Colin Charles Agenda

Been playing around with The GIMP (about time), and one of the most useful features that might need to be drummed in, is for creating transparent images. The much touted Colour-to-Alpha plugin, simply just rocks!

Layer -> Transparency -> Colour to Alpha

Now, I don’t need to do dodgy hacks to get an image, made transparent.

Technorati Tags: graphics, gimp, colour to alpha, transparency, transparent images

Use MySQL? On Leopard/OS X 10.5? Yes, the current available packages from dev.mysql.com don’t work very well. I track “mysql” on Twitter, and boy, are there heaps of complaints.

So its nice to see, Dan Benjamin, a member of the MySQL community, stepping up, and creating the amazing Installing MySQL on Mac OS X article. The Preference Pane will obviously still not be there, and I don’t know why he thinks Mantorg (?) will build it, but I believe this is something MySQL needs to fix for the next release.

Tracking mysql#28854 will be useful.

Mark Pilgrim decided that it would be cool to poke fun at OS X, because it “just works” on Ubuntu. While what he says is true, there have been a lot more testing of MySQL on Linux, than there has been on Leopard. Developer seeds aren’t exactly the same “final” product (sure, this particular bug has been around since developer seed days, from what I can tell).

Here’s wishing I was on Leopard (or even a Mac) a bit more regularly…

Technorati Tags: mysql, leopard, macosx, bugs

To be fair, Kenny Sia over-did the “election” vs. “erection” thing. But the transcript, I would have thought was a joke, is actually true. So kudos to Kenny Sia for typing it all up.

Now, an Information Minister (Zainuddin Maidin), speaking to a television station, in that kind of language? Someone ought to send him for media training.

Highly entertaining. Watch the video. I mean, I thought he was stupid a few weeks back, just didn’t know he was this stupid.

In the newspapers, there are some quotable quotes from Zam slams Al Jazeera’s coverage:

• “They also cited a blogger as an independent journalist when the blogger is actually a DAP member,” he said. –> referring to Jeff Ooi, who in every respect is an independent journalist (isn’t that what bloggers generally are? I mean we refer to housewives [and to be politically correct, house-husbands] as domestic engineers…)
• “The police only used water cannons and tear gas and did not shoot anyone,” he said. –> shoot anyone? Really, who knew you could be shot for protesting. Well, maybe you can be in the current situation in Burma, or Pakistan, but in Malaysia? Shocking.
• Zainuddin said Al Jazeera should use its base in Malaysia as an opportunity to strengthen bonds with the West rather than to portray Malaysia as anti-West. –> how is the video in any way, portraying Malaysia as being anti-West? Is the idea of democracy, a Western one? What is the West anyway? India is the world’s largest democracy, and its hardly located in the “West”

All in all, its great to see Wikipedia being used to push truths (or untruths). Currently, as I write this, the neutrality of the article is being disputed. Article in question: 2007 Bersih rally.

Oppressive governments, like the one in Malaysia, is probably really feeling the pain of the Internet. Blogs, video distribution, immediate distribution, rallies being organised via the Net. Wind back a decade ago, and I think the then-prime minister, Dr. Mahathir had no idea of the power of the Internet. Even then, the bungaraya and sangkancil lists were being run, and the early birds saw what was coming. Arguably, soc.culture.malaysia on Usenet was a good venting point for folk too. Yes, there was online political activism, before Jeff Ooi ;)

Technorati Tags: politics, malaysia, information minister, zainuddin maidin, al jazeera, jeff ooi, DAP, english, bad language, media training, democracy, protest, freedom to protest, BERSIH

David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, is in Singapore, and has allocated some free time to meet MySQL users. If you were in the Lion City, and had an afternoon free, I suggest dropping by.

When:Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 12:00 PM

Where:GeekTerminal

55 Market Street #01-01 Singapore 048941

Singapore

+65 65570098 

(Map: http://www.geekterminal.com/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=41)

Technorati Tags: mysql, singapore, david axmark

I have two talks in the coming few weeks, that I’m still madly writing. I’ve come to the realisation that writing talks, really does take a lot of time (when you have a deadline). Especially, if you’re doing it my style – everytime I write a slide, and find something missing in the Wiki, I go ahead and fix it. So its not actually talk writing I’m doing, but expansion of our online documentation, and keeping it in check. That takes time.

• Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology – I’m giving this talk at the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) Annual Conference 2007. Their conference is themed around “Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology & Law Reforms — The Next 50 Years” and is on the 19-20 November 2007, at the KL Convention Centre. My talk is on the 20th, as I’ll be on a plane on the 19th. This is targeted at CEO/manager level, so is lighter on tech-related content, but more concepts. Come see me in a suit :)
• Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources – I’m giving this talk at foss.in, it will have a localised title, with regards to the much hyped architecture of participation. MySQL has done some amazing things to “open up” for external contributions, and clearly, we continue to do so, and we must celebrate it, obviously. And get more contributors. I also submitted this talk for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, because I think a lot of folk attending will want to know the many ways to contribute to MySQL. We’ve done some great things, and we need to pimp it more. Targeted at the contributor, with some pretty diagrams and patches, yanked off the internals list.

The slide deck and speaker notes will be online, in due time. Part of yet another cool project I’m working on, in where we enable others to give MySQL-related talks.

One interesting feature of OpenOffice.org 2.3 is its Export to MediaWiki functionality. Its simply, a File -> Export, give it a filename, and select MediaWiki. Automatically, you have a .txt file, that you can paste directly into MediaWiki. There, an offline editor for MediaWiki!

Sadly, this isn’t as well integrated as I’d like. You can’t actually edit an existing MediaWiki document in OpenOffice.org. And it has some limitations, so I suggest taking a read of the Odt2Wiki page (also, the Features page). Like adding images manually, is a bit of a quirk.

However, as someone that writes a lot in a Wiki, I’m pleased to say that I can now do this easily in OOo Writer, and will only have to resort to the built-in Wiki editor, when actually, editing content. Well, here’s to open standards and XSLT transformations.

In a related matter, of editing Wikis, its good to know that Firefox 2 has built-in spell-checking in text area fields, so there’s now no reason to have badly spelt Wiki documents.

Technorati Tags: openoffice.org, mediawiki, odt2wiki, xslt, firefox, spell checking