Colin Charles Agenda

As some of you would have recently noticed, I’ve started playing around (I can’t really say using, seeing that its still not a daily basis kind of thing for me yet) with OpenSolaris and NetBeans. Now, Sun is encouraging students to use, review, and blog about these two great products - check out the student reviews contests.

If you’ve not tried OpenSolaris 2008.05, you should probably give it a twirl. Sure, I’ve not installed it on bare metal hardware yet (I’ve been travelling so much, I’m not anywhere near machines), but it works fine inside VirtualBox. NetBeans is great if you’re writing Java, Ruby, PHP, and are connecting to a database - Connector/J for MySQL is shipped with it. If you were trying it out, take a look at the NetBeans+GlassFish+MySQL bundle.

So, students out there, take a look at the Student Reviews Contest. You have till June 6, 2008. There’s your chance to win anywhere between $100-$250 (USD?), which really means a lot of beer ;)

(and here’s hoping we run something similar when MySQL 5.1 is GA… we used to run bug finding contests where we used to give away iPod Nano’s, though I think Visa Debit Card’s are so much more useful than iPod’s…)

It was reported recently that Maxis (my current mobile provider of choice), will offer an anti-spam service for cellphones.

Once you get MessagePlus, which costs RM1 per month, you can start blocking spam. Where do I get most of my spam from? Maxis information services!

So, while this magical service is the first in the world, is this just because Malaysia lacks an extension to the Do Not Call Register?

MessagePlus also includes an auto-reply feature for SMS messages. Think of this like vacation mail, in traditional e-mail. Vacation mail that costs money - you’re charged on a per SMS basis, ranging from between 5-15 sen per message.

It seems Maxis has a new business development manager, Nikolai Dobberstein. And the idea of sending spam, and charging folk to stop receiving the spam, seems like its just gold! Excellent idea for business development, I’m sure.

Me? I’ll live with the spam. And when mobile number portability shows up (find link), I might move to another sensible provider.

A useful statistic? Malaysia’s SMS use is ranked at sixth in the world, for total SMS volume.

Its worth noting some website changes. First, I dropped Skribit. The widget has been sitting there unused for weeks, so I’m thinking that’s software that no one, besides its founders use. “Is Skribit proving useful?” is the question they ask - no.

Next up, I’ve stopped using Technorati tags, and have decided to use Wordpress tags. I’ll still be using categories, as well as tags to complement the categories. Why? Wordpress has the feature… Technorati still gets updates/pings from my blog, and creates its own “tags” (largely from what I can see, from ways I categorise my post) that it sees my blog represents.

Besides, now I can add tags for relevant events, and RSS feeds can be generated from it. Good for people just wanting to follow notes from a certain event, and aggregations of the specific feed for said events.

In a tiny fit of paranoia, as the Norovirus has decided to pay a visit to the Moscone this week, I decided that I needed to clean my keyboard on the Macbook.

I’ve already been following best practices of washing ones hands before eating with them (say bread at a restaurant even). You learn this stuff as a kid, but somewhere in-between growing up, and finding a girlfriend, you decide to share over cleanliness. Anyway, the habit has been back for a while. This largely after looking at toilets in a many a men’s wash room, where I notice that a lot tend to not wash their hands!

Anyway, to the point. Keyboard Cleaner. Tiny application that locks everything up, allows you to clean your keyboard and trackpad, and then with the magic Command+Q only will the application exit. Its small, but it serves a useful purpose.

Presented by Ronan McBrien and Sourath Roy, both from Sun Microsystems. The highlight of the show for me? Seeing the Sun Media Receiver. Not much information about it, except from the Sun Labs Open Day.

• Sun Media Receiver (developed at Sun Labs, now maintained by ISV Engineering). Sun make a PVR? Cool.
• RISC Processor (150-300MHz, predominantly MIPS, some ARM), memory, HDD optional, Ethernet port, USB, IR (remote control), Video output (SD, S-Video, composite, or HD, via HDMI connectors), hardware codecs (MPEG2, MPEG4-2, H.264)
• Makes use of the Java Media Framework API
• Can also expose talking to a SIM/smart card through the Java APIs, for security in your IPTV hardware

Presented by Jonathan Haslam, Simon Ritter, Sun Microsystems

In what I thought was completely great showmanship between Jonathan Haslam and Simon ritter, it was simply, pure comedy, having the two of them on stage. No reason to go deeply into notes (as the verbose slides are available), but the actual demonstration, the writing the code on stage, and the dynamics between the two - that made this session pure gold to attend.

You can ask a system to panic with DTrace if you want!

Some terminology:

• Probe: place of interest in the system where we can make observations
• Provider: instruments a particular area of a system, and makes probes available. Transfers control into DTrace framework when an enabled probe is hit
• Aggregation: patterns are more interesting than individual datum, so aggregate data together to look for arrays. Generally an associative array

DTrace has a PID provider, to look at applications based on PID

dvm provider is a java.net project to add DTrace support in. Install a new shared library, and make sure its in the path.

DTrace in JDK6 exists as a hotspot provider. No need to download a shared library. Its also more feature-rich.

Project DAVE (DTrace Advanced Visualisation Environment) was demoed. Also note that there’s chime.

First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. 70% of households have mobile phones (even when total revenue is USD$2k). Middle and upper class are all, generally on the Internet.

In 2007, 98% of Income Tax has been sent by the Internet. By 2009, there’s only going to be use of a Java application for this. About 17.5 million people filed via the Internet. Impressive.

Brazil has 142k public schools - 26k are connected to the Internet now (18%), and 92% are connected at low speed, while 8% have 512kbps connections.

Plan? Free Internet for schools, from 2008-2025. 1mbps for each connection, growth plans in the next 3 years.

There exists Computer Reconditioning Centres (CRCs) for recycling PCs.

www.eping.e.gov.br (e-PING: e-Government Interoperability Standards)
www.governoelectronico.gov.br (e-MAG: e-Government Accessibility Model)

Brazil has been using electronic voting since 1995. 136.8 million people voted in 2006 election. Next version of vote machines will use GNU/Linux!

Open Standards. Interoperability. Free Software. Free License. Community.

e-PING: uses XML, browser compliant, they have metadata standards

Many organisations of the Brazilian Government use Java as a primary development platform. Remember, Java is important because its the first that allowed even Linux users to interact with government applications.

Brazilian Digital Television? Middle-ware responsible for the interactive process of digital TV also developed in Java. (Ginga is the name of the application).

In education? Enrolment is done via the Internet for universities. e-Proinfo is an e-learning project that has already trained 50k students.

Developing clusters and grids, with focus on high availability, load balancing, database replication, distributed mass storage, and virtualization. The government is backing this, since 2006.

We haven’t had a MySQL University session in a while (a semi-spring break?), but tomorrow’s session (May 8) should be real interesting. MySQL Cluster developer, Stewart Smith, will host a session titled Getting Started Using NDB. It will happen on May 8, at 13:00 UTC.

One of the most common queries I receive is from people wanting to install or get started with NDB usage (ok, strictly speaking, they want to “cluster” MySQL, and I’m happy Stewart is using the word “NDB” which refers to the storage engine). All in all, it should be a great session, so I encourage you to join in the festivities.

Lucky for me, 13:00 UTC equates to 06:00 PST, while I’m in San Francisco. So I should definitely attempt to be there.