Colin Charles Agenda

Program in Java? Want to be challenged? Want to work in a startup-styled environment, yet be happy, knowing that the company itself isn’t a startup (i.e. its backed by over a decade of work, and cashflow)? Well, they are looking for a Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead and some Software Engineers, to all create an application for enterprise use. The requirements are here (in PDF), the salary is expected to be high (i.e. 15% higher than average Malaysian rates. at least — so think of a payrise!), and I’m happy to forward resumes over to the company, so drop me an email (with your resume) at byte@bytebot.net and tell me why you’d be a great fit.

Ready for a challenge?

Note: Company is based in Malaysia, so at this stage, I’m told, only Malaysians or those that have work permits for Malaysia, need apply.

A fan of TED? Yes, ideas worth spreading, question is when I can ever actually attend a TED event… And therein comes TEDx, which is an independently organised TED event. TEDx Kuala Lumpur is happening next week, on Wednesday, June 3, 2009, from 3-6pm, at the Plug&Play Technology Centre, at The Gardens, in MidValley.

I am so, definitely going to be there. If you’re in Kuala Lumpur on June 3 2009, you should definitely be there too! Pray tell, what else could be occupying your time then? ;-)

Apparently, the whole idea behind registering bloggers is coming back. The esteemed Information, Communications and Culture Minister, Rais Yatim stated:

“The idea is good, but we have to see it from the legal aspects and from the aspect of freedom of Internet use.”

What is this? A world of X-Men, where there are mutant registrations, in where the special powers are that of questioning the current administration and providing a more balanced (or biased) view of the political scene? Ptff.

Curious I am, about the Multimedia Signature Act. I don’t think anyone in their right minds, is interested in registering the fact that they write a blog. But its great to see the threat of bloggers so mainstream, that they’ve been talking about registration for at least two years.

I’ve been a big fan of Evernote for a while now, but have found it lacking in some areas: no Symbian Series 60 support for my mobile phone (yes, there is a mobile interface, but I’d like a native application), and no native Linux support (yes, there are workarounds through WINE, but its nothing like a native application).

It seems like the API is open. It seems like a real popular request to get this going on Series 60, and it seems like there may be wind of such a client, especially since they’re also doing stuff for the Android platform, but nothing concrete.

Does anyone know if this is happening? Failing which, maybe a Nokia Nseries Widget (WRT widgets) might be what I’m after (seeing this working on the N97 yesterday, I was truly impressed).

At this juncture, I need Series 60 support, more than I’d need Linux support. I don’t have plans on carrying an iPhone anytime soon, just to make good use of Evernote (which I must say, is impressive – full integration with the hardware, is very cool).

I was at the Google Maps Malaysia launch at No Black Tie yesterday. All round, the Google chaps did a great job at organising a fun-filled event, which basically meant I got to talk to a lot of friends (it was a combination of Barcamp, open source hackers, entrepreneurs and some new media folk – I think I spotted a smattering of bloggers too), and also meet a few new ones ;-)

• I guess the big deal about yesterday was the launch of http://maps.google.com.my. No longer will you be re-routed to the States, and have to specify, sometimes even up to postcode level. This kind of stuff has mostly been working for a while, but I guess its now official.
• When asked when Street View will come to Malaysia, there was no comment on the timeline.
• I saw KLue being mentioned, but there was no speaker from there. It seems like their event guide has been extracted via a mapplet, and placed on AppSpot, to give you a Events in Malaysia map “overlay”. Pretty cool, and can really be integrated well, into something else…
• VirtualMalaysia spoke at the event, showing how they did some copy/paste of the mapplets, and how they built somewhat of an app out of it. I think Yoon Kit tweets it best:
  

  Virtual Malaysia copy and pasted the javascript for Tourism Msia. @arzumy asks “How much did u charge for it?”. Its our money eh? #mymap

• Back to Mapplets: they’re mini-applications to run in Google Maps. You have data, it can be overlaid with Google Maps. This is worth playing with.
• Not maps related, but the AJAX API’s Playground is a useful learning tool. You can talk to all the Google APIs, and it becomes easy – copy/paste and things happen.
• When its finally time to write code, don’t redo, just reuse – check out gmaps-utility-library. Its all Apache licensed, so convenient to pop into your code.
• Its worth noting that searching for properties to rent/buy should be easier now, considering iProperty.com.my now is also powered by Google Maps.
• Are you a local business? Make sure you add yourself, in the local business centre.
• There were a bunch of international sites using Maps, but the only one that caught my eye was Travellr. I’d have remembered more sites, had the Internet been working…
• Highly amusing to see that there were people from the event management company, trying to show us how to use Google Maps Mobile. Poor girl had “fun” trying to demo this to Yoon Kit, Han, Ditesh, Kevin and I. Problem is, Yoon Kit, Han and I were already playing around with Maps on the mobile for a while, and had been sharing our locations with Latitude with each other for a while (for example, we knew that Han was on a highway about 16 minutes before he arrived for the event!)
• Naturally, no Google event is complete without a t-shirt. We’re all now proud owners of a blue t-shirt, which has a marker that says “I am here.”

Now a bit about the location (which in my opinion, was a little crappy):

• Kudos to Google for getting the valet service going at No Black Tie. I’ve never been there before, but my trusty GPS told me how to get there — and then I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if I had a device, with just Google Maps, and a 3G connection, and some intelligent caching (for when I hit network blindspots), and a GPS chip on board? I’d prefer that any day over Malsingmaps on my Garmin…
• WiFi was fail. Maxis Broadband 3G was fail. It seemed like Celcom was fail. The event location, near the stage, basically meant that you got no Internet. My phone (DiGi) still had EDGE though ;-)
• No Black Tie, doesn’t seem to have the best management. I personally would never hold an event there. Why? Because the management is quite liberal at trying to embarrass the event organisers. I was going to get a beer, when I was told that we were over the RM2,000 quota, and I can’t get a beer. He shows me his chit, saying how much over the tab we are — I don’t need to know this, and this is something you should never tell a customer. Take it up with the organisers, and solve it amicably. But what took the cake? Another bloke asked for two beers and he shouted at the top of his voice, that the tab was dry. I mean this is Google we’re talking about — they’re not exactly a company short on money, and they splurge on things, all the time. I don’t represent Google, but I felt bad for them. For what its worth, in under 3 minutes and 25 seconds Google had extended the tab ;-)

I’m a big CentOS fan. I think servers these days should either be Ubuntu Servers or CentOS based, and nothing else, if you’re going the Linux route.

CentOS 5.3, on the x86_64 platform, seemed to have an issue where yum would cause a traceback, with file.x86_64 0:4.17-15.el5_3.1. There is a bug open for it, but it apparently doesn’t happen on all systems.

The magic around this is to really just run yum clean all, and then run yum update. What that basically does is it cleans all packages that are cached in the system, as well as removes all header files used for dependency resolution.

I haven’t heard jokes about RPM hell in a long time… I am thinking that its mostly disappeared, and largely this is thanks to dependency resolution provided for by yum.