The very brave soul, was Aaron Bockover, from the Banshee media player fame (via the LugRadio Live USA 2008 weblog). There were a few interesting highlights from these gong-a-thong sessions…

Zumastor
Dan Kegel spoke about the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Want snapshots and remote replication in your Linux filesystem? This one does just that. From the contributor list, it looks like its all Google engineers hacking on this… Yes, this is better than LVM. No, I haven’t tried it yet.

mod_ndb
J.D. Duncan spoke about mod_ndb. Here are my transcribed notes of the talk.

MySQL Cluster is a database designed to be fault tolerant, on cheap commodity hardware. Write SQL queries, and they access the …

I paid great attention to Ian Murdock’s talk at LugRadio Live USA 2008, as he’s an important person at Sun in terms of the open source community, and I’m community facing as well. It was also the first time I got to meet Ian (after his talk), and we hit off a conversation really quickly. I look forward to working alongside Ian more… Now to the talk notes.

A Bit About Ian
- Linux user, developer, and advocate since 1993
- Founder of Debian, co-founder of Progeny
- Joined Sun in March 2007, Chief OS strategist (launched Project Indiana), and now since February 2008 is VP Developer and Community Marketing

What’s a Linux guy doing at Sun?
- When people say they want Linux… they don’t actually mean that they want Linux. You don’t only want the kernel, but you want the userspace as well. You really want a distribution, not Linux itself. Ian is more of an …

An interesting morning for me. I woke up, had breakfast at the Hilton Concierge Lounge (complimentary, seeing that I’m on the Executive floor), and decided to find my way, by public transport, to downtown San Francisco, from Santa Clara. Boy was I surprised as to how inane everything was: I spent about 2.5 hours travelling on a light rail (VTA), then a Caltrain, and finally a BART. I almost finished a book I was reading, all on public transport. Talk about a commute.

Anyway, arrived at LugRadio Live USA, registered (paid my paltry $10 in cash, since their credit card provider was wonky), and started the day with great talks. Some quick notes about the conference itself, and then my notes shall follow soon.

• Turns out its very hard to see the screen, because of all the sunlight that was coming in. The Metreon is a great …

While catching up on some interesting chat on IRC today, I decided to watch the Alan Cox video series that Red Hat Magazine recently placed online.

In Alan Cox and the state of free software:

• Alan speaks about software patents, as a problem for free software. Lots are starting to understand that they don’t work and they violate international treaties.
• Alan talks about political systems - so you can’t get free software into government or schools, because of certain vendors that they choose. Approved suppliers cause grief, when they only supply proprietary software.
• Alan talks about the OpenDocument Format and OOXML mess, and it confuses people, who want standards (FUD).
• A challenge now, seems to be that there are a large number of free software users now, who are not …

On IRC, I told Pia, that I enjoyed the Beijing SFD tremendously, and they should definitely win for 2007. I did make a note that if it was required, I would blog about it… She mentioned that it probably wouldn’t matter, because they were a contender already. Nonetheless, I figured that eventually I’d blog about it - turns out its come many months later, generally inspired by Peter Junge’s blog post. Lucky for me, all this isn’t just coming off from memory, but my trip report, that was on an internal mailing list!

First up, some quick resources: the winning report, photos, including the ones from the speaker dinner, held after …

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a …

foss.in, describes itself as India’s Premier FOSS Event. I’m excited to be participating in it, and am leaving to Bangalore this Saturday evening (01 December 2007).

Schedules are out, and I’m giving a talk on 07 December (Friday) from 11.30am - 1pm. The title is generally aptly titled, and a similar (shorter) talk is one I’ve submitted for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 titled “Paying it Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources”. I will tell you what we at MySQL have done to help increase external participation, to actually be more like an open source project, and so on. Since there will be plenty of time for Q&A, I hope to harness some collective knowledge and find ways in where we can improve some more (maybe help create a 2008 community roadmap).

You can still …

I haven’t actually written about my amazing Japan trip. Arrived late on Saturday night, spent the whole of Sunday doing tourist-y stuff, visited MySQL KK on Monday, had an amazing dinner later with lots of MySQLers, and today, Tuesday is the first day of the users conference. And boy was it fun!

Larry-san spoke Japanese in the keynote introduction, and boy was it amazing. I absolutely loved the honesty in Yukihiro “Mats” Matsumoto’s talk. It was even funnier that while he spoke Japanese, and people laughed at his jokes, it took a while for the simultaneous translators to catch up with English, and then we’d have delayed laughter :)

I gave my talk today, and was pretty pleased with the attendance. My 35 slides were delivered in a mere 50 minutes, and at parts I was …

Just as a head’s up, I’ll be at Software Freedom Day 2007, not in Melbourne, but in Beijing! Its on Saturday, September 15, 2007, and it only starts at 1PM (I presume this means I get to party on Friday night, to re-live some Beijing memories?).

I’m told a beginner-styled talk is best, so what kind of MySQL-related talk would you be after? Business model related? Do give me ideas (sooner, the better). Keep in mind, I’ll have to pass the message on within a good 15 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions…

Check out the program, and I do hope to see you soon, if you’re in Beijing (or if we cross paths - I’m on Dopplr now, so you can play a “Where in the world is …

Mike Kruckenberg, well-respected community member recently blogged about MySQL taking another step (away from open source, and I’d like to refute some of his worries. In fact, this is really more to drive away from what some within the community think is not kosher, i.e. change #5 in Kaj’s blog entry.

The sources are always available. Its just gone one step further, in that you need to use the Bitkeeper free client, and pull the correct revision, tags of which are always at http://mysql.bkbits.net/. From there, you are welcome to compile it yourself, and even make a binary distribution, all with fair ease thanks to the excellent …