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’m at OSCON this week. Come say hi and talk Drizzle, Rackspace, cloud, photography, vegan food or brewing.

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I need help with this. I had a dream… Well, not so much as a dream, maybe a “It’d be cool to…”

I thought it’d be nice to discover new photos on flickr using your favorite photos and the people who also favorited those photos, and the favorite photos of those who also favorited my pictures. Still with me?

It’s actually a quite simple code (about 500 lines, check it on github: discovr), but it’s terribly slow. Some possible reasons:

• Way too much data. I’ve found people with around more than 18000 favorites, and there are photos with more than 2k fans. After limiting to 50 last …

Wow, Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Vincent Laforet has done it again! This time with Canon’s brand-new 1D Mark IV and a film shot at ISO6400. And SmugMug’s got it in all it’s full 1080p hi-def glory, of course.

UPDATE: Canon, whom I love, has requested that Vincent take the video down.  As a courtesy to both Vincent and Canon, we have done so, but hope to put it back up again as soon as they give us the green light.  Read more about it over on Vincent’s blog.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Related posts:

• Amazing Canon 5D MkII HD video footage! …

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 …

On my non-MySQL blog, I just wrote a blog post called “Photo Manager: How do you keep track of your pictures?“. I’m looking for Open Source Software that helps me keep track of my 100,000+ digital pictures. I wrote specs on dreamt-up software called “Robfat” (for rename, order, backup, find, archive, tag) as I want to remove excess fat from my HDs (and CD/DVD cabinets).

And then I thought this may have a MySQL dimension:

What if we had an “EXIF Storage Engine”? What if we could update EXIF tags directly from the MySQL command line, with UPDATE statements, and SELECT picture file names based on tags and other file …

What is the future of MySQL? This is a question that interests many.

To be specific: Will there be significant performance improvements? Code contributions? Bug fixes? New features? Open Source licensed documentation? Will the users be happy with the Monthly Rapid Updates now released for the MySQL Community Server?

On another, more competitive level: Will there be successful forks? What will the MySQL AB founders do? What is Percona’s next move?

Julian Cash, known for his visionary photography, extended his scope during a Wednesday session at the MySQL Conference. Hard work during his predictive session gave me insight. I now know the answers.

However, I’m afraid I cannot share the revelations on this blog. What I can do, though, is to point to Julian Cash’s site “The Human Creativity Project”, and to the visible results of his other …

So, there it was: The mandatory picture that every successful Kilimanjaro climber wants to brag with. And I am no better (or worse) than any of my predecessors. Of course, I want to show that I’ve conquered well over 13 % of the world’s Seven Summits.

What did I see from the summit? A new release of MySQL? To be honest, my mind was completely off business. I was contemplating the most basic human needs. I wasn’t feeling explicitly tired nor cold (except for my hands! I had taken off the gloves to take pictures). But I was completely out of breath, as the air is very thin at 5895 m above sea level. 

Now, I’m back home, tending to an inbox of over 400 emails personally addressed to me (and an unknown amount received through mailing lists). 

Luckily, I couldn’t access those emails from the hotel in Tanzania where we stayed after the climb, so instead, …

My prayers have been answered.

We have found a worthy replacement for Jay Pipes: Dups.

• Dups joined MySQL in July 2007.
• Dups until recently was in the MySQL Web Team, and has joined us now.
• Dups comes from Canada (Newfoundland).
• Dups even lives in Canada (Montreal).
• Dups will roam the North American continent to serve the MySQL community, to learn from it, to explain Sun to the community, and to explain the community to Sun.
• Dups is sometimes mistaken for Colin Charles, because of similarities in physical appearance.
• Dups has a somewhat challenging name, Duleepa Wijayawardhana.

I’m very happy we got Dups as our Jay clone, because

• Dups is a MySQL user since last century.
• Dups knows MySQL very well.
• Dups is an excellent communicator: he structures his thoughts clearly and writes an enjoyable …

Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through …