Colin Charles Agenda

Coming to the Hyatt Santa Clara, for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009? Beware, that this year, the in-room Internet just isn’t so peachy.

When you check in, there’s this option of a “Business Plan” that Hyatt sells you – USD$30, for free wired in-room Internet (a $12.95/day value), free breakfast (this includes 15% gratuity, so a $20+ value), a free bottle of water (yes, otherwise its $3.95), and all the local and long distance calls in the US that you’ll need (depending on what you do, YMMV). It seemed like a good deal.

Now, for the benefit of others, which has taken about four days for me to fix. When you’re on this plan, the Hyatt rebates your Internet within an hour or so of you signing up for the deal. This tells their ISP that you’re now not able to get access to anything else, but Port 80 and Port 443 access — yes, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC and all other ports, are blocked.

You need to call 877-22-HYATT (toll free), and tell them your predicament. Their system will not see anything in the bill cycle, and suddenly realise that they can’t even recognise your IP address. The system has no recollection of the MAC address either! So what the nice support guy on the phone can do for you is to enable this for about three days, and then you’ll have to call back again, to ensure things just work.

My case number is: 267 014. Needless to say, all this is about the most unintuitive thing that can happen to someone. Lets hope it all just starts working well… Of course, next week, when the conference starts, there will be Internet at all the lobby/common areas, as well as the conference centre itself, as well as breakfast provided from 7am onwards.

So unless you like breakfast at 6am, or need in-room Internet access, give the Hyatt Business Plan a skip. And now, I can finally go back to reading and replying to the deluge of email that has hit me.

Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

1. Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he works on this cool stuff at NetEdge, the startup he’s currently attached to).
2. Advanced memcached use cases in where you get best practice information on leveraging memcache, a software package that all the big boys use.

Frank also says, “If you’re not coming to the MySQL Conference, you’re losing out”. He’s right. You should be there. Look at all the amazing sessions, all the amazing networking opportunities, and more? He clearly specifies that the tutorial selection this year is pretty incredible, so make sure you’re signed up for Monday! Plan your sessions ahead, otherwise you might miss out some of the important things.

The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 runs from April 20-23, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre. Don’t hesitate to register as there are plenty of interesting sessions there, next week.

The one thing that has consumed my days (and nights) recently, has been the organising of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (hereinafter, referred to as the CE2009).

For starters, we’ve had 356 proposals. That basically provides a 1:3 acceptance:rejection ratio. So the voting committee had a really, really hard task to look at talks. Some even cross-referenced submissions with other submissions. Some even made suggestions of combining talks (successful, even). So my great thanks to the voting committee for the CE2009 – you guys all rock.

Then, once the voting committee has done the hard work, you’ve got to sanely schedule the talks. This is really, not an easy task. Very quickly, you realise that you want to be in all track, and you’ve got to split yourselves. This, being impossible, however, leaves room for the community (and in the past, Sheeri has done a great job at this, and I’m sure she’ll continue for the CE2009) to start making recordings. Good news is that we’re also looking into this, so it might be professionally done, for CE2009! Watch this space, for more details.

As of today, about 84% of the conference schedule is filled up. The tutorials are all 100% filled up. So come registration time, you can already be excited and start registering for your tutorials. And seeing most of the conference schedule, should be a positive thing, to help drive registrations.

Early registration is expected to open up sometime today. Early registrants, especially those that do so in December, I’m told will get a special gift.

The conference site even has features for you to now customise your own schedule. Even better, you can share this with others, if you choose (oh so, social networking :)). We also have a MySQL Conference & Expo Facebook Group.

Note: Some people are getting acceptance notes, and blogging, which is great. Some people are getting rejection notes, with discounts. And some people just aren’t getting any notes yet, because hey, we’ve got about 15% of the conference to fill up :-)

Anyway, this is your humble Program Chair, signing off for now.