its a good start.

Charlene Li leaves Forrester
Its an interesting reason:

I was once asked what was the best career advice I ever received — and it was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months, because research showed that people typically master a job in that time period and fall into a routine.

I’ve yet to post a review of Groundswell, but in short, its an excellent book.

Religious Social Networking
ZoeCity is a network for Christan folk. The idea behind it is sensible (shared values, etc. - get in the mind of an evangelical person, its “interesting”), and I know what database they’re powered by, and I’m hoping there’s traction for them to hit scalability issues so it’ll be an interesting story to talk about :)

Shinsei embraces open courseware too
Shinsei Bank is releasing their banking methods (normally a closely guarded secret), as open courseware. Of course, it will be licensed under the Creative Commons. They’re on YouTube, so don’t hesitate to watch their video about them announcing the release of their IT methods. Hat tip, Joi Ito.

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this really leverages Sun in many ways.

Its worth noting that Sheeri was at the lightning talk, and has a shorter, 8 minute video recording too.
Update: s/nothing/noting

We were at the Sun+Zend party last night, and it was a blast (thank you Jesse Silver!). If you’re a PostgreSQL or MySQL user/developer or just a general database geek, you should’ve been there. Why?

(watch the video if its stripped in your feed reader)

Monty Widenius (MySQL) and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL), decided to start sumo wrestling! It ended with a 5-0 score, advantage MySQL.

An attendee Tim Moore twittered: “Postgres is totally losing the sumo match. I’m migrating all of my databases to MySQL tomorrow.”

Monty says, this is what we do to people that leave Sun! In fact, if you didn’t already know, Josh Berkus, my esteemed colleague in the Database Group at Sun Microsystems, is leaving his post as the PostgreSQL Team Lead. We met for the first time, face to face at foss.in last year, and all I can say is I’m truly saddened to see him leave. But thanks to the magic of the open source world, we’ll still be interacting, I’m sure. Good luck Josh! (and better sumo practising next time, mmmkay?)

Silona Bonewald, the lady always in a hat (she says that it’s just become an extension of her). Describe her, by her tags: open government, open data, open standards, and databases.

(watch the video if your feed reader strips it out)

Silona’s the founder of The League of Technical Voters, which allows technical people to be more involved in voting process. As part of this, she created the Transparent Federal Budget, with Bill Bradley and Jimmy Wales.

On top of all that, she’s also the open source evangelist for grid.org. The focus there is a social network for grid, cluster, and cloud computing folk - a community of communities. Best of all, this was just launched on Tuesday!

It’s also the home to UniCluster, and they’ve recently struck a deal which Intel to pop UniCluster in BIOSes. UniCluster works with Sun’s Grid Engine, as well.

She’s interested in Drizzle, for the same reason that she likes Drupal. She likes the decorator model, and she thinks its a great way to get the parallel computing solutions fixed.

Needless to say, all of the stuff she works on currently, is powered by MySQL.

Interested in MySQL? Drizzle? How the Sun acquisition is going for MySQL? Listen to Brian, Monty, and Tim speak about this, at the OSCON panel. Watch the video, its 20+ minutes, it starts off a bit shaky (oops), but I’m mostly happy with the rest. Enjoy.