Colin Charles Agenda

What made Marie Digby? I’ve heard about her on the radio from time to time, while I do the unnatural act of driving somewhere. Now, I’ve been invited to an event, where the tagline says that she’s “a star born from YouTube”. I had to dig further.

Decided to watch the famous video. Its just her, sitting with her guitar, performing an acoustic version of Rihana’s Umbrella. Nothing fancy. I’m told she sat in front of her MacBook to make the “hit”.

Grassroots marketing? Bands try much harder, and still feel the pain of becoming somewhat famous. What makes her different? Beauty (she’s of Japanese-American heritage)? Sultry look?

I wonder what her tipping point was. She’s had it easy, when you think about it. The Internet has popularised so many good things, and even if you rewind back say fifteen years ago, there is no way an artist would have made it easily, via grassroots events/stunts.

Aren’t you glad you’re part of the free software revolution? If not for Linux (SuSE), Python, MySQL, and lots and lots of disk, you will not be seeing Marie Digby, now will you? And naturally, if not for the ease-of-use of her Apple laptop, and how they’ve become commodity hardware (15 years ago, there were for “graphics professionals” and were sordidly expensive). Times do change.

Maybe I’ll go to the event… if I’m not too jet-lagged (imagine, planning a month in advance to be jet-lagged)…

Technorati Tags: marie digby, music, youtube, trends, rihana, umbrella, macbook, apple, open source, free software revolution, tipping point

Who is the Dick on my site?
Dick Hardt

Most interesting keynote. About 1,000+ slides. Many slides per minute. Definitely a new way of presenting :)

• What is identity? What is Identity 2.0?
• Identity is a complicated topic, and you normally get the tip of the iceberg. Identity changes during your stages in life.
• Works at SXIP Identity.
• I wondered what the German’s thought about identity. Identat. “They’re German” <applause>
• Answers.com had the best answers for identity.
• There’s lots of different personas about a person. Women really are the masters of different personas (clothes, wife, mother, etc.). Reinventing oneself.
• Identity allows you to predict behaviour…
• When someone is in a “role” (fireman, etc.), you think you can predict behaviour. Is this identity? It’s who you are, not really, no.
• blame.ca (his website)
• Identity transactions… on where is identity used? Party identification, authorisation, profile exchange (information about a person so you know them better).
• “Do you want to present ID at a bottle shop? If no, you can rollback the transaction!” <applause>
• Photo ID is a reusable credential. This is an identity transaction.
• Reputation built up on eBay? You can’t take it over to Craigslist. Identity 1.0 is site centric, its a walled garden.
• identity20.com
• Facebook is becoming a new silo. URIs enable things to be open (LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, etc.)
• DataPortability.org – user centric
• Kim Cameron – Laws of Identity (read it)
• Device convergence – near field communication, phones doing more than make calls, etc.
• Digital natives and immigrants. What are you? CNN == news source for natives, immigrants tend to use newspapers. I wouldn’t use CNN as an example myself, but the drift is there. Digital camera (immigrant) vs. just a “camera” (native). The younger generation are all digital natives…
• OAuth spec – take a gander at this…
• Reputation services: blogosphere (“pagerank”), open source contributions, wiki, “human” (so stop typing captchas!)
• Viagra. You’re excited to take it. You can do new things!
• myhealth.sg was mentioned. Singapore on the forefront of Identity 2.0 and OpenID? Or is it CardSpace (Microsoft) related?
• What happens when you die? Your domain can be taken by someone else. Do they then become you, if that was your OpenID? Very interesting thought.
• He flies Air Canada, and loves to talk about his Star Alliance Gold status :) Jives well with me, I’m Star Alliance Gold.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqlconf, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, dick hardt, keynote, identity management, identity, identity 2.0, openid

Eli White from Digg presented. It was an interesting talk… He covered:

You are going to get hacked…
– SQL injection
– XSS
– CSRF (cross site request forgery)
– Session Hijacking

Slides (PDF, ODP) have SQL injection/XSS example, with the hole, the attack, and the prevention.

Technorati Tags: mysqlconf, mysql, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, eli white, digg, hacked, security, sql injection, xss, csrf, slides

Ahead in the Cloud – The power of Infrastructure as a Service
CTO Amazon.com, Dr. Werner Vogels

Pretty much everyone in the audience uses Amazon!

Announced: Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2.

Hitting one page, might actually go to 250 different services, before the page is generated for you. Shows the use of a tool (Amazon internal), that graphs it.

SaaS: Develop -> Test -> Operate

Hardware costs? Software costs? Maintenance? Load balancing? Scaling? Utilisation? Idle machines? Bandwidth management? Server hosting? Storage management? High availability? All this is the differentiated heavy lifting that Amazon bases their services on.

SaaS comes at a very big cost that you have to address.

70/30 switch: 30% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated value creation; 70% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated heavy lifting.

At Amazon, we expect data centres to fail. But we also expect software to tolerate this failure.

“Scalable Infrastructure that allows applications to meet infinite demand, cheaply and reliably” (statement, made with picture of large amount of Sun hardware)

Amazon S3 (storage), SimpleDB, EC2 (computer power), FPS (payment service). All this is scalable (increase/decrease capacity on demand).

Scalability. Availability. Performance. Cost-Effectiveness.

Growth: largest selection on earth, good customer experience, drives prices down, drives traffic, sellers, selection, and this is a cycle for growth. It brings a lower cost structure, that also lowers prices down then.

This means that incremental scalability is key to Amazon’s business. Grow one step at a time, consistently. Turn a fixed cost, into a variable cost, as your business grows seamlessly.

Elastic cloud: grow and shrink on demand, with minimal disruption to performance. Operational efficiency, fault-tolerant, and remember, everyone has different growth paths. Heterogeneity – do not believe that all your nodes have the same capacity! A year from now, you will have more powerful machines, your software must scale for this.

Everything fails, all the time. An epic truth.

Failures are highly correlated. By every possible worst way! Systems do not fail by stopping – they will fail by sending out garbage ;) Your system must be able to deal with that.

Determinism is an illusion. An illusion created in a very small space. “Let go of control!”

Engineer for performance at 99.9%. Remember, address uncertainty – acquire resources on demand, pay for what you use, leverage other’s core competencies, turn fixed costs into variable costs. Never every pay again for something sitting in your data centre doing nothing for you.

All data access at Amazon is primary key based. Eventual consistent, for high read volume and always writeable. Query-based access, was non-relational.

Primary Key Access: Amazon S3; Query-based Access: SimpleDB; EC2 with persistent storage for a dedicated solution

Persistent storage? Raw disk, attach a volume to EC2. You can also detach. Infinite scalability in terms of data. From snapshots, you can create new volumes.

“All you need is a credit card” – for AWS. Lots of laughter :)

Technorati Tags: keynote, infrastructure, amazon, aws, mysql, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, verner vogels, saas

I wish I had better notes, but I was enthralled by Jonathan Schwartz’s (CEO, President, Sun Microsystems) keynote. It was truly, very amazing an influential. He’s a great speaker, and very motivated (and I think he’s motivated a lot of the audience).

What is Sun’s Agenda?
Similar values, cultures, and similar dysfunction’s like any family.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center – 500 teraflop “open” super-comptuing facility.

“Computational science is the third mode of discovery, complementing physical experimentation and theory” — Daniel Atkins III, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastruture, National Science Foundation

The industry has valid, legitimate scientific purpose.

Improving society as a result of that understanding. What does it take to fuel developing economies? Or to make new scientific discoveries?

In Africa, a bank is giving mobile phones, to allow folk to increase wealth! The wealth is in the network, it can’t be stolen anymore.

An open source phone? Stay tuned, Sun thinks that industry needs to be disrupted.

What does it take to connect with your friends? MySQL :)

Like electricity, like clean water… “The Network has become a Social Utility”

I want Sun to be a Great Company, and a good company. You can’t buy the community. The greater you are, the “gooder” you are. Work with communities, drive innovation, and more opportunity is created for all.

Jonathan shows a map of places where all the blue dots are where people download MySQL. Take the map away, and you’ll see a beautiful picture. Its already the majority of the planet for instance. These folk, have decided that there is a demand for open source software.

Free software is taking over the world.

Today ZFS is under a CDDL license, but rumour has it, that this will change in the future.

“The Future Will Be Defined by Free… and Freedom”

“We want to be in control of our own destiny” – all those places downloading software… Freedom matters to me, because I want access to my own stuff.

The Amazon. Comprises of 10,000 rivers. They all fuel the Amazon River. Open source, is an ecosystem of many rivers… Sun is saying we’re pro-opensource, pro-free software. Put commitment behind many communities.

Individuals are making choices… MySQL might be used even without CIOs knowing!

Secret plot? Let people download, try it, use it, and they’ll change their view of how good it is. And there’s economic benefit (for Sun).

Technorati Tags: mysql, sun, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, jonathan schwartz, keynote

Chris Blizzard, now working at Mozilla and Linux integration, gave a most interesting talk, about Mozilla, and their new mobile initiatives. We managed to speak (but not nearly enough) about the mobile strategy afterwards (i.e. I think limiting it to the n810 or tablet like devices alone, seems myopic; phones are where its at), and I hope the conversation continues. Now for some quick notes.

– mozilla.org, is where products create motion. Been around for just over 10 years now
– Mozilla targets human beings (not developers)
– Focus on protecting open standards
– “Creating Joy!” for users
– Avoid feature creep (this is the secret of add-ons) – control the product, and just say, go build an extension. It isn’t just about customising your experience, but its about keeping the core experience joyous and uncluttered.
– Fix real problems on the web (i.e. pop-up blocking)
– 500 contributors to Firefox 3, 75 Localization teams, 200 people, 11,000 patches, 165+ Million users, added +45 million users in the last 6 months, and doubled in the last year – these are impressive statistics (I for one, am impressed by their developer community)
– Who are we targeting? Read Seth Godin’s blog entry “Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college“. Also, Stephen O’Grady’s Blog “Ode to the Common Man“
– Bring the full web to mobile. FF3 is where great technology for mobile exists.
– Apple has reset the idea of what the Internet on a mobile should be, thanks to the iPhone. They’ve definitely opened up the market for mobile based browsers. Note, no reason to redesign your website for mobiles in the future…
– Fennec – mobile browser experience
– Performance numbers on the n810 – faster than MicroB and WebKit. Not even optimised for ARM (i.e. no atomic locking), but already at a headstart
– Fennec will support add-ons. Touch and keypad versions are coming soon… Keep in mind all this is just getting started
– Android includes WebKit as part of the base platform. Mozilla on Android? Not quite yet, since Google wants only Java based applications. No mention of native applications yet from Google.
– Not really considered Series 60 (it would be nice), no talk of PalmOS, there is some form of Windows Mobile version, but its not released
– Gecko is hard to embed, in comparison to WebKit. The technology needs to improve, so that the gap that WebKit has, doesn’t widen further

Technorati Tags: gecko, webkit, mozilla, chris blizzard, lugradio, lugradio live usa, nokia, handhelds, tablets, mobile web, firefox, community, fennec, android