Arrived okay - long travel, but in one piece. Staying at the doubletree.

Its worth noting that MySQL will have a big presence at OSCON 2008. All this, thanks to Sun, as Sun’s a fairly big sponsor (Platinum Sponsor), and we’ve got a humongous booth!

There are booth talks, that you must attend! They range from getting started with the MySQL Community, MySQL 5.1, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Cluster, and many more. Expect to see the schedule up at the booth (and yes I know, there are a whole heap of already interesting talks in the program, but a lot of the talks at the booth are also scheduled during breaks).

Today, I saw the ad copy, which reads “Our Booth is Your Booth”. “We have whiteboards, tables, electrical outlets and fresh coffee. Come to converse, share ideas, participate or simply to vegetate.”

Seriously, …

And for some lucky circumstances, I am also a speaker.
I will join Ronald Bradford on the podium, to speak about (surprise surprise!) MySQL Proxy, from architecture …

I’ll be speaking at OSCON 2008 in Portland, delivering my Normalization Session. More details as I get them.

I’ve started working on a session on the practice of online ombuds ? especially as it applies to Free Software and Open Source communities. The session is based on my work in the Free Software, PHP, Mozilla, MySQL and Open Source communities - in particular, recent work (which I need to get back to) on the Open Source Initiative mailing lists.

So far, the session has been pitched to the following events: CommunityOne 2008 (waiting), FOSDEM 2008 (accepted), JavaOne 2008 (declined), Open Web Vancouver 2008 (waiting) and OSCON 2008 (waiting).

I’ll start posting alpha versions of slides and so on as they are ready. …

OSCON, the Open Source Convention organized by O'Reilly is coming up next week (July 23rd-27th, Portland, OR).

MySQL AB will be present in the exhibition area and we will also be giving some talks:

• Brian Aker: Extending MySQL, Swiss Army Knife Approach
• Kaj Arnö: The MySQL Architecture of Participation
• Mårten Mickos: The Path to IPO …

Summary

A good week - we made progress on the Internet as Public Good Symposium, which is the major task on my Mozilla plate right now. However, an unexpected event at another client meant that my Friday was a bit messed up. Will work on reviewing bugs and other missed responsibilities over the weekend.

Activities

• Worked with Berkman and Harvard Business School teams to help plan and present the Internet as Public Good Symposium.
  • Event wiki now online, but still private. - started putting in content. Will make public after panel participants have a chance to review.
  • Conf. call with available IPG team members to sort out logistics, invitations and distribute tasks.
  • Set up database to store info on who’s invited, who’s coming and so on.
• Minor bits of work helping Mozilla Corp. team plan their OSCON presence …

Mandy and I were working together on some accounting for Foo Associates earlier today. We were scratching down notes in an old notebook when I ran across some old bits and pieces from my days at MySQL - random lists of tasks, flight schedules, doodlings and this little snippet of text under the hotel address for OSCON 2002:

Flying into Salt Lake City is amazing. The terrain looks unfinished, like the surface of a moon recently given life. The Great Salt Lake spreads out past the horizon and, when low enough, you can see the weird and wonderful patterns formed by salt, evaporation and algae spreading out like plumes of gas boiling off a star.

Later, driving past the lake with an acquaintance, I remember being nearly equally amazed at the “dead sea creature in the hot sun” smell that rolls off of it.

…

The OSCON talk & tutorial submission period ends in about a week on February 5. Please submit your proposals soon!

And woah - we've done a poor job at beating people over the head with the submission deadline! Usually we have many many times more submissions than slots, but as of right now it's quite the other way around (which probably is normal too, I don't remember the stats for when the submissions come in). In the categories I'm particularly interested in there are only a handful of submitted Perl talks and only one(!) MySQL talk submitted to the databases track. The Ruby submissions are pretty sparse too, as of now. We'd like some more. :-)

Many more talks are submitted to "Web applications, client- and server-side" already, but as far as I'm concerned it absolutely won't hurt to have more to pick from. ;-)

…

While chatting with a few SVN hackers at OSCON, it occured to me that MySQL is the Perl of RDBMS. Discuss among yourselves.