Colin Charles Agenda

We were at the University of California, Berkeley, yesterday. Dups picked me up from the Hyatt, and we headed out there (despite the traffic jams caused by the major winds the night before — 50+mph winds!). Lunch was in Berkeley, and we met up with our Sun counterpart who deals with University Relations.

At about 3.50pm, we were told that our talk which was scheduled from 5-6pm, was actually meant to be at 4-5pm. Oops. I immediately sent a text message to Farhan, and he told me he was a few minutes away.

While the attendees all sat down and ate the pizza, we put on a little show for them, and then started at about 4.10pm. Farhan walked in a little later, and by 4.30pm, it was Q&A time.

Lots of interesting questions: why did Sun acquire you, how do you make money, is it true that MySQL cannot scale (surprised this question was asked after the presentation showing all the big ticket sites using it), is BigTable better, what new features can there possibly be to add, and more.

After that, Volker Oboda (from PrimeBase, the folk that bring you PBXT, and more – a picture of Volker and Dups talking earlier), Dups and I headed to grab a beer at the university pub, before heading back. All in all, good fun. A few photos are here.

So, the minor snag of it being an hour earlier, was taken by us in good stride. Today, Dups will visit San Jose State University, while Farhan and I will visit Stanford University. I had wished that the attendance was greater than the 20-25 or so that we had, but oh well. The slide deck is one prepared by Dups, that is pretty standard, that even Sheeri and Giuseppe are using.

This is one of the better three and a half minute videos out there (like a lightning talk), by Richard St. John, at TED, titled The Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes. Watch it. Its summed up as:

1. passion: do it for love not for money
2. work: its all hard work. nothing comes easily, but you have fun nonetheless
3. good: practice, practice, practice, and be damn good at it
4. focus: focus yourself on one thing
5. push: push yourself. physically, mentally, just push through shyness and self-doubt
6. serve: serve others something of value
7. ideas: listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve, make connections
8. persist: persistence is the number one reason for success

Thanks to @blogjunkie for pointing this out.

The idea behind GeekCamp started from Kamal Fariz’s tweet:

I’m going to run GeekCamp. All technical talks, single track. No offense to marketers, *preneurs, social media experts but you can suck it.

It received overwhelming responses over Twitter, and Kamal couldn’t have suggested a better date/time scenario — right before/after the MSC Malaysia event.

What is GeekCamp?
Its a platform for all technical talks to take place, in a single track kind of scenario. There will be no marketing pitches, no entrepreneurial talks, and nothing about social media — just focus on good technology talks. There will also be an emphasis on great food, laid back learning and sharing environments, and after parties.

Be a caring geek, by sharing your knowledge openly. Don’t go up on stage, to speak on git(1), when you don’t know how to use a SCM… you’ll end up looking like a git.

Do you know all the cool tricks to tunnel connections, and make SSH do wonders, with all the variety of configuration options in the ssh config file? You’re probably entitled a lengthier lighting talk session, then, I’m sure :)

Do you know how to write a search engine in about two-hundred lines of Ruby? Do you know how to index email metadata at the server level, and provide a Spotlight/Beagle styled search on the server side? Do you know all the nooks and crannies behind making Apache scale? Do you know what the most common ways websites get broken into, and how to fix XSS, and other things? I think you’ll definitely get a session that way ;-)

What resources are there for GeekCamp?
We have a mailing list, a a Twitter account @geekcamp, and a poll to decide when to hold GeekCamp.

We are actively looking for a location, somewhere in central KL, preferably available for FREE (as in beerteh tarik).

Attendance is expected to be free, ala Barcamp style. All this of course, provided we get a free location. Food, drink, et al – BYO (bring your own). After all, you’re coming to learn, and hack on stuff.

Anything else?
Once the location is decided upon, there are thoughts to have a proper “call for papers” session. However, unlike many other conferences, the CfP process will be public, and chances are you can vote on Doodle, like you are doing for the location.

Let’s make this as open, and geeky/technology-oriented as possible. Kudos to Kamal for kicking this off.

If you’re coming in from overseas, once we have a location, we’ll recommend hotels.

Comments? Send them to the mailing list.

Takeaway

• Let’s decide how many days and when it should be – vote here
• Let’s decide where to hold it – a hall for the sessions, and another room for hacking/socialising – read more about the requirements
• If you do want to sponsor the event (not with marketing materials, thank you very much), we’ll be looking at food and drink

My trek to the USA this time around, was mired with issues.

First up, I was flying a new airline – Cathay Pacific. I had generally flown United or Singapore Airlines to the States, because it just seems to work better — plus they’re Star Alliance, and I like keeping my status there.

So, I now register for their Asia Miles. My travel agent (the venerable AMEX travel) tell me that the flight they booked me, the seats can’t be pre-booked, so I’ll have to wing it at the airport. Nifty. Thankfully, I get an aisle seat.

Now, as soon as I get on the plane from Hong Kong to San Francisco (delayed, might I add, by a few hours — where’s my compensation, oh wait, AMEX booked the flight, I can’t ask my credit card company for money now), I get a tad shocked. I have an aisle seat towards the back of the plane. The seats don’t recline. OK, they do, but they are a new design, and they recline inwards. This means that if you carry any height, you’re screwed. Sure this means no one ever gets towards your laptop screen, as they can’t recline backwards, but is this really what I want on a long haul flight?

OK, the seats have in-flight power. There are nice screens, and the in-flight entertainment is great. All this reminds me of Singapore Airlines (in fact, SIA’s flights to SFO via HKG/ICN still sometimes tend to not have power, unless you fly the new Airbus). Heck, the whiskey they serve on-board is great – Chivas Regal 12yo, and Johnnie Walker Black Label (not the Red Label crap you tend to get) — pity I don’t drink in-flight. But the seats not reclining?

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has encountered this: Cathay Pacific’s New Coach Seats (I’d focus on the comments, if I were you – and yes, I too am 180cm tall, just shy of 6-feet), Economy class seat comfort review (hardest seat, bad for lower back, “seats were the worst”), and the list goes on.

No one seems to want to fly Cathay on a repeated basis, on long haul flights. Don’t believe their marketing hype. SeatGuru doesn’t have much info on the best seat to snag either — because there is no best seat.

So, I have to fly Cathay back again from the US soon. But let it be known that this is the last time I will fly them on a long haul flight. I don’t care if you can shave a couple hundred bucks off, I was useless and not at my optimum for two days since arriving, and I’m sure the productivity lost, outweighs the cost of the savings in the ticket.

About a month ago, I was surfing the Net, reading my mail on GMail, and I spotted a smart ad by Kah Bintang telling me in a short span of words (in the top — sponsored links in GMail – or it might have been a sidebar link) that the new Hyundai Accent 2008 model was a 1.6L car, with a very reasonable price tag.

Normally, I am blind to ads, but the message itself was very captivating, so I bit, and clicked the link. I arrived at the 2008 Accent Home, quickly jumped to its specifications, was impressed by its price tag (compared to the Toyota Vios S that I was driving, this car beats it in many ways), and brought it up in conversation.

Conversation, you ask? Yes, conversation with my parents. I was telling them it might be a nice car to have, it comes with leather seats, etc. Within a month, I hadn’t realised they had ordered it, and the car arrived early last week, and they handed the keys over to me – an early birthday present. Nifty. Thanks!

But that’s not the point. I would have never even heard of this car, had it not been for the Google ad. Someone at Kah Bintang, that’s in charge of marketing/gathering sales/et al, know that your Google ad, definitely works. In fact, I think the ROI is greater – imagine paying a blogger to write a review, versus actually running Google ads?

If you know the person from Kah Bintang responsible for this, don’t hesitate to have them call me, I’d love to interview them about their forward thinking nature. And I wish I took a screenshot of the ad itself — I can’t seem to replicate it now!

The Proton Exora

In other news, today I was listening to mix.fm. I heard them present some fun fact, and then, they tied it in with an advert for the Proton Exora. Smart, I’ve seen them do this with Harvey Norman ads before, but that’s just usually with discounts — the fact that with the Exora, they made some effort to expand my knowledge, then lead me back in, it did seem interesting.

Of course, going to mix.fm’s website, I seem to be a tad disappointed. There has got to be a better way to display ads, no?

I heard about TwitterJobSearch on net@night, and decided to give it a twirl. I typed “mysql” and found 3,092 results in 30 seconds. You can then filter by job title, salary, skill set, job type, and more, as well as sort it by relevance or date.

Useful? Quite possibly. Would be more useful, if you could filter out Twitter users (like @itcareer, for example). Search that is semantic, instead of just word based. So “mysql in san francisco” will return relevant results for you.

If you’re looking for a job anytime soon, note that there will also be a Job Fair at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, happening April 20-23 2009, are you registered yet? Its a great place to network, and you shouldn’t miss it.