On Thursday, the day before the long weekend (Friday being Good Friday, following week Monday being Easter Monday), the Melbourne MySQL Meetup group met, for an event that was not our usual meetup, but that of a Meetup Mashup.
Held at RMIT, I spoke about the recent purchase, what changes, what doesn’t, and how we’re 100% committed to making the same great product even better. After that, Gary Pendergast, spoke about how the support is run, and how nothing changes there, except its becoming beefier! We also had a Sun Campus Ambassador, Zhiqi Tao speak about the campus ambassador program, and how he evangelises Sun technologies at universities (his particular one, being Melbourne University). There is also apparently an RMIT ambassador, who missed the meeting.
After the talk, a pocket of us headed to dinner at the Oxford Scholar. There was much beer to be had, and there was food too. Good thing I remembered that I had picked up my camera earlier that day, so I did manage to take a few snaps. Below, are those that stayed till almost eleven, when we realised that it was about time to start catching our relevant trains and trams to head home (remember kids, no drinking and driving).
The Stragglers: (l-r) Colin Charles, Tristan Penman, Gary Pendergast, Zhiqi Tao
Thanks Sun for getting the tab! It was a good time, and even during dinner, we were mashing up, moving around from seat to seat, to participate in more conversations.
Things learnt that day?
- Community edition install on Vista failed for a user, who complained a lot. He then decided to try the Enterprise version, which surprisingly worked on Vista. He wonders why we ship a broken Community edition. We assured him its not broken. Another community member chimed in suggesting that it was really the fact that one needed to be an administrator on Vista, and obviously start the MySQL server as an administrator. Likely, this could have been the issue…
- Our manuals aren’t straightforward enough. I beg to differ, thinking they’re the best manuals out there for an open source project (because we have a fabulous docs team). However, maybe a “user installation guide” like you get with traditional packaged software might make sense? I don’t know, I’ll try a install on Vista the moment I can get my virtual machine working (VirtualBox Beta 3 on Mac OS X fails miserably), and take plenty of screenshots soon (all thanks to Skitch, naturally).
- Python is being taught at Melbourne University, having usurped C or Java for students. Python allows focus on the algorithms, and the concepts, rather than other bits, like memory allocation and so forth. Interesting to know that this is the basis of The Melbourne Model.
- Enterprise users should not be filling in the web feedback form, but filing a support request. There’s no way for those answering the web feedback form to know if you’re a customer or not, so standard canned responses tend to be the norm, especially if it surrounds installation issues.
- There is lots of interest for basic talks, on introduction to databases, inducting someone using MySQL from the ground up. I think this makes a lot of sense, and needs work, clearly (kind of like free training)…
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