Colin Charles Agenda

so, the national union of malaysian muslim students are a bunch of morons. first they make gwen stefani dress up, because she’s got a past record of (get this!) “indecent dressing and obscenity”. these same jokers have made beyonce cop out on having a concert in malaysia. and they were the same jokers that got the authorities to fine the pussycat dolls rm10,000 for indecent exposure.

the idiotic student group says that the artists “need to understand our culture”. bloody tools don’t seem to understand that there’s more culture elsewhere, than their stolen culture. oh, and did i mention more cultures besides the muslim culture? its ironic that indonesia probably has more muslims than malaysia, only to find out that beyonce can dress up the way she wants there.

wong chun wai, in the star, has told them to pick on a worthy issue. claims that they have 10,000 dumb members, who’s Abdul Muntaqim to say gwen’s performance and attire is not suitable for malaysian culture? what is malaysian culture? is it not a copy, mix and merge from all the cultures that landed in malaysia? portuguese, british, indian, chinese, etc. and whats wrong with youths “emulating the Western lifestyle”? watching tv alone will get you that far.

these students, bums, who are provided for by the corrupt regime running malaysia, have nothing else to do. they don’t need to study, they don’t need to pay their fees, heck, they even get a huge allowance. hence, they spend their time on trivial issues. if you don’t like gwen, beyonce, etc. don’t bloody go to their concerts! no one is holding a gun to their heads and saying that they must go. or their puny-minded friends must go.

all i can say is, i’m disgusted. 50 years of nationhood, and malaysia is taking further steps back, on a daily basis.

Technorati Tags: politics, concert, gwen stefani, beyonce, malaysia, malaysian muslim students, national union of malaysian muslim students, culture, lifestyle

Having been to the inaugural WordCamp in San Francisco last year, and having a ball of a time, I’m so happy to note that there is now WordCamp Melbourne. Its on November 17, from noon-7pm at Watermark Bar, in Docklands.

Its not free, but a paltry $25, to cover venue leasing and some snacks/beer. Hope there’s WiFi at Watermark. And mad props to James Farmer for organising all this.

Technorati Tags: wordcamp, wordpress, wordcamp melbourne, watermark bar

Today, I had a problem. I’d been used to doing rpm -q --changelog <packagename> and generally piping that through less. I sat at a Ubuntu terminal, and wondered how to do this. Poring through the man pages for apt-get or even dpkg, proved worthless. So, I hopped on to #ubuntu on Freenode, to have a rather enlightening conversation:

Oct 11 10:11:37 <ccharles>      hi! does anyone here know the dpkg/apt equivalent to rpm -q --changelog ?
Oct 11 10:12:10 <Pelo>  ccharles, man apt and man dpkg see what it says
Oct 11 10:12:46 <ccharles>      Pelo: you'd think i had already tried that, and failed, which is why i came here

At which point, I’m wondering what the clue-level of the channel is. So I hop onto #luv, the channel for my local LUG, and ask there. Not long after, I post this back on #ubuntu:

Oct 11 10:34:19 <ccharles>      pelo: the correct answer next time, is apt-listchanges, or even zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz or if you have internet access, aptitude changelog <packagename> (with thanks to cafuego for telling me)

I remember in my active Fedora days, we used to refer to #fedora as a bit of a wasteland, largely populated by meat-heads. However, it was also the primary contact point for non-meat-heads, for a non-development question. And a lot of folk on #fedora-devel never ever joined #fedora. This is probably largely the same with #ubuntu/#ubuntu-devel. This creates a disconnect within the community.

rpm -q –changelog equivalents on Debian

• apt-listchanges is written by an Ubuntite (is that what they’re called?), and requires installing. It also requires access to the package .deb, which seemed counter-intuitive.
• aptitude changelog <packagename> – useful, but seems redundant. It connects to the Internet to fetch this data for you, chewing up your bandwidth, and requiring you to have Internet access
• zless /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz – the winner, quite clearly. No Internet access required, it pulls directly off your disk, and its all in less

However, RPM still seems to shine quite this bit more, in comparison. Maybe someone wants to update the Switching to Ubuntu From Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora guide.

Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, rpm, dpkg, apt, changelog, apt-listchanges, aptitude, irc, community

it was only after reading the amazing spunk that atul chitnis possesses, that i decided to get cracking, and submit to the foss.in cfp. i like how there’s no reason for special treatment, and a select quote would definitely be how foss.in doesn’t understand the concept of “status”.

a lot of modern conferences these days seem to recognise status (that’s probably also because, largely, the audience seem to recognise status). community events have largely lost their appeal, and slowly but surely turn into silly corporate (read: sponsor) driven events. at some point, you’ll ask yourself, whom you have to fuck to get a paper admitted at some of these events.

so, there are 60 talks available in the main conference. the rest are all “project days” based – much like a linux.conf.au miniconf, however largely controlled by the main conference. even the cfp process is the same. i think this will work amazingly well.

at linux.conf.au, while miniconfs work well, you’re not getting into the main conference. for a lot of folk, especially those attending the conference with some form of corporate backing, will find it harder to justify their presence, or go on their own pocket.

anyways, back on topic. i submitted a talk about what i’m currently working on, and how we’ve improved our architecture of participation. we’re slowly getting rid of the cathedral-styled development model, and imagine if we can mine india for more contributions! i’ve only heard great things about foss.in from jayakumar, and it seems like aizat and ditesh are also going, so here’s hoping my paper gets accepted, and in under 90-minutes, i inspire many more contributions.

also, if you haven’t submitted yet, note that there has been a cfp restart. and the closing date is now, saturday, october 20. read the page if you’re submitting, because foss.in isn’t a foss user conference, its about foss contributions.

Technorati Tags: foss.in, atul chitnis, miniconfs, architecture of participation

I updated WordPress yesterday, so am currently trying out 2.3, Dexter. No major dramas, all, really thanks to the Automatic Upgrade plugin, which I’ve been using recently (second WordPress version it’s upgraded).

One annoying bug, was seeing: WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]. If only I’d read the release notes before hand, I’d have realised the Google Sitemap plugin was to blame (there’s also a relevant forum post). Disabled that (for now) and all is well. There’s some slick in-built tagging, so I’m using the web interface to write this (something I haven’t done in a very long time).

Standardisation is important.

Tagging in Uploadr involves writing tags in the format such that its:
    australia victoria melbourne “notting hill” clayton

Tagging in ScribeFire, involves writing tags that are parsed in a different way (for Technorati):
    australia, victoria, melbourne, notting hill, clayton

Notice the commas (“,”)? Without them, your tags are all lumped together. I’m wondering if I should change Uploadr to similar behaviour as ScribeFire (or vice versa)? What do other applications do for tagging in a field?

It should be trivial to make this change, the question is if my patch will be accepted upstream. I’m already using a patched version of Uploadr, as I await the author to implement my patch (which adds a description field, which the Flickr API supports). Incidentally, PyGTK is pretty easy to get around with, with superb documentation making it easy for anyone to get on the bandwagon. More on pygtk programming later…

Technorati Tags: tagging, uploadr, scribefire, standardisation, tags, flickr, pygtk, firefox, gnome