It will be Sunday, September 23rd at Taste from 1PM to 10PM. I’ll be there, along with the Ubuntu Florida team. Hopefully develpers from MySQL and Pentaho will go also! Possible topics I am considering speaking on include Bazaar, Launchpad, Ubuntu, MySQL, hiring and managing an international development team, how to evolve your database schema without going insane, and using bluetooth PAN networking with laptops. If you are going, what would be most interesting to you?

We’ll be doing a linux install-fest, so bring along your laptops and ubuntu CDs. I’ll also be able to answer questions on how to use Bazaar with a variety of different development workflows. We also need sponsors, so check out the website to learn more.

Tell me what’s wrong with the picture:

Anyways, Ubuntu Live looks like a great conference. The session line-up looks more like a conference than the one-day FUDCon’s, and with the tracks (there are 4 concurrent tracks), I am truly impressed. A big part of me wishes I was there… Some interesting tech bloggers like Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk fame, and Matt Asay are keynoting.

Of course, MySQL’s very own CEO, Mårten Mickos is also giving a keynote on Monday July 23, at 9:20-9.40am.

One caveat with Ubuntu Live: its cost. FUDCon is free, and true to its nature, really does spread community love (with about two tracks). Its USD$895 to attend Ubuntu Live - very troublesome to the pocketbook.

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For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

I promise, MySQL really does care about Debian. Since I arrived ten months ago (and even before that it seems), there's been several hand-wringing discussions about Debian and how we should approach it. The Debian and Ubuntu Developers do a fantastic job packaging mysql server, and I have nothing but respect for their efforts.

With RPM-based distributions, it's easy to tell people to download and install a package file. They expect it. They don't expect automatic upgrades. Creating a RPM file is easy because there's no implicit agreement about how to update it.

Our problem with Debian is that it's just too fantastic. That is, our Debian-using customers know that for almost everything, it's hard to do better than Debian does. We at MySQL wants to be able to give people our own binaries for several reasons, some good and some bad: Timeliness of package arrival; a Not Compiled Here disorder; options and defaults set as …

I was just reading a text on effective communications, and there was something interesting I noted. With different values and backgrounds all over the world, a lot of things happen (use of colloquisms, etc.) with regards to people understanding each other. When there’s face-to-face meetings, there’s also non-verbal communication to keep note of.

It turns out in South Africa, they call it Ubuntu (we’re much more familiar with its “humanity for others” meaning by now, for sure). They value collective efforts in solving issues that impact the members of the community. And if you’re ever face-to-face with a South African, limited eye contact often shows respect and humility (this is similar with Japan, its polite). In the Western world though, we need eye-contact for confidence purposes, and to show that we’re sincere.

Its also worthy to note (yes, this post had a point) that on the …

An update about Ubuntu: Mark Shuttleworth is coming to Moscow this week, and there will be a meeting with community. Is anyone coming? I'll be there. One reason, our CEO, Marten Mickos, is coming to INTEROP on 21st of June, and there will be no such meeting with MySQL users. So I'll go and see how to organize these things :)

Knoppix 5.0.1 available:
It looks quite nice, although some of the packages are very up to date and others are quite old. MySQL comes with 5.0.21, so there’s probably no distribution with a more recent MySQL version at the moment.

No Markus, Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper actually comes with 5.0.21 just as well. On June 1. And with their new Casper system, the CD you download is actually a LiveCD and an Install CD all rolled into one! 5.0.22 is a security release, for what its worth…

So I got to speak to MIlton Ngan right before his closing keynote. I don’t know where we got the idea that they (Weta Digital) ran Fedora, because all they’ve had are a bunch of Red Hat 9 machines as well as a few Debian. They seemingly are moving fully to Ubuntu real soon now. As always, sticking with MySQL.

Oh, and watch out for X-Men 3, out on May 19th…

Hey, hey, this is well worth a read: MySQL to Offer Linux Bundled with Database as Free Download.

So, the MySQL Forge has been announce and has been live for a while… Even the Forge Wiki has content that isn’t created by me! Ha, the community at work…

And Ubuntu, now supported by MySQL. There’s a relationship there. Mark Shuttleworth gave a great keynote, talked about the relationship with upstreams, the new MySQL relationship they have, and how he was really excited to be here. Thawte I believe, ran on MySQL :-)

If there’s one thing to take away from his talk it’d have to be the fact that he’s also a VC and a lot of people ask him for money. Don’t go to a VC and tell them, “Hey, I’ve got Project Y, and …

In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large - going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.

Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!

So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something …