As Tom and I will be heading to Ottawa for OLS Tomorrow you can expect some active blogging here this week..

That is if we can manage to find quality Wifi and our batteries last long enough..
before we find power :)

Anyway .. I`ll be heading to the Virtualization Mini Summit on tuesday, and then of to the big conference.

I`ll be presenting twice, once on the miniconf about openQRM4 and Tom and I will be presenting our findings comparing different monitoring tools such as Nagios, Hyperic, Zabbix , Zenoss and others at OLS itselve.

But don't hesitate to talk to me about other interresting topics such as MySQL or Drupal :)

Now first we have to cross a couple of borders, and an ocean :)

We did it. Designing Scalable Architectures with MySQL Proxy was delivered successfully, with over 150 attendees.
There is a large number of questions that were asked during the session, and you can find them in MySQL Proxy FAQ.
The slides, with the highly entertaining images used by John Loehrer to illustrate his point are also online
Finally, John posted his Connection pooler Lua script in the Forge.
Thanks to John Loehrer for his lively presentation, to Jimmy Guerrero and Rich Taylor for organizing the event, to Jan Kneschke, for answering questions online …

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 …

From 7:30 - 8:30 pm tonight, Wed. June 25th, in the Berkeley room of the Sheraton Boston, I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather conversation entitled “Pros and Cons of Managed Services”. This will go beyond MySQL and even beyond remote database management, and just deal with the overall pros and cons.

Come, share your good and bad experiences, and discuss why managed services may or may not be appropriate for your situation. I will try to take notes at the BoF.

(Note: I have no idea if they check badges for Birds of a Feather sessions or not)

If you are attending Usenix 2008 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Boston, you can meet me and ask your burning MySQL questions at my “The Guru is In” session. On Friday, June 27th, 2008 from 2 - 3:30 pm in Constitution B, I will be helping folks out by optimizing queries and schemas, teaching general principles of working with MySQL databases, and answering (to the best of my ability) any other question they may throw at me.

The event details are at:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/#fri

Hope to see you there!

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to …

In what I think must be MySQL’s first time in the Philippines, there will be a presence there next week. Well, its not the first time, but in terms of a community/developer event, I think it might be. The Sun Tech Days is happening from 17-19 June 2008, in the Shangri-La Makati.

Besides MySQL, expect great talks on NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and so much more. I’ll be the guy walking around in the MySQL shirt, so feel free to stop me and ask questions. Its exciting for me, as we’ve not really paid much attention to the Philippines, in terms of community growth (and the Philippines is in the APAC region!).

This isn’t a free event (its 1,000 PHP = ~USD23), and registration should still be available. If you’d like to meet up, and talk MySQL, shoot me an email at colinATmysqlDOTcom or …

There were some funny moments during the conference at Rome University.
Before Marten's arrival, we built an impressive heap of fluff dolphins on the desk.

For convenience, Marten used my laptop (an Apple MacBook) for his presentation, and he remarked about "open source enthusiasts who use closed source software". Mac OSX is, indeed, not open source, but it is the friendlier closed source operating system around. And since I am not a zealot, but I use what is best for me, I can cope withApple. My Mac has all the applications I am used to in Linux, with more pleasant graphics, media, and networking features. This is my personal opinion, and YMMV. Back to the topic.

After the presentation, there was a Q&A session. When Marten said he was ready to take questions, I addressed the audience in Italian, saying that we could …

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

    This video …