Colin Charles Agenda

What started as some chat about having a one-day event, after MyGOSSCon, on the 26^th of September 2008, about open source, has turned into a full-blown conference, to be pulled off in about a month, affectionately known as foss.my. Its being held at APIIT from November 8-9 2008, and is touted to be the most technical conference of its kind in South East Asia.

We want people to participate as speakers, delegates, sponsors, or volunteers. This is a grassroots event, and its purely non-commercial - no vendor talks, or marketing gimmicks are permitted. Largely the motto is very foss.in/linux.conf.au-ish - both community events I truly enjoy going to, and wouldn’t miss for the world.

The Call for Participation is open till midnight October 10 2008, so if I were you, I’d rush and submit some topics. If you’re nearby - Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the rest of South East Asia, it would be silly not to show up, with all the budget carriers there are today (maybe next time, we’ll get an official airline ;)).

Conferences must have themes, and foss.my is no exception. We believe the world is just awesome, and there’s so much FOSS goodness that can be shared with others. So if you’re involved in something free and open source related, its only sensible that you submit a talk topic. Share the knowledge, foster more open source development growth and contributions.

There are expected to be talks on topics such as: hacking on phpMyAdmin (a Google Summer of Code Project, run under the MySQL project), MyMeeting (a Malaysian government open source project), Asterisk, Django, CSS, source control, OSS Development on OS X, PHP, open source databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), and the list goes on. There will be four great keynotes, and lightning talk sessions (so everyone can share).

Just show us your awesomeness. Read more from Aizat, Khairil, and Izhar.

since getting back from riga, life’s been fun. i’ve been mostly Happy.

friday: get off plane, go for foss.my meet, then off to deutsches gasthaus for guinness. slowly becoming our new favourite place…

saturday: hazy, but it involved seeing sk2, having banana leaf, and deutsches yet again

sunday: went home, lunched with parents, skipped the f1 night race, and off to see sk2. skipping the f1, is rare, take note

monday,tuesday,wednesday,thursday: work. uneventful. hari raya apparently, but who cares, worked anyway. i could use the comp days later

oh, tuesday evening. cova. beer buffet. kilkenny. the count stood at 12 glasses, each, only. we could’ve done better. come earlier next time

friday: busy day. work. cheras for more work. see sk2. bangsar. we go shopping (note:charm bracelets, ftw). ice cream, post dinner was good. back to cheras. back to bangsar for foss.my meet. back to cheras for some more work.

the day ends at 8.30am, saturday morning. fun. and no liquor! +1

saturday: hazy (today), watch some telly, human trafficking is a great show (good way to spend 3 hours), did more foss.my work, pinged/spammed folk

its sunday morning now… 4 in the morning. and the gwen cd is in the car… and the mp3 server is still packed up in a box (october now, still unpacked since end-march/early-april).

oh, but i’m Happy. why? i’m still speaking with sk2. fun. its 5:40. amazing. sleep time!

spotted in riga, latvia, at the university, during software freedom day 2008.

“Sex is for recreation; leave reproduction to the professionals.”

This from reading Intelligent Life, published by The Economist. Their tagline “Lifestyle with Substance” simply rocks. Picked it up in Amsterdam, and I hope their subscriptions reach my home (reminds me of The New Yorker, just quarterly). Read their web compliment - More Intelligent Life.

everyone gets censored
learn to deal with it?
open source in name

bugs filed are redundant
time loss is crucial
open source in name

Malaysia just gets crazier, and crazier, daily.

Its headlines to “commit a sinful act”, that is being provided with a woman. In fact, the accused has the statement that takes the cake:

“what is important is we did not ask for the women. He supplied them to us. If people sedekah (donate), don’t you want to accept the sedekah?”

However, there’s no cake, without egg. Politicians bickering over a statement about an egg.

The Seputeh Umno Youth division lodged a police report today against Seputeh MP Teresa Kok, claiming she had insulted the Royal Malaysian Police and the egg, which is an essential food of the underprivileged.

He said Kok had said the food she was served was “fit only for dogs”.

“By saying this, she had insulted the police and the poor. Eggs are an important food for low-income earners and the poor. As an elected representative of the people she should not have said that,” he said.

I love eggs. So much so, that I can say “chi dan” like its supposed to be said in Mandarin. I eat eggs everyday. Should I be lodging a police report against the Seputeh Umno Youth division as they just classified the egg as food of choice for the underprivileged? ;)
(there is after all, no caviar without eggs… tsk tsk… )

From a UI perspective, Google got this right:

How thoughtful can you get? I mean, in a regular IM client, statuses mean next to nothing to many folk. They will still ping you anyway. Google’s interface actually tells you “You may be interrupting”. Smart.

Its great to see that the Obama campaign in America are after folk that dig open source. They’re after folk that can write software for nation-wide voter contact and mobilisation (something like Twitter?), fund-raising, and social networking and online organising at My.BarackObama.

They’re a LAMP shop. They’re after:

• Experience scaling large LAMP applications
• Posses deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimisation

I once wrote:

If they can waste your ringgit on buying proprietary software licenses, when there are clearly open source alternatives, can you trust them with spending and budgeting for a country?

It may seem extremely naive to correlate the use of open source software to creating a better budget or spending wisely, but I think its a start.