Colin Charles Agenda

Anyone from Microsoft reading this? If you are, get me a ticket to Microsoft Tech.Ed South East Asia 2008.

Interesting talks look like:

• ARC341: When localization goes bad by Chad Hower – the OSS world can learn a lot about just translating the UI text into another language
• The entire Database Platform Track is interesting (duh!), especially Database Recovery, reporting services, and the overview of SQL Server 2008 (one can always learn, esp. with info about spatial data types, database compression, and so on)
• TLA330: Concurrency and Parallel Programming by Justin Lee – seriously, I don’t think .NET when I think concurrency, parallel programming, high performance. But I’d like to be impressed, nonetheless
• TLA335: Conquering XML with Visual Basic 9.0 by Lisa Feigenbaum – Say goodbye to XSLT and hello to VB 9 is the tagline. Interesting (VB is now at 9…)
• The entire Office & SharePoint Track – obvious reasons, I like office software, and SharePoint I must say, is most interesting (though Khairil will tell me Plone does it all too)
• SBP322 – Messaging, Identity, and Workflow in the Cloud by Nigel Watling – It has the magic word “cloud” in the title, I must take a gander… esp. with Microsoft Live! and their APIs that they’ll announce soon enough
• WUX332 – How to Build an App like Twitter? by Dirk Primbs – Interesting, because I kind of know Twitter goodness, and have a real interest in messaging platforms. No specification of language, et al, but I am certain it’d be interesting.
• Most of the Windows Server Infrastructure Track, with regards to virtualization, SVR425 – SMB v2.0 in Action by Ralf Schnell (where he even mentions Linux in his abstract), et al

You can ensure I’ll write interesting blog entries (maybe with video interviews) from what I learn. Heck, you guys should learn to hand out media passes, because there are a few talks that really do interest me..

Let’s see if Dear Microsoft works like Dear Lazyweb ;)

Picking up my mail today, there was the venerable Expat Magazine in my inbox. Out came a DiGi flyer, offering their business plans. What interested me?

Worker Finder™
Worker Finder™ will tell you where each employee is – based on the nearest base station to the location of the employee’s mobile phone. All with the convenience of an online interface.

Find out more, at their mobile enterprise page. RM40 for 200 searches (“pings”, if you must).

This is smart. I mean, the facility has existed ever since cell towers came to play, just why hasn’t anyone monetised on it before? Kudos to DiGi on finally, trying to.

Brings up questions of privacy though. As an employee, would you want to turn off your business phone, after hours, for fear of your office tracking you? If you were planning to skive off work, would you turn the phone off before leaving, in the event that this service tells you the last recorded cell phone tower?

Lots of thoughts, though I’m assuming once this is offered to parents, they’ll have an added bit of piece of mind, for their children. After all, isn’t the excuse to buying kids a mobile phone these days, because of safety?

Sparse notes, from An Open Source Project Called “Failure:” Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. Both lists of panel members are inaccurate (and I seemed to have forgotten to take the list down, myself).

Blocking anti-pattern
feature you really want implemented, someone blogs it saying they’re going to do it, and a few years later, there’s nothing done

Docs? We don’t need no stinkin’ docs!
Look at SQL-Ledger and their documentation… this is our hero… Project around for 10 years, and most people end up using a fork of it instead.

Don’t screw around with licenses. Licenses are a social contract defining what people can do with your code and what you expect from them when they use it. Most open source license enforcement is done via peer pressure, not court order.

Community members have emotional attachments to licenses and responses to changes in them.

Sparse notes from the talk, I noticed Sheeri recording some video, so sitting through that at some stage might make sense. There were no slides, this was a panel discussion. Suggested reading: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source.

Does Open Source need to be “Organic”?
Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts’o

Taking code, and slapping a certain license on it, doesn’t a successful software project make.

Blurring the distinction, by marketing. Not doing any work to get external contributions.

Open sourcing a product one plans on “genociding”, its really bad.

“Corporate sociopathic Druckerism” — Brian Aker

“As long as the source code is open, let the market decide. MySQL is largely inorganic, and its a success. Much of it comes down to choice.” — Stephen O’Grady

Mark Shuttleworth has pushed the idea that forking is OK. Look at Launchpad: take a project, fork the project, make your change, and you can publish your tree that people can use. The wonders of distributed version control.

Its up to a company to decide if they want an organic or an inorganic project. Its your code, do what you want with it. In the future, an organic project may outstrip your inorganic project.

Netscape: inorganic piece of open source (with Mozilla). Firefox: forked the code, turned it into an organic model, then there was success.

Is Firefox really the best example? Look at what it did for Netscape Corporation or AOL? This won’t work well with the Pointy Haired Boss.

What was your goal of releasing the product under an open source license? If marketing buzz, then you make lots of PR, etc… then go home. If your goal is wanting to cut your development cost, you’re going to be disappointed with an organic model. If your goal is ubiquity, you aim for an organic model.

Commit access actually means you’re a worker bee. It doesn’t mean a free wheel to push features, it means you’re the garbage man – you collect everything, you sort everything, and so on. Let’s rethink what it means to have commit access.

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this really leverages Sun in many ways.

Its worth noting that Sheeri was at the lightning talk, and has a shorter, 8 minute video recording too.
Update: s/nothing/noting

I was at part of the Open Mobile Exchange at OSCON today, so here are a few scraps of notes that I found interesting (from various speakers).

While we do live in the shadow of the iPhone now, this is going to change.

Every person in the modern world uses Linux multiple times EVERY DAY (even if you don’t know it). Linux is everywhere.

The AppStore is something that’s making the iPhone rock. The reason Windows is so popular, is because there are so many applications. This is changing in the open mobile world: think Android, for example.

There are 3.3 billion mobile phones (more than PCs, cars, telephones, credit cards, and TV even).

When Apple sends a million phones in the weekend, its a drop in the ocean when Nokia sells a million phones a day! The iPhone is about usage (German iPhone users use 30 times more data; Google notices 50 times the number of searches from iPhone usage)

• User Interface – Vimeo has a video, “OpenMoko train wreck” which compares to why its a FAIL versus the iPhone
• Access to Device Characteristics (camera, location, accelerometer, network, security, privacy) – today you really don’t get access to this, this needs to happen, really!
• Standards
• Performance – Firefox 3 for example, is very performance oriented. Remember, we’ve become bandwidth gluttons (webpage size has tripled since 2003… 22 times since 1995!). We’ve all been spoiled by having high broadband connection… look at Yahoo!’s 14 Performance Rules (34 today).

There are numerous mobile web browsers, and so little documentation about them today.

Leveraging Mobile Open Source for New Wireless Apps and Services
Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager
(instead of Hal Steger)

• Push email, PIM synchronisation
• Younger generations are using more than just voice, in mobile – its SMS, data, chat
• Nokia Ovi (http://www.ovi.com/) – Nokia is using this to monetise user generated content

Average American gets 3,000 visual stimulus messages per day. That’s a lot of advertising!