Archive for January 2012

MariaDB/MySQL users in Paris & Brussels

I’m about to head to Paris to present at the February meetup of the MySQL User Group in Paris, France. It happens 1st February from 6-8pm at the Patricks Irish Pub. Its free to attend, and I understand that SkySQL keeps this event afloat.

I’m also heading to my first FOSDEM right afterwards and will definitely hang out at the MySQL & Friends Devroom. There is an amazing lineup of speakers, with all talks being about 25-30 minutes, it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. To boot, Michael “Monty” Widenius will also be there, so expect lots of Salmiakkikossu.

If you want to keep track of where Monty Program folk are going to be to talk about MariaDB, make sure you’re subscribed to our news page, which also includes important release information. Pretty much every conference that we plan to attend (and have attended) is at the conference page.

I am looking forward to meeting & learning from many MariaDB/MySQL users!

Movies, January 2012

I’ve been on a plane quite a lot this month. Consequently caught quite a bunch of movies.

  • A Good Year – a romantic drama with Russell Crowe.
  • One Day – I like Anne Hathaway but this show is probably not one of her best. They pick moments from one day every year for some twenty years. Male star gets out of whack when she passes. Makes you always remember to seize the day. Carpe diem. Sometimes the best things in life are standing right in front of you.
  • What’s your number? – romantic comedy, just to pass the time over a meal
  • Killer Elite – most of Jason Statham’s movies tend to be action packed and this one is no exception. It’s based on a true story. I highly recommend watching this.

In non-movies, it’s worth noting that Californication is back! I’ve learned to watch Community, seems season 1 & 2 are complete so they are easy to watch back-to-back.

Popular Malaysian passwords (sample size=75,000)

I just read that about 100,000 most likely Malaysian Facebook accounts have been cracked. Well their passwords are available for all to see in pastebin. Upon checking, I only saw a little over 75,000 since the third file has been compromised. From that sample, I quickly derived that the most popular Malaysian passwords are:

  1. 123456
  2. sayang
  3. brokenheart
  4. 123456789
  5. rozaliqa75
  6. effaluve
  7. akucintaallah
  8. zzz999
  9. pradeebkumar123$%
  10. 12345678

The least popular ones in that sample set include having spaces, hashes, brackets, and more. So there are some secure ones!

Using one’s phone number seems to also be popular. Sometimes appending or pre-pending a string (like a name) to it. Using birthdays seems to also be quite common, sometimes also appending or pre-pending a string like a name to it.

And for those wanting to “further analyse” the dataset yourself, I just quickly used standard Unix tools, and you can do it too.

grep "Password:" part_* | awk -F":" '{print $3}'| sort | uniq -c |sort -n

Pipe to less, use head/tail, etc.

On killing Hollywood

Paul Graham recently published a new request for startups titled Kill Hollywood. It is definitely worth reading. The motivations behind such thoughts are clear. Filesharing is not killing the movie & TV industry.

“What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people.

Better ways to entertain people. This thought has been sitting in my head for the last couple of days while I’m just a stones throw away from Hollywood & have a pretty good view of the Hollywood Hills from outside my window. The RFS goes into more detail about games, apps, the possibility that exercise might take over, but to think broadly and figure out where the entertainment of folk are going to in the next twenty years.

The studios are making less profits because the way Hollywood is structured. This is why Sarah Lacy says to kill Hollywood, you’ve got to learn their game. Someone like Ryan Kavanaugh is using math to beat Hollywood at their own game — you may have seen Relativity Media, and that’s the company who’s funding many successful movies today. Sarah Lacy sums up the content game that will help us win against Hollywood fairly well:

“The lesson: Eyeballs aren’t equivalent to one another. For Hollywood to be killed, the Internet needs to focus on a metric other than eyeballs. It’s not about mass, it’s about good. That’s absolutely anti-YouTube and anti-Farmville and any other content which we expect to be rapid, mass and disposable. Disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s all that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.”

There is an experience of going to the cinema in where I am happy to pay USD$12 or RM25 for a seat. In the USA I believe in the ratings system, but in Malaysia where I watch most of my movies I feel cheated by the censorship board. But I still go and spend cash because there’s an experience. However I’ve noticed my TV & movie watching habits have changed — I wrote about how I consume Hollywood in 2011. I believe that in Malaysia (and most of Asia), one is forced towards looking at content via filesharing. Because Hollywood hasn’t grown up and they believe in making money from regions, delaying releases by regions, etc. Traditional models.

Of late I’ve quite enjoyed watching the Sundance channel on cable. On Friday in the USA Today, Robert Redford, founder of the channel and the film festival had this to say: “With the new technology creating all the voices and noise from bloggers and tweeters, it’s chaos,” Redford says. “Where are you going to get the real truth with so many loud voices barking? I look to documentaries as almost investigative journalism.”

That covers a set of genres. But independent films rarely cover comedy, action, etc.

People get entertained by different things. At different times. Some days a romantic comedy makes sense. Some days a chick flick is all that gets you going. Then you’ve got days when action is all you crave. And the list can go on…

So what are better ways to entertain people? Games? Interactive movies? How does everyone get paid fairly when you get away from the big studios? Do production costs then go down when you bypass them?

This is why people love the Cheezeburger Network. Or 9gag. These are new ways for people to entertain themselves. However the metric there is eyeballs and the content is disposable. People need substance to entertain them. I once said that paying $10 for Plants vs Zombies provided me with a lot more entertainment on my iPad than going to maybe 2-3 feature length movies.

I’m still thinking about different ways for people to consume media. Different ways for people to sink their time in. And I presume I’ll be thinking about this for long.

As an aside, don’t assume that independent media folk get “new media” either. Classic examples in Malaysia would be Nasi Lemak 2.0 and Relationship Status. Nasi Lemak 2.0 stars the controversial Namewee, who not only made the movie on the cheap (independently), he went on to getting it in cinemas and also at the same time did the entrepreneurial thing of in tandem getting it showing on cable TV. This subsequently got his movie pulled from the cinemas in question, rather abruptly. He disrupted the cinemas and the cinemas reacted in their traditional methods to pull his movie. But even today, you can’t buy a DVD or download a digital version… Even if you’re willing to pay for it (I know I am). More recently, Khairil M. Bahar made Relationship Status; however still with the traditional model of going to the cinema. No DVDs. No downloadable digital version. Its worth noting that I’d pay RM35-40 for a digital download (though I don’t think that might be everyone’s price point – experimentation needs to happen clearly).

Its sad to see that even young independent film producers aren’t moving where their audience is moving to. They’re thinking like studios are thinking. They need to be disrupted. After all, these Malaysian producers are forgetting that there is such a large portion of the Malaysian diaspora spread across the world whom are unlikely to step into Malaysian cinemas anytime soon. Imagine a day when I can read a review about the show, then automatically click on a link that allows me to either stream the movie now or download a copy. If it is a service that has my credit card details on file, this is a seamless process; if its individuals, I just checkout via PayPal, and am either seeing the movie on my TV or waiting half an hour or so for the download so I can pop it on my iPad.

Back to the drawing board. There are better ways to entertain people. There are better ways for consumption of media & content.

SCALE 10x – there’s lots of MySQL there!

I’m just about to get on a plane to head to my inaugural SCALE event. It’s their tenth year running!

In a world filled with NoSQL related media, its kind of nice to see that on Friday January 20 2012, we have a MySQL room right next to the PostgreSQL room (schedule). It is awesome to see that the track will have participation from Oracle, Monty Program Ab, and SkySQL Ab.

On Saturday for the main tracks, I’ve got a talk about the growing MySQL diaspora (just got larger this year in case you haven’t paid attention to the packaged up Galera product!). This one is a constant work in progress and I’m hoping to complete research closer towards March ’12.

Monty Program and SkySQL are also sharing a booth in the expo hall, so come by booth #65 for some interesting schwag (t-shirts, poppers, etc.). Looking at the schedule lineup, I’m surprised I’ve never ever been to a SCALE before – looks totally awesome. See you in LAX (well, we’re so close-by the Los Angeles Airport :P)

Growing out of Foursquare

It seems like after two years of using Foursquare, I’ve reached check-in fatigue. I’ve written my thoughts before after a year of usage.

Today I don’t turn the app on. I visit places but I can’t be bothered about checking in. If I’m visiting a new place, I might fire up the app to check on reviews. And I will continue using it for the Topguest integration. Beyond that, I can’t imagine why I’d be firing it up.

Some reasons to my lack of continued interest in Foursquare:

  • if I wanted to meet you, we’d be meeting. Coming to “catch” me at a place is not useful for me. I fixed this by checking into locations after I’d left.
  • many duplicate venues. Tips spread across all of them. No way to clean it up.
  • tips becoming increasingly less useful. People aren’t using it, ads are coming in, etc. frankly I’d like some way to not just see what my friends recommend, but friends whom have good taste/tastes similar to mine
  • hardly many establishments even care to offer check-in rewards, mayor discounts, etc. in fact the establishments in Malaysia/Singapore are easily countable. This I attribute to the company being disinterested in penetrating the market – I hope google places and Facebook check-ins become more useful as they both have local offices
  • after a while, the gamification, badges, etc just get boring
  • frequent roaming means I don’t frequently have a data connection enabled, which has helped me deplete my usage of Foursquare

In short, I don’t see the value from the application. I know that when I’m in San Francisco I can see value. Budapest surprised me with value again. But generally, it seems like value is tough to come by.

From a merchant standpoint, I’d like more control. If I know people frequent an area, I’d like to tell them about my establishment.

I do find the Explore function quite useful when I’m in a new city or I’m just looking for something to do. Sometimes I use it to gauge the parking situation at certain malls (a 10km radius from where I live covers some rather popular places :P). But it could be more useful again. Let’s say I want to search for the term “pork satay” in a 10km radius. Some people spell things like “sate”. Sometimes there’s no tips. Shops don’t normally label themselves after a food even though that might be their main pull.

Addresses are generally incomplete. Map locations can be wayward. Phone numbers and opening hours are non-existent.

The problem for me is largely dirty data. Foursquare would be a lot more useful if it were edited. And provided to me information, rather than data.

The idea is that dirty data gets fixed via crowd-sourcing. Get your users to do the work for you! Have you seen the lengthy application process to become a Superuser Level 2? Compare that to how easy it is to edit Wikipedia.

There used to be a movement to clean up Foursquare locations in KL. Eventually though, I think the users moved on, found busier jobs, and life took over. Crowd sourcing works; barriers matter.

Facebook and Google are at their primes here. They can win by providing information, rather than data. User generated comments are always useful, but building further filters with a wider network probably helps. Besides, I bet there are more connections on Facebook and more loose connections on twitter and google plus, in comparison to Foursquare for most. Google is already pushing getting merchants online, why not make them also focus on Places?

In the meantime, Foursquare is still on my phone. It’s usage is just severely reduced.


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