Colin Charles Agenda

The fun with Maxis Broadband continues. I last wrote about the real story behind Maxis Broadband, which apparently is quite a favourite amongst Google searches. Today, @hantu asks on Twitter: $99 mobile unlimited or $138 maxis broadband?.

Lets delve into this a little deeper. I have the RM99 mobile unlimited connection, so that my E71 can surf the Internet. It allows me to check and send email on the go, post updates to Twitter, perform quick Google searches, and when I’m waiting for someone, read my Google Reader feeds. I estimate I use about 150MB or so per month, and this will probably grow in size, as I have JoikuSpot installed, and can share it with my iPod Touch. If I had an iPhone (and used it), I can imagine my data usage being a lot higher.

I’ve also had a Maxis Broadband SIM card, that I pay RM143 per month for. No, its not RM138, because they decided to send me a bill, which costs RM5/month. Nothing I do, can stop me from receiving said paper bill (not even threatening to stop their services). Do I use the Mobile Broadband services? Yes I do – I average 2GB per month, sometimes more, depending on where I choose to work for majority of the time.

In my head, I’ve been thinking, with the economy being the way it is: why am I paying RM143 and RM99 for mobile data? I noticed Maxis had a “Multi-SIM” service, in where you pay RM15/month, and you get a second SIM for your number. I thought that this was the way out – get a second SIM for my primary number, pay an extra RM15 and share the 3G connection (the second SIM to be placed in my broadband modem, a Huawei E220).

To my dismay, I visited the Maxis store and was told I couldn’t do this. If I wanted a second SIM, my services don’t extend to it. That means, I have to pay RM15 + RM10 + RM99 for the second SIM. Could I have found two idiots at the Maxis Centre in Klang – quite possibly – I think her name was Lina, and her supervisor was no better.

Maxis has an FAQ that suggests I can get a second SIM card, and just place it in my broadband modem. Imagine, only paying RM99+15 (RM114) rather than RM242.

My only solace? I don’t pay RM143 any longer. I only pay RM118, as I have Mobile Broadband and I am a Maxis postpaid customer. If you listen to the customer service representative, you’ll realise that you’re paying RM124 per month. I however think the customer service rep, is just being a plain idiot, and this can be fixed.

Why don’t I just use JoikuSpot, or tether via Bluetooth, to my Nokia E71? Because of battery life. The last time I tethered to my Nokia E61i, I had about 2 hours of battery life, before the phone got really hot in my pants pocket, and the battery went almost flat. Not having a working phone, is of course, unacceptable, which is why I’ve gone the mobile broadband route.

So, Andy, what’s your best choice? It depends on your usage. If you’re using your phone a lot, get an unlimited data package for RM99. If you don’t need access too much, consider Bluetooth tethering, which will work OK (maybe you have to carry a phone charger around). If you need to sit in cafes a lot, or work away from your desk and proper Internet connection, consider the Mobile Broadband package, at RM143/RM138/RM118 (paper bill/no paper bill/Maxis postpaid Bolt-on program).

If I ever get this multi-SIM bullshit figured out, I’ll be sure to write about it, and let you all save money. If any other provider (Celcom, DiGi, U mobile) offer it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment behind.

I decided to experiment with Google Friend Connect today, after seeing the “Social bar” being used on the Open Source Bridge site. I had even set aside some time to start writing some code; to my surprise, Google did all the magic for me, and it didn’t even take me longer than five minutes to setup.

It was as simple as setting up a new site, uploading two files into ~/www/, then editing my WordPress theme’s footer.php and adding the auto-generated code before the </body> tag (I did it after the <?php wp_footer(); ?> call though).

I immediately joined my own site. At first, I setup a profile, but then realised that I could import my profile from my usual Google one. Heck, I could even import a profile from Twitter! One thing I found odd, was that to edit my profile, I had to do it from the social bar itself (from the far left column).

The social bar – click for a larger version

On the far left column, you can join the site, or edit your profile and settings. Next to that, you can see the activity stream throughout the site. Next to that, you’re given the option to add comments. And on the far right, you can see like-minded visitors who’ve joined, and even become friends with them.

What does the social bar do for me?

1. It allows members to join my blog and be part of my community. Do you remember MyBlogLog (a Yahoo! service)? Well, Friend Connect allows me to have MyBlogLog type features, with no problem whatsoever.
2. It allows comments from members. These can be fine grained comments – either for the particular page, or for the whole site. In my experimentation, I’m using it for the whole site naturally. On a blog, if you’re going to write a comment of substance, you’re going to do it with the commenting facility available on the blog – however, if you just want to write throwaway comments, one-liners, “me too” replies or have one of those “chatboxes” that blogs tend to have, you’ll find the Friend Connect Social Bar to be quite useful.

I’ll be the first to admit, that its probably not too useful for me, per se, but I can see its usefulness for sites that require a lot of collaboration.

Sites that I think can benefit from Friend Connect? Kenny Sia – the Chatterbox can be replaced with the comments in Friend Connect, and frankly all the one-liner comments will be better suited for the Social bar’s comments (maybe on a per-page basis?) – plus, he’ll get a “community” for free. LiewCF can also benefit – the “members” feature provided by MyBlogLog (he currently boasts 1,441 members) can probably grow with Friend Connect, and all those one-liner comments again, can go into the comments of the Social bar. Not picking on either site, but I think they can “socialise” their sites a lot better.

MyBlogLog is kind of a walled garden. You need to have an account there (on Yahoo!). Friend Connect tends to be a bit more useful – you can either use a Google, AIM, Yahoo! or OpenID account to login (a lot of bloggers will already realise they have OpenID for free – wordpress.com, livejournal, et al provide this). I think it can be a bit more useful if it supported logins from Windows Live/MSN accounts too – after all, a large proportion of my non-geek friends are MSN users.

And if I join another community, that information is cross-pollinated to my other communities. As a site owner, you can even see “reports” of how social your site is, over time – this whole idea of data mining (ok, analytics) is highly useful.

What if you decided to use comments on your blog, for just that – comments. But use the Social bar to enter “blog suggestions”. Smells like Skribit, to some extent. Do I see myself keeping the Friend Connect Social bar at the bottom of my blog for long? Who’s to say. Let’s see if a community builds up around it. I think this will be most useful for sites that really want conversations amongst readers, something like the foss.my site, or other social sites.

Are you using Google Friend Connect? How? What are your thoughts on it? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments (or via the Friend Connect Social Bar!).

If you’re using Fedora 10, and are a KDE desktop user, you’ll notice that your latest KDE 4.2 update, requires having a local MySQL server installed. This is due to Akonadi, part of the KDE PIM packages, that now rely on MySQL as a default server, for storing PIM data. Just a few months ago, I mentioned the news that Amarok 2 will also use MySQL as a default database.

Akonadi uses MySQL mainly as a cache, not as a data store. This is something that Debian users will also see. Eventually, anyone with KDE 4.2 will see the requirement to have a MySQL server installed. If you already have a native installation of MySQL provided for by your distribution (maintained by RPM/DPKG), it naturally won’t be installing another copy – it just uses the system-wide version.

Not everyone is happy. Especially those that use netbooks, with limited disk space. Reading Reducing the MySQL 5.1.30 disk footprint by Ronald Bradford might help in that respect – there are ways to reduce up to 25% of the space.

However, from a MySQL perspective, and as a member of the Sun Database Group, I am happy to see the ubiquity of MySQL, on the Linux desktop.

For the technical folk amongst you, its worth looking at the akonadi spec file:

BuildRequires: mysql-devel
BuildRequires: mysql-server
..
# when/if akonadi grows support for other backends, consider splitting
# these similar to how phonon is done currently.
Requires: qt4-mysql
# not *strictly* required, but we need a functional default configuration
Requires(hint): mysql-server
..
%{summary}.
Requires an available instance of mysql server at runtime.  
Akonadi can spawn a per-user one automatically if the mysql-server 
package is installed on the machine.
See also: %{_sysconfdir}/akonadi/mysql-global.conf

I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexed at MySQL for Developers. Its more or less the standard deck for the Tech Days events these days.

The best part? The questions. I had intelligent questions, and they lasted well over twenty minutes, and there was even more chatter afterwards. Twenty minutes might not seem like a lot, but this is Asia, and in some audiences, you’d be hard pressed to get even a single question! MySQL is hot, in India. Really, really, hot.

I’m glad to see that most people are using MySQL 5 and 5.1. I’m not so glad to see that most people don’t know about storage engines – most are using MyISAM without even knowing it, and they don’t know there exist other engines. This is what I notice, every time I talk about storage engines, though. For the astute MySQL developer, the DevZone is known (thanks to the documentation, mainly), but the Forge is almost unheard of. Planet MySQL seems to be more popular, actually.

Arun Gupta has some nice pictures and videos of the event in general. For me, I was jet-lagged after a massive delay in my flight leaving Kuala Lumpur (plane was unserviceable), and I only mustered under three hours of sleep before addressing the large crowd of folk.

The Tech Days events for the (financial) year are winding down, and for the next (financial) year, we (MySQL/The Database Group, in general) need to plan to be first class citizens at the event. Not only in terms of talks, but we need booth space (we’re about the only Sun project lacking a booth). After all, we have interesting things to talk about: MySQL, Drizzle, MySQL Enterprise Tools/Merlin, Workbench, Proxy, Query Analyser/Quan, Cluster, Replication, DTrace, Virtualisation and the database (VirtualBox? xVM?), etc. This list is probably never ending, so some cool demos, lots of fact sheets, maybe even USB sticks of goodies (2GB sticks are dirt cheap, and loading it up with information not only make people want to get a stick, but makes them learn more – hopefully before they format it! :P).