A friend of mine (thanks Hilary) saw my posting on Air Canada’s new charges and sent me the following MadTV skit, which funny as it is sadly seems to be where we are headed. And while we’re at it, check out this skit from the Carol Burnett Show… a classic and not all too unlike Flying Air Canada

One of the things about the Grand Canyon is that it just does not photograph well. Yes, yes, I know you’ve seen amazing photos of the Grand Canyon, beautiful ones taken at sunset or sunrise as the light bounces on clouds and red rock. But let me tell you, no photo can ever capture the sense of awe and just plain “hugeness” of the place.

Doesn’t mean I didn’t try!

Now, here’s a small experiment. Does colour in a photo enhance the scale and grandeur of the canyon? So in this photo taken with a Tokina 12-24mm on a Nikon D300, I’m standing above the Grand Canyon looking down from Lookout Cabin near Bright Angel Lodge on the South Rim. The people on the ledge below are focused and as you look farther into the distance the depth of field gives you a sense of perspective. The people give you a sense of scale and the lines and shadows of the canyon walls are meant to focus your eyes.

My question to you: which photo gives you the greatest sense of grandeur? My answer of what I believe is below both photos.

So here’s one (click to view the original full size JPEG – 3MB) and it’s in colour.

Now here’s the second (click to view the original full size JPEG – 2.5MB) and it’s in black and white.

In my mind the black and white focuses you on to the things I mentioned, the things I wanted the photo to focus on. The colour is an added distraction and actually makes the Grand Canyon seem smaller and the canyon lines softer and gentler.

Okay, I know I’m rabidly anti-Air Canada. I admit it. I no longer fly with them if I have to spend a dime of my own money; points and work money are excluded. The only other reason to fly AC would be because there is no road, timely rail or the ability to parachute into a community or be sent by way of a giant human cannon.

So Air Canada now announces today that starting in May they will charge $25 for you to have an extra bag in the luggage compartment. So, fine, other airlines have done it and Air Canada wants to be the “me too!” airline when it comes to finding role-models who stiff their customers. But that leads me to the question, what is it that I actually pay for when I pay a fare to fly with Air Canada? Let’s see…

• Cost of carrying my luggage, well I guess from now on if you say an extra bag is $25 then my other bag must be the $25 cost hidden in the ticket price.
• Cost of peanuts and a soft drink. That must run Air Canada about $10 at the very most.
• Cost of carrying my pet. Oh wait Air Canada doesn’t allow that anymore.
• Cost of the Airport Tax… no that’s always added as a service charge.
• Cost of the meals… right, they charge for that extra in economy.
• Cost of them to help me out when winter weather screws up my travel plans… right they now want you to pay an “insurance” fee to get good customer service.
• Cost of manning call centres for lost baggage (and they sure have a lot)… oh right they route your calls to India for cents an hour…
• Cost of the fuel you say? Then why do we pay extra fuel surcharges?
• Cost of the NavCanada? No that’s also a surcharge.

So tell me where do all my hundreds of dollars go? Bad customer service and annoying stewards and stewardesses? Look, I would understand if I received friendly and helpful service and maybe even a nice airline to boot. The entertainment system crashes, the people are unfriendly, the seats are cramped, food you have to buy… Maybe Air Canada needs to find the proper way to be “competitive”, like maybe making me want to fly with them again.

So, I am basically paying let’s say $400 (minus taxes etc) to board a vehicle, be prodded by security, wait in umpteen lines, have Air Canada people be rude to me, buy my own food, sit cramped for hours and then let out at my destination and have my baggage lost? Great. I love air travel with Air Canada.

Okay, I admit it, I like Star Wars. Somewhere on my hard drive is the horrendously bad Star Wars Christmas Special (yes the one with the Wookies). Now I’m not a complete Star Wars geek. I’ve never dressed like Luke or Leia (shudder, a brown man dressed as Leia, now that would likely be someone’s fetish or someone’s nightmare… if it’s your fetish, please don’t let me know, I like blissful ignorance).

However, there is now a complete replica of R2D2 available and it is the gadget of gadgets. It is a projector, an iPod dock and a web camera… and it acts and controls like the R2 unit. Woah. I want one! If some kind millionaire is reading this, feel free to send me one for Christmas!

I have seen enough pictures and video of the Grand Canyon that I had figured there was really not that much to see. I knew the geological story of the tiny Colorado River eating through thousands of feet of rock to create this massive entity. I had learned all that when I was a kid in high-school. What magic could await for me there?

Nevertheless, I rented the car from Las Vegas’ monolithic rental complex designed solely to soullessly churn you through the rental process as fast as humanly decent and was on my way down the Nevada highways with Arizona in my sights. It had taken me a long time to decide that perhaps with just three days I would see the Grand Canyon and perhaps Zion National Park in Utah. At least then, I figured, I would have at least done the cheese factor of seeing this “Grand” Canyon that I had already seen on TV a million times. Woo hoo.

So much was my feeling on this that by the time I had finished the drive in the late afternoon, the flu that someone had given me on the last days of the MySQL Users Conference had spawned a fever and instead of driving to the edge of the canyon I headed straight to my campsite and to bed. The Grand Canyon could wait.

Next morning however, feeling only moderately awful, I packed my camera and gear and headed over to “The Rim”.

And there it was. I will never be able to describe in words what the Grand Canyon looked like. Even the words “Grand” and “Canyon” don’t really describe it. It’s the kind of vista that keeps drawing your eyes. Walk along the path and you find yourself silently and automatically turning your head towards it. My first look was so jarring that I just had to sit down and take a picture; my personal addition to the billions of photos that really don’t do the thing any justice what-so-ever.

Yup, I’m sitting in San Jose Airport poaching some internet access of the “Admiral’s Club” and getting ready to board a flight to Las Vegas. The MySQL Users Conference is over and I’m using the trip to see a bit of the Southwestern US.

However, first it will be to celebrate my friend Sue’s birthday in the city that money built: Las Vegas, the home of CSI and one of my favourite movies and books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. From there, I’ll rent a car and drive to the world-famous Grand Canyon for some photography and some camping. I might even head around to Zion National Park. I meant to make reservations but didn’t so who knows what will happen.

Maybe, just maybe I’ll hit a lucky streak in Vegas… probably not though!

Okay, so Markus and I did actually give the presentation yesterday  at the MySQL Users Conference and no, we weren’t booed off stage, and neither pro or anti-framework people came by to bludgeon us. Mind you, it could be that the hundred people or so were being extremely kind.

For those giving talks, remember, no matter how much you prepare, things still go wrong… In our case, when we plugged Markus’ laptop in we discovered that the projection produced an eye-watering flicker. Yay. And then, I forgot that Markus’ laptop has a German keyboard. Sigh. Despite that the presentation went well and we had some interesting post-discussion.

Couple of interesting notes though:  Only one person in the entire room had run xdebug and profiled their site. Do so immediately. Stop reading, forget about our basic presentation, just go do that. I’ll have to blog about how and what you can learn later.

Okay, so here are two slide decks, one which we showed and the other which has more written content which might be better for those that didn’t attend. There is also the sample application that we presented during the presentation it’ll get you started on all this.

• The slide deck as shown
• The slide deck with a bit more information
• The Constellation Phoenix Sample Application

Again thanks to all who attended, and thanks to those who already gave feedback. Any feedback, positive and negative will be considered. Beer and other gifts will be even more appreciated.

I certainly hope all the keynotes from this year’s MySQL User Conference are posted somewhere (I suspect you probably want to have a look at the conference web site). Looking at the printed presentations will not come to the spoken presentations, especially the keynote delivered by Dick Hardt the CEO of Sxip Idenity in British Columbia on Identity 2.0

Very briefly and nowhere near as smoothly, the keynote focused on the movement of digital identity systems away from each site or “silo” controlling the identity management and closing access to your profile/role/persona data we need to move away into a much more user centric model where you control your identity. The model would focus on “issuers” which give you “the agent” your data which you then choose to relay to others. The idea being that you can do things like  finally be able to have your e-bay reputation available in craigslist and more.

Naturally there are things like OpenID out there, something I’ll be pushing to implement in our MySQL web sites, and certainly Sun is a big supporter of OpenID. However, OpenID is, as Dick Hardt pointed out, still a bit annoying.

The second keynote was from Jeff Rothschild the CTO of Facebook, and let’s face it, the most interesting tech keynote I’ve seen in a while. Usually I’m expecting a lot of description and not a lot of substance. This was quite the opposite.

Rothschild went over the challenges of the “Social Graph” and the impact to the database. I’m not going to type any numbers as I’ll just get them wrong, but the numbers for access in Facebook due to the distributed nature of the social graph was staggering. They implement, as many do, including us, a Memcache/MySQL situation. They’ve actually optimized and written enhancements to thread Memcache and even the ethernet drivers on their linux boxes.

To scale Memcache over data centres, they’ve written a Memcache Proxy (which they announced would be released to the community). To integrate Memcache with MySQL more, they are writing their queries in MySQL to trigger marking dirty keys in Memcache so that data from widespread data locations which are taking replicated data in MySQL will not end up in a race condition when you proxy the Memcache data as well.

Rothschild then proceeded to issue a challenge: The key to solving these problems will be to get MySQL running as fast as Memcache. Well? Let’s get at it!

When I was a member of Memorial University’s newspaper The Muse there was one annual meeting I learned to dread. So much so that in later years when my friend Seamus and I were editors (I believe, though it could have been the folks who came after us, my memory gets hazy for many reasons), the newspaper abolished that meeting for good or for ill. I talk of course about the infamous student newspaper “Boycott List”. If you were ever a part of a Canadian University Press newspaper in the eighties and early nineties, you would know exactly what I’m talking about.

We were all idealistic students and we wanted to make a change in the world, and frankly what better vehicle to promote such change but by boycotting products, governments, companies etc. which were doing bad things. The arguments for who ended up on this list would drag and if my memory serves correctly, this meeting would be quite heated.

The question you should ask is whether these boycotts from a small student newspaper worked. After all there were many folks on this boycott list that would not be caught dead advertising with a student newspaper.  I am sure that Shell and other companies of their ilk were shaking in their boots that they might end up on our lists.

I do not believe anyone of us had any notion that our small printed vehicle was about to change the nature of freedom in China. However, we wanted to make a statement, we wanted to say something to the world and speak out on the evils that surround us, and we wanted to infect the student body with these same thoughts.

The reality is that boycotts and boycott lists have never been as successful as we want them to be. Many western countries, for example, boycott the Burmese government and supports a free and democratic Burma. Yet over the years very little has changed. If anything, one might argue, the Burmese government leaders have thrived at the expense of their oppressed people.

However, everyone points to the case of removing Apartheid as a situation where boycotts did work. Like with Burma, I remember thinking that that was a situation that would probably not be ended in my lifetime. But it did and the world has moved on.

So now we come to China’s hosting of the Olympic Games and boycotts are front and centre again. Do we boycott the Olympic games? Do we show China that the rest of the world does not like its record in Tibet or other human rights abuses?

This all raises so many questions, are the Olympics more about the politics or about the athletes? What about the athletes themselves who have dreamed from childhood about entering the Summer Games with their country to the adoration of the crowds, their families, their countries and their peers? Is it right that we place sports and competition above the real pain of humanity? Indeed, what about the marketing and commercial machine that we call the Olympic Games in the first place? Are we perhaps persecuting China? All the countries in the world have skeletons in their closet and we’ve let most of them host the Olympics, is this new level of protest a bit too much?

While I did not believe in boycott lists for The Muse at the time, I do believe in the original reason for why they existed. I believe that journalists and media above all have the responsibility of bring forward ideas, thoughts, information that i counter to popular discussion. Whether the boycott for the Olympics is a good idea or not (and maybe I’ll explore that a bit further on this blog at a later date) the amazing amount of publicity given to the plight of the Tibetan people, China’s support of Darfur and more can never be taken back. We will be heading for a summer of Olympic discontent, but the people of China now know in no uncertain terms that the eyes of the world are indeed watching and not necessarily on the beauty of their facilities. They are quite aware that their actions do carry weight throughout the world.

I once thought Apartheid would be an institution that would live into the 21st century. I now believe that change for good is something for which we as humanity all strive. The problem is that our belief in what is “good” is so disparate at times. However, when all in a country realize the evilness that might be apparent, change will happen.

Now back to the boycott lists at The Muse. Did they actually do any good? Please remember I am now looking back at all this with the imperfect lens of human memory. Those lists created a lot of bad blood. Many wanted journalists to be impartial and we were being preachy. However, now, a decade later, I attribute those boycott lists to how I view the world, the way I question the motives of governments and companies and the way I choose to allow my money to participate in the free-market economy.

So yes, I think the boycott lists worked for me, whether any of the student body picked up on it, well, that I have no clue about, but I do doubt it and I think in that sense, the boycott lists failed.

I think I’ve been asked a number of times what it is like to suddenly be part of a 34,000 person company after being in a 400 person open-source driven company. Oddly enough, personally, it’s not that much different. I guess that’s what happens when the cultures of the 400 person and the 34,000 person companies match so closely. It could also be I’m drinking some kind of kool-aid that they are passing around at the MySQL Users Conference.

If it’s crazy kool-aid then I’m drinking deeply right now.

Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun delivered a keynote that really resonated with me. It was about Sun’s agenda. Delivered to a couple thousand folks attending an open source conference he started off with the joke of “enough of this free software”. Well, really, I like to think that I made the choice to join and work for MySQL because I wanted to work not just for a fantastic company but help in a company that was producing software which was doing something profound in the software world.

We create and publish a free database that is not only used by social networking sites like Facebook, but also by hospitals, charity organizations, non-profits, environmental groups and science organizations. Our software is not just changing the way you connect and are entertained, but literally the free software movement is changing and helping grow the planet and help humanity. That is a noble goal.

So for me as Jonathan went through his presentation he brought up that his goal for Sun was to create a “Great Company” and also a “Good Company” it resonated. Sure we need to make money, MySQL has to make money in the end, Free Software does not mean that I don’t get paid. As Marten Mickos has often said, Free also means Freedom, freedom in data, freedom in use, freedom in ownership of what matters to you.

I like this goal, I want to see this goal through.

So what is it like to join a big company? As long as we go down this ride of free and freedom, of being good global, human citizens, use our technology as a vehicle of human empowerment, human growth and challenge  the world to do better and live better, I think I’m signed up.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Sun and MySQL will have to strive to be profitable and make money, but why not do it by giving everyone the choice to create the innovative ideas which will fuel human exploration beyond and within this incredible world we live in?

Is there pain in being part of a bigger organization, I’d be lying if I said there isn’t pain, but nothing that can’t be overcome! At least that’s my hope currently!

This kool-aid tastes fantastic! It’s Orange and Blue though