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 characteristics?

But beyond this technical aspect, I think many, many MySQL users are avid photographers and may have input about the specs themselves, or even know of existing software that satisfied the needs.

So please go to the blog post and comment!

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 sessions on Wednesday.

Thank you Julian!

Links:

• The Human Creativity Project: http://www.humancreativity.com/
• Julian Cash’s visionary sessions on Wednesday at the MySQL Conference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliancash/sets/72157617184626249

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, I have been able to write plenty of Kilimanjaro related blogs. Each blog exists in one language only. First, the English blogs:

• A Pictorial Report From An Ascent To Kilimanjaro is where to go for those who want to see pictures, with a “tourist’s perspective”
• Ten suggestions to Dismass Mariki, our mountain guide in Kilimanjaro is my attempt at helping Dismass to start blogging (he said he wanted “a web site”)

In German, I have so far only one blog

• Kilimanjaro: Experiences from Photography and Video Filming

In Swedish, I wrote a whopping six blog entries:

• Camping in the sites around Kilimanjaro
• Kilimanjaro reduces human needs to the purely physiological
• Porters are a luxurious necessity for Kilimanjaro climbers
• Asanti for the good food, Dolla!
• Kilimanjaro: Learnings for Everyday Life
• Climbing the Kilimanjaro Is A Unique Father-and-Son Experience

I may or may not decide to translate (or rewrite) one or more of the non-English blog entries. Feel free to suggest which one would interest you!

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 language.
• Dups is a superb web developer, very competent to take over MySQL Forge.
• Dups’s heart beat strongly for the community already when I interviewed him for his Web position (our recruiting processes required an out-of-department interviewer, and I’m happy I volunteered).
• Dups enjoys photography, quite like I do.
• I have already managed to learn to write and pronounce Dups’s real name by rote (see: Duleepa Wijayawardhana! I didn’t even look it up.).
• Dups is a geek even by name, as his (sequentially) first name is Geekiyanage.

I’m looking forward to working with Dups, on all things community. And I’m hoping to learn some mountaineering from him, too — he’s climbed over 28% of the world’s Seven Summits (Kilimanjaro for the highest peak in Africa, Elbrus for the highest peak in Europe).

Welcome, Dups!

Links:

• Dups’s blog on joining: http://blogs.sun.com/dups/entry/don_t_panic
• Giuseppe’s blog on Dups joining: http://blogs.sun.com/datacharmer/entry/good_luck_jay_welcome_dups

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 MySQL colleague Zack Urlocker’s biking trips. He shared albums of his trips, which I browsed through, and found “quite OK”. Meaning: Easy to consume pics posted by others, but no trigger for me to start producing web albums myself. When running with Zack, the Picasa topic occasionally popped up, with me expressing skepticism towards the time expenditure for uploading a gallery, and Zack saying it wasn’t that hard, as there is a good picture uploader. It turns out Zack was right, as I learned much later.

What triggered me to join Picasa Web was my blogging. A blog entry without a single picture isn’t very appealing, and some blog entries require many pictures. I had for long used a complex setup, uploading my pictures using Unix utility scp from my Mac to my account on @arno.fi. The domain arno.fi was a parallel domain to a now-extinct server grankulla.mysql.com, which I had to stop using after the Sun acquisition, as the use was bordering on the private. So I started to host arno.fi privately (a different story entirely) and became worried about bandwidth cost for the pics referred to from blogs.mysql.com/kaj. So the MySQL Web Team enabled uploading of pictures as part of the MySQL Wordpress blog site itself. This worked fine, but by this time I had already thought a bit about hosting the pics on Picasa or Flickr. So when I saw Picasa pictures automatically connected to Google profiles and Google maps, I decided to try out Picasa.

Like for all social networking sites, I obviously had to register. This wasn’t hard, and it was part of my general Google profile (Google Reader, Google Mail etc.). The real obstacle which had kept me from doing it earlier was installing the picture uploader, called “Picasa Web Albums Uploader“. I’m not a person who likes to tweak with the technical setup of my computers, hence the reluctance. But it was OK. I didn’t have to know anything in advance; the Picasa web site gave the relevant pointers and I wasn’t lead astray during the installation.

Next came the learning part, which in fact turned out to be fun. Uploading the pictures was trivial. I am a character based (”command line”) type of guy, hence the perceived ease-of-use of the scp utility. But merely dragging the pictures from the Mac Finder to the Picasa Uploader was easier still. And uploading pics with the Picasa Uploader came with two real benefits:

1. Automatic picture resizing into multiple sizes: 144px, 288px, 400px, 800px. For that I had used the resize command of Imagemagick, which took me quite a while to install, and which despite its command line nature wasn’t as fast and automagick as the ease of use of the Picasa Uploader for this specific task. Plus, Picasa relieves me of renaming pics in various resolutions to distinguish them from each other.
2. Easy housekeeping of album names / directories. I like order (not that I always succeed in keeping it). So I dislike putting all pics into a one single directory. The Picasa uploader provides me with a drop-down list of my previously used albums ( “directories”), which I can refill, or the opportunity to create a new album (”directory”). And at the point of upload, I can very quickly label the pics.

The next step is completely optional, but very “cool” and inspiring: I can tag the pictures, and I can place them on Google Maps.

Tagging is merely about finding out multiple, good descriptions for pictures, for later searches. So that doesn’t take long.

Placing the picture on the map can be everything from dead easy to very frustrating. For my pictures from Munich, I very simply typed in the address: just “Balanstr. 22″ for the pictures of my son trying to be an actor, and “Kleinfeldstr. 28b, Germering” for the pictures of my daughter by Riccardo Desiderio. For South Africa, it was much harder. It didn’t know Kievits Kroon, Reier road, or even Kameeldrift. I just had to point manually to somewhere north-east of Pretoria, where I assumed the pics were taken. That was a time drain.

Still, as a result, I got a nice map of where I took the pics of the trip, and if I’d like more detail, I’ll even see the individual pictures placed on a map.

The last step is about using the Picasa pictures in the blog itself. And this is also a bit simplified from my character-based scp blogging, where I had to semi-manually concatenate the first part of the picture urls (”http://kaj.arno.fi/”) with the name of the picture (”IMG_1234_Blabla.JPG”). In Picasa, I do the opposite, i.e. I cut-and-paste the huge text provided by Picasa, e.g.

<table style=”width:auto;”><tr><td><a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/YpJLrGsLVDIbs_jSHkAQ-Q”><img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg” /></a></td></tr><tr><td style=”font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right”>Från <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/KajArnPortraits”>Kaj Arnö Portraits</a></td></tr></table>

and clean it up from surplus stuff to get only what I want, i.e.

<img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg”/>

which I then paste into my Wordpress blog entry, perhaps adding an align=”right” or align=”left” in the process. And I take care to select the desired resolution: 144px, 288px, 400px or 800px; more than once, I’ve been happy with reducing the picture size further than what I would have done during my Imagemagick resize days.

In all of this, I see little if any problem, except the huge size of the licensing agreement I clicked through. That’s another barrier of entry. I don’t know what I really agreed to. Who knows, perhaps I even violated the agreement by taking screen shots of what Picasa looks like, for this blog entry?

Which brings me to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Many, and significant   + Very easy and fast to upload pictures + No need to shrink the pictures before upload — Picasa does it for you + Great to get many resolutions (144px, 288px, 400px, 800px) automatically + Fast integration of pictures in blog entries + Easy to keep pictures in order + Cool to tag the pictures for searches + Cool to place pictures on maps
	Negative experiences: Few, and all related to legalese   - Very irritating to have such a lengthy license agreement - The license agreement was so long and difficult that I don’t know what I agreed to - Meaning, I also don’t know if I’m missing something important - And why didn’t I get http://picasaweb.google.com/kajarno as my public page?
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself  Privacy! It isn’t even 20 % clear to me when it’s in my interest to allow the albums to be visible for everyone, and when it should be private (sure, I won’t put up pictures of drunken friends, or of myself in a similar state — but what about the innocent family pictures I linked above?) I first thought Picasa was a standalone photo organiser like iPhoto, and then learned it was a picture sharing thingie like Flickr, but only now reading Wikipedia do I understand I was right to begin with, and Picasa Web is separate from Picasa (good thing I read that before posting this blog entry, as I now sprinkled in the word “Web” here and there after “Picasa”)
	Remaining questions from my side   How much time should I spend uploading my existing pictures? Should I do that at least for my past blog pictures? Privacy! When should I make my pictures public? Why? Should I link the pictures from other social networking sites? How can I do that easily? Privacy again! Who will use the tags I provide Picasa Web with? Will that be of benefit or harm to me?

Starting to use Picasa Web Albums has so far been a very positive experience, and I do expect to manage all my online pictures in it, and get lots of good vibes from it going forward.

Links:

• Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com
• My Picasa Web page: http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Picasa_Web_Albums

I just started a new blog on photography, in German. It’s based in http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/ and so far only has just four entries — one on a photo session with fashion photographer Riccardo Desiderio, one on my ensuing autumn portraits of my wife along the Isar here in Munich, one on fun underwater photography (autotranslated to English) and another about a Panama hat (also autotranslated).

Judging from the quality of the auto translations, this is going to be only for German readers. So far, I’ve mostly stated

• Why this blog? http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/wieso-dieser-blog/
• Why photography? http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/wieso-fotografieren/
• My photographic biography: http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/fotografischer-lebenslauf/
• Challenges: http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/herausforderungen/

Perhaps this new blog may mean I won’t disturb PlanetMySQL.org with endless posts on mountaineering and running any longer, where one mentioning of the word “MySQL” triggers the aggregation of a huge entry.

Earlier, I noted that Julian Cash was to do some “light painting” at the MySQL Users Conference. And boy, did he do it!

He had a normal conference room, the Bayshore at the MySQL Conference, made a bit darker. Not pitch dark, but let’s say too dark to read. Then, he had us sit down on a chair in front of a neutral background, and took the pics with his camera mounted on a tripod. A picture took perhaps 30 to 60 seconds. After opening the shutter, the object was supposed to sit still. Julian then lit up our faces, in my case with blue and red light sources (”mini-torches”) which he moved top-down. Then, he sprinkled in some additional stray light in various colours.

I had asked for a picture of an angel (with halo, above — perhaps to be used at my own funeral?) and a devil (with red horns, below — perhaps as an alternate funeral picture, depending on my then-current CV?). Being the guinea pig for the setup, Julian spent over a quarter of an hour on the pics.

It was great fun, and I remain a great admirer of Julian’s.

Ah, and just to be clear: Note that the pictures are not digitally edited. They’re originals. I.e., the tricks work also with granddaddy’s analog cameras. However, seeing the pics on the camera display does help; in my case, the final pics were the fifth and sixths tries. So if you experiment yourself (and at least I will), do go with a normal, modern camera, mount it on a tripod, and use some creative sources of light.

If you click on the thumbnails below, you’ll see a number of other pics taken by Julian in that session.

References:

• Julian Cash’s Flickr set “MySQL 2008″: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliancash/sets/72157604716923223/
• Julian Cash’s web site: http://www.juliancash.com/
• The Human Creativity Project: http://www.humancreativity.com/about.html

First of all, thank you, Jay Pipes, for setting up the Bayshore Room tomorrow between 10am and 2pm, for Julian Cash to take pictures of us!

Second, I am a big fan of descriptive subject headers. So I thought I could promote this memorable event even more explicitly than what Jay did in his posting “Yes, It’s That Time of the Year Again…“.

It’s Julian’s fault that I bought my 8mm Sigma lens. He has one, and takes weird pictures with it. As opposed to mine, his are good (yup, he uses fancy high-tech equipment like flashes, and white background paper — one day I’ll go there, too).

This is MySQL’s very own Brian Aker, as distorted by Julian.

The new thing Julian is doing is Light Painting. This means he creates pictures that look like they’ve been PhotoShopped through some strange filter, but they haven’t.

Let me quote Julian:

Light Painting

Light painting portraits are distinctive, innovative, and magical. The photos have a dreamlike futuristic feel and lend themselves to editorial work, advertising, book covers, and portraits of musicians.
I do not digitally manipulate the images. All of the effects are created simply by painting the subject and the surrounding area with colored light in a dark room while the camera shutter is open. This makes for images that feel especially organic and believable despite their surreal nature.

My subjects and I have a great time creating light portraits together. The style of the images is both unique and varied. My proficiency comes from 15 years of experience and experimentation with this type of photography. It also helps that I am an illustrator and painter as well as a portrait photographer. The process is fun and is a natural combination of painting and photography.

If there is a concept or emotion that you want expressed in the image, I especially enjoy using that as part of the creative process. I’m happy to work with an art director, or I can take the initiative to come up with a powerful and satisfying image.

So if you’re at the UC, do stop by at Julian’s event and have your picture taken!

References:

• http://www.juliancash.com
• http://www.HumanCreativity.com

Allow me to provide some relaxed photographic observations from this morning’s MySQL UC keynotes.

Warning 1: My view is distorted, by my favourite lens, Sigma 8mm.

Warning 2: I took the pics with a shaky hand in low light, so they’re not sharp ones, of the James Duncan Davidson type (the guy who takes all the great pics for O’Reilly).

On Johnny Good’s command, doors open, and the audience starts pouring in.

Zack Urlocker has challenged me in the James Callis Lookalike Contest (of Battlestar Galactica fame), but is himself clearly in the lead.

Journalist James Niccolai of IDG, taking a picture of Rich Green and Mårten Mickos (Note: I am a fan of recursion; it would have been even better if Zack had taken a picture of me taking a picture of James, Rich and Mårten).

Mårten Mickos talking to Sheeri Kritzer Cabral.

Jay Pipes’s head is moving so fast talking to Gina Blaber of O’Reilly, that it gets blurred.

James Duncan Davidson, one of my two favourite contemporary American photographers. The other one is Julian Cash, whose fault it is that I now have a Sigma 8mm lens. He takes weird pictures with his fisheye lens (way weirder — and, above all, better — than mine), and now he has turned his interest into something he calls light painting. Speaking of Julian: He is here. Do come to the Bayshore Room (on the Mezzanine level of the hotel) tomorrow between 10am and 2pm, and have your weird picture taken!

Me showing my favourite gadget (remember? the 8mm fisheye lens) to Jonathan Schwartz; Rich Green and Mike Zinner look suspicious.

Everyone has found their way in and we’re ready to go!

Mårten complains he got only 35 minutes, of which Jay had already burned 5 when Mårten got on stage.

Sheeri Kritzer Cabral’s video camera recording Mårten.

Mårten asked everyone in the audience who had reported bugs to stand up.

Mike Zinner wearing a MySQL Workbench t-shirt doing his great demoes, with an amount of superlatives that is more American than Austrian (prompting Mårten to mention that Mike could have an alternate career in Hollywood; perhaps, later, Mike could run for governor somewhere).

Ah, did you note that MySQL Workbench went GA and is ready for download today? At least Mike Hillyer did. And of course Patrik Backman did, but it would be strange if he didn’t, as he is Mike Zinner’s boss.

Mårten Mickos and his SunVisor Rich Green (Note 1: Rich Green doesn’t want Mårten to call him “boss”. Note 2: A “SunVisor” is a helpful person working for Sun Microsystems that adopts an employee of an acquired company to guide him through the first rough times with a new employer).

James Duncan Davidson taking pictures of award winners.

The Community Award Winners between Rich Green and Mårten Mickos: Diego Medina, Baron Schwartz, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral.

How bright (not)! I didn’t take any well-lit pictures of Jonathan. Perhaps because his captivating presentation kept me focusing on the content? But I did take this picture of the stage when Jonathan explained the world map in blue and green dots. The light blue dots depicted places downloading MySQL. And if you look really carefully in the top-left corner of this picture, you’ll see green dots. That’s the US East Coast, and Europe, which are eager at downloading the GlassFish application server for Java EE.

Today’s keynotes were concluded by Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, on “The Power of Infrastructure as a Service”.

Yesterday, we concluded the Sakila Express World Tour, more aptly named “Sakila Tour of Seven Top European MySQL AB Sites Using Decadence Airlines“. The last two were in Germany: Hamburg in the north, in Sun’s offices, and Munich in the south, in Hilton am Tucherpark.

In Hamburg, we went directly into the meat with three hardcore developers. Onboarding, intellectual property, and contractors were the hardcore topics.

Ulf, Jan and Kay experienced Izhevsk and Kiev vicariously through the blog

The discussions added plenty of colour to the picture for Julie and Dave. Julie has a great metaphor for explaining the purpose of Sakila Express: To understand how the integration message comes out in the other end, in the Telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers, in German as Stille Post, in Swedish as Ryska posten, in French as Téléphone arabe, where the German version is the only one which would pass all tests of political correctness).

Sadly, Dave had to depart for the US after Hamburg, and sadly, Julie and I had to go back to reality from having used the rental jets of our beloved Decadence Airlines, into using normal airlines, in our case Lufthansa.

Lufthansa departs from the “normal” part of the airport in Hamburg

Me getting back to real life, in a real aircraft

The last stop in Munich saw plenty of local MySQLers, but this time also quite a few Sun employees and MySQL community members from Mayflower and other companies.

This time, my thank you note goes to Julie Ross and Dave Douglas. We had a fantastic week together! It was superb to meet with MySQLers, as a team of three, in so many different locations in such a short time. Your comfort zone when travelling was wide, and when in distress (not being allowed into the Moscow hotel without an immigration card, having lost the pilots in Izhevsk, not knowing how much time was left to get to the airport in Kiev), you still were a charm to travel with. You listened to the concerns of the MySQLers with interest, respect and an open mind, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that your presence was highly appreciated. Well done!

P.S. Julie: Do expect me to verify your knowledge of three key phrases whenever we meet from now on: Nasdrovye, Budmo and Zum Wohl!