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Instructions for Attendees

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Contents 1 Addresses 2 Requirements 3 Preparation 4 The session 4.1 Join a session 4.2 During the session 4.3 After the session 4.3.1 Unibot Authentication

[edit] Addresses

• Web – MySQL_University#Upcoming_Sessions
• IRC – server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #mysql-university
• Voice stream – http://your_nickname:your_password@myuniv.mysql.com (see #Unibot_Authentication for details about your_nickname and your_password)

[edit] Requirements

To attend MySQL University sessions, you need this:

1. Web browser and access to the Internet
2. IRC — either an IRC client application or a browser-based IRC client
   • General information about the Freenode.net IRC Network
   • Instructions for using XChat to connect to Freenode.net
   • Instructions for using a browser-based IRC client
   • If you have access to the MySQL intranet, you can use this browser-based IRC client
3. Media player — you need one of these:
   • Windows
     • foobar2000 (mp3 + ogg vorbis),
     • MPlayer, <ref name="mplayer">If you're using MPlayer, start it like this: mplayer -nocache -af gate,comp <url>
-nocache disables the cache. Try -cache 32 (or 64, 128) if the sound frequently drops out.
       -af gate,comp adds audio filters. Usually that's not necessary, but helps if a stream is noisy.</ref>
     • VLC
     • winamp 2.x, 5.x (Not 3.x) (mp3 + ogg vorbis)
     • Zinf (mp3 + ogg vorbis),
   • Unix/Linux
     • MPlayer <ref name="mplayer"/>
     • Xine
     • XMMS (mp3 + ogg vorbis)
     • Zinf (mp3 + ogg vorbis)
     • Amarok (mp3 + ogg vorbis)
   • Mac OS X
     • MPlayer<ref name="mplayer"/>
     • VLC

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[edit] Preparation

• Go to the appropriate University session page.
  • Read the presentation.
  • Put any questions you might have in the Questions section.
  • We appreciate if you register for a session by entering your name to the Attendees section of the session page.

[edit] The session

[edit] Join a session

1. Authenticate with the Unibot bot; see instructions below
2. Point your web browser to the appropriate University session page.
3. Open the presentation if it's not embedded in the session page.
4. Point your IRC client to Freenode and join the #mysql-university channel.
5. Point your media player to http://your_nickname:your_password@myuniv.mysql.com:8000/voip.ogg
   (Be patient — initial buffering may take up to one minute, so you might not hear anything for some time.)

[edit] During the session

• On the IRC channel, prefix questions with Question: to make them easier to identify for the presenter. Ideally, ask questions before the session (see above).
• The voice stream that you will listen to is delayed by approximately 10 seconds — take that into consideration when waiting for an answer to your question.
• Do not edit the session Wiki page during the session to avoid concurrency problems (the scribe will likely edit that page during the session).

[edit] After the session

• The appropriate session page will be completed by the scribe shortly after the session:
  • You'll find a voice recording file there that you can download and play with your media player.
  • The Questions section will contain answers.

[edit] Unibot Authentication

Requiring MySQL University attendees to authenticate imposes an additional barrier, so we'll have to see how it works out. Authentication is required if the scribe started the Unibot bot that handles voice streaming and logging with the !start auth command (this is the default). Authenticating users has the following benefits:

• It makes sure everyone is on IRC; this avoids attendees missing the IRC channel and just listening to the voice stream
• It provides information about the number of users listening to the voice stream
• It gives automatic feedback about the media player and operating system which can be helpful to improve things

Everyone who wants to listen to the MySQL University voice stream has to request a password which is assigned to the IRC nickname and valid only for the current session. To request a password, point your IRC client to irc.freenode.net and open a private window to Passmaker:

/query Passmaker

and say anything that contains the word "password", for example this:

Password or life!

Alternatively, you can use /msg:

/msg Passmaker Password or life!

The Passmaker bot will reply something like this (where your_nickname is your IRC nickname):

It's 'foobar123'
You can simply go to http://your_nickname:foobar123@myuniv.mysql.com:8000/voip.ogg

Depending on your system settings and the media player software you're using, you can click or copy that URL to start listening to the voice stream. For example, to start MPlayer on Linux from the command line, you would copy the URL and paste it into this command line string:

% mplayer -nocache http://your_nickname:foobar123@myuniv.mysql.com:8000/voip.ogg

Warning: if you are getting authentication failures when using mplayer you should upgrade to a more current version as there seems to have been a HTTP authentication bug in mplayer up to at least version 1.0pre7

If mplayer has problems to decode the stream, you can try a command line ogg player of your choice. I.e. the following works fine:

$ wget http://user:pass@myuniv.mysql.com:8000/voip.ogg -O - | ogg123 -b 32 -

(this uses a 32kb buffer in the ogg123 ogg player)