Colin Charles Agenda

Via Ditesh:

Interesting aside: the bus stopped in a ${RANDOM} town in Johor for food, and at the cashier, I spotted the cashier using KC POS which had a prominent “Powered by MySQL” text and the Sakila logo. Very cool!

This was a small town coffee shop, using a cash register, powered by the mighty Sakila. Similar to the chain of restaurants, Old Town White Coffee.

The whole blog post from Ditesh itself is interesting, but knowing you can find MySQL just about anywhere, showing the ubiquity of the database, just makes you proud to know, you work at/on/with MySQL.

Both Giuseppe and Kaj have blogs in languages that I don’t understand. In fact, even Planet MySQL has feeds for German, Spanish and French blogs.

Want to keep up with non-English based blogs? Happen to use Google Reader? Then use their nifty “Translate into my language” feature.

I can now read Giuseppe’s latest Italian blog. Current content is about MySQL 5.1 for the impatient – a feature overview of what’s new and cool.

I have always been excited about location based services. I’ve found it daft that its taken so long to get a camera integrated with a GPS chip for this amount of time, considering how cheaply available GPS chips are.

Yes, its taken a while for me to go the GPS-phone route… Nokia has had a bunch for a year-18 months already I’m sure (their Navigator phones, the N95, etc.), but for me it all came with the E71 purchase.

I like photos. Its quite natural, that I like Flickr. Its also nice to know that EXIF has so many unused fields, that you can embed location data. Flickr takes the embedded location data and then pairs it with a map. Just look at the following photo of a garden.

The meta information includes Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, as well as GPS Time/GPS Date. The Time/Date fields seem inaccurate (or non-parsed), but the Latitude, Longitude and possibly the Altitude are very correct.

Unfortunately, when I click “map”, I am disappointed. “We’re sorry, the data you have requested is unavailable. Please zoom out to see more map information or refresh your browser to try again” is the sad message I see. Yahoo! Maps doesn’t work too well… but…. Google Maps does! I enter the latitude/longitude combination, and it shows me street level accuracy. In fact, the phone’s GPS picked up the data almost as accurately as a device from Garmin did.

Flickr (and by this I mean, Yahoo!) should tear down the walled garden, and allow people to let the “map” link point to Google Maps.

How does all this work?
In Flickr, make sure you allow it to Import EXIF location data.

On the E71, I installed Nokia Location Tagger. I run this application, allow it to auto-hide, and the camera does its thing. The only way I know Location Tagger is running, is when taking a photo, has a significant lag, as the GPS data is being written. This software can start in the background – just make sure you have a fairly sensible data plan.

I upload images either via Share Online (direct to Flickr from the camera) or via transferring the images to my laptop and then uploading them. The way it gets to Flickr is immaterial – the location data is embedded in the EXIF tags.

Other thoughts
Some say this is a violation of one’s privacy. Because now, people may know where you live, and stalkers may show up. Sure.

I’ve seen examples of this on Picasa (which integrates with Google Maps, and is cool), but I haven’t used the service myself.

Searching for Creative Commons photos, by location, can be a really useful technology for stock photography. Might this disrupt the industry? Might this help, enhance the industry for someone who harnesses it?

I really like The Age’s Blog Central. I wish more papers took on new media (The NYTimes is another shining example, of a good new media citizen, coming from the old media world). The Star Online tries with the Citizen’s Blog, which is crowd-sourced blog entries. The Age explores new boundaries, topics that may not make its way to print, but can definitely be OK for online dissemination. Plus you get comments. Crowd-sourcing blog posts, under the guise that you’ll get more readership (for the author) probably doesn’t make too much sense… everyone will jump on the idea of creating their own blog, and harnessing the many ad networks there are out there…

What’s hit my RSS reader for today? The eight-week rule from All men are liars.

…formalisation of a new dating regulation – the eight-week rule – a time period “at the commencement of a relationship, in which there is no obligation on behalf of either party to offer any form of commitment”.

“On one hand, the eight-week rule offers (dare we say encourages) eight weeks of carefree fun, even when you know full well there is no future in the relationship. On the other hand, it forces you to lay your cards on the table after eight weeks, and discourages you from stringing the other person along or getting too comfortable with a person you’re not that interested in,”

Read it. Laugh at it. Realise it will probably never make a print magazine/paper, unless its the relationship column of some rag. But go on and read the comments. Some are downright witty. They make for excellent Sunday reading. And urban myth or not, this eight-week rule (or Sam’s three-week one) makes a lot of sense

Halim brought up a great topic on how computers are alienating us from the outside world… (c.f. finding information from the library might take an hour, but a Google search will take all of 30 seconds – plus don’t forget they scan books now too).

“”…we got out. We saw other people in the street and in the library: a man in a wheelchair, a helpful librarian, folk reading magazines. Although we didn’t speak to anyone, we interacted with them: a nod, a smile, and people saw us too. We were out there in the community.

It’s a pity that our computers have taken us away from other people.”

Really though, what have computers taken away from us?

Nodding, smiling? These are nice, polite gestures, but there’s no love lost, if you don’t do that (to randoms you find on the road). A really common practice in Australia (especially in the smaller cities, like say, Port Pirie even!), but a not so common one in Malaysia.

We have senses. Is it about the senses?

• Sight – you can see someone via a video-conference. Google has brought this to GMail, so it can now happen in-browser. Skype has had it for ages… 3G video calling means you don’t even need to be chained to your desk
• Hearing – you can already hear a person… most IM clients now have voice components, and we’ve had the telephone for ages.
• Taste – I doubt you taste the humans you meet, but maybe this can be locking lips? OK, this is still a in-person thing, if at all
• Smell – no smells through a computer yet… and smells can evoke emotions… I know the whiff of hair, or even a some perfume can subtly excite someone, so this is still an in-person thing
• Touch – I think this might be the most important of all the things that computers have taken away from us. Why, later

So, if its a friend, or even an acquaintance, the sight and hearing is all you need. If you’re intimate with someone, taste, smell, touch make sense… so its a given, intimacy doesn’t happen through a computer keyboard.

Touch is important. I dislike touching people, unless I’m comfortable with them and they’re in the inner circle. The other day, I hugged a close friend I’d not seen in over a year. It felt good. Closest human contact I’ve had in a long time (to put it in context, I can’t even remember the last time this happened). I can see the importance in touch, and I wish it happened more often, I guess

Why do I dislike touching people, as a generalisation? Shaking hands… rabid passing of germs!

OK, this is getting on to becoming a pointless rant. I don’t think computers alienate folk – sight and sound is all you really need, for 95% of your relationships (ok, that number pulled out of the hairs on my arse :P). ’nuff said

I was at the December foss.my meetup, something I haven’t been to in a while. I had told Aizat that I’d attempt to record the session, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t find the AC adapter for my video camera!

With less than an hour to spare, I decided to give Qik a try. It seemed to work in my initial testing, so I headed to the location and decided to give it a twirl.

Executive summary? It just worked. AeU had a good enough WiFi connection, and broadcasting Mohan speak live, just worked.

The MyOSS Meetup
Mohan talked to us about oAuth. His slides are online – Mohanraj – Securing Your Web Api With OAuth. If you want to grab the video, don’t hesitate to look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Note that there are also comments from the live chat feature – very cool.

Why is it in 3 parts? I received three phone calls during that one hour session, and everytime the phone rang, and I cancelled the call, it would end up in me having to restart the streaming. Oh woe!

Live chat? Allowed a few others to join in on a myoss meetup, without actually being there… There might have been five people chatting, with two actually being in the room ;)

My initial thoughts on Qik

• Its dead easy to setup. I broadcast video now at my Qik account.
• It allows export to .3gp (which I presume will work in real player on my Nokia), and mp4 (which may work on an iPod?). It doesn’t do .ogg, but neither does anything you can find hardware for commonly…
• It doesn’t seem to playback in my phone, in browser (with OperaMini or even the standard Series 60 browser). It also looks like playback in the iPhone doesn’t work. I understand kyte.tv fixes that (but its woefully slow in Malaysia, so a waste of my time)
• It seems to be pretty choppy on my UMTS connection. Bad Maxis… So there’s lots of buffering, before
• When it buffers, it uses the phone memory, instead of the memory on the memory card… this means that with about 100+MB free on the e71, you run out of memory after about 10 minutes of video… and then it kind of hangs the phone (typical of S60 devices). It involved rebooting my phone once
• The moment the connection resumes to qik.com though, everything buffered gets uploaded in an instant. Great!
• 1 hour of video knocked 2 bars off my battery, while using WiFi
• Receiving phone calls, breaks video streaming. This is annoying. Continue recording, please!
• There seems to be no way to concatenate videos together. It would be wise, considering the problem above, where you actually get phone calls…
• It integrates with Twitter. So those following me there, or on FriendFeed can know when I’m broadcasting something live. Smart.
• There is mapping capabilities on the website… but it didn’t seem to integrate with the GPS in the phone. Why? Maybe I need to look harder
• It looks like it integrates well with iTunes… so this is a great tool for video bloggers and video podcasters… with enough adoption, I see this as being crowd-sourced JenniCAM… a way for the current camwhores to become videowhores!

There seems to be a little trend of Qik users now… han and aizat are broadcasting BarCampJB live on Qik. All in all, hat tip to @thechannelc, whom gave me that “aha moment” before going to the meetup – I saw her short clip of StartupCampKL, and was amazed that it was live, coming off an e61i…