Just a note that my personal blog resides on lentz.com.au/blog/

The story is this… I first started my blog when at MySQL AB, the Community Relations gig. It was a mix of personal and MySQL-related stuff, and hosted at LiveJournal. Last year we managed to migrate all the LiveJournal data to the Open Query blog instance, but naturally there it’s not really suitable to write about non-OQ stuff. So I’ve cloned that instance and am deleting the posts that are really only OQ/MySQL-related. Some business/development topics that refer to MySQL as an example will stay.

In any case, this allows me to scribble about my (bio)diesel car, gardening, cooking, bushwalking and all that without bothering the Open Query blog readers Those of you who are interested can subscribe to both. Easy!

I’m shifting away from LiveJournal. It lacks ability to search and otherwise peruse archived blog posts. And of course it’s only me, while Open Query has more people.

From now on the posts will be at http://openquery.com/blog/ and this is aggregated to Planet MySQL as a group blog. You may have already seen Walter posting from his seat at the MySQL Conf. All posts and comments from my LJ blog have been migrated to WordPress, thanks to magic performed by young Akash Mehta. Unfortunately the comment threading can’t be exported.

The full export means that my personal posts are now also present at Open Query, although I may move those elsewhere later. The existing blog entries on LJ will stay for a while at least, although I do have to pay for the LiveJournal subdomain to keep the URLs alive.

A little sidenote …

If you'd like to follow shorter scribbles of what I get up to, like my work at Open Query, OurDelta and of course the BlueHackers initiative, I've got myself organised at http://twitter.com/arjenlentz or http://identi.ca/arjenlentz (you can pick one, they have the same feed).

Arjen & Monty @ LCA2009 in Hobart

I did a couple of sessions on OurDelta at the Linux.conf.au database miniconf: an overview of the project, a short delve into the features, and a “hacking the mysql server for dummies” which was found of particular interest. It’s a pity that session didn’t get accepted into the MySQL conference, it even had MySQL-uberguru Antony Curtis as co-speaker.

In the hacking talk in Hobart, I showed people the basic infrastructure of the source tree, then going through one particular patch and which changes it makes inside the server (and why). This is an excellent way to learn, as patches have a neat limited scope yet they do something significant. The good news is that the sessions were recorded, so when the LCA team finishes transcoding the hundreds of sessions we might be able to put ours up here!

Original author and MySQL …

Aka Arjen's head ;-)
So this was at the conference dinner of Linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart Tasmania. There's always at least one auction, and for some reason it has become tradition to a) bundle in extras with the original auction item and b) for some of those extras to involve removal of facial hair.

As described earlier, my hair was a package deal with Bdale Garbee's beard, and it was later bundled with Linus Torvalds turning into a barber for the day. So here's the fun in action...
I think Linus did a great job, having practiced previously only on his dog (who did not like it). The organic kernel hack appears bug-free, there was no bleeding, and I even have both my ears still.

In this case it was all even fairly appropriate in "shave for a cure" context, since the target …