“Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to this presentation regarding the acquisition of the company MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems.”

Since my speech on Sun / MySQL integration for about 400 people in Beijing last week, I have been asked a few times about what it’s like to give a speech in Chinese. Well, I wouldn’t really know, as all I did was read aloud a text for 8 minutes. I remembered what passage was about what topic, and I had noted which words to stress, when to raise my hand etc. But of the actual words, I understood perhaps 5-10 % (based on them being repeated often enough). So I know I am a fuzongcai (Vice President) with Sun Microsystems, I know the difference between a kèhù (customer) and a yònghù (user). I live in Munihei (München), but I am not deguoren (German), I am fenlanren (from Finland). And, nüshìmen, xianshéngmen, that’s Ladies and gentlemen.

So far, hen hao.

I read aloud from this paper (no, not the Chinese characters, just the pinyin).

But the ambition level could really be a bit higher. Not stressing every syllable. Speaking a bit faster. Repeating the tones once (ok, five times) more. And I could memorise more words, not 5-10 % but perhaps 25%. That would be more enjoyable for both the audience, and for myself.

That said, giving a speech in Mandarin was a very positive experience, even at my level of delivery. My ambition was for at least 70% of my message being understandable from a pronunciation standpoint, and I heard estimates of the outcome being 80% to 90%. And I got interrupted by applause at least five times, and laughter at least once (even at the intended spot). So I’m happy. And I recommend using Chinese for more than the mere greetings, for any non-Chinese wishing to be well received in China.

Xìexìe, thank you, xìexìe.

References:

• Kaj Arnö speaks Chinese to the Sun/MySQL crowd: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3036893738929286405&hl=en
• Wikipedia: Pinyin (Chinese spelling): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

We had over 400 participants in yesterday’s MySQL-Sun event in China! Plus another 30 or so in the press event, happening in parallel.

Beijing, if nobody noticed, is preparing for the Olympics. Here’s the so called Birds Nest, that we passed several times on the way to various meetings — including yesterday’s event.

After initial linguistic difficulties, Larry Stefonic (MySQL VP APAC) found our way to the event.

This was the first MySQL-Sun event with a banner across a street!

Everything takes place in Chinese here. About as much as it’s Japanese in Japan. In Europe, we seem to give way too much way for English.

And to accommodate to the local situation, I gave my presentation (on MySQL-Sun integration) in Chinese. It was about 8 minutes, and I was happy to be several times interrupted for applause. And I didn’t say anything particularly smart — just read aloud my normal presentation, albeit in Chinese. Judging by the warm reception, that’s not an everyday gesture by Westerners in Beijing.

Now, after nearly three weeks on the road, I’m finally going back home. Hence the popular Chinese gesture: the Thumbs Up sign.

Thanks to everyone who arranged the event — especially, Scott Chen at Sun in Beijing, and Yoko Suga-san with the MySQL APAC team!

The very first UC related parties are over, and the Users Conference hasn’t even started!

The first one was Mårten’s traditional and well-liked MySQL staff party in his garden. The coolest and most community significant one was the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party, though, as advertised on MySQL Forge Wiki. So we dropped out of Mårten’s party at six, to meet with the community.

There were 48 registered people, and I think even more turned up. And some of the guys who turned up unregistered were from Sun.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz crashes the party and is surrounded by community members and MySQLers alike

Rich Green, Executive VP of Software at Sun, also surrounded by Community Dinner attendees

Given that we’ve got record number of attendees at the UC, I think I will have to speed up my discussions, as I got to talk properly only with Florian Haas and Philipp Reisner of Linbit / DRBD, with Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler of XAMPP, with Marc Delisle of phpMyAdmin, with Volker Oboda of Primebase, other than the MySQLers, ex-MySQLers and Sun employees. Note to self: Blame the jet lag, as this is my second Sunday 13 April 2008 (having got up in Tokyo at 7, and left Tokyo at 16, and arrived in San Francisco at 9 i.e. 7 hours before leaving).

And it seems I also blew my opportunity of flying Decadence Airlines again anytime soon. I was going to handle the payment using Rich Green’s credit card (Rich had to leave a bit earlier), but the restaurant gave him back the credit card and left me with merely signing a receipt. This isn’t going to buy me any aircraft fuel on Netjets.

Footnote 1: Yes, I was teased all evening for the four days we flew “Sun’s Corporate Jet“, i.e. a rental airplane by Netjets from Dublin via Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Moscow again, and Kiev to Hamburg in March. But it was good, so I suppose I deserve some teasing.

Footnote 2: I googled for “Decadence Airlines”, and funnily enough, one of the links goes directly to http://www.netjetseurope.com/eng/welcome-to-netjets/. I think I will have to plead guilty to that one.

Japan is a wonderful place for someone like me.

Not only do I get to have sushi to my heart’s content. I am also exposed to the wonders of the Japanese culture, and — the topic of this blog posting — Japanese cultural imports from the West.

While preparing for the Sun-MySQL event last Wednesday, I was happy to see the back of Toru Takahashi-san’s laptop, featuring a big sticker with Snusmumriken and a small sticker with Duke.

• Toru-san is a Principal Solution Architect with the Software Practice in Sun Microsystems K.K. He was involved in the planning and execution of the Tokyo event in our Sun-MySQL World Tour. You can also meet him at the MySQL Users Conference next week, if you’re there.
• Duke is the friendly mascot of Java technology.
• Snusmumriken, or Snufkin in English (sorry, I wouldn’t know what he is called in Japanese), is a Finland Swedish cultural export. He is one of the Moomin cartoons (Moomintroll’s best friend, who goes south every winter and returns in the spring), and I did know from earlier travels to Japan that the Moomins are about as popular in Japan as Victoria and David Beckham (exposure in random unrelated ads in the metro or on the streets). Ah, the humble cultural imperialist in me was happy to note that it’s not only IT (Linux, MySQL) which is spreading from our tiny group of 300.000 people in Finland, but also my favourite children’s stories, written by Tove Jansson (1914-2001).

My Finland Swedish ego trip got a further highlight later in the evening, when I noticed that the scissors I borrowed at Larry Stefonic’s place (MySQL’s VP Sales in APAC) were made by Fiskars (in the consumer goods industry).

I’m big in Japan.

I’m small in the US.

In Europe, I am size M.

Me trying out replacement clothes in Tokyo

On my trip to Japan, I thought I was smart by saving money through combining tickets in my fairly complicated trip Munich - Tokyo - Santa Clara - Beijing - Munich. So I booked MUC-PEK-MUC, PEK-NRT-PEK and NRT-SFO-NRT. That meant a stopover in Beijing on my way to Tokyo.

And that, in turn, meant lost luggage.

There was plenty of time to think about whether I would lose my newly-bought suit and my favourite lense (8mm Sigma fisheye) forever, but 59 hours later than myself, the bag finally turned up on the Stefonic residence doorstep in Minato-ku, Tokyo.

In the meantime, I had to buy some emergency clothes and time to make the above observation on clothing sizes: I’m usually M or L in Europe, I’m often S in the US, but in Japan, I had to go for X to XL.

Right after Paris, Giuseppe and I turned our attention to Milan, Italy. The flight from Paris Roissy to Milan Malpensa (EasyJet, 57 euros/PAX) turned out to be clearly cheaper than the taxi ride from Malpensa to Sun’s Milan office, where we had the meetup.

In time before the meeting, we had some HR, integration and general planning discussions with Sun. One of the most difficult aspects turned out to be to pick the right form of coffee, as the number of alternatives in the coffee machine exceeded anything observed before.

Luckily, I’m a tea drinker, where the challenge limited itself to finding out how to change the default of adding sugar to drinking the tea straight.

The event saw over 100 participants. It was very competently arranged by Emanuela Giannetta, hosted and supported by Franco Roman and many other Italian Sun people — including Stefano De Toni who presented the GlassFish Application Server and NetBeans platform/IDE projects.

My Italian Meetup-Mashup keynote also marked a first in what I plan to be a regular thing: That I present the key messages, i.e. the first 4-5 minutes, in the local language, even if I don’t speak the language but just pretend to do so. Giuseppe kindly translated my Paris presentation from French to Italian, and we then walked through the difficult passages to pronounce:

Signore e signori, benvenuti a questo incontro informale per celebrare e discUtere l’acquisizione di MySQL da parte di Sun Microsystems.

Mi chiamo Kaj Arnö, e sono il Vice Presidente per la Comunità di MySQL. Vengo da Monaco, ma non sono bavarese. Sono Finlandese come Monty, il creatore di MySQL e molti altri colleghi. Durante l’integrazione con Sun, ho anche il ruolo di Ambasciatore di MySQL, cioè vIsito tutti gli uffici Sun e spiego cos’è MySQL.

[the remaining 90% deleted for your benefit]

You might nOtice some non-standard capitalisAtion of a few words, denoting where to put the stress. How else would a stupid foreigner like me know it’s discUtere and not discutEre?

I didn’t get thrown at with raw eggs and tomatoes (perhaps the audience was just unprepared) so until further notice, I will continue the practice of presenting the beginning of my keynotes in the local language.

References:

• ATLAN66 report in Italian by Eva Balzarotti & Maria Pia Izzo: http://www.atlan66.it/news.htm
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog entry: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/working-with-sun-love-at-first-sight.html

Last week’s Wednesday (seems like ages ago, and I haven’t got any blogging time since), the Sun MySQL Meetup-Mashup World Tour got to Paris.

The Meetup-Mashup gets a local flavour wherever we are. And the local flavour in Paris was an Irish Pub, where we had an intimate meeting with a good 160 of the closest friends of MySQL.

We had some bière gratuite (free beer) to celebrate the logiciels libres (free software), as well as a presentation by Giuseppe, after a brief introduction by myself and followed by an overview by Sun.

I had good encounters with old friends and made some new ones. Damien Seguy from Nexen.net belong to the oldest, and our discussions ranged from the well-being of the French PHP community to stuffed animals, particularly those depictingo species relevant to FOSS (elephants, penguins, and, let’s not forget, dolphins).

The PHP contingency was probably the biggest developer audience in the group, but Ruby on Rails and Java were also ably represented.

From a community perspective, the most interesting discussions I had with three gentlemen from www.developpez.com: Adrien Artero in charge of the Business Intelligence column (bidvp.com@gmail.com), Nicolas Joseph and Antoine Dinémant. They asked us to help them by identifying the best articles related to MySQL on our website, so that their volunteers can translate them to French and publish them on their developer site. Talk about well-aligned interests! We’re happy to oblige, as we very much welcome spreading the word on MySQL in the languages relevant to the developers — in the case of France, French.

Some notes on www.developpez.com, the French language community that concentrates the largest number of professional IT specialists:

• Provides for free all kinds of useful services for IT specialists: newsletter, magazine, topicality events, tutorials, articles, FAQs, tests, benchmarks, debates, surveys, tools, sources, components and examples of code, blogs, and free site hosting for IT specialists.
• Up to 130.000 visits per day
• More than 1.400.000 distinct readers attend www.developpez.com at least once a month.
• With more than 5000 messages per day, it is also the most active forum of mutual support in its field.
• The largest voluntary editorial team: more than 500 authors.

A great thanks to Mick Carney, our senior Sales guy in France, to Giuseppe Maxia, who organised the event from a community perspective, and, most of all, our long-time French PR agent Véronique Loquet of AL’X Communication, who did an amazing job in planning and coordinating this event.

Looking forward to the next French event, an enterprise event directed at Sun & MySQL customers, happening in June.

References:

• Damien Seguy’s blog: http://www.nexen.net/articles/dossier/18257-rencontre_sun/mysql_du_3_avril_2008.php
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/meetup-in-paris-mysql-social-event.html

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!

Today in Kiev, we had a great time with MySQLers in Engineering and Support. And I got competition in the area of photography from Oleksandr “Sanja” Belkin. Other than that, this blog entry is again of the sit-back-and-relax type, not going into lots of MySQL detail. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have gone into detail, though, although we saw more churches under the leadership of our Kiev team than we had seen in a long time.

This is how much I like my Sigma 8mm lens

We started the day by looking at Sun’s on-boarding procedures for MySQLers in the Ukraine, sipping tea and coffee at the Hotel President. And we went through Sun’s business model, through the importance of retaining the Eventum systems for Support, about how MySQL-time contractors are managed as part of Sun, as well as other topics familiar from other MySQL locations. Our Sun colleagues noted that our values, topics and concerns seem to be the same across our locations, and that MySQLers across the teams know each other quite well. With our IRC culture, Radio Sakila, our Development Meetings and other meetings, the strong bonds between MySQLers might not be that surprising, but I’m still glad it’s noted by our colleagues at Sun.

After the “formal” meeting (which did conform with ZSP, the Zero Slides Policy), we went for a walk across Kiev. Our first stop was the City Hall, where hundreds of yellow buses were honking their horns.

There was a bus strike going on in Kiev

Valeriy, Alexey, Sanja, Bogdan, Julie, Dave

Then we went on to the main Independece Square, with a statue of a “kosack” leader. Yes, I know, these guys are probably spelt differently in English than in Swedish. But I refer to these fiercely independent guys on horses that carried swords and played the balalaika-like bandura instrument.

A kosack, a horse and myself at Kiev’s Independence Square

Sanja (of Lugansk and Maria Engine fame) has a big camera

Batman

Sanja is from Lugansk, 672 km away from home but next to Kiev’s well-known Internet Explorer monument

I like the Kiev architecture.

The Sofia Cathedral …

… counts as several churches in my book

My favourite St Petersburg architect, Rastrelli, was hard at work also in Kiev

You remember Misha? Misha Bulgakov? Our local MySQLer who helped us in Moscow? Well, guess what, we jumped into a statue of him in Kiev!

Misha Bulgakov and me, both sceptical

Then we went for a Georgian restaurant, famous for a Soviet era film comedy “Mimino” about a Georgian and an Armenian (of whom a Japanese commented “all Russians look alike”). Our Ukrainian hosts educated us about Lviv (famous as Lemberg, from the Austro-Hungarian era), Kamennets-Podolski, Uzhgorod and other cool sights in the Ukraine. Personally, I enjoyed seeing the Crimea eight years ago, and am still looking for an excuse to visit Odessa on the Black Sea coast.

The Georgian and the Armenian from the Soviet comedy Mimino

After dinner, it was about time to head back for the airport. Just ten more churches! So we took the Funiculaire uphill, for a view of the Dnjepr river.

The funiculaire

The view over Dnjepr river

Ten more churches to go

This one counts twice

.ua is EU friendly

Time flew, and we needed to find our way to the hotel, so we took the metro.

Julie on the way down the endless Kiev metro escalators

A Kiev metro we barely missed

Dave, Aleksey and Julie felt I took a picture of their knees

Valeriy, Bogdan, Aleksey and Julie

It’s fun in the Kiev metro

And now, the last leg of the Corporate Jet tour is coming to an end, as we’re landing in a few minutes in Hamburg. Yup, we’ll also do Munich tomorrow, but for that, we will have to take Lufthansa, as opposed to Decadence Airlines, which we’ve used so far. Ah, I have to confess, I could bear with another whirlwind tour of Europe with Decadence Airlines, despite sleep deprivation, not to mention a few issues with the Russian officials in Munich (not getting a visa), Helsinki (getting a visa but incurring huge extra cost), Moscow (not getting an immigration card), and Izhevsk (not having pilots, as the flight was randomly postponed by 1h).

Thank you all Ukrainian MySQLers, especially Bogdan Degtyarov and Lawrentii Novitzky, for excellent arrangements!

Today in Izhevsk, we had the best welcome a group of Sun-MySQL integration people could ever imagine. “As you’ve been flying a Corporate Jet, you now need a corporate car”, our reception committee said.

And, we travelled in style. After some shampanskoye, we were shuttled into the white limo (somehow exported from the US into Izhevsk) fixed by the local MySQLers.

Today’s Tip #1: If you look for meaty MySQL stuff, look elsewhere. If you look for travel tips for Russia, read this report of one of the most exciting day trips I’ve had in my life.

The Royal Welcome in Izhevsk

Today’s Tip #2: If you want to go to Izhevsk, then start in Moscow, fly due east towards the Ural mountains, and land after two thirds of the distance. Be sure to bring a Russian speaking co-co-pilot.

The first red carpet that has literally been rolled out for the MySQL Ambassador to Sun

Today’s Tip #3: If you want to pronounce “Izhevsk” and get away with it, pronounce the “zh” as the “s” in “pleasure” (which going to Izhevsk was at least for us).

I’ve been in a limo once before, in New York, but this was clearly the more fun one.

Wannabe-Izhevsk-employee Lars Thalmann pays for our dinner with a smile

The MySQL Izhevsk office has the corner room with the best view of all MySQL offices /me has seen

After having a great dinner (I had broccoli soup and a delicious sturgeon with black rice) and sending the latest emails and blog entries from the wireless in the Izhevsk office, our local hosts guided us to the local sights. The first one is the Kalashnikov museum. A must!

/me in front of the Kalashnikov museum

My main goal in the Kalashnikov museum was to see an AK-47.

Today’s Tip #4: This is how to decipher the code AK-47: A as in Automatic, K as in Kalashnikov, 47 as in 1947 (similar branding to Windows 95).

The majestic entrance to the Kalashnikov exhibitions

And an AK-47 could be observed right from the beginning, as could the Windows error messages “File not found” in the video shows above the booths with soldiers from various centuries.

Mission accomplished: Kaj with an AK-47

The AK-47 is very similar in design to the Stg (Stormgevär) I used in Dragsvik serving in the Finnish army 1983-84. In fact, the AK-47 was commercially licensed to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries. According to our local MySQLers, the Chinese used the GPL version.

A modern-day AK-47, the Nikonov from 1994

Having seen the Nikonov, we looked out for the Kanonov, but found neither that one nor the Hasselblattov.

After that, we went for a test of how much we trusted our co-workers. There’s a shooting range in the basement, where you can pick amongst sniper guns, handguns and an assortment of other guns produced in the belligerent city of Izhevsk.

Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and Alexander Barkov prepare for the shoot-out

Dave Douglas trains in the usage of backup motivational methods for making the Sun-MySQL integration work

/me tries the Big Mac of the Izhevsk guns — the AK-47

Today’s Tip #5: If you want to try out plenty of guns with little waiting time, at a low cost, and without signing heaps of legal indemnifications, go to the basement of the Kalashnikov museum in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, wear protection for your ears, and be sure to really trust the colleagues you’re going with.

After this much aggression, we had to go for more peaceful activities. Last year, the rebuilding of the cathedral of Izhevsk was completed, based on the original from around 1908 which was, ehh, deleted in the 1930s.

Alexander Barkov going up the stairs of the “chram” (cathedral)

Gospodi pomiluy! Lord have mercy! The contrast to the shoot-out couldn’t have been bigger. We came into an orthodox mass with kneeling locals, sacral music and an atmosphere of complete tranquility.

An orthodox service in the cathedral of Izhevsk

The atmosphere in Russian Orthodox churches is peaceful

Today’s Tip #6: If you want to have a look at the frozen pond in the Izh river, early March is a good month, and the central square of Izhevsk is a good spot.

The pond on the Izh river through Izhevsk

But all good things must come to an end. Ours came at 19:30, when we had to be back at Izhevsk airport, to catch the flight which we had booked for 20:00. You may have your own set of excuses for missing flights and flight times, but we ended up with a novel one: By 20:10, the pilots hadn’t yet arrived. By 20:15, movement was sighted in the airplane and by 20:20, we had noticed the mixup being due to the one hour time difference between Izhevsk and Moscow.

Kaj, Dave and Julie departing from Izhevsk — a day trip we’ll never forget!

Anyway, it worked out, and we’re now on our way to Kiev, in the Ukraine, with a short stopover in Vnukovo, Moscow.

Let me conclude by thanking our local MySQLers Alexander “Bar” Barkov, Alexey “Holyfoot” Botchkov, Ramil Kalimullin, Sergei Vojtovich, Sergei Glukhov, as well as the co-visitors Georgi “Joro” Kodinov from Bulgaria and Lars Thalmann from Sweden for arranging a most magnificient and memorable visit for Julie, Dave and myself! We’re most grateful. Thank you also for the music, and the Kalashnikov vodka.