Colin Charles Agenda

Another month has come to an end. If you’re looking to be updated on MariaDB content on a regular basis, don’t forget to be on Twitter (@mariadb), Facebook (MariaDB.dbms), or Google Plus (+mariadb).

There was a question on Quora – Is Facebook considering ditching MySQL in favor of MariaDB like Google did? The best answer really comes from Harrison Fisk, so I’ll leave you to it to read. The older link made its way on social media about Wikipedia_$ mv MySQL MariaDB.

MariaDB 10.0 went into beta (with the 10.0.5 release). We made a 10.0.6 release shortly afterwards to fix some bugs. One cool thing to note — the blog post from Ian Gulliver at Google about how Google is making use of MariaDB today.

The MariaDB Audit plugin is now GA – yes, you have to register to download it, but it’s worth it. There is also a webminar on this come Dec 5 which can be worth attending.

There is a new book out by Daniel Bartholomew: Getting Started with MariaDB. I fully intend to read & review it soon (you can also get this from O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf).

Navicat has announced Navicat for MariaDB for all your GUI needs on Windows, Mac or Linux. There is a free trial, or it costs in various prices for their non-commercial, standard or enterprise edition.

The MariaDB Enterprise Beta program started. I myself signed up for the beta to give it a spin. From what I gather most people that signed up qualified to give it a go. It is likely to go GA in mid-December. It is opensource software. Look at the getting started guide for more.

And in case you didn’t already notice, the Knowledge Base has had a redesign. There currently exists 3,165 articles in English licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GNU GFDL.

I recently kitted all the TVs in our homes with a Google Chromecast. It streams content from YouTube very well, and if you want content from other services like Vimeo, etc. you use a web browser (Chrome) to do the task.

I see it as a great productivity gain. You make playlists or say you want to watch videos later on YouTube. You use your phone or tablet as a remote and just watch content on your terms. You can then go on and read on the tablet, or work on your laptop. If you use the Chrome browser plugin for desktops, you can’t work on the machine at the same time as Vimeo or another video source will take the full-screen (though this isn’t a huge use case for me).

Sara had a party recently and part of the attraction was that people picked their music videos and added them to the playlist. So there was not only music but music videos. Naturally, they were all adding to the queue using her iPad.

Suddenly I understand why Android has the option for Users. This is a missing feature on iOS. Tablets are personal devices with a lot of private information on them (think Evernote, 1Password, etc.). Sure you can setup individual passwords, but the option to have a “guest mode” makes a lot of sense. It is something Apple clearly needs to work on going forward.

That said, for $35, the Google Chromecast is a great little device. Well worth it, and provides hours more TV usage. I’m thinking of getting a TV in my office room again!

I just wanted to collect the links of the Google and MariaDB relationship. These were all items in September 2013.

The Register: Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB – this was largely based on a presentation at SLAC by Jeremy Cole (slides). Same news was picked up by ReadWrite (with a different angle naturally), Google Waves Goodbye To MySQL In Favor Of MariaDB.

If you’re more audio inclined, there was great discussion on the This Week in Google podcast: checkout episode 216.

I’m surprised not a single local media site in Malaysia covered the fact that Google Apps & Chromebooks are coming to Malaysian classrooms. That’s 10 million students, teachers & parents getting Google Apps accounts. Primary & secondary schools get Chromebooks. This, I guess has something to do with the fact that there will be a laptop provided for every student if BN wins again.

It looks like the only cost to us is the Chromebooks. The Google Apps for Education accounts are free, implying a significant investment into Malaysia by Google.

Read more about large deployments of Chromebook. It seems that the deal is between YTL, Frog, Samsung, Acer & Google. YTL provides the Internet connectivity via YES4G/1BestariNet. frogasia is a YTL subsidiary, and it looks like they’re providing learning apps.

I worried about generations being tied to Microsoft Office. Is it time to worry that the next generation gets tied to Google Apps? I continue to worry overall that the focus is doing everything in-browser, and while I’m a big proponent of the idea that the browser is the OS, I still do a lot of things outside the browser.

It seems like Chromebooks can be provided by either Samsung or Acer. There must be something custom being built for YTL’s WiMAX chips to be popped in. Nonetheless, I doubt that there are many Malaysians experienced with Chromebooks or accomplishing everything within a browser.

Further reading: Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2015, Classrooms, Chromebooks & The Web: Lessons from Miami to Malaysia.

I’m buying a Chromebook (not the Pixel) to take a deep-dive. There are virtual machines too.

I came home after a long day of activities to find myself locked out of my Google account. I was told that there was suspicious activity and it had decided to lock me out. 

The verification code to set everything going is via a text message to your phone. After that you enter a completely new password. 

Now comes the fun. You have to regenerate codes for all your 2-step authentication authenticated applications. This is a huge pain for me – iPhone, Galaxy S3, Nexus 7, BlackBerry, Mail, Adium, etc. The list is really long. 

Overall this seems counterintuitive. I checked my account history. I did get connected via one odd IP today, but beyond that, nothing. It was me, my mail client connected from that IP.

Saw a bounce. Seems that I forwarded a message from google groups, it got rejected, and automatically it triggered that I might be a spammer. Seems like a bug more than anything.

Overall, I spent about 45 minutes just sorting out this problem. There has got to be a better way considering how important the Google account is to us these days. I didn’t notice a phone number either so if I needed to call someone, I’d probably be quite out of luck.

In times of “war”, Wikipedia can be used to sway Google results. Read: In Lahad Datu conflict, Google bombs & Wiki-wars. That’s pretty much what I tweeted yesterday. Just check out the revision history for Sabah.

Wikipedia tells an interesting tale. Even since 2005, you can see from the Talk page, that there have been Sulu sultanate claims. All in, just look at the traffic stats to the page and you see a marked increase in people wanting to know about Sabah.

The page is now semi-protected till March 14, but I doubt the standoff will be over by then, so expect Wikipedia editors to be paying close attention to this page. As for Google, there are benefits to getting the latest information from Wikipedia, but you’re also vulnerable when non-neutral points of view get displayed (thus making many people claim that Google was hacked!).

I checked DuckDuckGo and it seems that they use a much older cache of Wikipedia so was not affected by these Wikipedia changes.