MySQL Conference 2008

Monday, March 24th, 2008

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

April 16th

April 17th

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?

Pine is a UNIX command line mail application. So how do you delete all messages in a folder?

The combination is

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; A A D

If after pressing ; you see

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[Command ";" not defined for this screen. Use ? for help]

then you don't have a check in the "Enable aggregate command set" settings checkbox. To enable it, go to the main menu (M) -> Setup (S) -> Config (C) and scroll down to "Enable aggregate command set". Then press X (to check it), E (Exit). Now repeat the above.

Updated: May 1st, 2008

Sometimes in my line of work, I need to figure out if a url or filename point to a media file by checking for the file extension. If it's a url, however, it may be followed by various parameters. Not to overcomplicate things, I came up with the following Perl code:

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $name = "some_file.flv"; # or http://example.com/file.mp4?foo=bar
my $is_media_type = ($name =~ /\.(wmv|avi|flv|mov|mkv|mp..?|swf|ra.?|rm|as.|m4[av]|smi.?)\b/i);
if($is_media_type){
  print "media extension found\n";
}
else{
  print "not a media file\n";
}

This gets the job done without triggering any false positives (at least for the files/urls I've been dealing with so far). Am I missing any obvious types? Do you have a better way to accomplish the same thing? If so, please share in the comments.

Must-Know People In The MySQL Field

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Updated: April 8th, 2008

If you're serious about MySQL, it doesn't hurt to know the people closely tied to its development and maintenance as well as famous bloggers. Here's my ongoing list of people I consider important:

Peter Zaitsev - MySQL Performance Blog, former head of MySQL AB High Performance Group. His company Percona is available for consulting. He's a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition (great book).

Baron Schwartz - also know as Xaprb, Baron a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition and creator of innotop and Maatkit. Maatkit is simply brilliant, and so is Baron. Baron recently joined Peter Zaitsev at Percona.

Jeremy Zawodny - MySQL guru, works for Yahoo, and is considered a legend. He wrote mytop and both editions of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition among other things. Here's Jeremy's twitter. I suggest subscribing to his rss feed as his blog is quite interesting and versatile.

Paul McCullagh - developer of the PBXT transactional storage engine for MySQL.

Ronald Bradford - active blogger and a recent addition to PrimeBase Technologies, the maker of PBXT.

Roland Bouman - a MySQL developer and blogger, active in the community. He likes to post really, really, REALLY long but detailed and informative posts. He's one of the speakers at the upcoming MySQL conference (as most of the people here, actually).

Jan Kneschke - senior software developer in the MySQL AB Enterprise Tools team. He maintains the MySQL Proxy and the awesome lighttpd web server (!!!).

Giuseppe Maxia - a MySQL QA developer and tester for MySQL Proxy. Giuseppe loves LUA and maintains a blog called The Data Charmer where he writes about the MySQL Proxy a lot.

The Pythian Group - a group of ingenious DBAs (who also blog). This company does remote DB management and consulting.

Paul Vallee - CEO of The Pythian Group. A smart, dedicated, really great guy.

Sheeri Cabral - a very active and insightful blogger and speaker who also happens to work for The Pythian Group. She posts often and calls herself a MySQL She-BA.

Farhan (Frank) Mashraqi - Director of Database Infrastructure at fotolog.com, one of the top 15 sites in the world. He maintains a blog called MySQL Database Administration.

… more to come.

If you want to see some pictures of these fascinating people, head over to:

Programming Comic: Lisp, Perl, And God

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Computer Science majors out there that went through tedious hours of studying Lisp - this is for you from xkcd. If you know Perl, it will make even more sense.

image

Source: http://xkcd.com/224/

See Also: Best Programming Comic Ever: Code Quality In WTFs/Minute