Colin Charles Agenda

This is a weird world. I’ve learnt that the Falcon tree is now public thanks to following Brian’s blog (which thankfully I follow, not just thru Planet MySQL, which is also unreachable), and reading Slashdot’s RSS feed. I was sure there was going to be email, and today, I’ve managed to suck mail from the MySQL’s mail server thru some convoluted means and find the announcement :-)

The Taiwan quake has made Streamyx’s quality of service extremely low. More importantly, it’s not allowing me to write or get mail (something I haven’t done in a while). I sincerely hope that no one’s doing silly BitTorrents or podcasts (I think downloading MP3 files fail immediately, or I just can’t even connect to PodShow and get my Daily Source Code), and that some magic routing starts working.

Happy New Year. I had a great December, visiting Siem Reap, Cambodia and Bangkok, Thailand (escaping the bombings by a mere day), took a great many photos (I estimate about 3,000 RAW files), and will upload them to Flickr the moment I actually can access the site!

Oh, back to the topic of Falcon. Larry McVoy of Bitkeeper fame is working on the bkbits server, to ensure that even the free client can pull certain revisions, and not just HEAD, which sometimes might not be what you’re after. So BK’s free tools might not be able to get you 1.2384’s changeset (yet), which might very well be the Falcon alpha in the 5.1 tree.

Here’s hoping the Internet weather improves. How’s the weather in your area?

MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2007
This implies I’m coming to linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney next January. What’s more is that during the MiniConfs, we’ve got one for MySQL. Its on January 15th, and we’ve just put out the call for participation/papers. You have about eight (8) days left to submit a paper. So submit your tales of deployment, conference presentations, and I believe we’re even willing to accept “hand’s on” hacking sessions (ala what happened at MySQL Camp). Keep the wiki page handy, and submit goodies to mysql-miniconf[AT]mysql[dot]com.

Interview with Paddy Sreenivasan
Yes, Engineering Lead at Zmanda, they’re big on AMANDA and now have the Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. Paddy’s very interested in the online backup API and we’ve been communicating for quite a while.

Connector/PHP
We give you Connector/PHP with MySQL Community Server 5.0.27 and PHP 5.2.0. In the very near future, we’ll bring you updated packages for the 4.1 series as MySQL AB is going to be releasing it soon.

Technorati Tags: connector, interview, LCA, linuxconfau, miniconf, mysql, paddy, php, sreenivasan, zmanda

I’ve been thinking a lot about Core Data recently. It supports SQLite out of the box, and its rather scalable and fast. Main reason being sqlite3 is included on every desktop and server of OS X that has shipped since 10.4 (Tiger).

It got me thinking about using MySQL as a data store. It will involve work, as Core Data itself is not extensible. And if written, will we have to embed MySQL into the application? What kind of problems will this pose? Licensing is the least of my worries, I’m thinking more from an application perspective.

I haven’t played with the Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) yet, but it allows custom SQL, and is available in WebObjects so its probably time to take a gander. Only real problem is its not in Core Data, thus not available in desktop applications. Then there’s AJRDatabase which allows you to use EOF via Objective-C, which seems to be the missing link.

And then, why MySQL? Because it might be cool to use FEDERATED tables? Especially if FEDERATED is extended to allow local modifications…

Some useful resources: Core Data as a Cheap Database, CoreDataWish.

Technorati Tags: coredata, macosx, mysql

There have been some interesting MySQL happenings lately. First we had the Enterprise/Community split. I’ll talk more about that in terms of distributions shipping it, as I’ll be liaising with them.

But today, I’m going to talk about Digg. I listen to Diggnation, a surprisingly funny podcast to keep track of the weekly Web happenings. But I’ve never actually paid the site a visit. Until today.

Its the epitome of Web 2.0. User driven content. Its not like Slashdot. I’ve seen many people compare to it, but it isn’t. Slashdot is for tech-content. Digg is for anything. Slashdot has a bunch of editors. Digg is user-edited.

And for users, if your stories get promoted to the front-page, you get ratings. The more ratings, the merrier, right? It probably also increases the trust model, as higher ratings usually mean that you’ve got good news sense. And we all know that if your page gets “Dugg”, you’re going to be receiving some amazing amounts of traffic. Its like a popularity contest.

So I took the liberty of searching for “mysql”. And I found the Converting scripts fromt he old PHP MySQL extension to MySQLi submitted by another DIgg user, so I dugg it. I couldn’t resist further, and I submitted Do babies dream of being database engineers?

Yes, thats a really funny one. Keeping in mind that MySQL makes databases, not videos, we’re now rewarding people in the recently announced MySQL Video Contest in where the top prize is a spanking USD$1,000. December 15th is the closing date.

The video, Do babies dream of being database engineers? actually inspired this contest. View it, have a laugh, rate it, send it to groups, or digg it.

(More comments in the near future about Digg and YouTube, for certain).

Technorati Tags: contest, digg, mysql, video, web, youtube

Slashdot | MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Answers Your Questions:

Its an interesting interview. And as Stewart pointed out, it seems that this must be the first Slashdot comment in where I get named fully. Heh. Kudos to Julien :)

Actually if you continue reading on the comments, you’ll notice that Marten responds to a lot of the threads – that in itself is impressive, right? When was the last time you saw a CEO write on Slashdot?

Okay, back to your daily grind… lets hope that doesn’t involve Slashdot.

I don’t normally blog about events that I’m not going to be attending, but this seemed like too cool an offer to pass up. Proven Scaling will be offering one free ticket to MySQL Camp – thats free airfare and hotel, for the rather cool MySQL Camp un-conference.

From what I can tell, there’ll be a lot of rather cool people attending, its from the 10-12 November, at the Google campus (yes, you get to tour that place, and eat free food). And maybe if you’re super nice to Jeremy, he might be flexible with the flights, and you might also want to go to the Mountain View Ubuntu Summit. Having been to one of these before (Ubuntu Down Under), all I can say is its great. Go if you can.

All at Google. Food’s covered. Find a couch somewhere (I’ll admit, there are no real cheap-ish hotels in that area, but if you’re willing to go the public transport route, its a 30 minute train ride to the city, afaik).

So kudos to Jeremy Cole and Proven Scaling for such a great offer.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, free, google, mysql, mysqlcamp, ubuntu