Colin Charles Agenda

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a preference to invest in the local workforce. Simon mentions that all this allows you to keep the sovereignty of your country.
• You cannot pirate free software. Want to avoid foreign interference, and all the worries of WIPO? Free software is the answer.
• Simon Phipps thinks “software patents are bananas”. I tend to agree.
• I also found out that the Sydney Opera House owns a trademark on all photos taken of the Opera House. That seemed retarded, and not long after, I found out this was similar with regards to the Petronas Twin Towers in KL. I can take a photo, but apparently, I can’t sell it on say, ShutterStock Photo or anything. Ridiculous.

I didn’t get to attend the next round of talks, mainly because I was giving my talk! The room was full, the questions were good, I was happy. I read a report, from Ditesh, so that’s a pretty good summary, I guess.

I really wanted to attend the Mozilla talk from Mitchell Baker (mainly because I’d have liked to have met her), however, I couldn’t resist going to the PostgreSQL 8.3 talk by Josh Berkus. It was an interesting talk, well rounded, with the occasional jab or two at MySQL. The attendance was about half full, and we had some unwelcome loud noises in the talk! I took away from it:

• Contributors are full participants. PostgreSQL is owned and run by the community. Write a patch, and its accepted? Be prepared to write documentation.
• CSV logging is now built-into PostgreSQL 8.3
• I was introduced to Heat Only Tuples (HOT). Benchmarking, then seems to be skewed towards greater performance gains in PostgreSQL
• MVCC: Overwriting model (InnoDB, Oracle) or the non-overwriting model (PostgreSQL, Firebird)
• The attention to standards is great. Extending SQL, to create the SKYLINE feature, to power approximate queries, however, this was rejected for the core of PostgreSQL, and is available in their foundry
• Release engineering in PostgreSQL is amazing. 6 weeks development, 2 weeks commit, and repeat.
• There are doubts of an embedded PostgreSQL – this is what SQLite is for. I like the focus of the core team here.
• You never want PostgreSQL running on handheld devices – heavy writes it has.
• “There is no one size fits all solution, for databases” — Josh Berkus. I tend to agree
• Why are few hosting companies providing PostgreSQL? Customers don’t ask for anything else? CPanel doesn’t run with PostgreSQL. pg_hba.conf (my.cnf equivalent) needs fixing, for controlling quotas (can be implemented via tablespaces), etc.

Next up, was the OpenMoko: What, why and how talk by Harald Welte. The talk was packed to the brim, and I didn’t learn much more than I’d have found out from their website. Its an interesting project, but with the upcoming Android, and the idea that I need a working phone now, I don’t know if OpenMoko is right. Besides, the battery life on that thing is horrid.

Spent time talking to Josh Berkus, in the corridor, nearby the Sun booth about life, the universe, and everything. Then it was Lightning Talks, and dinner…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, sun, foss, strategy, philosophy, postgresql 8.3, simon phipps, josh berkus

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really quickly, so I hope the Q&A is a good reflection.

But what does this all mean for me? Its too early to tell, right? Besides, I do know the Sun community quite a bit, having spent quite a few years working on OpenOffice.org (from the unofficial FAQ, to being a community marketing contact, to PowerPC and OS X porting work – heck, at the 2005 linux.conf.au, I was the Sun Regional Delegate, nationally within Australia which tacked on a great prize of going to OLS, and my first time meeting Simon Phipps), so I should be stoked, in general ;)

Thats not to say, I didn’t ask my colleague Lenz, seated next to me, if this was some kind of joke. He reassured me, it wasn’t. On internal IRC, Kaj then posted the link to his blog post Sun acquires MySQL, and at that point in time, I realised, it was all true. Monty was positive about it on internal IRC, and if its OK for Monty, it must be OK for the rest of us.

Here’s to the next chapter in MySQL’s story.

Technorati Tags: writing, mysql, sun, q&a, interview, marten mickos, video, youtube, sun meets mysql, mike lischke

After writing my impressions on Eeedora, it seemed only natural to write about the hardware. There are definitely some issues that I found with the Eee PC that I am not too happy about (and some that are just great).

For starters, who makes a laptop these days, without integrated Bluetooth? It just seems daft. This is a tiny sub-notebook, and how can I get on the Internet if I’m sitting in a train or a bus? The most natural thing would be for me to enable Bluetooth on my mobile phone, and use it as a modem. Oh wait, the Eee PC is missing Bluetooth, and its a WiFi only device. Sure, I can stick a USB Bluetooth dongle on it, but thats an external contraption, that I’ll have to make do with.

I was going through the fine print, and while ASUS provides a 2-year warranty on these laptops, the warranties themselves, seem to be limited to the country of purchase. These warranties, are not international. Who makes a laptop these days, that doesn’t expect the user to travel much? I can imagine that when travelling, the Eee PC can’t be my only laptop – I’m the kind of person that finds Dell’s next-day-onsite-business warranty pretty darn useful.

The keyboard, is tiny, but its expected for such a tiny laptop. I’m wondering why so much space is reserved for the speakers, and why not just give us a larger screen? I have a feeling its got to do with cost, and this can only get better in the future. I’ve noticed that the keyboard requires you to occasionally “jab” it harder, to get the key press that you want. Or its just that my fingers aren’t nimble enough, on this small thing.

The location of the left Shift key, is silly. In VIM, you occasionally tend to press the Up Arrow key, as opposed to the Shift key. I’ve seen people hack their Eee, to ensure that this stupidity is reversed. However, I’m not into moving keys around, to satisfy my needs at this stage.

The one button mouse, that does both right and left clicking is a very nifty feature. How do I middle-click? This is a very crucial feature in Unix land, and especially useful in Firefox (tabbed browsing).

The battery life, for something this tiny, sucks. It sucks even worse, when the WiFi is enabled (quite naturally). My dreams of it being used daily during a conference, or at a meeting, has clearly been shattered. To fix this, I might have to order an external battery pack, that outputs between 9-12V (apparently, 9V is too little to power this 9.5V device, but 12V is just fine).

I’m pretty happy with the performance of the SSD:

[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:

 Timing cached reads:   566 MB in  2.00 seconds = 283.05 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:    4 MB in  4.39 seconds = 932.40 kB/sec

[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Timing cached reads:   566 MB in  2.00 seconds = 282.50 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:   66 MB in  3.07 seconds =  21.50 MB/sec

/dev/sda being the internal SSD, while /dev/sdc being a USB thumb drive (2GB, Sandisk Cruzer Micro).

The built-in video-camera, is pretty standard. Its resolution isn’t great, but it suffices for a video chat.

Sound, is OK. I installed VLC, to allow me to play video/audio, and realised that it was going to set me back, in total, about 21M, with all its dependencies. Hardly appealing, but I was going to have a more interesting time, bringing in Totem, for instance. I have managed to watch a DivX movie, without too much trouble. Will I be able to watch one, entirely, say, while on a plane (or train), I don’t know.

Yes, video, and DivX decoding, works fine on a 630MHz processor. Why has ASUS under-clocked the Eee, giving it a 300MHz performance slack? Did the difference, really save battery life?

There are many ways to hack an Eee. The many guides online, showing how and what one can do (from simple Bluetooth, to a GPS or a touch screen) is just amazing. I don’t plan on hacking my Eee (yet, anyway), and the most I’m going to do, is go get more memory- RAM is always a good thing.

Its small. I spent this week using the train and tram system quite a bit, and realised that even though the trips themselves were short, I was getting some work done (like finding time to write blog entries, and some code – I haven’t gone as far as installing a toolchain on the Eee yet, but if you can find some Internet access later, committing code is easy). Its OK that its cramped. And its OK that it works on top of my huge backpack. These are clear benefits of its size, and hopeful durability.

Its cheap. I had a colleague who’s laptop (a Macbook) died the night before he was about to give a talk. He could head a few blocks down, buy an Eee, and immediately start re-writing his talk again. I saw him deliver his talk, using the Eee and the stock Xandros that was installed on it. In the old day, if your laptop died, you just started to walk around with a notebook and pen,and you gave your talk informally, without slides :)

Anyway, enough rambling (I’m about to reach my stop). Next up, what powertop thinks of the Eeedora install, and re-spinning it.

Technorati Tags: eeepc, asus eeepc, asus, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux