beer planet

As half of the world population already knows, the MySQL conference is coming in less than 3 weeks. Since this event only happens once a year, lasts only 4 days, and costs more than a Russian mail-order bride, I'd really like to get the most out of it. Considering that the schedule is completely packed, with 8 (!!) events going on in parallel, I imagine things can get a little frantic. Additionally, I've never been to a conference of such size before and I'm not sure what to expect.

So… I'm contemplating:

• printing out the event schedule and drawing a zig-zagging "map" of exactly where I'll be jumping to next, once the previous presentation ends. I'm actually wondering if I'll need to figure out where all the events are located exactly in advance. How big is that place? Did Google invent in-building walking maps yet? Do people normally jump from one presentation to another parallel one or is that unheard of?

• bringing a laptop to take notes. I find it that my brain tends to retain mostly the general ideas for a good period of time. Code details and specifics tend to flush a lot sooner. Keeping notes (and publishing them online) is the best way to retain all this tasty information. Learn it and starting doing it, don't be lazy. For my note taking application, I actually prefer Microsoft (:gasp:) OneNote. It keeps things organized and has a coupe of neat tricks up its sleeve, like built-in OCR, Win-S shortcut for a quick area-defined screenshot, integration with Outlook, audio note-taking. Aha!..

• recording audio at every presentation, is that allowed?

• getting plenty of sleep the night before each conference day, as the amount of information is going to be simply crushing. I guess I'm going to have to postpone my 3am sessions until Friday or so.

• bribing an organ thief to steal Peter Zaitsev's brain and replace it with a statistical computer chip capable of running 17 billion MySQL benchmarks a second. Nobody is going to notice the difference anyway.

Do you have any tips? How do YOU handle conferences? Please share in the comments.

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL - the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster - parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database - definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) - should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features - an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications - more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment - I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL - tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System - sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design - I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL - sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) - more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) - even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database - by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle - probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks - more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures - man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime - by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP - by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?

Finally, the snowstorms in Tahoe are raging! CNN posted this video of a reporter Kevin "Coop" Cooper in Kirkwood, CA resort, who talks about current weather conditions and gives some snow stats. Who's up for some snowboarding?!

I was looking through some old papers while cleaning out the closet and found this list that Milla made for my mom when she was visiting. I quickly jotted it down for future reference. Here it is in no particular order:

In San Francisco

• Golden Gate Bridge
• Golden Gate Park
• Twin Peaks
• Legion of Honor (beautiful place!)
• Embarcadero
• Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf
• Ghirardelli Square
• Palace Of Fine Arts
• Lombard Street (the curvy one)
• Alcatraz
• Treasure Island
• Chinatown
• MOMA (Museum Of Modern Art)
• Broadway
• North Beach
• Coit Tower
• City Hall
• The Marina
• Union Square, Downtown

Outside San Francisco

• Sausalito
• Hearst Castle
• Reno
• Winchester Mystery House
• Napa, Sonoma (wine tasting, beautiful nature)
• Stinson Beach
• Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea
• Berkeley, Telegraph St
• Sacramento

A lot of these places of interest are covered by the 49 mile drive.

Updated: December 19th, 2007

If you haven't heard yet, there's a cool useful little device that you can buy for about $20, called the Kill-A-Watt. You plug it into the power outlet, then plug something into it and observe various fun facts about the plugged in device, such as the power consumption, voltage, amperage, etc. I started plugging things in and recording power consumption that you can see below. Here are the results I got so far (updated often):

• Vizio P50 HDTV 50" plasma
  • standby: 0-1W
  • on - perfect white screen: 450W (OUCH!)
  • on - bright screen: 350-430W
  • on - medium brightness: 250-350W
  • on - dark scenes: 200-250W
  • on - perfect black screen: 185W
• Torchiere floor lamp with a 300W bulb
  • 1st torchiere - on: 272W
  • 2nd torchiere - on: 305W
• Cell phone charger
  • no phone, no LED: 0W
  • no phone, LED on: 0W
  • phone charging (Samsung A900): 3W
  • phone charged (Samsung A900): 0W
• Dell 90W laptop charger
  • no laptop, LED on: 0W
  • laptop on, screen on, already charged: 33W
  • laptop on, screen off, charging: 74W
  • laptop on, screen on, charging: 85W
• Revlon 1875W blow dryer
  • low cool setting: 192W
  • medium cool setting: 231W
  • high cool setting: 251W
  • low hot setting: 408W
  • medium hot setting: 644W
  • high hot setting: 1520W (HOLY SHIT! Blow drying your hair may just be the most expensive thing you can do. Don't you have some baby seals to club?)
• Braun WK200B AquaExpress electric water kettle
  • on: 1430W (SHITx2! If you like to constantly reheat your tea kettle, like some people I know, maybe you should switch to a regular stovetop one)
• Rowenta electric water kettle
  • on: 1465W
• Plain 2 slot toaster
  • on: 950W (and 8 Amps! If everyone just gets rid of their kitchens, we will have an instant green paradise)
• Honeywell 51000 air cleaner
  • on - low setting: 57W
  • on - high setting: 94W
• Honeywell compact fan similar to this one
  • on - low setting: 28W
  • on - medium setting: 36W
  • on - high setting: 45W
• Panasonic MC-V5710 vacuum cleaner (10A)
• on - 900W (8A, guess it's getting old)
• Norelco electric shaver
• plugged in - charging: 3W
• plugged in - in use: 0W (apparently, the shaver can't charge while being in use)
• plugged in - charged: 0W (no overcharging is done when you leave the charge on for too long)

Got any requests? Post and I'll try to fulfill and publish them here.