Colin Charles Agenda

So, its the 30th of December here. But that’s no excuse for the dismal service that Tanjong Golden Village Cinemas (running Microsoft IIS nonetheless) has to provide. Meet the Fockers is premiering in Malaysia today, so the natural thing to do is to go watch it. So, here comes my tale of trying to book two tickets…

To make an online booking, I need to sign-up at the website. Except they ask for some ridiculous personal information, like your Identity Card/Passport number - why?. I don’t like giving away this information, especially over HTTP, but I comply. After the signing up, I quickly hop on into their ETicketing service (UI Improvement: when clicking on showtimes -> and “book now” for a movie of your choice, it takes you to the e-ticketing feature, but I still have to manually choose everything again (I’d expect the movie to be pre-selected for me already)). I choose my cinema, the movie, and the time, and enter a value for tickets to be purchased, all of which work really well. Then it contacts the cinema, or tries in vain to do so, and when its done after over a minute, it complains that I lack the Java VM, and I can’t get tickets allocated.

I install the JRE, link it correctly, restart the browser, and attempt to do this again. Now, the server is non-responsive - i.e. it says it can’t process the request. I also get the occasional IIS error page, which stupidly sends me to a page at Microsoft to resolve my error. (UI Improvement: Better error messages, rather than going to the IIS administrator page would make more sense - customise the 404).

Now I call the number that’s listed at the website. Go thru the menu, and what error do I get? One that says their system is down, so contacting the cinema directly would be my next best option. So I take the number down, and try dialling it repeatedly, to no avail. At the same time, I’m trying to get the e-ticketing stuff to work.

I finally get lucky, and it allocates my two tickets. I can’t choose my seat allocation, it seems broken (and now, I have the JRE mind you), so I get auto-allocated to the fifth row from the screen. Semi-happy that it worked, I take down the booking number, and agree to pay the extra RM1 premium for online booking. (UI Improvement: I don’t want to re-enter my mobile phone number, and other random information thats already in my user profile - mine the data for me, so it saves me typing, thanks.)

Contrast this with my experience with trying to do this in Australia. I booked my seats at about 2.45am on the day the show was playing (TGV closes at 1am), paid for it all via card, and just hopped over to the cinema on the day itself and got the machine to spit my ticket out when my card was inserted. Never had to see a human, at all. Didn’t waste time from 10.49am right up to 11.26am.

I don’t mind paying a premium for convenience. But when a cinema doesn’t value my time, and makes me waste over half an hour just to get a ticket, it seems rather silly. Well, its either that or battling queues that might take you just as long, and you’ll probably not get a movie on time either. And I paid full price today as well, no discounts, whatsoever.

Not blogging in over a week, means that lots of “away-from-computer” things got to happen. Last week was spent mostly going out to various malls, and getting various shopping done for Christmas. Then Christmas eve came, and it was the usual family reunion dinner thing. Christmas day was a blast, as usual - big party, many guests, generally lots of fun! Some of the myoss folk came too.

So, if you’re ever in the Subang area in Malaysia, there’s a rather nice mamak joint called Gazebo - pay it a visit. Woke up sometime Sunday to find out that we cancelled our Penang trip for Monday morning, since the killer earthquake/tsunami hit, so decided to go out with the girl instead and spend many hours out, including catching the rather hilarious Kung Fu Hustle.

Seems our planned family holidays always have tragic events around them - Penang this year, hit by a tsunami; Langkawi last year, when we took a drive, and then there was a landslide at the highway (closing it for more than 6 months). And going back to ‘94, Northridge earthquake when we visited San Francisco/Los Angeles (my first time outta the country even!). Anyways, thanks to ya’ll that sent thoughtful e-mails asking if I was still around and okay - its much appreciated.

Most of the week has been slow, being around traffic jams, and spending quality time in the car. Caught A Cinderella Story yesterday, after my visit to a pasar malam - show was good, and so was my visit to the night market. Ate lots of food (that I’d normally consider horribly dirty), had a good time walking around with the girl, and I think she was impressed I didn’t fuss at all about the visit… So, my first visit in over a decade, rock.

So reading the OpenOffice.org 2.0 preview review, Hubert thinks OOo 2.0 is non-free now. Well, its always been the case then…. for both building and the app itself

• Accessibility features need Sun’s JDK 1.4.1 with the ATK layer
• XML file filters as well as XSLT filters, including that for Docbook
• JDBC database connectivity
• Report Wizard
• PocketExcel/Word import features
• Java UNO bridge
• The SDK itself has Java depends - on OS X, we point to Java as well as Ant in configure
• Rhino for scripting
• Applet access when doing HTML stuff (or embedding in Impress for instance)
• And now… HSQLDB for database integration

On the bright side, this is all disabled in the ooo-build that most Linux distros tend to use, so OOo 2.0 is generally free, as opposed to being non-free. And with work done to get OOo building using gcj, I wouldn’t worry so much about OOo 2.0 being non-free. Join Caolan and the rest of the free-JDK people at jdk@tools.openoffice.org.

Back on dialup for a while, and boy is it slow. To all Thinkpad R51 owners, for wireless you need the ipw2100 drivers. For the modem, its the linuxant hsf (softmodem) drivers - its well worth shelling out the USD14.95, it also works with a stock Fedora kernel. So the last thing that I need working, is sleep - it goes to sleep, but I can’t wake the display up (s3 sleep). Bad acpi.

I cut my hair anyways, and from a trim, it became a layered mess. I should shave it all off, its embarassing to look at. I’m back in Malaysia for a while; caught Christmas with the Kranks, with the girl yesterday. Its got some spirit of Christmas, though thouroughly predictable.

The Mozilla ad in the New York Times came out, and thanks to the nice folk at Red Hat, I managed to see my name there too; a bit disappointed I needed to get Acrobat to view it, as nothing on FC-3 seemed to view it well.

So cvs is open, though the flight might’ve delayed the original announcement. One thing I’ve learnt is that from day one, we said CVS, and now that we’re open, people go “where’s Subversion/arch/<insert-random-source-control-system-here>?”

And of course, The Fedora Status Report made the initial announcement too… Now if I have time to start collecting stats from Mailman, I’d really like to note the subscriber count for the lists. Like when do we get more subscribers, when do we get more posts, etc… It’ll be interesting to run statistics, since we are getting even more and more lists at redhat.com.

So as Seth has mentioned, Fedora-wise things are coming into play. CVS, pre-extras, etc… this is a big week for The Fedora Project and all ears tuned, there’ll be lots of announcements this week. Really. Or I’ll cut my hair. So no, all of you using it, you definitely weren’t stupid and a nice gift will come your way.

Otherwise, Beijing LUG meeting last night, with a Fedora talk. Nice. Many questions, many convertees.

So, I think this is our (Fedora Project’s) most successful week in a long time. And we all now sport cool @fedoraproject.org aliases :)

Interesting point: The Ubuntu team seemed to have made the Debian installer a lot better, and a lot more friendly, and so on, and I thought it was a marked improvement. But for Joe End User, it still breaks baby. They do an FC-3 install without issue, but they ain’t getting by with Ubuntu (X is missing, grub partitioning is wonky, etc…). And I ask myself, how, oh how, did they break it? And why is python-dev not installed by default?

Caught A World Without Thieves premiering in Beijing last night. It was excellent, as was most of the night. The day-day before we had a company lunch, then dinner, and lunch again so thats lots more food…

Fedora Core 3 on PowerPC (Macs) is out. (see, I’m not only completely having fun, there’s still work to do.)

The Fedora Project is proud to annonuce a TESTING tree for Fedora Core 3 on the PowerPC platforms

Happy PPC-ing!

Err yeah, so that means the Fedora Core on your Macintosh (PPC) guide has been updated (sorta). And the title was from a really funny song we heard (literal Mandarin->English translation) at the massage place…

Beijing continues to provide more yummy food, and good visits to night clubs and other assortment of fun. The World of Suzie Wong Club was particularly good, though we hit Vics and I had a very good time.

OSS-wise, Slony-I is cool (though the spec file needs fixing), and ERServer is another usable option for database replication.