I arrived earlier in the afternoon (on my second Friday now), and was waiting in the shuttle, for apparently another colleague. Twiddling thumbs, getting bored, and just when half an hour passes by, I think of the advice Stewart gave me, saying that the shuttle service was a little dodgy. Suddenly, I see a “familiar” face - its Lenz Grimmer, my colleague that I’ve been working with for ages. I say familiar, because all I’ve seen are photos, and made contact regularly via conference calls, IRC, and email. We met face to face, for the first time, just today.

Amazing, working in a distributed environment, no?

All that aside, Jay, Lenz and I couldn’t resist catching up by the poolside. Dinner ensued at Nicolino’s Italian restaurant in …

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 …

So I'm back from RIT2007 which took place April 16,17 in Moscow,Russia.
The conference was well organized, while the conference center was a bit small for event - halls were jam packed during the breaks and there was limited sitting available for many sessions.

It was great to see attendees from almost all serious Internet Technologies players among attendees and speakers - Yandex, Rambler, Mail.ru all were quite well presented and there were a lot of people to talk to and large number of interesting talks.

The conference was quite diverse in presented topics which made it yet more interesting for person with wide range of interests as me - there were talks starting from very technical such as FreeBSD kernel tuning, Web QA or AJAX Development, number of Project Management focused talks, Investment related talks (both for ones looking for investments and looking to invest) and …

In lieu of the events at Virginia Tech I am slightly behind in getting ready for the Summer of Code. But alas, here is the first posting about what I intend to do this summer. I am working with MySQL on code coverage and test cases development to further enhance the quality of code released. As of this moment I am still getting aquainted with the code itself, but also the MySQL test tools that will be my primary focus this summer. So that being said, I have much to do.

In case you didn’t know it, the demand is extremely high right now for MySQL DBA’s. As MySQL becomes more popular and begins to manage more critical applications for modern businesses, the demand for solid MySQL DBA expertise will only continue to grow.

To make sure we’re doing all the right things at MySQL to make your job as a MySQL DBA (or as someone who administers MySQL databases) as easy as possible, we’ve created a *very* brief survey that asks you how much time you spend across various activities (e.g. managing replication, performance tuning, etc.) Please take a few minutes and fill out the new survey - it is much appreciated.

I was flying back from Helsinki yesterday and was in line at Heathrow Customs behind an earnest young man. The Customs officer asked him,

"What nationality are you?", referring to something the teenager had written on his Customs declaration."Jewish."was the response."That's not a nationality. That's a religion."I rudely snickered with the men in line behind me, but it occurs to me well after the fact that the teenager was simply replying according to a different definition of nationality. (I wish I could ask the boy's pardon, though I'm not sure he heard me.) If asked what we are at our core, we're almost certainly something else before we're Americans, Nigerians, Lebanese, etc.

In like manner, and this will sound trite in comparison to the above, but I'm not in the software business. I'm in the open source business. Open source software business, if you like, but open source is the foundation and core of my interest in software. …

I will be out of the office all next week, so expect more blog posts from me! That’s not a joke — both Yannick Gratton and I will be at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, taking in all the material we can, processing it, and spewing out what I hope will be [...]

The slides are available in PDF format here.

Thanks to all of you who have participated to the webinar!

-ivan

Welcome to the 41st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. There is rarely any shortage of commentary on conferences in the world of databases. This week is no exception, with one or two waiting in the wings and another fading into the past. That would be Collaborate ‘07. Here’s a sample [...]

This is already making the blog rounds but the next pre-release version of the best development environment on the planet is out.  VPC images out and some ISO bits are available on MSDN.  Microsoft will also be making Express versions available in the next few days.  You can find all the links here.