Colin Charles Agenda

of all the hullabaloo of sending the first malaysian into space, only to find that the great sheikh muszaphar shukor is just a spaceflight participant (link). not an astronaut, but a space tourist. one that the government used tax payer dollars (okay, ringgit) to push him into. thats rm100 million to play children’s games and make teh tarik (pulled tea).

someone like mark shuttleworth, forked out his own cash, between USD$15 to USD$20 million to see space. this was an out-of-pocket expense, and now he’s the first south african in space. why are the malaysian tax-payers funding a space tourist?

malaysian spin-doctors better not make sheikh a laughing stock. now they’re talking about him praying more than 80 times a day, as the first muslim to go to space during ramadhan. was this one large joke?

p/s: rm100 million roughly equates to around USD$30 million. why was mark’s independent trip cheaper than this tax-payer-funded instance?

Update: Read Ditesh’s take titled The Angkasawan Programme is a political sham.

Technorati Tags: politics, tax payer, spaceflight participant, malaysian in space, first malaysian in space, sheikh muszaphar shukor, corruption, laughing stock, malaysia

so, the national union of malaysian muslim students are a bunch of morons. first they make gwen stefani dress up, because she’s got a past record of (get this!) “indecent dressing and obscenity”. these same jokers have made beyonce cop out on having a concert in malaysia. and they were the same jokers that got the authorities to fine the pussycat dolls rm10,000 for indecent exposure.

the idiotic student group says that the artists “need to understand our culture”. bloody tools don’t seem to understand that there’s more culture elsewhere, than their stolen culture. oh, and did i mention more cultures besides the muslim culture? its ironic that indonesia probably has more muslims than malaysia, only to find out that beyonce can dress up the way she wants there.

wong chun wai, in the star, has told them to pick on a worthy issue. claims that they have 10,000 dumb members, who’s Abdul Muntaqim to say gwen’s performance and attire is not suitable for malaysian culture? what is malaysian culture? is it not a copy, mix and merge from all the cultures that landed in malaysia? portuguese, british, indian, chinese, etc. and whats wrong with youths “emulating the Western lifestyle”? watching tv alone will get you that far.

these students, bums, who are provided for by the corrupt regime running malaysia, have nothing else to do. they don’t need to study, they don’t need to pay their fees, heck, they even get a huge allowance. hence, they spend their time on trivial issues. if you don’t like gwen, beyonce, etc. don’t bloody go to their concerts! no one is holding a gun to their heads and saying that they must go. or their puny-minded friends must go.

all i can say is, i’m disgusted. 50 years of nationhood, and malaysia is taking further steps back, on a daily basis.

Technorati Tags: politics, concert, gwen stefani, beyonce, malaysia, malaysian muslim students, national union of malaysian muslim students, culture, lifestyle

So others know how I check out a fresh tree, here are instructions to building MySQL from mysql.bkbits.net, using the free bkf tool.

• in ~/code, do bkf clone bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community to clone to community tree down to your disk
• wait patiently, while bitkeeper attempts to suck some of your bandwidth
• now, do BUILD/compile-dist, and wait while MySQL builds
• you might find it handy to now get the test suite on your build, via make test
• run make dist, and you’ll have nice dandy source tarballs to go with your build for easy installation/distribution/etc.
• if you encounter problems, say with ndb (and you’re not testing against it), you can run make dist --ignore ndb for instance

If for some reason you don’t want the latest development tree, and say, are more interested in a tag, all you need to do is find the appropriate tree under the Repository section on bkbits, click on it, head over to tags, find an appropriate tag, and execute a bkf clone -rTAG bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community-TAG. You now have a mysql version that matches a certain tag. Build as per above.

To keep up-to-date, just run bkf pull.

If you actually need to install supporting packages (or bkf itself!), etc. on say Ubuntu or Fedora, read Installing from the Development Source Tree, part of the excellent MySQL manual. Also, executing bkf --help is pretty easy. The tool itself is pretty brain-dead, quite unlike its older (commercial) brother, BitKeeper (bk).

Update: I should clarify that make dist alone, only gives you a pristine source tarball for distribution, etc. What I normally do is hook it into the package management system of the platform of my choice (usually RPM or DEB), and build binaries that way. However, if you want a binary tarball, there’s an additional step in that you need to run scripts/make_binary_distribution (generally, after running tests!). This will be a tarball that contains a binary for distribution. Heads up to Giuseppe for dropping me a line.

Technorati Tags: mysql, bkf, bkbits, tarballs, source

I must be moving to another shard, having outgrown my current one. Its a manual operation.

Flickr tells me they’re moving my stuff around

Incidentally, I can’t sign out. Or view the main page. Or any of the groups I’m subscribed to. Its completely locked. But it does take under-15 minutes… (at least for the load I have – ~11,500 images).

Update: Read John Allspaw‘s comments at the HighScalability link to this blog post. He’s in-charge of operations, and an all round nice guy, and great presenter.

Technorati Tags: flickr, shard, moving

Having been to the inaugural WordCamp in San Francisco last year, and having a ball of a time, I’m so happy to note that there is now WordCamp Melbourne. Its on November 17, from noon-7pm at Watermark Bar, in Docklands.

Its not free, but a paltry $25, to cover venue leasing and some snacks/beer. Hope there’s WiFi at Watermark. And mad props to James Farmer for organising all this.

Technorati Tags: wordcamp, wordpress, wordcamp melbourne, watermark bar

Today, I had a problem. I’d been used to doing rpm -q --changelog <packagename> and generally piping that through less. I sat at a Ubuntu terminal, and wondered how to do this. Poring through the man pages for apt-get or even dpkg, proved worthless. So, I hopped on to #ubuntu on Freenode, to have a rather enlightening conversation:

Oct 11 10:11:37 <ccharles>      hi! does anyone here know the dpkg/apt equivalent to rpm -q --changelog ?
Oct 11 10:12:10 <Pelo>  ccharles, man apt and man dpkg see what it says
Oct 11 10:12:46 <ccharles>      Pelo: you'd think i had already tried that, and failed, which is why i came here

At which point, I’m wondering what the clue-level of the channel is. So I hop onto #luv, the channel for my local LUG, and ask there. Not long after, I post this back on #ubuntu:

Oct 11 10:34:19 <ccharles>      pelo: the correct answer next time, is apt-listchanges, or even zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz or if you have internet access, aptitude changelog <packagename> (with thanks to cafuego for telling me)

I remember in my active Fedora days, we used to refer to #fedora as a bit of a wasteland, largely populated by meat-heads. However, it was also the primary contact point for non-meat-heads, for a non-development question. And a lot of folk on #fedora-devel never ever joined #fedora. This is probably largely the same with #ubuntu/#ubuntu-devel. This creates a disconnect within the community.

rpm -q –changelog equivalents on Debian

• apt-listchanges is written by an Ubuntite (is that what they’re called?), and requires installing. It also requires access to the package .deb, which seemed counter-intuitive.
• aptitude changelog <packagename> – useful, but seems redundant. It connects to the Internet to fetch this data for you, chewing up your bandwidth, and requiring you to have Internet access
• zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz – the winner, quite clearly. No Internet access required, it pulls directly off your disk, and its all in less

However, RPM still seems to shine quite this bit more, in comparison. Maybe someone wants to update the Switching to Ubuntu From Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora guide.

Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, rpm, dpkg, apt, changelog, apt-listchanges, aptitude, irc, community