Colin Charles Agenda

Over the weekend I read in the FT (paywall): Is Brussels safe? Ring a local resident to find out. I’m sure it will be fine, and you will want to be there for FOSDEM, happening 30-31 January 2016. 

There is the excellent one day track, that is the MySQL & Friends Devroom (site). Talks hail from Oracle, MariaDB Corporation, Percona and more. We don’t have a booth this year, but we do have amazingly good content on Saturday. I’m happy to have been part of the committee that chose the talks, but you know that this is a labour of love put on by Frédéric Descamps, Liz van Dijk, Dimitri Vanoverbeke, and Kenny Gryp. I’m sure the party will be awesome.

But that is not all! In the distributions devroom, you can see me give a talk at 11:00-11:20 titled Distributions from the view of a package. This is an important topic, because you start seeing MariaDB Server becoming the default in many distributions with the last holdout being Debian. But there is a lot of discussion, especially from the security standpoint there now, about MySQL overall. But that’s not the focus of my talk – I’m going to talk to you about how we, as upstream, have had to deal with distributions, changing requirements, etc. overall. I’ve done this since the MySQL days, so have quite a bit of experience dealing with it. 

If you are making software and want to be included and supported across all distributions, I highly recommend you coming to my talk. If you happen to decide to live in an ecosystem where there are forks, I also promise to make it useful for you.

And on Sunday, you will want to go visit the RocksDB Storage Engine for MySQL talk by none other than Yoshinori Matsunobu of Facebook. This will be at the main track and I highly recommend you visit it – I’m sure Sergei Petrunia will also make an appearance as he spends a lot of time on this too.

All in, I’m extremely excited to be at FOSDEM 2016. And you don’t need to ring a local resident to find out if its going to be safe/fun – come for the learning, stay for the beer ;-)

One of my favourite events run by a grassroots organisation is SCALE, and they are now doing their 14th edition, SCALE14x. If you’re into opensource software as well as all things open, this is the place to be from January 21-24 2016. It is at a new location in Pasadena (so not quite next to LAX as it was previously), but this is due to growth – so kudos to the team.

From MariaDB Corporation you get to see Max Mether (Scaling MySQL & MariaDB – I’m extremely interested in seeing what he has to say and will likely blog the session) and me (The MySQL Server Ecosystem in 2016).

One thing is for sure is that the topic I plan to present on will surely come under contention since I also represent a server maker – however I believe I will be extremely objective and will put up blog posts before/after the event as well as slides, because it is clear that MySQL is now going to be 21 years old and the ecosystem has grown tremendously. Let me reiterate my main thesis: MySQL server development has been at its most vibrant since the Oracle acquisition – the ecosystem is flourishing, and Oracle is doing a great job with MySQL, Percona with Percona Server, MariaDB Corporation/MariaDB Foundation with MariaDB Server, and lets not forget the wonderful work from the WebScaleSQL Consortium, Facebook’s MySQL tree and even Alibaba’s tree (the Twitter tree seems to be sadly not really maintained much these days, but there was innovation coming out of it in the past).

There are also going to be many other great talks at the MySQL track on Friday, from Peter Zaitsev, Dave Stokes (I’m excited about the JSON support in MySQL 5.7), Ovais Tariq/Aleksandr Kuzminsky on indexes, and Janis Griffin on query tuning. There’s also an excellent PostgreSQL track and I think one of the highlights should also be the keynote from Mark Shuttleworth at UbuCon on Thursday.

See you at SCALE14x? Oh, before I forget, MariaDB Corporation also has a booth, so you will get to see Rod Allen manning it and I’m sure there will be giveaways of some sort. 

If you have any feedback about the MySQL Server ecosystem and its developments, please feel free to leave a comment here or send an email to me. Thanks!

Oleg Tinkov, a Russian oligarch, at his recent Lunch with the FT interview:

Tinkov says the major difference between himself and more conventional Russian oligarchs is simple: “I don’t depend on the government like they depend on it.” Most oligarchs are “temporary managers of their assets – they are not real owners”.

This got me thinking quite a bit, because the idea of being a temporary manager of your assets is an interesting (albeit, true) one. This is probably true in many situations, and one that resonates in the startup world is when you’ve taken on venture funding. It also applies to most of the Top 10 list of richest businessmen in Malaysia, whom largely got their wealth through rent-seeking/cronyism/etc.

It doesn’t however apply to a bootstrapped company I would think (where you are a real owner); there you just have to wait till you become profitable and proud!

A phrase I have often liked comes from a French poet, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. In order to live happily, live hidden.

Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés

So when I read about Li Younghi, in the FT (paywall, Li Yonghui, Chinese self-made ‘everyman’), it resonated well with me to see the Chinese saying men sheng da fa cai, which translates to “keep quiet and prosper”.

This year we spent New Year’s Eve in Vienna, Austria, and I have to say it was a lot colder compared to being in Phuket, so I think we’ll do it in a more tropical country going forward.

I didn’t take the TripIt stats that I should have taken, but I do have a visualisation: 328178 miles (so 528,151km versus 435,271km last year), 15 airlines flown, 33 airports and 116 flights. So we’ll assume the 33 airports are “cities”, so I visited a lot less than the 49 cities. I was on the road for 281 days (as opposed to 264 days in 2014).

I guess this is one of my heavier travel years, and we’ll see how 2016 pans out. In the meantime, back to enjoying Vienna. And here’s hoping TripIt either improves, or I have to make a service that does better (post-Concur acquisition, things have been going downhill generally).

I’ve been using the Sony DSC-RX100M III for over a year, despite thinking that my iPhone will be my primary pocket camera. I have to say that the iPhone 6 Plus 64GB is a fine phone, and it has an amazing camera and I don’t have plans to get the iPhone 6s Plus (see: not a worthy upgrade for photographers and is it worse?).

So generally the iPhone suffices for lots of snaps, Instagram/Facebook pics, etc. But when it comes to taking a family vacation, I whip out the Sony RX100 III. From comparisons, it doesn’t seem like I would benefit too much from the RX100 IV, since a lot of the improvements seem to be around video which I tend not to take.

The battery is rated at about 320 shots, and I think I get about there but some days are special and I exhaust the NP-BX1. Couple that with misplacing my battery charger which also has a USB cable so you can transfer images easily, I decided to grab the Sony ACC-TRBX. This package comes with an additional battery, a charger with USB pass thru so you can charge the camera directly, and of course there’s the brick that allows you to charge the additional battery.

Smart solution? You should be able to charge the battery within the camera as well as the battery in the charger, right? Wrong. They build a silly button that either allows you to charge via USB the battery within the camera OR the battery in the dock. Why?!? 

Well, that was RM300 spent on the ability to get more pictures. However one wonders what the designers at Sony were thinking? I guess there also exists the idea of a hardware misfocus.