The short: 2007 Sysadmin of the Year Nominations being accepted — http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com. Canada and US candidates only (due to prizes and regulations. 🙁 )
Last year, I found out too late about the Sysadmin of the Year Award (see my lament at http://sheeri.net/archives/157). Mark Cohen, this year’s “poster boy” for 2007 Sysadmin of the Year, contacted me to let me know that the 2007 Sysadmin of the Year contest is on. It started on Sysadmin Day, always the last Friday in July.
I asked if DBA’s count as sysadmins, and here’s what Mark had to say:
In our book, DBAs qualify.
I’ve worked with some totally amazing DBAs that not only do their job, but ALSO work as a sysadmin when asked..
Great bunch of people generally.
The press release to Forbes Magazine http://tinyurl.com/2cufvc confirms this:
During the three-month contest, anyone can nominate their system administrator, network manager, database administrator, or other IT professional simply by submitting an online nomination describing why their IT person is a SysAdmin Rockstar, going beyond the call-of-duty on a daily basis.
My hat’s already in the running (from my co-workers, so use skritzer at online-buddies dot com if you’re going to nominate me), so if you think my contributions to the general community through my podcast, my blog, as mentor in the Google Summer of Code for 2 students, or through actually working with me are useful, go ahead and nominate me.
And be sure to nominate other folks as well — the first 2500 folks to be nominated will receive a T-shirt. But I’d really love to go to LISA again, and I’ve already been to the MySQL Conference this year so my training budget is used!
The short: 2007 Sysadmin of the Year Nominations being accepted — http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com. Canada and US candidates only (due to prizes and regulations. 🙁 )
Last year, I found out too late about the Sysadmin of the Year Award (see my lament at http://sheeri.net/archives/157). Mark Cohen, this year’s “poster boy” for 2007 Sysadmin of the Year, contacted me to let me know that the 2007 Sysadmin of the Year contest is on. It started on Sysadmin Day, always the last Friday in July.
I asked if DBA’s count as sysadmins, and here’s what Mark had to say:
In our book, DBAs qualify.
I’ve worked with some totally amazing DBAs that not only do their job, but ALSO work as a sysadmin when asked..
Great bunch of people generally.
The press release to Forbes Magazine http://tinyurl.com/2cufvc confirms this:
During the three-month contest, anyone can nominate their system administrator, network manager, database administrator, or other IT professional simply by submitting an online nomination describing why their IT person is a SysAdmin Rockstar, going beyond the call-of-duty on a daily basis.
My hat’s already in the running (from my co-workers, so use skritzer at online-buddies dot com if you’re going to nominate me), so if you think my contributions to the general community through my podcast, my blog, as mentor in the Google Summer of Code for 2 students, or through actually working with me are useful, go ahead and nominate me.
And be sure to nominate other folks as well — the first 2500 folks to be nominated will receive a T-shirt. But I’d really love to go to LISA again, and I’ve already been to the MySQL Conference this year so my training budget is used!
Sadly, it’s not my bug, it’s a bug in the MySQL Documentation.
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29915
I’m actually quite surprised nobody has run into this before, and in fact many sources quote this stating that %I and %h are the same thing.
I can’t be the only person in the world that’s ever needed hours with stripped leading zeros before. The irony is that before the submitted bug I was 5 points away from being a Basic Quality Contributor, and it would be very funny to me if this is the bug that pushed me over to qualify for a free Basic license….particularly since my company JUST bought a few licenses a month ago.
Sadly, it’s not my bug, it’s a bug in the MySQL Documentation.
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29915
I’m actually quite surprised nobody has run into this before, and in fact many sources quote this stating that %I and %h are the same thing.
I can’t be the only person in the world that’s ever needed hours with stripped leading zeros before. The irony is that before the submitted bug I was 5 points away from being a Basic Quality Contributor, and it would be very funny to me if this is the bug that pushed me over to qualify for a free Basic license….particularly since my company JUST bought a few licenses a month ago.
aka, “Better late than never”…..
Back in March 2007, the Boston MySQL User Group (http://mysql.meetup.com/137) watched and heard Brian DeLacey give a tutorial of Ruby on Rails, including its interaction with MySQL using ActiveRecord.
I knew absolutely nothing about Ruby on Rails before attending the presentation, other than Ruby was a language and people were saying that Rails made for easy development. After the presentation, I knew enough to start coding!
Brian is an excellent speaker, and this presentation is long overdue. (I’d tried creating the video before, during and after the MySQL Users Conference back in April, and my application kept crashing. I guess it just needed a break, because I fired it up today and it seemed to save the movie OK. Please let me know if you watch the presentation and something seems wrong).
Enjoy!
Direct download link:
http://www.technocation.org/movies/mysql/2007_03_Rails_BostonUG.wmv
Ruby on Rails by Brian DeLacey
aka, “Better late than never”…..
Back in March 2007, the Boston MySQL User Group (http://mysql.meetup.com/137) watched and heard Brian DeLacey give a tutorial of Ruby on Rails, including its interaction with MySQL using ActiveRecord.
I knew absolutely nothing about Ruby on Rails before attending the presentation, other than Ruby was a language and people were saying that Rails made for easy development. After the presentation, I knew enough to start coding!
Brian is an excellent speaker, and this presentation is long overdue. (I’d tried creating the video before, during and after the MySQL Users Conference back in April, and my application kept crashing. I guess it just needed a break, because I fired it up today and it seemed to save the movie OK. Please let me know if you watch the presentation and something seems wrong).
Enjoy!
Direct download link:
http://www.technocation.org/movies/mysql/2007_03_Rails_BostonUG.wmv
Ruby on Rails by Brian DeLacey
A sysadmin friend of mine was describing some DBA work he was doing, and wrote this:
I’m not much of a DBA, really – if it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin I’m not likely to be doing it.
This is in stark contrast to so many so-called DBAs who say “I’m a DBA….If it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin it must be Senior DBA work.”
I’ve used phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration, and there’s just something so nice about working on commandline.
A sysadmin friend of mine was describing some DBA work he was doing, and wrote this:
I’m not much of a DBA, really – if it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin I’m not likely to be doing it.
This is in stark contrast to so many so-called DBAs who say “I’m a DBA….If it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin it must be Senior DBA work.”
I’ve used phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration, and there’s just something so nice about working on commandline.
Some have pointed out that the 12 Days of Scaleout campaign is a “cheap marketing tactic.”
Why, yes. It’s inexpensive as far as campaigns go. It’s definitely marketing. The grumbling seemed to be that there was no content on how the scaleout happened and worked for these companies.
We have to remember that not everyone is a geek. While we already know and love MySQL, there are people out there who only vaguely understand what a “database” is, much less have even heard of MySQL. Many laypeople I talk to haven’t heard of Oracle!
MySQL needs this kind of marketing. Perhaps it better belongs as an advertisement in a glossy magazine, but I see no problem with MySQL using what they own — lists, forums, PlanetMySQL, its own web page — to do cheap marketing. In fact, “cheap marketing” is one of the main reasons for having a website! The Log Buffers are a great way to give back to the community, but they’re also marketing for Pythian.
Heck, the people who post on Planet MySQL are marketing themselves — which may seem like a silly statement until you realize that there are a few folks who are independent consultants.
So, yes. I’m all for Planet MySQL being cheap marketing. I market my podcasts on the ‘planet, and I market my own skills. The next time I look for a job, I can point an employer to the fact that I’m at or near the top of the Planet MySQL top posters list.
Some have pointed out that the 12 Days of Scaleout campaign is a “cheap marketing tactic.”
Why, yes. It’s inexpensive as far as campaigns go. It’s definitely marketing. The grumbling seemed to be that there was no content on how the scaleout happened and worked for these companies.
We have to remember that not everyone is a geek. While we already know and love MySQL, there are people out there who only vaguely understand what a “database” is, much less have even heard of MySQL. Many laypeople I talk to haven’t heard of Oracle!
MySQL needs this kind of marketing. Perhaps it better belongs as an advertisement in a glossy magazine, but I see no problem with MySQL using what they own — lists, forums, PlanetMySQL, its own web page — to do cheap marketing. In fact, “cheap marketing” is one of the main reasons for having a website! The Log Buffers are a great way to give back to the community, but they’re also marketing for Pythian.
Heck, the people who post on Planet MySQL are marketing themselves — which may seem like a silly statement until you realize that there are a few folks who are independent consultants.
So, yes. I’m all for Planet MySQL being cheap marketing. I market my podcasts on the ‘planet, and I market my own skills. The next time I look for a job, I can point an employer to the fact that I’m at or near the top of the Planet MySQL top posters list.
As the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year, I’m taking the “MySQL 5 Wishes” meme and changing it a bit. I hope y’all don’t mind:
1) Everyone has a different level of familiarity. The community does well with this when writing articles, for instance cross-referencing older articles, linking to documentation, the MySQL Forge, etc. Not much background information other than “MySQL usage” is assumed.
However, where we fall down is when we aggregate some writings and call it documentation. The worst form of this is a tool that grows organically, from “look, here’s a script!” to a full-blown tool/patch/add-on. Sourceforge stinks for trying to make documentation, so most folks just link to their posts tagged “mytool” or whatever the name is.
Using some marketing skills would be wonderful — make a page for folks who have never seen one post about it. Voila, you get your code going from something that people only learn when someone else tells them, to something folks wind up getting as a result of a search.
2) Along those lines, MySQL provides us with some great tools that we rarely use. When was the last time you linked your presentation to the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Main_Page? It took me a long time to make Technocation’s MySQL 2007 Conference Video page at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos — Even after all the video was edited, I had to make the page.
How much easier would it have been if the descriptions, slides, handouts, video and audio were all available in one place? Obviously we can’t hack on the O’Reilly site, but there’s nothing to say that we can’t make a wiki site with everything about a presentation in one place — including links to everyone’s notes! Make it so that 5 years from now a person learning MySQL can find what they need, when they don’t have the same time/date context that we do.
3) Use (and appreciate) what we have. We have great software, sure. But we also have a company full of folks willing to talk to us. We can complain about the fact that even simple patches from non-employees take several months or a year or so to get into the code, because of existing coding conventions, etc. We can be annoyed that we have to download 7 addons for our software, but instead of saying MySQL should offer them for download in the same package (which of course they should, all the code should integrate nicely, and we should be able to turn on features we want and turn off or not use those we don’t)…….
….we can help that by making a centralized repository of MySQL addons. Run by the community, for the community. On the forge. At the very least we can make an index page of the neat tools we’ve created or found for MySQL and categorize them. Think of how plugins for software such as Firefox have repositories.
4) Volunteer unexpectedly. Got a presentation that didn’t make the cut for the 2007 MySQL Users Conference? Offer to present it at a local user group. Don’t have a local user group? Record the presentation as a lecture and post it online. Alternatively, make a local user group. Do what you’re mostly comfortable with — don’t always stay in your comfort zone, push it a little. Maybe it means volunteering to help the MySQL documentation get a bit better. Contact someone you know in MySQL (or just put the word out in a blog post) that you’d like to help _________ get better, and you’re sure to find a few takers.
5) Contribute! OK, many already do this at http://www.planetmysql.org. But consider contributing to:
As the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year, I’m taking the “MySQL 5 Wishes” meme and changing it a bit. I hope y’all don’t mind:
1) Everyone has a different level of familiarity. The community does well with this when writing articles, for instance cross-referencing older articles, linking to documentation, the MySQL Forge, etc. Not much background information other than “MySQL usage” is assumed.
However, where we fall down is when we aggregate some writings and call it documentation. The worst form of this is a tool that grows organically, from “look, here’s a script!” to a full-blown tool/patch/add-on. Sourceforge stinks for trying to make documentation, so most folks just link to their posts tagged “mytool” or whatever the name is.
Using some marketing skills would be wonderful — make a page for folks who have never seen one post about it. Voila, you get your code going from something that people only learn when someone else tells them, to something folks wind up getting as a result of a search.
2) Along those lines, MySQL provides us with some great tools that we rarely use. When was the last time you linked your presentation to the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Main_Page? It took me a long time to make Technocation’s MySQL 2007 Conference Video page at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos — Even after all the video was edited, I had to make the page.
How much easier would it have been if the descriptions, slides, handouts, video and audio were all available in one place? Obviously we can’t hack on the O’Reilly site, but there’s nothing to say that we can’t make a wiki site with everything about a presentation in one place — including links to everyone’s notes! Make it so that 5 years from now a person learning MySQL can find what they need, when they don’t have the same time/date context that we do.
3) Use (and appreciate) what we have. We have great software, sure. But we also have a company full of folks willing to talk to us. We can complain about the fact that even simple patches from non-employees take several months or a year or so to get into the code, because of existing coding conventions, etc. We can be annoyed that we have to download 7 addons for our software, but instead of saying MySQL should offer them for download in the same package (which of course they should, all the code should integrate nicely, and we should be able to turn on features we want and turn off or not use those we don’t)…….
….we can help that by making a centralized repository of MySQL addons. Run by the community, for the community. On the forge. At the very least we can make an index page of the neat tools we’ve created or found for MySQL and categorize them. Think of how plugins for software such as Firefox have repositories.
4) Volunteer unexpectedly. Got a presentation that didn’t make the cut for the 2007 MySQL Users Conference? Offer to present it at a local user group. Don’t have a local user group? Record the presentation as a lecture and post it online. Alternatively, make a local user group. Do what you’re mostly comfortable with — don’t always stay in your comfort zone, push it a little. Maybe it means volunteering to help the MySQL documentation get a bit better. Contact someone you know in MySQL (or just put the word out in a blog post) that you’d like to help _________ get better, and you’re sure to find a few takers.
5) Contribute! OK, many already do this at http://www.planetmysql.org. But consider contributing to:
So, the open source community/mentality/legacy/mindset tends to be attached to the idea:
“Free as in beer” — for comparison’s sake, another meaning could be, “free as in speech”.
Wikipedia has a good explanation of this, making “free as in beer” equivalent to “gratis,” meaning “free of cost.” Whereas “free as in speech” is equivalent to “libre,” free of restrictons.
Now, I understand why some things cost no money but are restricted. I also understand why some things cost no money and are not restricted. I do not have a particular religion either way, I think each product’s business model can be different.
So I’ll present a third concept: “Free as in water.”
Water is a privilege. In many places, we turn a handle and clear, potable, disease-free water comes out. We can drink it, we can wash ourselves with it, and we can luxuriate in it, as in a bath. However, many people in those places take it for granted that clean, potable, disease-free water will always come out when that handle is turned. Water is a precious commodity, though very often not treated as such. Many of us in the first world have not experienced how precious water is, as have those in the third world (“developing world” is the politically correct term these days).
I was reading randomly the other day, and came across a blog post where someone asked, “should water be free in a restaurant?”
There were a few repeated responses:
1) No, water should not be free in a restaurant. The water does actually cost money, and owners of properties typically pay a water bill.
2) No, water should not be free in a restaurant. While the water may be “free”, the glass is not, and neither is the waitstaff who bring you the glass and refill the water.
3) Yes, water should be free in a restaurant. The amount of water used does not cost that much, and the waitstaff is there anyway, so do not cost more.
4) Yes, water should be free in a restaurant. It puts me off when water is not, and I do not go back to those restaurants.
As I was reading, I immediately thought of open source business models. Because open source is, at its core, “free as in water”. The product is the water — whether it’s server-side software like Apache or MySQL, desktop software (aka “freeware”), an operating system such as Linux, or programming software such as PHP, Ruby or Perl. Much like water in a restaurant, as compared to other drinks, the cost is negligible. For instance, the cost of water compared to the cost of a soft drink is much less in most places.
Similarly, the monetary cost of MySQL compared to Oracle, or the cost of Linux compared to Microsoft, is much less.
Should all software be free? Certainly, I don’t think everything on a drink menu should be free. Oracle and Microsoft have a lot of overhead, and at the end of the day families need to be fed. Much like in a restaurant, though, open source software is the result of one or more folks doing work. Some of that work is programmatic, and yes, like water to soda, the programmatic cost is often less than the programmatic cost of the commercial entities. However, the waitstaff is analogous to support. Why is it that nobody thinks “free refills on drinks” is a ploy to get a bigger tip for waitstaff, yet many people think offering a free product with for-pay support means that the product is shoddy and of course you will need support?
That clean glass your water comes in is equivalent to QA. And yes, it’s not perfect — occasionally we find a spot of lipstick on the glass from a previous customer, and send the glass back.
So I believe the open source legacy should be that it is “free as in water” — it should be ubiquitous, though we should treasure it because it is truly valuable and if it did become rare, we would lose a lot of quality of life.
Nobody thinks “If you give away free water, nobody will ever buy a drink!” Yes, free water is a bit disruptive, but there will always be folks that use SQL Server, with it’s fabulous data analytics, and Oracle, with its long history and name recognition — just as there will always be folks willing to pay US $10 for an alcoholic drink. It’s not that someone paying $10 for a drink, or $5 for a beer, or even $2 for a soda is dumb because they could have just had water for free. It’s that sometimes you need water, and other times you want a $10 drink.
Now, MySQL has the potential to turn water into wine, and in that case, it’s even more disruptive…….
So, thoughts on the “free as in water” concept?
So, the open source community/mentality/legacy/mindset tends to be attached to the idea:
“Free as in beer” — for comparison’s sake, another meaning could be, “free as in speech”.
Wikipedia has a good explanation of this, making “free as in beer” equivalent to “gratis,” meaning “free of cost.” Whereas “free as in speech” is equivalent to “libre,” free of restrictons.
Now, I understand why some things cost no money but are restricted. I also understand why some things cost no money and are not restricted. I do not have a particular religion either way, I think each product’s business model can be different.
So I’ll present a third concept: “Free as in water.”
Water is a privilege. In many places, we turn a handle and clear, potable, disease-free water comes out. We can drink it, we can wash ourselves with it, and we can luxuriate in it, as in a bath. However, many people in those places take it for granted that clean, potable, disease-free water will always come out when that handle is turned. Water is a precious commodity, though very often not treated as such. Many of us in the first world have not experienced how precious water is, as have those in the third world (“developing world” is the politically correct term these days).
I was reading randomly the other day, and came across a blog post where someone asked, “should water be free in a restaurant?”
There were a few repeated responses:
1) No, water should not be free in a restaurant. The water does actually cost money, and owners of properties typically pay a water bill.
2) No, water should not be free in a restaurant. While the water may be “free”, the glass is not, and neither is the waitstaff who bring you the glass and refill the water.
3) Yes, water should be free in a restaurant. The amount of water used does not cost that much, and the waitstaff is there anyway, so do not cost more.
4) Yes, water should be free in a restaurant. It puts me off when water is not, and I do not go back to those restaurants.
As I was reading, I immediately thought of open source business models. Because open source is, at its core, “free as in water”. The product is the water — whether it’s server-side software like Apache or MySQL, desktop software (aka “freeware”), an operating system such as Linux, or programming software such as PHP, Ruby or Perl. Much like water in a restaurant, as compared to other drinks, the cost is negligible. For instance, the cost of water compared to the cost of a soft drink is much less in most places.
Similarly, the monetary cost of MySQL compared to Oracle, or the cost of Linux compared to Microsoft, is much less.
Should all software be free? Certainly, I don’t think everything on a drink menu should be free. Oracle and Microsoft have a lot of overhead, and at the end of the day families need to be fed. Much like in a restaurant, though, open source software is the result of one or more folks doing work. Some of that work is programmatic, and yes, like water to soda, the programmatic cost is often less than the programmatic cost of the commercial entities. However, the waitstaff is analogous to support. Why is it that nobody thinks “free refills on drinks” is a ploy to get a bigger tip for waitstaff, yet many people think offering a free product with for-pay support means that the product is shoddy and of course you will need support?
That clean glass your water comes in is equivalent to QA. And yes, it’s not perfect — occasionally we find a spot of lipstick on the glass from a previous customer, and send the glass back.
So I believe the open source legacy should be that it is “free as in water” — it should be ubiquitous, though we should treasure it because it is truly valuable and if it did become rare, we would lose a lot of quality of life.
Nobody thinks “If you give away free water, nobody will ever buy a drink!” Yes, free water is a bit disruptive, but there will always be folks that use SQL Server, with it’s fabulous data analytics, and Oracle, with its long history and name recognition — just as there will always be folks willing to pay US $10 for an alcoholic drink. It’s not that someone paying $10 for a drink, or $5 for a beer, or even $2 for a soda is dumb because they could have just had water for free. It’s that sometimes you need water, and other times you want a $10 drink.
Now, MySQL has the potential to turn water into wine, and in that case, it’s even more disruptive…….
So, thoughts on the “free as in water” concept?
So, this is me:
Special thanx to Colin Charles for taking the picture and linking to it from his blog.
Notice that in addition to my photogenic qualities as well as the bags under my eyes, that I’m wearing an incredibly geeky necklace.
Yes, it’s true. I bought a white gold dolphin to wear around my neck, because I am THAT much of a MySQL geek.
So, this is me:
Special thanx to Colin Charles for taking the picture and linking to it from his blog.
Notice that in addition to my photogenic qualities as well as the bags under my eyes, that I’m wearing an incredibly geeky necklace.
Yes, it’s true. I bought a white gold dolphin to wear around my neck, because I am THAT much of a MySQL geek.