Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been on what I consider, a blogging break. In reality, I’ve been working, and then having a modicum of a social life, finding less and less time to write blog entries. I have morsels of half-baked ramblings saved, so expect a load of posts to show up soon…

luna:toblog ccharles$ ls |wc -l
29

For a comeback…

I have been checking in my photographic equipment. I already carry a backpack with 2 laptops and various other tech gear (it probably weighs in at around 10KG, which airlines can frown at). Of late, I’ve also started carrying a briefcase. Where does my camera gear fit? In checked-in luggage of course!

This can be anywhere in the reigns of 3 Canon bodies, a 30/1.4, 50/1.4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 17-40/4, and a couple of flash units. Not exactly the cheapest of equipment, as I’m into good glass (read: L).

However, the one place I don’t tend to check equipment in, is when I fly to and from the US. The TSA have a silly rule that says your bags must be unlocked, or else they will break the lock for you. This has naturally led the paranoid me, not want to carry any professional camera gear into the US.

And today, my paranoia proves right. I found out that Matt (WordPress fame) lost his camera gear, as did another blogger.

Yes, this is on a certain particular American airline, but I wonder if its just baggage handlers that are dishonest with them, or baggage handlers that are dishonest in general? Also note that insurance tends not to pay (afaik, anyway) if your camera equipment or laptop gear is checked-in.

What are options for the technophiles in us, that fly a lot?

I threw the idea of a BarCamp Malaysia a few years back, and it was mostly shot down amongst the free and open source community members. The reasoning behind it, largely was because it was assumed that we could have the same amount of discussion at a bar (over beer), and there would be a lack of participation from the attendees.

The “Web 2.0 types” though seem to be getting their act together, at organising a BarCamp Malaysia. Kudos to them, I hope it’s a success (and there will be many, many more to come). I’d attend, but its the weekend right after OSCON, which I mentioned on the Facebook wall of one of the early event planning meetings. Apparently, nobody listened.

I’ll try and be at the next event planning meeting, to see what morsels I can pick up, and keep everyone updated. Maybe more hacking sessions up in the highlands, like how Aizat and Ditesh went to last weekend, would rock (I’d have gone, except I was in Melbourne).

At the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, Britt Crawford and Justin McCarthy, both from Cafepress.com, gave us a very interesting talk on scaling with HiveDB. I took a few notes (pasted below), their slides are online (warning: 6.1MB PDF), and if you’re after their abstract its available as well.

I also took a video of them (refer to Slide 12, for the IRC conversation):

The quick notes:

• OLTP optimised (as it serves cafepress.com)
• Cannot lock tables, or take it offline
• Constant response time is more important than low latency (little slower query is ok, just not exponentially slower)
• Queries run might return wildly sized result sets.
• There can be growth and usage hotspots. You cannot predict this at all.
• Partition by key (the set of all partition keys is the partition dimension)
• Partitioned Hibernate from Google (Hibernate Shards). HiveDB is now married up with shards.
• Thought about MySQL Proxy to support high availability components, but it was dismissed

So, it looks like Asus is rolling out more Eee PC’s, with bigger screens – up to 10 inches. They’ll be loading it with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, and they’re promising 7.5 hours of battery life.

Now we’re talking. The Eee 701 that I own is piss poor with regards to the battery life. And the other thing that has annoyed me for a while with the Eee, is the keyboard. Its just simply too small. I try to touch type with the Eee, and its not that my fingers are fat (really, they’re comparatively thin and long), but its just difficult. The new Eee’s don’t have such an improvement.

They’re still going to be shipping with 12 or 20 gigabyte SSDs. One thing I notice with the Eee is that for critical bits of information, I definitely do not even need more than 4GB of storage.

I think I’m over the Eee. I’ll probably run OpenSolaris on it soon (I wonder if ZFS performs well on flash based storage?) and dock it with a real keyboard, mouse and monitor. And I think that’s where the Eee could shine (or where OpenSolaris could shine) – support a limited set of hardware from a few laptop manufacturers, and one might be a great success if everything “just works”.

What’s caught my fancy this week? The Dell Mini Inspiron. There are photos, and the specifications according to Slashdot (take it with a grain of salt) state:

• Atom 1.6 GHz – just like the newer Eee’s
• 3 USB ports – Apple better start worrying… Seems nicer than the Air, but naturally, OS X simply rocks
• Ethernet
• Card reader – I’ve found reading SD cards really handy
• Mic/line-out
• VGA port, with screen resolution at 1280×800 – winner! It sounds like this might actually be a 12″ screen, which I like

All for under-USD$500? Eee and Macbook Air killer. Of course, no mention of what kind of disk storage will be available. Frankly, I don’t care if its not flash or SSD; throw in an 80GB 4,200rpm 1.8″ drive even. SSD is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist today for laptops (it offers next to no benefit to hard disks, in battery life or performance).

So Dell, you’ll have my business, plus the extended 3-year “everything” warranty if you come up with something like the above. Make sure the keyboard is usable. Heck, if you can fit 1280×800 on something smaller than a 12″ screen, that’d be fabulous. And don’t forget to throw in WiFi and Bluetooth. Forget an optical drive. Pack it all in with a 7 hour battery life, and you’ll be selling Mini Inspirons like there’s no tomorrow.

Heck, bring back the idea of docking stations! (I realise that a lot of young folk reading might have no idea what a docking station is, but these were fairly popular in the 90’s for laptops, to “enhance” their capabilities with parallel ports, serial ports, an optical drive, etc.) Charge us a whole bunch more for a sensible docking station. The Mini Inspiron might not be someone’s only laptop, but neither is the MacBook Air.

No mention of what OS will be on it. I don’t really care what flavour of Linux comes with it, I’m probably rooting for Ubuntu LTS, but if it comes with something crap like Xandros (aka Eee PC), its easy enough to replace it with something more sensible.

All I can say is that the next couple of months should be real fun for mini-laptop purchasers. It almost seems like you’ll end up owning several mini-laptops, keeping them in various parts of the home… after all, as we all move online, everything we need will be within a web-browser, right? :)

Dear (mac) Lazyweb,

I have MP4 files. DivX encoded, I should presume, because after installing the DivX codecs, I can play them in Quicktime Pro.

I however, cannot import these .AVI MP4 files into iMovie.

Workaround? Use QuickTime Pro to export it to a QuickTime Movie (.MOV), then open it in iMovie, then re-export after “fiddling” with it.

Surely, there must be an easier way? Will Final Cut or something similar help?

What do video bloggers/video podcasters use, for quick and easy (and hopefully, cheap) video editing on Mac OS X?

Any help will be most appreciated. Thanks!

Finding out that Adobe is the latest to jump on the online office bandwagon, I decided I need to try their service out. Working together, anywhere, is their tag line.

First impressions? They provide a few fonts that look nice. There is document sharing built-in. You can also add comments on parts of documents – and this is a killer feature with the built-in sharing, I love how the way comments are displayed (they’re in your face).

Comments being displayed in a Buzzword document (click for larger image)

What am I disappointed with? File formats. Not supporting ODF out of the box, is really silly. Exporting to PDF is nice, RTF is standard, .txt (so you lose the fonts), a zipped up HTML document, and Word (.doc), Word 2003 XML (.xml), and Word 2007 (.docx), only? Open standards, FAIL!

Buzzword, not supporting a wide variety of common file format (click for larger image)

I’d try out the rest of the services, but I’m sent to Acrobat Health, as it seems like they’re just a little overloaded now…