Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been on what I consider, a blogging break. In reality, I’ve been working, and then having a modicum of a social life, finding less and less time to write blog entries. I have morsels of half-baked ramblings saved, so expect a load of posts to show up soon…

luna:toblog ccharles$ ls |wc -l
29

For a comeback…

I have been checking in my photographic equipment. I already carry a backpack with 2 laptops and various other tech gear (it probably weighs in at around 10KG, which airlines can frown at). Of late, I’ve also started carrying a briefcase. Where does my camera gear fit? In checked-in luggage of course!

This can be anywhere in the reigns of 3 Canon bodies, a 30/1.4, 50/1.4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 17-40/4, and a couple of flash units. Not exactly the cheapest of equipment, as I’m into good glass (read: L).

However, the one place I don’t tend to check equipment in, is when I fly to and from the US. The TSA have a silly rule that says your bags must be unlocked, or else they will break the lock for you. This has naturally led the paranoid me, not want to carry any professional camera gear into the US.

And today, my paranoia proves right. I found out that Matt (Wordpress fame) lost his camera gear, as did another blogger.

Yes, this is on a certain particular American airline, but I wonder if its just baggage handlers that are dishonest with them, or baggage handlers that are dishonest in general? Also note that insurance tends not to pay (afaik, anyway) if your camera equipment or laptop gear is checked-in.

What are options for the technophiles in us, that fly a lot?

Its worth noting some website changes. First, I dropped Skribit. The widget has been sitting there unused for weeks, so I’m thinking that’s software that no one, besides its founders use. “Is Skribit proving useful?” is the question they ask - no.

Next up, I’ve stopped using Technorati tags, and have decided to use Wordpress tags. I’ll still be using categories, as well as tags to complement the categories. Why? Wordpress has the feature… Technorati still gets updates/pings from my blog, and creates its own “tags” (largely from what I can see, from ways I categorise my post) that it sees my blog represents.

Besides, now I can add tags for relevant events, and RSS feeds can be generated from it. Good for people just wanting to follow notes from a certain event, and aggregations of the specific feed for said events.

The great Interwebs have caused my tabs to expand, but here are a few bits I think a lot of you will find useful.
(Should’ve posted this about a week ago, but somehow, it never made it)

• Joel Spolsky’s Travel Survival Guide - Joel recently went on a tour to promote FogBugz, and he comes up with some sensible tips. His air travel tips might be a little too technical, but the fact that they fly first class alone, interests me greatly. As someone that spends a great amount of time in a tin can, in coach might I add, I can appreciate companies that place you in business or first class. Large companies like IBM and HP generally have policies of placing anyone flying longer than n hours in business class - open source companies haven’t quite got the hang of this yet.
• A month with FreeBSD, Zope and Plone - KageSenshi is a Fedora contributor, and currently works as an intern at Inigo Tech, the company started by my friend, Khairil. Main focus: Zope, Plone, and FreeBSD. The blog entry is interesting, because you can see that he enjoys interning for Inigo, is gladly willing to provide free publicity for Inigo, and it seems like he’s truly proud working for a startup. Thats a feeling a lot of employees in larger organisations don’t seem to have any longer - they just become corporate drones, IMHO. Here’s wishing Khairil and Inigo all the best in keeping the startup feeling alive and kicking.
• Why Comp Sci Grads Can’t Hack (and why you need them anyway…) - Its refreshing seeing this in words, from someone else, other than me. Reading this, and the article that spurred it: Is Computer Science Dying? > Computer Scientists Can’t Program! can be pretty useful. A 3-4 year bachelors teaches you an array of languages and concepts, that in the end, one becomes something of a “know it all”, yet not an expert in any domain. There is just no room for you to become an expert, because the curriculum just isn’t free-flowing. Writing a library management system over and over again, in a different language even, just makes no sense at all, does it? (I picked on a library management system because Ditesh, Prabu and I had a good laugh about this yesterday).
• CCPlus - This is Creative Commons at its best. I can do a By-Attribution-Non-Commercial, and also add a +Company Commercial License. This is what I’ve wanted for a few years. Now, when will Flickr implement this? In fact, sharing the original sizes for CC-licensed things on Flickr has always bugged me - I’m fine with everything but the original size (duh, I upload original JPGs). This will also be fancy for work, like training materials. I have a feeling I’ll be using this one very, very soon.

I was just listening to an episode of G’Day World, and Cam was mentioning that he owned Australian culture (Google g’day and his podcast ranks #5 or #6). So I thought I’d Google myself.

I hit up google.com, entered Colin Charles, and to my dismay, my blog ranks number 3 in the list. Its preceded by:

• Colin Charles Award Winning Wedding and Portrait Photography - it has the domain colincharles.co.uk and has a PageRank of 1
• Music Books, Charles Colin Publ Brass & Jazz Methods… - it has the domain charlescolin.com and has a PageRank of 3

And then my blog, which has a PageRank of 6. The above two websites have got the strings colin and charles highlighted in the URL, of course. So am I to understand that if I wasn’t bytebot.net and had my name in my domain name, I’d rank higher? Or is Google’s index just broken?

Technorati Tags: web, google, search, index, pagerank, domain, name

I found it rather appalling that kablog was going to cost me money. And the idea of downloading via Handango, i.e. Registering via the mobile web, just wasn’t for me.

Luckily I found the J2ME version, which is open source based and hosted on sourceforge. Initial thoughts? The software can use a lot of improvements, i.e. To become more user friendly. Its been so long since I entered HTML tags into my regular blog posts (Circa pre-2004, when I was writing a html journal).

What, no category support? We all know the xmlrpc interface supports it… Can’t seem to load images off the memory card either… Maybe image blogging is best done via an app like ShoZu, which has Flickr integration. YouTube too, so video recording is something on my to play list.

Caught:

• The World’s Fastest Indian - inspiring story, telling you, you can still achieve your dreams when old, and when everyone writes you off. Some Down Under-isms, and how it is when going to the US clearly made me chuckle
• Bulletproof - this came via Quickflix, and I realized that I’d already seen it before and not logged it. The wonders of cable TV, ala ASTRO, while I was in Malaysia. Its a funny show, with a bit of action here and there…
• Super Size Me - terrestial TV had this. Amazing show. I knew McDonalds was bad, but I’m pretty certain that my bulking up in recent years was caused by McDonalds, pizza, and Snicker bars. Slowly thats all being cut down, or cut off, but fast food is probably a really bad idea.
• Ghost Rider
• Wild Hogs
• Norbit
• Death to the Supermodels - utter rubbish, don’t ever waste your time watching it. Quickflix’s recommendations are getting worse.
• Kinky Boots - terribly interesting, great inspiration to remaking and reinventing things.
• Lonesome Jim - boring, put me to sleep, even the presence of Liv Tyler didn’t help.
• The Sweetest Thing - wow, television has come a long way in showing something I actually enjoyed. Funny, Cameron Diaz show, about taking that leap.
• EuroTrip - a teen flick, seemed very much like Road Trip on steroids, but I enjoyed it much (also on television).
• Derailed - the last good movie Quickflix has sent. Its excellent. The plot is something you can’t figure out till the end. Justice is served, pity that all the crooks die in the end :-(
• Bobby - amazing cast, all connected together by JFK. Interesting concept, but I think this might have been money better spent elsewhere. Watch it for the stars?
• Borat - its out on DVD. Incredibly funny. Crass. Though Ali G in my opinion, was much better.

Of course, when I cancel my account with Quickflix at the end of this month (the value I was getting was certainly not good, with each DVD costing at least $0.05 more than if I got them at a video rental store), I certainly want to watch a bunch more “old” movies, that I’ll probably just list here, quickly:

• Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
• Win A Date With Tad Hamilton
• The Good Girl
• Boy Eats Girl
• Chocolat
• Ghost (but I remember getting this DVD, its just some 8000kms away, and I’ve seen bits and bobs on telly)
• Matchstick Men
• Changing Hearts
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Les Miserables

After typing that all, I realized that this would be best kept in Tomboy. But if anyone has recommendations or wants to tell me something in the above list sucks, by all means, do so.

Dear Interweb (really Linux on Laptop people),

Do you recommend a Turion 64 X2 or an Intel Core 2 Duo in a laptop?

My main aim is to make it run Fedora with all its bells and whistles (and hope it lasts longer than 2 years; the older IBM can’t do Xen in FC-6).

Are Dell’s a good buy? Are their three years comprehensive warranty worth buying (much like its a necessity for the Apple stuff)? Is the Inspiron or Latitude the more affordable versions of the Dell? Why can’t I see Firewire in their specs? Whatever happened to good ‘ole PCMCIA slots?

Size isn’t really a factor, I’ve become used to lugging 15″ wide screens for a while now, even during travel.

One thing I’ve found funny with the Dell website - I can’t untick MS Windows or even MS Works. I apparently need to have them. Can I return them without hassle?

So, a while back, Dr. Nah, announced that my-opensource.org will be no more. I guess its a sad day, because the ever (in)famous myoss@my-opensource.org list, which has been around since 1998 (or earlier?) is now, no more.

It is now at myoss@lists.foss.org.my it would seem. And Khairil, who runs the box has created a rather important list for the newbies: one to get their Questions answered.

Of course in myoss tradition, it has expanded the discussion into one that asks if a forum is better, and a whole bunch of other things. Knowing them, it’ll get a lot larger, but its fun reading ;-) And if you’re new, and have a FLOSS related question, don’t bother about the rants on myoss, just post to the Questions list.

Technorati Tags: foss, malaysia, myoss