I’ll be in Hong Kong for the upcoming OpenStack Summit Nov 5-8. I’d be thrilled to talk database things with others present, especially around Trove DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) and high availability MySQL for OpenStack deployments.

I was last in Hong Kong in 2010 when I worked for Rackspace. The closest office to me was in Hong Kong so that’s where I did my HR onboarding training. I remember telling friends on the Sunday night before leaving for Hong Kong that I may be able to make dinner later in the week purely depending on if somebody got back to me on if I was going to Hong Kong that week. I was, and I went. I took some photos while there.

Walking from the hotel where we were staying to the Rackspace office could be done pretty much entirely through buildings without going outside. There were bits of art around too, which is just kind of awesome – I’m …

It’s getting close to time to head to Auckland for OSDC and a few days ago I blogged about how I’m speaking there). I’ll be speaking on MySQL In the Cloud, As A Service and all of the challenges that can entail as well as on The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration. Both of these talks draw heavily on the experience of Percona (my employer) and with experience from helping customers with all sorts of MySQL deployments and in our experience in producing our own high quality software.

I was in Auckland earlier this year, so thought I’d share some pictures of the wonderful city in which OSDC is being held.

Firstly, New Zealand has some pretty awesome wildlife. This is …

I’d meant to finish writing this way back in July… but I failed at that. Now is a good time to talk about Rookie-O as my again new colleague Andrew Hutchings (Buy his and Sergei’s book on MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development!) just went through the same thing (but in London instead of Hong Kong) given by the same trainer (Hi Eddie!).

Rackspace is the second employer I’ve had that has some kind of new hire training (the first being Sun). I am, of course, not quite counting Salmiakki as new-hire training for MySQL (although I probably should). To quote from the …

One of my all-time favorite services, Animoto, has teamed up with SmugMug to make truly epic professional quality videos from both your stills and your video clips.  I’ve wanted this partnership since 2007, but Animoto’s had their hands full dealing with explosive growth, so it took us a little longer to sit in that tree together than we thought.

We had my good friend, Robert Scoble, over last night to demo for him, and you can see the video below (or click here to view it on blip.tv):

The really great thing about this is that it’s totally full-circle and tightly integrated.  Find your favorite photos on SmugMug, send them over to Animoto right from SmugMug’s interface (look in the ‘Buy’ …

I didn’t take many photos at the Drizzle Meeting, although I did take a couple at the end at the Hopvine (just down the road from Brian’s place).

A good read is Brian’s wrap up of the meeting.

But we have (courtesy of Brian):

• Drizzle/Gearman/Memcached authors photo
• Jay’s “fo’ Drizzle” shirt
• Drizzle developers hard at work

and a couple I took at the Hopvine:

…

Yesterday, the ebox and warp staff went to Alagon (25km from Zaragoza) to have a very nice BBQ, or should I say WBQ?

We had delicious food, drinks, music, a swimming pool and weather couldn’t be more perfect.

And also we ended up with a new guest in our home

View …

"The two metrics that are most important to me are first customer satisfaction and second growth." - Don McAskill

Today, I noticed Don is featured on Sun's customer success stories page:


Don McAskill is the CEO and Chief Geek of Smugmug, a photo and now hi-def video (using H.264) sharing site with a successful business model behind it.

I initially met Don last year at the MySQL Conference when my then boss told me that he is interested in meeting him. That was my introduction to Smugmug. I was impressed by SmugMug's presentation of photos and the care they took to make your photos and galleries look awesome.

This year, as a member of Smugmug, me and my wife got to interact with Don on a personal level.

We had several suggestions related to how our …

Diary: Saturday 16th June 2007

Today, Miss She-BA Sheeri Kritzer married partner Tony in Boston. For those that remember, Sheeri was the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year at the MySQL Conference.

The official photos and videos are already up, so I’ve add my snaps online now. This was an excellent day, it had some the best planning I’ve seen in a …

Day 3 Photos

Okay - so it’s the morning - and the battel of the database egos session has just finished. Some photos up already!

Bdale is just about to start now… maybe some photos soon :)

Day 2 Photos

I gave my Intro to Cluster talk and then a Design and Internals of MySQL Cluster.

Also some photos from the DRBD BoF in the evening (which was really good). So was the BLOB streaming BoF earlier (but I didn’t take my camera out).

Currently in Eben’s keynote on Wednesday morning. As always, insightful and thought provoking.

World of awesome.