Colin Charles Agenda

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

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?

At BarCampKL, I conducted a quick interview with Gen Kanai, the Director of Business Development, at Mozilla in Asia. He has vast experience, that ranges from starting the Japan office, to marketing, to helping open the Beijing office, and this year, its all about South East Asia.

Mozilla wants to know if there is a need for Firefox in Bahasa Malaysia? I asked Gen how hard it was to translate Firefox – there are over 60 localisations, and unofficially, there are over 100.

Bahasa Malaysia is about 40% complete, and the website needs localisation as well. While the system itself is not as simple as Ubuntu’s translation system, you don’t need to be a programmer, just know how to use source code management tools. You can use a simple text editor like Notepad, and move all the way to using Pootle.

Do you want Firefox and other Mozilla tools translated into Bahasa Malaysia? How will it help you (or someone else)?

At BarCampKL last weekend (wow, time flies), one of the more interesting talks I attended was Preetam Rai’s session, on Netbooks. Carolyn was suspicious that a Mac head was at a netbook session, but the reality is, I’ve always been interested in netbooks, ever since I picked up the Asus Eee PC 701.

I didn’t “live tweet” the session, but I did take notes:

• Keep in mind the small screen – 800×480 is crap. 1024×600 seems to be the new preferred resolution, and it might make things like Google Reader easier to use
• What browser? Chrome seems to work well – I’ve been Chrome free, considering I don’t run Windows… All this may change, but it seems like the interface of Chrome, the lack of a top toolbar, is a pretty good thing
• Dock, to make it more OSX like, Rocket Dock – read Preetam’s post about Netbook Tweaks 1: Rocketdock
• Magnification – The Magnifier, EZ Magnifier
• Anti-virus – use AVG (free)
• MSN Messenger – hack to remove ads, mess.be. Otherwise use Pidgin, which as an alternative to MSN Messenger
• Office – MSOffice isn’t so user friendly on small screens because the toolbars take lots of space. OpenOffice.org is also a problem, in terms of toolbars. Mozilla Prism, then use Google Docs, with offline mode
• Using Linux? Well, you can contact your local LUG
• Battery life? Turn of wifi, bluetooth when you don’t need it. Low power saving mode.
• Windows? Disable computer discovery, bluetooth management
• Linux? Mind the filesystem, also keep in touch with fstab. You don’t want to kill your SSD
• How do you speed it up? Upgrade the RAM.
• Keyboard? 701 has a horrible keyboard. HP seems to do pretty well with their keyboards. Ditto with MSI Winds, the Lenovo, and newer Asus EeePC’s – so the keyboards are getting better

So, with regards to Linux, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix seems to get the most traction. I am partial to Fedora… If I pick up an Asus 1000HE, do I just “enjoy” using Windows? So many thoughts…

Today at BarCamp KL, I presented a brand new talk: Advertising and PR, Bloggers and Integrity: Making Money, While Being Honest.

Advertising And PR, Bloggers And Integrity Making Money While Being Honest

View more presentations from bytebot.

The back story

On April Fool’s Day, I sent out a feeler to see if anyone was interested in a talk titled “Advertising & PR, Bloggers & Integrity: making money, thru honesty”. It seems like the response was positive, and it was to be scheduled on Saturday for BarCampKL. Wow, a few days to come up with a brand new talk… naturally, I asked people for feedback, and received them (right up till 7 or so hours before the talk was scheduled to be given).

Preparing for the talk

On Friday, I posted a bunch of notes that I had taken down in OmniOutliner. I gathered some feedback, and then implemented the whole thing into Keynote (this is incidentally also my first presentation in where I am not using OpenOffice.org Impress, a software package I had helped contribute to for a significant portion of my life). To boot, I also purchased the Keynote Remote application for the iPhone/iPod Touch, for USD$0.99. This moves me away from using the usual Logitech Presentation Remote. So let’s just say all this marked new ground for me, as I got to learn new software in an evening, including using the presenter notes, and so on.

Giving the talk

Considering I had never given the talk before, and was winging it based on notes I had created a day before, let’s just say it was a little rough on the edges, lacking statistics that I would have liked, and lacking graphics that I should have included. I’m sure there will be a 2.0 version of the talk, if I’m to give it elsewhere.

I was pleased that the talk had a standing room audience. During the talk there was active discussion. That’s what made it fun. Lots of participants shared their experiences, and it was people representing media buyers, PR firms, as well as the bloggers themselves.

Generally speaking, most people believed that disclosure should be the way to go. There is nothing wrong with making money from your blog, but telling your audience that you are doing so, is a duty to your readers. Its the right thing to do!

Conversation about the talk went on even during lunch, and I seemed to hear lots of positive feedback about it. Its a pity I didn’t get the whole talk recorded!

In closing

Expect a series of blog posts, that are more well thought out, and are logically separated on this topic in the near future. And to think, all this talk started with what I told David Lian, a few weeks ago, at the KLTweetup, about how I believe Nuffnang will be irrelevant in 2 years if they don’t change their business model. Not existing is hard (both founders have got deep family pockets), but becoming less relevant, I guarantee it (or I’ll eat a shoe — one made of cake, nonetheless ;-))