Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been using the Sony DSC-RX100M III for over a year, despite thinking that my iPhone will be my primary pocket camera. I have to say that the iPhone 6 Plus 64GB is a fine phone, and it has an amazing camera and I don’t have plans to get the iPhone 6s Plus (see: not a worthy upgrade for photographers and is it worse?).

So generally the iPhone suffices for lots of snaps, Instagram/Facebook pics, etc. But when it comes to taking a family vacation, I whip out the Sony RX100 III. From comparisons, it doesn’t seem like I would benefit too much from the RX100 IV, since a lot of the improvements seem to be around video which I tend not to take.

The battery is rated at about 320 shots, and I think I get about there but some days are special and I exhaust the NP-BX1. Couple that with misplacing my battery charger which also has a USB cable so you can transfer images easily, I decided to grab the Sony ACC-TRBX. This package comes with an additional battery, a charger with USB pass thru so you can charge the camera directly, and of course there’s the brick that allows you to charge the additional battery.

Smart solution? You should be able to charge the battery within the camera as well as the battery in the charger, right? Wrong. They build a silly button that either allows you to charge via USB the battery within the camera OR the battery in the dock. Why?!? 

Well, that was RM300 spent on the ability to get more pictures. However one wonders what the designers at Sony were thinking? I guess there also exists the idea of a hardware misfocus.

It looks like the result of a company that is focused on adding features, not focused on creating something well-designed. – John Gruber

He was referring to Evernote. We talk regularly about feature creep, don’t we? How many pieces of software have you seen that is basically mis-focused? 

I was thinking about buying a Mac Mini, but the Apple Store in Malaysia has over-priced it, due to the crazy Malaysian Ringgit (prices don’t reflect current realities; custom Mac Mini with all things thrown in is USD$1,499 vs RM6,899, today’s rate being RM6,435).

So I decided to buy an Intel NUC and go the Linux route. I picked up the Intel NUC NUC5i5RYH from CZone for RM1,643 which has an Intel Core i5-5250U processor, WiFi, Ethernet but requires you to provide some RAM, storage and you’re good to go. This is the model that allows an M.2 SSD and another regular 2.5” disk, so I chose to get the Transcend M.2 256GB SATA III 6Gb/s MTS800 to be the disk I’ll used to install an OS on for RM477 and decided that I’ll get another disk for storage/Dropbox purposes — HGST 7000rpm 2.5-Inch 1TB SATA III. RAM was easy – just make sure to get low power DDR3 RAM (DDR3L), and its easy enough to pick up 2*8GB sticks for a total of 16GB of RAM.

All in, I paid RM2,713 for this, and I provided by own MiniDisplayPort to VGA adapter. I see this as a huge savings over the Mac Mini. Sure, I can get a 2TB spinning disk on the Mac Mini (it seems that OEM folk can’t get these fusion drives at that size), but if I really wanted to go all out, I could have gotten a larger M.2 SSD and also went all in with SSD instead of spinning disk. Maybe when the 6th generation NUC comes out.

Configuring Ubuntu was relatively easy. Ubuntu 15.10 did require me to boot with the nomodeset option (so immediately after the visual BIOS splash screen, hit the Shift key, press e to edit the displayed kernel, and when it says ro quiet splash, edit it to say ro nomodeset quiet splash. You install Ubuntu via a USB thumb drive as well.

This is basically a server with X for me. It’s doing tasks like syncing Dropbox, backing up with CrashPlan, and it will allow me to use Docker containers, compile software, etc. while I’m sitting at my desk. It makes for a pretty mean desktop, all packed in a tiny little package. 

Why didn’t I go with the current i7? Seems like there wasn’t too much of a performance boost (good reading: Intel NUC Mini PC Review: Core i5 and i7 Benchmarked). The 6th Gen is also coming, so it will be a much more interesting platform for me (see the NUC6i5SYH; here’s hoping they also have i7 versions).

There was some discussion a while back to maybe make MariaDB Server follow the Ubuntu release model, i.e. having a Long Term Release (LTS) and then having a few regular fast releases with a shorter support cycle.

However its good to note that the decision now going forward is to support each and every GA release for a period of five (5) years. However, regular releases will only happen for the latest three (3) GA releases, so at this moment, you are getting updates for MariaDB Server 5.5/10.0/10.1.

Practically, we’ve not seen an update for 5.1/5.2/5.3 since 30 Jan 2013 at the time of this writing. And its clear MariaDB Server 5.5 will have an extended support policy, as it ships in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. 

At this time it’s worth noting that for MySQL 5.5, premier support ends December 2015, while there is extended support till December 2018.

Swift is now opensource, and it’s interesting to see Craig Federighi talk about it. This is Apple doing right, considering FaceTime is long overdue to being an open standard. People are nitpicking on Apple’s Open Source tagline, but really, this is akin to nitpicking on Mark Zuckerberg donating 99% of his Facebook stock to his new limited liability corporation charity (key: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth).

Apple has chosen to put Swift on Github, and they’ve ensured that it wasn’t just an initial commit, but you’re seeing a lot of history. And it’s the right choice clearly, for engagement – 1,275 watching, 18,884 stars, 2,139 forks, 51 pull requests currently, but most interestingly a lot of accepted code. Even simple things along the lines of “fixing typos” (see commits, eg. d029f7e5ae84cf8f6c12907f9ed0ac0a694881aa, e8b06575d26a684f415af95143ec576a6aa5168d, etc.). 

Swift has open source documentation – like all good open source projects are supposed to have. They use Sphinx and its in the source tree. This is something I’d wish to see from MySQL (docs copyright Oracle, online, but you can take it offline too via PDF) or MariaDB (friendly licensed Knowledge Base), but so far only Percona Server has gotten this right.

What else did Swift do right? Focus on user contributions – the Contributing page is a breath of fresh air. And don’t forget the code of conduct for participating in the project.

But besides just the documentation and contribution pages, I learned something new from one commit in particular – the existence of nproc, part of coreutils. I immediately hopped onto IRC to chat with Nirbhay (our resident MariaDB Galera Cluster expert), because in scripts/wsrep_sst_xtrabackup.sh, we do this via a get_proc() function. We should be focusing on modernising/standardising our codebase, shouldn’t we?

There is a lot we at MariaDB Corporation and the MariaDB Foundation can learn from Swift being opensource and how Apple deals with the community at large. Here’s hoping we get the best practices from it and implement it in due time.

So this year the Percona Live conference has a new name – it is the “Data Performance Conference” (presumably for a much broader appeal and the fact that Percona is now in the MongoDB world as well). And the next new thing to note? You have to go through a process of “community voting”, i.e. the speaker has to promote their talks before via their own channels to see how many votes they can get (we tried this before at the MySQL & Friends Devroom at FOSDEM; in this case, please remember you also need to create a new account and actually vote while logged in).

I hope you vote for Sergei, Monty and my proposals!

1. Using and Managing MariaDB – a tutorial, which has been referred to as The Complete MariaDB Server tutorial, I thought I will change the name up a little, in addition to the content. The most recent version of this tutorial was given at the Percona Live Conference in Santa Clara in 2015 (slides). Since then we’ve released MariaDB Server 10.1, and there’s much more new things to talk about!
2. MariaDB 10.1 – What’s New? – a talk that would have Michael “Monty” Widenius (creator of MySQL and MariaDB) and me give it together. I’ve described this as a dance, and the last time we did this was at Percona Live Amsterdam. The content will of course be new, and I am creating the slide deck this time around.
3. Databases in the Hosted Cloud – this is a pet talk. It costs some money to make, and if accepted I plan to also showcase who has better performing hosted databases. I did this at Percona Live Amsterdam 2015 (slides), but since then we’ve seen Amazon offering MariaDB Server as part of RDS, HPCloud being sunset, and also Rackspace upping their offering with High Availability Databases. More research to be done from now till then!
4. Best Practices for MySQL High Availability – this would be another tutorial, and at Percona Live Amsterdam 2015 it had the highest registered attendance (Kortney told me the day before and I removed all practicals, since 100+ people with practicals is impossible for one person to manage – slides). I think with the changes in NDBCLUSTER (recently announced at OpenWorld), the addition of tools in the MHA world (mha-helper), this should have a lot of new information (and more importantly a lot of new things to play with).
5. Choosing a MySQL HA solution today – a talk based on the above tutorial, cut short, to ensure people whom are not at tutorial day, will have solutions to think about and take home for implementation in the future.
6. MariaDB/MySQL security essentials – a talk which focuses on improvements in MariaDB Server 10.1, and MySQL 5.6/5.7, including encryption at rest, easier SSL setup for replication topologies, and even external authentication plugins (eg. Kerberos is almost ready – see MDEV-4691).
7. The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016 – a talk about MySQL and the forks around it, including the private trees that exist (some like the Twitter tree haven’t been updated in a while, but clearly have made inroads in giving us new features). Learn what to use, and what is the best one for your use case. 
8. MariaDB Connectors: Fast and Smart with the new protocol optimizations – a talk from Sergei Golubchik, about new protocol optimisations in MariaDB Server as well as how we optimise this from the connectors as well.
9. MariaDB 10.1 Security: Validation, Authentication, Encryption – a talk from Sergei Golubchik focusing on MariaDB 10.1 security improvements; he’s got some amazing slides on encryption that I saw at Percona Live Amsterdam, and you can see a five-minute lightning version from the meetup.

Here’s to happy voting and I hope to give at least some of these talks (if not all!).