Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been starting to use Google Documents more and more, lately. Its great for collaborating with people, that are not within your Intranet - i.e. gone are the days of using the internal wiki.

But the Wiki has a good feature - the history of a page. Tools -> Revision History seems to solve that for me, in Google Docs (apparently, File -> Revision History works too).

It would be nice if there were more fonts available… some truly libre fonts, like Liberation.

On the Mac, another tool that’s worth installing is precipitate. It allows indexing of your Google Documents in Spotlight, so you can use “unified search” to find your documents on your desktop, and “in the cloud”. Haven’t found the equivalent for Linux.

This is interesting. Google’s Street View. Yes, I’ve seen a lot about it on the blogosphere, but I decided to finally try it out. The photo is of the house, where I used to live. Zooming in, now I can tell you that to the left of that, is where my dodgy landlord still lives ;)

Actually, more to the point. These pictures were definitely taken this year. I know this because I had the room in front, upstairs, and there were things sticking out between the shutters and the window. This picture is too serene, so must’ve been after November 2007.

I see good potential in Street View. Think about mashups with a site that focuses on you finding rental properties. Now people can comment on the property, look at the surrounding neighbourhood, and basically help you make a better choice at renting.

The real estate industry has moved online (in Australia, I can think of Ray White, LJ Hooker, at the top of my head), but its not really been disrupted. No, domain.com.au isn’t disruption - look who owns it?

I was mildly surprised to find out about HomeSpace.sg from the e27 unconference I attended a few weeks back. Its focus currently is only for homes that are for sale, but they focus on the important aspects - like is it near an MRT, what kind of shopping malls are nearby, if you’re buying a property and have kids in mind, what zone to head to and so on.

They’re mashing it up with Google Maps. Pity there isn’t Street View in Singapore, huh?

Street View does 360° views as well. Nifty, if you ask me. See the surrounds. Does anyone know of a real estate disruptor in Australia, yet? Otherwise, there’s definitely room to start coding one…

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that their student Filippo Bollini had crafted a particularly well written update; it’s worth checking out for mentors wondering what sorts of information to collect from students or for students wondering what kind of details are most useful to their mentors.

Congratulations Filippo. I expect great things from you (as does Brian.)

Start your engines!
Students, and mentors alike, this is the week that the Summer of Code starts! Well, coding anyway. Its very encouraging to see all the weekly reports flow in, and once I catch a breath, I’ll be summarising them for all to see and keep up with how the MySQL SoC students of 2008 are doing.