Colin Charles Agenda

Hactivist Richard Stallman takes on proprietary software, SAAS and open source – Tech News and Analysis: “‘Our ideals become forgotten,’ he said of open source eclipsing free software, and encouraged the audience to keep talking about free software.”

Richard Stallman is spot on. Read the whole article. I hope video makes its way online, because RMS is right. 

It further augurs well that I spoke with MÃ¥rten Mickos on Twitter today (he’s a former CEO of mine and a brilliant mind) and we got chatting on control. He says, “Every time you choose convenience, you lose a little control.” An interesting conversation followed naturally.

Every time you choose convenience, you lose a little control.

— MÃ¥rten Mickos (@martenmickos) August 6, 2013

Leaves me a lot to think about as I have over time chosen convenience over control and clearly it has come by because I need to refresh on my ideals.

Here are some things I think are well worth reading (also, I’m starting the year fresh with nothing in my tabs :P)

• Wired has a great interview by Steven Levy on Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing. Tim taught me to work on stuff that matters (fond memories of an O’Reilly Moleskine Christmas gift), and now continues teaching everyone to create more value than they capture.
• Blood Sugar or how the diabetes market is waiting to be disrupted. More needs to be done in terms of controlling this disease. We already have sensible trackers like Fitbit, etc. what more can we do to manage this?
• Why Samsung’s Man in Silicon Valley uses Apple Devices – interesting take in the MIT Technology Review on Yong Sohn, President & Chief Strategy Officer for Samsung based in Silicon Valley. 
• Another from MIT Technology Review is Installable Web Apps WIll Be the Next Tech Battleground. I see web apps as being important, and I’ve been thinking about this space a lot more lately.
• Paul Buchheit wrote an amazing essay titled The Gift. It is a must read on unconditional love & living life to the fullest.
• MIT Technology Review again, this time on disrupting college textbooks. Free Textbooks Spell Disruption for College Publishers profiling Ariel Diaz and his site Boundless Learning. I remember a time buying really expensive textbooks and realized that you only use them for a term, with very few that you plan to keep on your bookshelf forever. The second-hand market naturally thrives but they go out-of-date usually within a year. I know many in Malaysia that love to photocopy textbooks (which I abhor and would never encourage). Imagine free e-book textbooks that you can read on your tablet? Highlight? Have all your notes in one place based on the highlights? This will revolutionize education.
• Marten Mickos asks: What is Innovation?
• I’m always interested in new & innovation publishing mediums, and this summary post leaves a lot to think about: Frankfurt Book Fair 2012: Self-publishing, cell phones & startups.
• Back to a nugget from Tim O’Reilly, a must read is It’s Not About You: The Truth about Social Media Marketing. There’s a money quote there:

• Activism has been the core of our marketing ever since.  We tell big stories that matter to a community of users, and together we use those stories to amplify a message that we all care about. Framing ideas in such a way that they include and reinforce the identity of a group of people who might not previously have seen themselves as part of the same community allows everyone to tell their own story in a way that adds up to something bigger than any one of them might tell alone. And once they start telling their story as part of the bigger story, it suddenly looks like a parade. 

I had the pleasure to chat with my former CEO, Marten Mickos, at LinuxCon Barcelona on his birthday. Marten is prolific on Twitter (@martenmickos). I’ve always encouraged him to blog, so I’m glad that he now has two blogs: CEO blog at Eucalyptus, as well as another on Wired’s Innovation Insights.

We spoke about many things, but one of them was email. Marten always replies to emails very quickly and it has always impressed me. He told me he felt bad that now he might take up to a week to reply to an email. He jokingly blamed it on age catching up.

It got me thinking about my email backlog. Across all accounts, I am embarrassed to say I have 3,821 messages that I have to process. I’m sure quite a number of those will require replying (even at 10%, that is quite a number).

There is no better time than now to take over my INBOX. I have the next couple of weeks to be home and a little more relaxed, so I’m going to tackle this email backlog. Once I’ve paid off this debt, I plan to answer emails fashionably quick. I mean if Marten, CEO of Eucalyptus, board member at several firms, can do it, so can I.

Thanks Marten for continuing to inspire me to be better.

For additional inspiration, I plan to listen to Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself. I’m sure it is one of Marten’s better inspirational talks!

I’ve been collecting a bunch of tabs, MySQL related, that I think people might have missed during the holiday period.

Contrarian Minds: Marten Mickos – this is a great interview with former CEO of MySQL, now SVP of the Database Group, at Sun Microsystems. Its got a bit of interesting history, and thoughts about the future. There’s also some interesting photography.

Facebook is now at 150 million users. They grew quite a bit recently, it was just 140 million about a month or two ago.

Flickr has seen traffic reaching ten terabytes. As you know, Flickr runs MySQL, and they make use of InnoDB. Recently, Chief Operations Officer, John Allspaw, showed how fragmented one of their databases was. Reminds us all, that running optimize from time to time, is useful. Flickr is also using MySQL 5.0.51 currently.

Flickr make extensive use of Ganglia. I found that there are Ganglia graphs for MySQL metrics available now. Interesting stuff.