Colin Charles Agenda

LinkedIn allows blogs (a publishing presence – read LinkedIn Builds its Publishing Presence). Medium is a place to read and write things that matter (a curated blog). Svbtle is a new kind of magazine. There are networks like Read & Trust, that eventually make magazines out of content.

WordPress requires setting up. It means you’re serious about writing something. WordPress.com is hosted and eventually you pay for it. Tumblr just got a billion dollar exit, for what? Allowing you to easily express yourself.

Have blogs really evolved or have people just found different mediums to get published? All mediums come with different levels of control. Discovery is crucial. Will end users ever get RSS or do dashboards need to be built?

PRISM and the NSA has blown up recently. We have Malaysian politicians worried about it naturally. The opensource zealot will tell you need to prism break.

I’m more pragmatic. I prefer opensource. But if there are no opensource alternatives, I will use the proprietary tool. This extends to cloud software like Google Docs/Drive. Its great at collaboration, which is something you can’t get close. 

I was suggested that FENG Office might work. I retort that it’s not the easiest install and it requires maintenance. Also, with PRISM, the web host clearly matters (they look at the pipes). I didn’t even think to consider LibreOffice due to lack of collaboration in desktop software.

In Malaysia, next generation children are going to be roped into the online Google world via Chromebooks.

So my thinking is simple: if there are no alternatives (to being hosted in the US or to having better controls over your cloud offerings), you should start one. This can be a great business. As the FT says, data privacy is a handy weapon to challenge the titans with.

Watch this video of Fred Wilson. If the world thinks Dropbox is suddenly insecure, its ripe for alternatives to crop up. It also doesn’t mean that people just start using alternative services… DuckDuckGo might have had a 50% increase in search traffic, but all that search traffic may be what Google processes in a moment ;)

This PRISM stuff isn’t going to blow away anytime soon. Now’s the time to come up with matching software that has additional features (like privacy, encryption, etc.). Maybe Kim Dotcom was ahead of the curve with Mega?

I’ve been thinking about simplifying e-commerce checkouts in Malaysia.

At bare minimum you need:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone
• Street address
• Postcode

State can be derived from Postcode. Country can be set as default, with the option to change it to something else (so a pull-down).

I found MalaysiaPostcode as a useful database. It looks like scraped data from POS Malaysia Location Finder.

I’ve lamented the fact that there are very few stores in downtown San Francisco that I care about. The closure of bookstores, music stores, tech shops, etc. has been quite annoying to a frequent visitor. 

Today after lunch I took a different path back and stumbled upon Alexander Book Co, on 2nd Street (between Market & Mission). I immediately went in. I saw a book that I liked, and the first thing I did? I whipped out my phone and checked it on Amazon. It was about USD$3 cheaper online. 

Then I remembered that we have to support these indie retailers that are taking the trouble to still run a bricks & mortar store. I put my phone away and continued to find more interesting books, magazines, papers and more.

After browsing three floors, I walked out with many dead tree print items. I felt good. I know I spent more than if I had gotten it from Amazon, but I also know I would have never bought any of those items because I would have never discovered it online.

You can’t beat a physical space for discovery.

Subject says its all, this is of course, very good news coming out of the Red Hat Summit. Looking forward to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. And of course, CentOS 7 and the other builds that follow. Thank you Red Hat!

MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL 7. Glad to see that. #rhsummit

— Major Hayden (@majorhayden) June 12, 2013

at #rhsummit , rhel7 will come without mysql as it will be replaced with mariaDB; which is mysql api compatible. it will include mongodb too

— John Fulton (@fultonj) June 12, 2013

So MariaDB 10.0.3 Alpha is out. Download it and remember to provide feedback.

When you run SHOW ENGINES by default, you don’t get CassandraSE or the CONNECT engine. Make sure you do a yum install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and a yum install MariaDB-connect-engine. 

You will run into conflicts if you had an older MariaDB-CassandraSE engine (so yum remove MariaDB-CassandraSE).

Once you’ve got the packages installed, you can either install the plugin or just restart mysqld.

Happy testing!