Colin Charles Agenda

I was in MidValley today, looking for a tiny power adapter for the power adapter on my Eee PC. After much searching, Ace Hardware seemed to have what I was after. However, post-dinner, it became clear to me that walking by the IT Mall there would be kind of useful.

Walked into the Acer shop to check out the Aspire One. I had seen one at foss.my, and Ow had recommended it to me. They were retailing at RM1,499 and were unfortunately out of stock. I walked by and saw the Dell Mini 9, and wasn’t impressed by the overall size of the unit. Heck, the keyboard seemed like there was little improvement from my Eee, and if I were buying Dell, I’d hold out for the newly announced Mini 10. I mean, who wouldn’t want a TV tuner, built in GPS, built in 3G and more, right?

Then, it was into the Lenovo shop, and I was taken away by the Lenovo IdeaPad S9. This is a tiny cute little machine, that has an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, with 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk, and a lot of ports. Its also dead light, but gets heavier with the 3-cell battery attached. I’ll admit to actually liking the Lenovo S series quite a bit, The keyboard was of the right size, there was tactile feedback, I could type normally, and I even managed to crash the built-in Internet Explorer! Yes, it comes with Windows XP, which can be a minor annoyance, but I think I could live with it.

SD card slot, check. USB slots, check. It even comes with an ExpressCard slot, and for a little over RM600, I can buy a 3G modem, pop by GSM chip inside, and never have to worry about the USB modem ever again. I was almost ready to make an impulse purchase, when I thought I’d give it some time, come home and give it a little research.

Good thing I did that. I found it quite limiting that both the S9 and the S10, have a resolution of 1024×600. One of my main gripes with the Eee PC 701 is the fact that the resolution of 800×480 just doesn’t cut it – I can’t even read my feeds in Google Reader! (unless I use the mobile version, which also means I lose my keyboard shortcuts). Worse, it seems that the 8.9″ screen and the 10.2″ screen mean you pay less for the S9, but the physical dimensions of the units, are exactly the same!

Come on Lenovo. What kind of scam are you trying to pull? The price tags are just a couple hundred ringgit apart, but the physical dimensions are the same, just that the screen is a little smaller? Good thing I waited, because if I do go out and buy something from Lenovo, its definitely going to be the IdeaPad S10.

However, upon further searching, it seems that the battery lives on the IdeaPad’s aren’t so hot. It seems the Eee PC’s with the Atom processors and SSD’s or flash drives are much better. And primarily, my goal for even wanting a netbook of sorts, is to ensure that the battery life completely rocks.

I have an external APC battery pack, which I use with my Dell laptop. From what I understand, it will probably also work with the IdeaPad’s. I don’t know if it will work with the newer Asus’s. It doesn’t with my Eee 701, the last time I checked.

Then I prodded further. (All on my Eee PC 701, running Fedora 8, might I add). It seems that the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is the latest model that they have, which claims about 9.5 hours of battery life! All for under USD$400 (I’ve not seen this unit in Malaysia, so to speak). It comes with Windows XP, and its the recommended OS. For battery life, I just might keep it – I’ve seen the comparisons with Linux, and the battery lives are remarkably shorter. One wonders why?

So the 1000HE is heavy (1.45KG – even the IdeaPad is lighter), but has an impressive battery life. Choices, choices. Netbooks are becoming so commodity-like now, there’s plenty of choice everywhere, with plenty of configurations. I’m glad I didn’t make an impulse purchase, because there’s been much change in the world of netbooks.

I should make it clear, that I am against software piracy, and do not support it in any way, shape or form. However, I want to provide some context to my tweet earlier:

RM8,599 for Adobe Creative Suite 4 bundle, at machines. I’m sorry Adobe. I’ll limp with open source alternatives, and others will pirate you

I have an inkling to play with, and use, Photoshop CS4, as well as Illustrator. So I started calling around and finding out a little more about it. Only to be shocked that the entire “bundle” of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium would cost me a meagre RM8,599 (then again, it might be the Master Collection – I was just told it was a bundle). I called elsewhere, to find that the Standard Edition is RM5,500, but I can get a discount for a mere RM5,300!

I prodded around the Adobe website further, to find that they had some offers, like bona fide students can for a mere RM399, get Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium (normally US$2,313). So that’s a good deal, if I were in an educational institution.

However, Adobe doesn’t seem to understand Asian economics (something, even Microsoft is getting with lower priced software, including for their flagship Office products). I can go to my friendly neighbourhood software retailer, and for a mere RM10, pick up RM5,300 worth of value. Heck, I won’t be surprised if I can pull in RM8,599 worth of value, even.

On Twitter, I was advised that its cheaper to buy an older version, then upgrade from there. I cannot imagine many a Malaysian wanting to pay this much for software.

Adobe is a member of the Business Software Alliance. Doesn’t the organisation dole out advice to members, to keep software prices in check?

How many legit users of Adobe Creative Suite are there in Malaysia? Please stand up. Remember, you could get a MacBook, a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, or even an iMac for less than the entire bundle.

Me? I’ll just happily limp on with using The GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, and the like. For others that don’t grok open source software? They’ll shell out RM10 (or fire up their BitTorrent client).

Long live proprietary software license fees, and ridiculous prices that go with it.
(and I hope that the open source alternatives eventually force Adobe to rethink their business model)

I recently found out about the Facebook Lexicon. There’s a FAQ, but in a nutshell, the Lexicon tracks and counts occurrences of words and phrases on Facebook Walls (profile, group, or even event Walls) over time. It doesn’t seem like status messages count, though maybe the new Lexicon might in due time.

Searched for “the flu“, only because I wanted to compare it with what you’d get over Google Flu Trends. Facebook doesn’t have the limitation that it has to be US only – its worldwide.

Then I thought about Twitter search, since lots of people post their updates on life, their feelings, et al – look at the results there, for the flu. Look at the mashup the New York Times built for the Superbowl on Twitter. Are there graphing tools, that track keywords? It might actually be cool.

Lots of new ways to data mine, it seems. Google shares some semblance of raw data. Facebook doesn’t. Twitter has whatever is available, that is limited by its API (what, some 3,200 entries?).

Imagine all this being used to predict flu clusters, or something more close to home, dengue clusters. Or voter turnout (status saying “voted”, even).

A while back, Ted Ts’o asked for a incremental backup solution that used a database. It reminded me of the talk at the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, titled Build your own MySQL time machine.

Chuck and Mats will talk about the backup and replication code, and will show off a web interface, that allows you to go back in time, similar to Apple’s Time Machine in Mac OS X. Its a talk that I most certainly want to attend, as an avid Time Machine user.

Register for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 before February 16, and you’ll get an early bird discount (saving $200). April 20-23 2009 will be a rocking few days, see you there.

Red Hat Management Escalation Contacts

Wow. “Need to raise a concern to Red Hat Support management? Use the contact information.” These are all contact details (work, mobile, and email) of directors, and senior managers from Global Support Services, at Red Hat.

I value this openness. I value good customer service. I wonder how many calls or emails management actually gets, though, from irate customers?

This should be a model for all support organisations, no matter how large or small.

John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, shares some insights and thoughts on Mozilla, and its a most interesting presentation to go through. The insights are (drizzled with some of my comments):

1. Superior Products Matter – Without excellent experience and utility, the rest is meaningless. This is true, even with MySQL – our aims and values have always been performance, reliability and ease of use.
2. Push (most) decision-making to the edges – I understand that as make sure your community has a significant voice (kind of like Wikipedia’s anyone edits policy, but there’s patrolling). He also suggests that on a regular basis, you need to have surprising innovation – things that blow people’s minds. In Mozilla’s case, there are a set of core values that everyone agrees too; decision making is with the module owners (very much like how the Linux kernel, tends to run), after all, groups have different ways of working. Mozilla has decision makers, that are even outside the “official” organisation – i.e. community has a voice. And communication, is key.
3. Communication will happen in every possible way (so make sure it’s reusable) – this means via Wikis, blogs, the bug tracker, IRC, forums/newsgroups, mailing lists, audio, video, Skype chat, real-life get-togethers, and probably more. Writing notes, and sharing them, might be useful – I’ve found that the Mozilla Weekly Progress Reports on Planet Mozilla (and especially from Zak Greant) to be really useful. I’m thinking of something similar, in the MySQL (and other Sun open source communities) scope. A lot of decisions tend to be taken up on IRC, and people go on hacking on stuff, without writing documentation (worklogs/blueprints), or consulting with the mailing lists – I guess we all have communication improvements in us.
4. Make it easy for your community to do the important things – Here the highlights are SpreadFirefox, Mozilla QA, localisation and more. A focus “to help others do more” should be the mantra of every community! I see it as very easy to translate Drizzle now, that its on Launchpad, but its not the same with MySQL. Translation, documentation, non-code related tasks tend to increase community contributions – though, what do you do when you already have an excellent manual?
5. Surprise is overrated – John suggests that surprise is the opposite of engagement, which is true – no one likes surprises, and everyone wants to feel they’re important and had a role to play when something has happened. The “inner circle” needs more participation. I remember back in the days of Red Hat Linux to Fedora… there was something called the “Fedora Merge” group, and this allowed externals to provide significant decisions towards the direction of the Fedora Project. This was eventually eclipsed by fedora-maintainers, and the various boards like FESCO, and so on. As a participant in the Merge group, I felt like I had a voice, and was part of the “cabal” (there is no cabal), or the inner circle, so to speak – decisions I made, mattered. The inner circle grew, so that everyone (a maintainer, i.e. a person who “deserved” a voice) could feel included. Similar things happened for documentation, marketing, and so on, with various members and boards.
6. Communities are not markets: members are citizens – John stats that citizens are more than consumers, bystanders and stake-holders – we are all citizens in the community (whether you’re a paid staff member, or an external). The best citizens even challenge the status quo, propose improvements and make the conversation richer – I think we have this, via Planet MySQL. The question though is, are we as Sun, listening to the citizens?
7. The key is the art of figuring out whether & how to apply each of these ideas – John suggests experimenting, trying new things, and then measuring the reaction.

Of course, back to point #6, engaged citizens are noisy is highly true. But the old adage of people complaining because they care, is probably a good thing to remember. Expect noise, demands, threats, contradictions, and more. You can’t please everyone in a healthy community, but they will help you make decisions.

A most interesting presentation, and there’s a lot to learn from Mozilla, for other communities to apply.