Archive for October 2006

Number portability, only next year? Wake up MCMC

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has decided that by December, next year mobile number portability will be available in Malaysia. This has been available in Australia since September, and more importantly in Singapore since 1997! (read more on mobile number portability).

A proposal has been floating around since 2004, and its going to take them another year to implement it. Three years to conduct research. Datuk Dr Halim Shafie, heading the Commission and all their research has decided that Maxis, Celcom and DiGi are receptive to the idea – so what’s the reason for the deferment?

Healthy competition between three providers is hard to do. Opening that limit up in itself will encourage more competition (even for service reselling, like how B resells Optus). Of course in Malaysia, its all about protecting the connected companies.

“Telcos in those countries have improved their delivery services since MNP was implemented,” he added.

It seems like Halim Shafie knows what MNP will mean for the consumer. Yet, its been dished about for the last couple of years. Let’s hail the day a consumer rights group in Malaysia will actually be taken seriously or perform useful actions.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Recent MySQL happenings: from digg, to $1,000 for a video contest

There have been some interesting MySQL happenings lately. First we had the Enterprise/Community split. I’ll talk more about that in terms of distributions shipping it, as I’ll be liaising with them.

But today, I’m going to talk about Digg. I listen to Diggnation, a surprisingly funny podcast to keep track of the weekly Web happenings. But I’ve never actually paid the site a visit. Until today.

Its the epitome of Web 2.0. User driven content. Its not like Slashdot. I’ve seen many people compare to it, but it isn’t. Slashdot is for tech-content. Digg is for anything. Slashdot has a bunch of editors. Digg is user-edited.

And for users, if your stories get promoted to the front-page, you get ratings. The more ratings, the merrier, right? It probably also increases the trust model, as higher ratings usually mean that you’ve got good news sense. And we all know that if your page gets “Dugg”, you’re going to be receiving some amazing amounts of traffic. Its like a popularity contest.

So I took the liberty of searching for “mysql”. And I found the Converting scripts fromt he old PHP MySQL extension to MySQLi submitted by another DIgg user, so I dugg it. I couldn’t resist further, and I submitted Do babies dream of being database engineers?

Yes, thats a really funny one. Keeping in mind that MySQL makes databases, not videos, we’re now rewarding people in the recently announced MySQL Video Contest in where the top prize is a spanking USD$1,000. December 15th is the closing date.

The video, Do babies dream of being database engineers? actually inspired this contest. View it, have a laugh, rate it, send it to groups, or digg it.

(More comments in the near future about Digg and YouTube, for certain).

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Flight attendant gets inspired by “Veni. Vedi. Codi.”

I spoke to the Apple folk on Friday in Sydney, and wore my “Veni. Vidi. Codi.” t-shirt that was gifted to all WWDC 2006 attendees. After Virgin decided that we shouldn’t leave Sydney, changing our gates three times, because of the bad weather, we finally left. When I did land in Melbourne, one of the flight attendants was talking to me because of the t-shirt I was wearing and he wanted advice on buying his first Mac.

He’s now sold on the idea of a MacBook, and even if he needed the Windows goodness, he’d get it, thanks to BootCamp/Parallels. Merchandising is important…

Incidentally, at the second gate, they told us the plane there was unserviceable. However, they managed to fly that to the (sunny) Gold Coast. Seeing that there were no major dramas in Saturday’s papers, I guess planes can become unserviceable depending on the weather?

Oh, and I tried Keynote (demo-version for 30 days). Man, I was impressed. Its highly polished. And it works well with the remotes that Apple ship nowadays. It seems to take presentations to the next level. And the interface, its just simply amazing. Need to outdent a bullet? Just drag it and the grid shows up. Amazing, amazing, amazing.

Slashdot | MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Answers Your Questions

Slashdot | MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Answers Your Questions:

Its an interesting interview. And as Stewart pointed out, it seems that this must be the first Slashdot comment in where I get named fully. Heh. Kudos to Julien :)

Actually if you continue reading on the comments, you’ll notice that Marten responds to a lot of the threads – that in itself is impressive, right? When was the last time you saw a CEO write on Slashdot?

Okay, back to your daily grind… lets hope that doesn’t involve Slashdot.

Free ride to MySQL Camp

I don’t normally blog about events that I’m not going to be attending, but this seemed like too cool an offer to pass up. Proven Scaling will be offering one free ticket to MySQL Camp – thats free airfare and hotel, for the rather cool MySQL Camp un-conference.

From what I can tell, there’ll be a lot of rather cool people attending, its from the 10-12 November, at the Google campus (yes, you get to tour that place, and eat free food). And maybe if you’re super nice to Jeremy, he might be flexible with the flights, and you might also want to go to the Mountain View Ubuntu Summit. Having been to one of these before (Ubuntu Down Under), all I can say is its great. Go if you can.

All at Google. Food’s covered. Find a couch somewhere (I’ll admit, there are no real cheap-ish hotels in that area, but if you’re willing to go the public transport route, its a 30 minute train ride to the city, afaik).

So kudos to Jeremy Cole and Proven Scaling for such a great offer.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

MySQLi Converter Tool, ext/mysqli against MySQL 5.0.26 released

Some interesting things happened today…

We released a new MySQL server a few days ago, and that consequently means we’ve got a new Connector/PHP available for download. Go get ext/mysqli and ext/mysql against 5.0.26 while its hot.

And while we do support ext/mysql, we’d rather you (and your applications) used ext/mysqli. After all, wouldn’t you like to be able to use the new, much touted features that came post MySQL 4.1, like Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Precision Math, and so on?

So to make it a complete no brainer, we released a MySQLi Converter Tool. Its also available via subversion. The tool is branched off Revision 11 (in where support for the error functions were added!), and if you wanted an easy, HOWTO styled guide for using it (i.e. the great GUI web interface wasn’t enough), here’s a step-by-step guide to getting WordPress 2.0.4 using the mysqli converter in almost no time!

Yes, read Converting to MySQLi and do provide feedback. This is really just to whet your appetite, developer documentation will probably be next. All on the MySQL Forge Wiki, of course.

Happy PHP-ing.

Technorati Tags: ,


i