Archive for February 2009

Online photo printing comes to Malaysia – why not harness the Flickr API?

Found a cool Malaysian company, eoe. They apparently have physical stores, but what’s cool about them is online printing of photos — something which I believe is totally new in Malaysia.

They’re cheap – RM0.30/4R print. They’re even trying the viral marketing thing – get bloggers to write about them (no, I am not participating) in exchange for free photos.

I might try there services at some stage, but not today. Why? Because I have to upload photos through my browser. Their “Easy Upload” app displays a silly message saying they don’t support Firefox (so I don’t get the fancy pants editing of images, et al.).

<free advice>If they want to be a smarter Malaysian company, they would partner with Flickr, and harness the Flickr API, so that people can make easy prints from Flickr. After all, advertising for Flickr is already done for free, thanks to Maxis (they love advertising Flickr and how easy it is to use on their phone network). Printing images that are already there, rather than re-uploading (with slow, unreliable Streamyx) will make a whole lot more sense. Besides, each photo coming out of my camera, is probably 5MB in size — so I’ll pass.</free advice>

Here’s wishing Eoe much success, and hope they partner with the likes of Flickr, or just harness their darned API, for easy printing.

Card counting the iPhone way (or Cheating 2.0)

Two weekends ago, for Valentine’s Day, Sara and I decided to spend it up in the mountains, and the closest one we found, with enough fun, was Genting Highlands (going down to 18°C is good for us living near the Equator). Besides the trip being absolutely fun, we had intentions of visiting the casino to try our hand on the tables — unfortunately for us, it was crowded and there wasn’t even a single seat free on any table!

She asked me about card counting and how its done. I explained a little, and somehow we got onto conversation that you cannot bring laptops into casinos (I remember Crown Casino, in Melbourne will ask you to keep it at the coat check). Genting was surprisingly lax. She then asked me what about if it was on her iPhone or something – since these phones are significantly powerful enough.

I thought about it for a bit, and said, “Yeah, its definitely possible”. Upon further thinking, I figured it can’t be that hard to hack up even. So it comes to me as no surprise to see that someone else has already done so :-)

It seems Hi Lo does this and more. Available from the iTunes App Store for a mere USD$0.99, even! Its most definitely illegal (two more apps, Card Counter, and Blackjack Card Counter exist even), and you can be thrown out of the casino for this.

Today, maybe an astute casino security manager will look for iPhones. But tomorrow, there may be apps like this on Android phones, heck, even on Nokia’s Symbian platform (the 5800 XpressMusic has a touch screen that may be ideal for this). I wonder when casinos will start sending mobile phones to the coat check (the guards are already looking out for camera phones, etc. that point to the casino floor — this is especially the case at Crown where there are restaurants inside the casino grounds).

What about a mobile application that communicates with the cloud? Offload processing, and you can run simulations that are even more demanding for games like baccarat or roulette. Or is the common smartphone today, capable of it? Hmm…

Malaysian politicans need to focus on the economy, not power plays

So, I don’t read dead tree newspapers (dislike newsprint, think I get more unbiased news online, anyway), but I wish I had got The Star from a few days ago. Why?

Because Anas Zubedy published an amazing ad. He spent about RM40,000 on it. The gist of the message?

Please stop the power chase, call for a truce and focus on the economy.

Malaysia is about the only country that seems to focus largely on political power plays in this time of day. Every other country has a news service and a government that focuses on the economy. Our economic news seems to hardly cover the mainstream — lowering interest rates, losing value to the USD, job loss, and more. Politics though, still the focus.

Stop the fighting. Its childish. We didn’t elect a government to lead us into more screwups. Fix the economy. If you’re Malaysian, read the ad. If you’re not, realise that we might say we’re “Truly Asia” and multicultural, but that’s just on the surface — finding a “Malaysian” is hard (note: I feel for Zubedy, because I too like to call myself Malaysian — but I’m a rare breed), so maybe you’ll get a true picture from reading the ad.

And if you want to know more about this colourful character, there’s an interview with Zubedy, where he focuses and strives on unity. We need more forward-thinking Malaysians like Zubedy. We need Malaysians, period (you know, stop focusing on racial lines — stop race based parties, etc.).

Dictionary data for MySQL?

I’m told WordWeb, a dictionary application for Windows, allows you to find words, quite unlike the MacOSX dictionary. I’ve never even found a usable dictionary when I use Linux, that doesn’t require me to go online.

The whole idea is that if I search for the phrase cure all, I get back a thesaurus entry that suggests the word panacea. OK, that example alone wasn’t so great, because cure-all tends to be a word in these dictionaries. WordWeb Online allows me to have a “reverse dictionary” result, which I think is just fabulous (as long as I have access to an Internet connection).

Does such a Mac app exist? Seems WordWeb exists for the iPhone, but their Java app, requires an Internet connection.

What’s interesting is that they sell the dictionary data. They are powered by MySQL, and if you’re wanting to grab their dictionary data in either tab separated plain text files or a MySQL database, you fork out a mere USD$999.

That’s a lot of money for a database file. I have no intention of spending that much money, considering the restrictive licensing on their site. So I searched, and found GCIDE_XML – described as “The GNU version of The Collaborative International Dictionary of English, presented in the Extensible Markup Language”. I tried to see if it had reverse dictionary search results, but it didn’t.

So, does anyone know if there’s English dictionary data out there, for MySQL, that doesn’t cost a bomb and is comparable, to WordWeb? Of course, it also comes with sensible licensing, will be an added bonus.

On Ma.gnolia, and data recovery

There’s a good podcast from Chris Messina and Larry Halff, about what really happened at Ma.gnolia. If you’re at all interested in what happened (i.e. how did they lose all their bookmark data), don’t hesitate to watch the video. I took some quick notes:

  • half a terabyte database file got corrupted
  • a mysql 5 database
  • everything was running even though there was corruption, and eventually, the site went down
  • backup system also failed, as it didn’t backup the data from mysql
  • backup was just backing up corrupted data (file sync over a firewire network was the backup mechanism)
  • a Rails application, he now recommends clouds over running your own infrastructure for startups
  • a couple of xserves (for database, etc.) and four intel mac minis as front end web servers
  • the site didn’t actually make any money

So I don’t know if Baron can rescue Ma.gnolia, per se, but I think the problem was largely:

Doing a file sync over the Firewire network, as the backup mechanism

You can’t safely backup MySQL that way. I don’t know what mechanism was used, but it sounds like rsync, and as much as I love rsync, I wouldn’t use it to backup a live running MySQL database that way.

With two servers, there should have been MySQL replication.

I’m curious if the data recovery Baron talks about is that of using the utility ddrescue? After all, ddrescue gets the raw data off the block device, without even trying to mount it. After that, you can attempt to recover the MySQL data off disk. In fact, I was surprised that the Ubuntu folk have a very nice Data Recovery page – no information about extracting MySQL databases, but its nothing a little hackery won’t get you.

I tried to ping Larry on Twitter, to ask what engine they were using… No response, per se. Good luck, and I hope the users get their data back, in time!

MySQL 5.1 release t-shirt

Look what arrived in the mail! MySQL 5.1 Release t-shirts!


MySQL 5.1 Release T-shirt (Front)
The front

MySQL 5.1 Release T-shirt (Back)
The back – with all our names

We made something similar for the MySQL 5.0 release and 10th anniversary, and sold that. I don’t know if we have plans to sell the MySQL 5.1 t-shirts, but if you think you’d like to buy one, maybe drop me a comment and if there’s enough requests for it, I’m sure we’ll try to sort something out.


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