Colin Charles Agenda

Today marks a big day in the history of the Malaysian Government – they’ve released their first fully open source software package, MyMeeting.

Poking around their Trac installation, they use PHP and MySQL 5 (5.0.51a from Ubuntu, even!). Of course their install documentation suggests a lot of Windows usage, but this is a step in the right direction.

Give it a twirl. Report bugs. How many more governments out there are writing and releasing open source software packages? Or is this a first?

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

With my MacBook Air, I aim to have less tabs open… Its got something to do with having 2GB of RAM, maybe.

Yebber
Maybe I like somewhat ditsy looking girls, but if you’ve never seen Lunch with Yebber I highly recommend it. Good food within Singapore is the aim. Only complaint? I have to watch it in-browser, and not on my iPod. I find it interesting that Yebber is aiming to pay people in “Yebber dollars” for reviews. Its definitely a motivator….

At the e27 Unconference, it was asked if Wikipedia was started in Singapore, would it have been that successful? I think if the Wikipedia equivalent that is Mahalo, was started in Asia, and there was monetary gain, it will be very successful.

PDF Import in OpenOffice.org
First up, you know that OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 is out now, right? In that case, take a gander at the Sun PDF Import Extension. Its limited: no PDF form support, no editing say in Writer (it just works in Draw and Impress), but its a good start.

Charlene Li leaves Forrester
Its an interesting reason:

I was once asked what was the best career advice I ever received — and it was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months, because research showed that people typically master a job in that time period and fall into a routine.

I’ve yet to post a review of Groundswell, but in short, its an excellent book.

Religious Social Networking
ZoeCity is a network for Christan folk. The idea behind it is sensible (shared values, etc. – get in the mind of an evangelical person, its “interesting”), and I know what database they’re powered by, and I’m hoping there’s traction for them to hit scalability issues so it’ll be an interesting story to talk about :)

Shinsei embraces open courseware too
Shinsei Bank is releasing their banking methods (normally a closely guarded secret), as open courseware. Of course, it will be licensed under the Creative Commons. They’re on YouTube, so don’t hesitate to watch their video about them announcing the release of their IT methods. Hat tip, Joi Ito.

Anyone from Microsoft reading this? If you are, get me a ticket to Microsoft Tech.Ed South East Asia 2008.

Interesting talks look like:

• ARC341: When localization goes bad by Chad Hower – the OSS world can learn a lot about just translating the UI text into another language
• The entire Database Platform Track is interesting (duh!), especially Database Recovery, reporting services, and the overview of SQL Server 2008 (one can always learn, esp. with info about spatial data types, database compression, and so on)
• TLA330: Concurrency and Parallel Programming by Justin Lee – seriously, I don’t think .NET when I think concurrency, parallel programming, high performance. But I’d like to be impressed, nonetheless
• TLA335: Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0 by Lisa Feigenbaum – Say goodbye to XSLT and hello to VB 9 is the tagline. Interesting (VB is now at 9…)
• The entire Office & SharePoint Track – obvious reasons, I like office software, and SharePoint I must say, is most interesting (though Khairil will tell me Plone does it all too)
• SBP322 – Messaging, Identity, and Workflow in the Cloud by Nigel Watling – It has the magic word “cloud” in the title, I must take a gander… esp. with Microsoft Live! and their APIs that they’ll announce soon enough
• WUX332 – How to Build an App like Twitter? by Dirk Primbs – Interesting, because I kind of know Twitter goodness, and have a real interest in messaging platforms. No specification of language, et al, but I am certain it’d be interesting.
• Most of the Windows Server Infrastructure Track, with regards to virtualization, SVR425 – SMB v2.0 in Action by Ralf Schnell (where he even mentions Linux in his abstract), et al

You can ensure I’ll write interesting blog entries (maybe with video interviews) from what I learn. Heck, you guys should learn to hand out media passes, because there are a few talks that really do interest me..

Let’s see if Dear Microsoft works like Dear Lazyweb ;)