Posts Tagged ‘india’

Speaking in May 2017

It was a big April if you’re in the MySQL ecosystem, so am looking forward to other events that have different focus and a different base, so to speak. See you at:

  • rootconf – May 11-12 2017 – Bangalore, India. My first Rootconf was last year, and it was a great event; I look forward to going there again this year, to talk about capacity planning for your databases. If you register with this link you get a 10% discount.
  • Open Source Data Center Conference – May 16-18 2017 – Berlin, Germany. I’ve enjoyed my trips to OSDC in the last few years, and they’re on their last tickets now – so register if you plan to go!

Sun Tech Days Hyderabad

I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexed at MySQL for Developers. Its more or less the standard deck for the Tech Days events these days.

The best part? The questions. I had intelligent questions, and they lasted well over twenty minutes, and there was even more chatter afterwards. Twenty minutes might not seem like a lot, but this is Asia, and in some audiences, you’d be hard pressed to get even a single question! MySQL is hot, in India. Really, really, hot.

I’m glad to see that most people are using MySQL 5 and 5.1. I’m not so glad to see that most people don’t know about storage engines – most are using MyISAM without even knowing it, and they don’t know there exist other engines. This is what I notice, every time I talk about storage engines, though. For the astute MySQL developer, the DevZone is known (thanks to the documentation, mainly), but the Forge is almost unheard of. Planet MySQL seems to be more popular, actually.

Arun Gupta has some nice pictures and videos of the event in general. For me, I was jet-lagged after a massive delay in my flight leaving Kuala Lumpur (plane was unserviceable), and I only mustered under three hours of sleep before addressing the large crowd of folk.

The Tech Days events for the (financial) year are winding down, and for the next (financial) year, we (MySQL/The Database Group, in general) need to plan to be first class citizens at the event. Not only in terms of talks, but we need booth space (we’re about the only Sun project lacking a booth). After all, we have interesting things to talk about: MySQL, Drizzle, MySQL Enterprise Tools/Merlin, Workbench, Proxy, Query Analyser/Quan, Cluster, Replication, DTrace, Virtualisation and the database (VirtualBox? xVM?), etc. This list is probably never ending, so some cool demos, lots of fact sheets, maybe even USB sticks of goodies (2GB sticks are dirt cheap, and loading it up with information not only make people want to get a stick, but makes them learn more – hopefully before they format it! :P).

Tab roundup for December 2008

Om Malik’s blog design, and themes as a business
I stumbled upon Om.Is.Me…, Om Malik’s private blog, and was taken away by the design. For one, its hosted at wordpress.com (something I’m thinking I might do at some stage, if it was less rigid). But more importantly, what I noticed was the design – I was really taken away by the blog theme. Its designed by GNV & Partners, and it looks snazzy.

Is there big business in WordPress themes? If their website was in English, I’d be a little more interested… Largely because I have to theme at least two WordPress sites in the near future, and I’m not looking forward to mastering CSS, etc.

What do custom WordPress themes go for? How many folk pay for themes?

Hackerspaces
Found this via Twitter (thanks @achitnis), and it Hackerspaces reminded me a lot of coworking. When in Melbourne, I always pined of a co-working space (I believe, Joe’s Garage came close to it – upstairs, anyway). Now that I’m in Kuala Lumpur a lot more, I am wondering if a warehouse somewhere, might make sense…

Cybercafes in Japan, offering physical addresses to the homeless
Read Cyber cafe offers address to homeless. I didn’t know that cybercafe’s in Tokyo gave away a free email address (maybe they don’t, but they might give you access to one), but I was impressed that comic books and unlimited beverages were a norm. Kudos to Cyber @ Cafe offering long-term lodging and an official registered address (important, when PO BOXes aren’t acceptable or you’re homeless).

Takemitsu Karitachi, used to sleep on park benches, but he doesn’t have to anymore:

This simple service is vital for the 50 semi-permanent residents of the cafe, many of whom have taken refuge here after being laid off abruptly during the current recession.

Takemitsu Karitachi, a contract worker at a nearby factory, is one of the many people who have been sleeping at the cafe every night for the past two months since he lost his office job and his apartment.

Karitachi, who used to roam the streets and hopped between various Internet cafes for months, says he is now relieved to have found a more permanent home — even if it’s a cubicle just slightly bigger than the back seat of a car.

BMW India sales records
It stunned me when I found out that in 2007, BMW only sold 1,338 cars, and in 2008, plans to sell 2,800 units. The sales ratio between the BMW 5 and 3 series is 55:45 (so the one’s buying a BMW, actually have a lot more disposable income than one would think).

I don’t know the cost of a BMW in India, but if its prohibitively expensive as it is in Malaysia (what is it, up to 300% excise duty?), I’m surprised the numbers are a lot lower. Seeing a BMW (or a Mercedes) on the road in Malaysia is very common – yuppies are driving 3-series cars (BMW 320), straight into their first management job, willing to fork out RM220,000+, and paying it off over seven or nine years.

Lucky for me, I don’t think of a car as a status symbol (and think that people that do, are rather daft).

After Credentials
Read Paul Graham’s After Credentials. It is probably his best essay in recent time, and its very pertinent to those living in Asia.

Not only in South Korea, but in most parts of Asia, education is touted as being very important. Quotes like “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future,” don’t surprise me. Paul thinks its old fashioned – I tend to agree. Today’s universities are not more than cram universities.

The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

This doesn’t work in small companies. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they’d soon be parted from you if your performance didn’t match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The whole article is interesting. There is a good analysis of the big company versus small company paradigm, as well as the fact that people want instant (and not deferred) rewards.

I predict that within Asia, in the next two decades, hiring based on your after credentials (first bachelors, then masters, possibly doctorate eventually), are going to be a thing of the past.

Lawyers use Facebook to serve notices
Via The Age:

Canberra lawyers have won the right to serve legally binding court documents by posting them on defendants’ Facebook sites.

In a ruling that could make legal and internet history, a Supreme Court judge ruled last week lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.

Email and even mobile phone text messages have been used before to serve court notices, but the Canberra lawyers who secured the ruling are claiming service by Facebook as a world first.

“The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.

On perfumes, and smell
This is interesting, The scent of a man. Very captivating, here are a few select quotes:

They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. … What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway was: “The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man’s social status from his smell alone.””

Women can smell success?

MySQL Camp in Bangalore

In Bangalore, India? Definitely go there, to the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, on the 29 of July 2008, from 4-7pm (no, not Indian Standard Time ;)), and listen to Kaj Arno speak about MySQL.

Sun Microsystems - IN - MySQL Camp
We’re on the front page of Sun Microsystems .in

In addition to Kaj, Thava Alagu will speak about contributing code to MySQL, and Sonali Minocha (from OSSCube) will speak on optimising enterprise applications.

There is also hope that this will be a regular meetup, aka the Bangalore MySQL User Group. Amit Saha has an entry on MySQL Camp (which isn’t exactly the hands-on MySQL Camp you’re used to – its just a name), and a schedule available.


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