Colin Charles Agenda

I’m noticing some trends of late, as I go through the proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

Rails: has it lost its steam? I’d like to see some talk submissions for Ruby and Ruby on Rails users, clearly. This stuff is still hot on the web (look at Twitter, and Dopplr, for instance) and there’s lots more out there.

I’m recommending a lot of people work on talks together. I don’t know if this will happen, but we have mashups in this web 2.0 world, I don’t see why we don’t have talk mashups with 2 presenters. Having a co-presenter not only keeps your talk real, but keeps the momentum going (especially when your talk is scheduled early in the morning or after lunch). It can also help nurture yet-another-guru in the area. And if you’re worried about your language or presentation skills, having someone next to you to interject when required, probably helps, heaps.

What do you think about having a co-presenter in your talk? Are you for mashups? Against mashups?

Incidentally, I probably should plug that the CfP closes on Tuesday, October 30 2007. Submit a talk, already.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference and expo, mysqlconf2008, rails, ruby on rails, ruby, mashups, co-presenter

In the open source world, its quite common to see bug statuses as CLOSED, RAWHIDE (on Fedora, to tell you its in the current development version). Sometimes, you also see CLOSED, CURRENTRELEASE (which usually implies that they’ve bumped the minor version number up, and have pushed the update to you, via yum/up2date). Sometimes, CURRENTRELEASE is used to define ERRATA (though with a fast moving project like Fedora, you tend not to really have errata releases - this is more RHEL-space).

Bottom-line: I get my bug fixes, for free.

Over a year ago, I reported a bug to Apple about an iChat error I was getting, that gave me a Feedbag Error 10. I’ve definitely got numerous other radar entries, but no point linking to them, since there’s no public bug tracker. Today, Apple basically closed the bug as CURRENTRELEASE (or really, what they meant to do was close it as NEXTRELEASE). And as a consequence, they’ve decided that charging me AUD$158 would be the most appropriate course of action. They’ve told me to upgrade to Leopard!

I won’t paste the message here, because that’s apparently under NDA (how can you really NDA a bug report? I’ve seen radar numbers being posted on the Web before… and its not like my bug report, which is my own, isn’t public - maybe if there were actually responses from Apple engineers, then it’d become private). But to paraphrase, Apple Engineering thinks my bug has been fixed in the commercially available Leopard, and upon installing the new software, my bug will most likely be fixed.

Bottom-line: I have to become $158 poorer. Or renew my ADC membership, and wait patiently for the mail (really, why do they even bother sending updates on CD/DVD monthly, when pretty much every Mac developer is connected to the Internet? Waste of resources Apple, how non-green of you, worse, thinking that Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for all his work. The only good thing about renewing an ADC membership is possibly the free t-shirt, the occasional pushes of OS X on DVD, and the hardware discount, if utilised).

Technorati Tags: fedora, apple, macosx, bugs, bugzilla, apple radar, bug status, adc

I’m reviewing proposals, that have come in when we made the CfP for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, and I’ve noticed some bugs in the CfP process. So let me take a break, gripe, and go back to the grindstone. I wish more people read the instructions for CfP submission (I’m even referring to you experienced presenters, might I add).

Via the CfP page, it says be creative, descriptive, and specific. I delve into this a little more, and add some of my thoughts.

1. Be creative - sure, a catchy title helps, but I personally review everything, even if you have the world’s most boring title
2. Be descriptive - please, heed to this. Don’t tell me that you’re going to expand on the abstract if its accepted, and don’t tell me to trust you that the content will be good. All these send my internal reviewer radar off the charts, and make me very worried.
3. Be specific - that means, no vague proposals. That means, being descriptive (refer above). I don’t care if your English language skills aren’t up to scratch, because believe it or not, I read every word - so I’m not expecting that you have a literary masterpiece in the first paragraph that makes me want to continue reading the next 5 paragraphs.
4. Buzzwords are famous these days. Acronyms. All this alphabet soup, it does not impress me. If you are using them, be very specific about what it is you’re going to talk about.
5. If you’re going to talk about something that even isn’t public yet, this worries me. Similarly, while I know its fun to release new software at an event (I’ve watched as software gets released live, at the end of the talk), this must be for already existing software, not something that’s going to make its first release at the conference. I have trust issues, I mentioned this up there at #2.
6. If you’ve given a talk previously, about a technology you’re familiar with, and claim to have magical updates/extensions by next year, with nothing really in the form of any buzz around it till say early-November 2007 (i.e. when the CfP’s generally close), this worries me.
7. The magic words “performance tuning” and “benchmarks” by now, you all know is a crowd puller. Abuse of these words make me cringe. Simply, don’t. And if you are, make sure your abstracts are so descriptively tuned and specific.
8. On an important note, that I’m stealing directly from foss.in, I think I should make it clear that I don’t recognise the concept of “status” and rock stars. Maybe you’ll be a rock star after the MySQL Conference.
9. Stealing from Apple, Think Different. Maybe this is like being creative. People aren’t going to come listen to you reiterate your blog entries, but those entries surely help people come see you talk. So market yourself appropriately (because I use the ever-powerful Yahoo! and sometimes Google search engines if I don’t know you well). Show that you’re a thought leader in your area of expertise.
10. Lists are so much better when there are 10 tips. So, yeah, submit a proposal, already!

So, if you haven’t submitted a talk yet, the CfP process closes October 30 2007. If you have submitted a proposal, and want to heed my advice of expanding upon it, I’d strongly advice that. Lastly, these words are my own (I don’t have control if your talk gets approved or not, and I’m not speaking for the others on the voting committee, I just vote, and arguably, rant here), and there probably are a dozen other folk that you have to convince (to get a vote in), besides just me. Baron has a good piece on this, read it if you haven’t. Chocolate (or good scotch) works for me, also ;-)

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference and expo, mysqlconf2008

It’s been a while since I did a book’s I’ve read update. And really, the reason I do it is to ensure I don’t go out and buy doubles, because I do have a pile of “books I want to read”. Maybe I should use LibraryThing (USD$25, lifetime) or AllConsuming (free, integrates with 43things, etc.). But its nothing like walking into a physical bookstore, and whipping out your phone, and hitting the blog, to do a search ;)

• The Google Story - David A. Vise - an amazing read, about a company that started in a university. Lots of gems, not that I didn’t already know most of them, but still, useful. Explaining 20% time, Google hacks, even a recipe from the chef, just gives you a good idea of the whole Google family.
• NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)… The new art and science of getting what you want - Dr. Harry Alder - I liked this book, but I felt it was filled with too much theory. It isn’t until past halfway through that you learn to control the situation. I think it could have focused on a more howto-styled approach, to ensure that the reader finds no hassle controlling their next subject!
• The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell - great book, I only wish I’d read it earlier. Crossing the threshold is most interesting, differentiating between connectors/mavens/salesmen, how exceptional people start epidemics, stickyness factors, and so much more. I’d encourage anyone attempting to build up a community or work with an OSS community to read this.
• The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford - I love reading about economics, and this book continued fuelling my interest. I think to technology folk, what’s most interesting is how Tim put in words, how most technology nowadays is so easy to create/replicate, and since there’s a lack of scarcity, these companies move/fold quickly. There’s more to the book than just those three pages, I’d recommend this highly (in fact, I got a copy for Giuseppe in Heidelberg for just this purpose - he book-swapped with me, I got the God Delusion, which I haven’t read yet).
• Founders At Work - Jessica Livingston - Excellent read. About companies you use currently. Or used (there have been some deaths, or sites that lost out the scarcity war). A must read, because Jessica gets into the founders’ heads.
• Bella Tuscany - Frances Mayes - wanting to complete my reading interest in all things Frances Mayes, I just had to read this. And its only made me want to go to Tuscany a lot more (from what I hear, its filled with foreign tourists and not Italians nowadays, because of her books - I’m told Sardinia might be a better bet :P)
• The Year of Yes - Maria Headley - A girl from a small town in the US, moves to New York, and says “yes” to all manner of men that ask her out on dates. For a whole year. She found a partner in the end, which I found kinda ironic (but I guess this is what fairytales are made of). It left me asking the question: why would a 21-year old girl do this? Was the sole purpose to write about it?
• English as a Second F*cking Language - Sterling Johnson - While English is my first language (and realistically, my only language that I can read/write/converse fluently in), this book was too hard to not pick up. Saw this in a bookstore in Germany, and boy is it funny. Teaches you all the stuff you really shouldn’t use, but hey, its humorous!

I’m not the biggest fan of web mail, so couldn’t really rejoice when Yahoo! and the likes offered unlimited storage. Heck, I hardly ever log into Zimbra’s web mail interface, even though its a thing of beauty. But today, Gmail introduced IMAP capabilities.

Gmail and me have always had a love-hate relationship. I even have the Gmail Notifier plugin in Firefox, and still hardly ever read my email. This was a real problem when I had to deal with the Summer of Code Google Groups (which I just ended up setting a filter and pushing it to my real email account).

All that’s water under the bridge. I have 4GB of storage on Gmail, and its just growing (and if I needed more, ahem, I could cough up some cash). And now, it works via IMAP (for free). Ages ago, speaking to some Googlers, I was told that the idea of IMAP is hard to implement because tags aren’t folders. I see they’ve fixed said bug, and am totally stoked. I’m now happy to read Gmail in Thunderbird, and will be using it a lot more.

Lock-in? Google knows more about me now? Sure. But now I’m spoilt for choice - reading Gmail via my Series 60 phone (their client is pretty swanky), reading it via IMAP in Thunderbird, and if required, via the web (ick).

On a rather ironic note, I use Yahoo! for search, not Google.

Technorati Tags: web, gmail, imap, googlemail

With disk being as cheap as it currently is, there’s no reason to not buy some large disks, and create some redundant backup of images (DVDs are getting stale). Of course, my main requirements are writing to these disks via either Linux or Mac OS X.

And therein lies my problem. Should I just attach it to a NAS like the NSLU2? This ensures the filesystem will be ext3 based, and both Linux/OSX will connect to it via Samba. But it also means I need yet another device turned on.

If I plug disks in directly, I have to beware of the ext3 or HFS+ issue. Do you backup to disk? Are you using a NAS or plugging it directly via USB/Firewire? What are you using as a filesystem of choice? (please don’t suggest VFAT for 500GB disks…)

Technorati Tags: photos, large, disk, backup, ext3, hfs+, linux, macosx

One of the many reasons to come to a MySQL Meetup, is because you’ll learn something new.

We cater for beginners - Minh Van Nguyen

We cater for the more intermediate - advanced users - Arjen Lentz

You’ll start hacking stuff up, while you’re there!

You also get demonstrations, with live human beings, showing a man-in-the-middle-attack

More photos are at Flickr. Where are your meetup photos?

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

Resisting an upgrade, is hard, so I finished some work on Friday, and proposed to upgrade away to Gutsy Gibbon. I’ll talk about what I like and don’t later, but I still face a problem. I can’t seem to get X/xrandr working as well as I’d like it to. I also can’t get all the desktop effect bling going, but that is not as significant a problem as working VGA out.

lspci says, I have a Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03). I drive my laptop at 1440×900, and externally, I’ve got a 17″ LCD panel that can go 1280×1024 (FWIW, I tested against an external 19″ wide panel capable of 1440×900, but it made no difference). However, xrandr thinks I can only, at most, display 1440×1440, and I think that’s why I’m not being able to get a nice “stretch screen” (i.e. two desktops, not mirrored displays) experience going.

xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1440 x 900, maximum 1440 x 1440
VGA connected (normal left inverted right)
1280x1024 59.9
640x480 60.0
LVDS connected 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 303mm x 190mm
1440x900 60.0*+
1280x800 60.0
1280x768 60.0
1024x768 60.0
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

So, mirroring works. My desktop looks a little shitty, but at 1280×1024, all is well and dandy. I have a feeling that when I plug it into an LCD projector, I might get away with things working, for a change. That alone, is impressive. So, how do I magically get a dual-display, stretched desktop experience? My xorg.conf file for reference, is tacked to the end of this.

My heart goes out to whomever decided to write displayconfig-gtk. This is a step in the right direction. End-users will want a GUI to choose external displays and stuff. I love the idea of location profiles (so, at home, maybe I’m tacked to an external 1280×1024 monitor, at another location maybe another, a roaming locating that just creates a 800×600 display, etc.). Of course, it would help if this utility actually worked. It doesn’t, and is currently broken, from my experience with it. Why is it included, under the guise like it might work?

Kudos to Intel, and their page on How to setup Dual Head for Intel Graphics with RandR 1.2. Everyone says, stick to Intel and you won’t go wrong with Linux. Why then, does such a page need to exist? Why is my out-of-the-box experience, still so bad?

If it helps, here’s the xorg.conf configuration file (I didn’t muck with it, its dpkg configured). Help appreciated, and remind me to buy you a beer when/if I see you next.

Section "Files"
EndSection

InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Technorati Tags: xorg, xrandr, gutsy gibbon, ubuntu, displayconfig-gtk, usability, external display, keeping it real, linux, intel, intel graphics, intel 945gm