Colin Charles Agenda

The 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo is nearing, and I’ve still got unpublished notes from the 2007 conference! In a way, its a good thing – too much was published during conference time, its hard to keep track. Here comes my notes from a superb keynote by Guy Kawasaki, titled The Art of Innovation, presented at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007.

… on Apple
– “Back then, sexual harassment was a good thing”
– Apple allowed first class travel as long as you worked for Steve back in the day :-)

… on being a/pitching to a VC
A good test for entrepreneurs is: “Are you using MySQL”. Guy’s a VC, he likes you to use cheap, highly available tools.

Make meaning – don’t go to a VC and say you want to make money. It means you’ve attracted the wrong kind of person. Besides, making money, is obvious.

Make mantra – Mission statements are too long, they’re not memorable, they’re useless.

“If you ever hear MySQL is having an offsite at the Ritz Half Moon Bay, that is when you need to abandon the platform.” First day is team building exercises, to build cross-functional teams. Learn communication and trust. Second day is in a smaller room, each will then contribute to the creation of the mission statement.

Jump to the next curve – do things 10x better. Make your parameters correct.

Niche thyself – provide a unique product or service and value to the customer

Follow the 10/20/30 rule – his slide talk.

“Life is a pitch”

“Don’t let the bozos grind you down.”
(Especially the successful ones. Because they are less likely to appreciate or know what the next curve is going to be like)

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, guy kawasaki, the art of innovation

A while back, I built some PPC64 (powerpc 64-bit) packages for MySQL. They were built on a POWER5 box, running Fedora Core 6, with glibc 2.5, using a Bitkeeper snapshot (public bkbits, 5.0.45 tag). All tests pass on ppc64, for what its worth. I’ll do periodic builds for Linux/PPC64 as and when its required (i.e. someone pings me or I need them for some reason).

Grab them from: ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/people/byte/mysql/

Hat tip to dwmw2 (for power5, bombadil) and Bryce (for ftp.linux.org.uk).

Technorati Tags: power, power5, mysql, linuxppc, ppc64

MySQL Workbench has a beta out! No idea why its version 5.0.9, but its highly exciting. This software existed before, but this is quite unlike its predecessor. One snag for me is that it is Windows-only at the moment, with Linux and OS X versions to follow suit.

However, due to excitement, I decided to try running it on Linux, anyway.

Seeing that it is a .NET application, I thought I’d pass it through MoMA (the migration analyser). Everything passed, so I got excited. Running mono MySQLWorkbench.exe however, led me to a failure:
** ERROR **: Method '<Module>:<CrtImplementationDetails>.DoDllLanguageSupportValidation ()' in assembly '/home/byte/Downloads/MySQL Workbench 5.0.9 OSS Beta/wb.wr.dll' contains native code and mono can't run it. The assembly was probably created by Managed C++.

So I hopped onto #workbench on Freenode, where the MySQL Workbench crew hang out, and spoke with Mike Zinner (team lead for this software). He mentioned to me that it probably wouldn’t work, as there are some 3rd-party FOSS controls that rely on Win32 API calls. Immediately, I think of WINE.

Running it against WINE, I get an error basically telling me I need Mono for Windows:
fixme:actctx:parse_manifest_buffer root element is L"asmv1:assembly", not <assembly>
install the Windows version of Mono to run .NET executables

Workbench fails on me in WINE

Downloaded mono-1.2.5.2-gtksharp-2.10.2-win32-0.exe, installed it via WINE, and then made another attempt at running Workbench, only to see a similar failure, this time in GUI form.

A little disappointed, I think the next option is to run Workbench in a virtualized Windows environment. KVM immediately came to mind, with only one minor snag – while its full CPU hardware virtualization, it doesn’t virtualize the graphic layer as well (it just emulates a graphics card, like it does for pretty much every device). Windows will see a Cirrus Logic card, from ages ago. This means, no OpenGL support, which Workbench really needs (otherwise, it drops down to software rendering, and becomes much slower).

However, there is hope. Check out VMGL, which is OpenGL Hardware 3D Acceleration for Virtual Machines. This should work with Xen and KVM, so I’ll give it a twirl, and see how it goes.

If you’re on a Mac, I am told that VMWare Fusion does not do OpenGL, so you’re out of luck there. However, Parallels does – so let that be your virtualization option of choice, if you’re on an Intel Mac.

Next stop, to go out and buy Windows Vista – wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: mysql, workbench, mysql workbench, moma, .net, mono, wine, opengl, virtualization

foss.in, describes itself as India’s Premier FOSS Event. I’m excited to be participating in it, and am leaving to Bangalore this Saturday evening (01 December 2007).

Schedules are out, and I’m giving a talk on 07 December (Friday) from 11.30am – 1pm. The title is generally aptly titled, and a similar (shorter) talk is one I’ve submitted for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 titled “Paying it Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources”. I will tell you what we at MySQL have done to help increase external participation, to actually be more like an open source project, and so on. Since there will be plenty of time for Q&A, I hope to harness some collective knowledge and find ways in where we can improve some more (maybe help create a 2008 community roadmap).

You can still register, so please consider doing so. You generally need a visa to get into India, and it just takes a couple of days, at the Indian consulate (ask them to rush it for you, even). Flights are pretty reasonable. And watch the registration statistics!

If you’re in Bangalore, from 02-09 December, I’m generally free for meeting up with you to talk about MySQL, Linux, open source, and lots more. Drop me some email!

Technorati Tags: conferences, foss.in, schedules, bangalore, india

Use MySQL? On Leopard/OS X 10.5? Yes, the current available packages from dev.mysql.com don’t work very well. I track “mysql” on Twitter, and boy, are there heaps of complaints.

So its nice to see, Dan Benjamin, a member of the MySQL community, stepping up, and creating the amazing Installing MySQL on Mac OS X article. The Preference Pane will obviously still not be there, and I don’t know why he thinks Mantorg (?) will build it, but I believe this is something MySQL needs to fix for the next release.

Tracking mysql#28854 will be useful.

Mark Pilgrim decided that it would be cool to poke fun at OS X, because it “just works” on Ubuntu. While what he says is true, there have been a lot more testing of MySQL on Linux, than there has been on Leopard. Developer seeds aren’t exactly the same “final” product (sure, this particular bug has been around since developer seed days, from what I can tell).

Here’s wishing I was on Leopard (or even a Mac) a bit more regularly…

Technorati Tags: mysql, leopard, macosx, bugs

David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, is in Singapore, and has allocated some free time to meet MySQL users. If you were in the Lion City, and had an afternoon free, I suggest dropping by.

When:Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 12:00 PM

Where:GeekTerminal

55 Market Street #01-01 Singapore 048941

Singapore

+65 65570098 

(Map: http://www.geekterminal.com/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=41)

Technorati Tags: mysql, singapore, david axmark