Colin Charles Agenda

The videos I’ve recorded lately, have come out of a Creative Vado Pocket Video Camera. I considered getting the Creative Labs Vado HD but at USD$229, I thought I would give it a pass. After all, I only purchased the Creative Vado for a mere USD$65.85 (list price: $99.99). OK, I picked up a pink version, saving me $14.10 from the silver model, but who cares? Its a nifty little toy. It is all enclosed in what feels like a rubberised coloured sleeve, and the buttons are very easy to use. It almost feels waterproof. There is no optical zoom, and the digital zoom seems to be kind of useless, and the LCD screen size sure seems a tad larger than the Flip cam’s.

The whole camera feels cheap, and very light. It takes a rechargeable battery, and it recharges over the USB port (so no AA batteries here — if its flat, it has to charge via USB). There seems to be enough to record 60 minutes of video on my unit, which is more than enough. I have no idea how long the battery lasts, but I would presume I’ll get a cycle or two.

The USB port is at the bottom, and there’s this little rubbery bit for you to pull it out (the Kodak and the Flip cameras tend to have a button of some sort). Unfortunately, the rubbery bit does get a little squashed when you’re mounting it on a monopod.

Audio quality seems to be tolerable. Even from a distance of about 3 metres, I can grab the audio just fine. Projector screens at that distance of course, don’t seem to render much detail (then again, it was a projection of a spreadsheet… so not the best example).

All in all, its pretty tiny, but surprisingly feels pretty rugged, and it can definitely easily fit into my pocket. Compared to the Flip’s even, this camera seems to be the smallest and thinnest available. It is also the only camera in its class, that doesn’t come with a carrying pouch of sorts (in comparison to the Kodak or Flip offerings).

Playback on the Mac, with Perian installed, seemed to show me that with VLC, I would see the video but not hear the audio. However, if I chose to open the clip in Quicktime, I could hear audio and see the video. Wonder what codec pack I’m missing (for ADPCM), then? For the geeks, file(1) spits out: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 640 x 480, 30.00 fps, video: XviD, audio: ADPCM (mono, 14000 Hz).

Some sample video:

• Taken at face-to-face interview distance
• Taken at about 3 metres away from the subject speaking. Also notice the screen (a spreadsheet), so not exactly clear
• Audio about 1-1.5m away with a pan around the room

Will I recommend it? Sure. It seems to fit the bill of a tiny video camera that gets the job done at the price point its available at. Will I get it even if its silver, or at the MSRP? Probably yes ;-)

Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

1. Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he works on this cool stuff at NetEdge, the startup he’s currently attached to).
2. Advanced memcached use cases in where you get best practice information on leveraging memcache, a software package that all the big boys use.

Frank also says, “If you’re not coming to the MySQL Conference, you’re losing out”. He’s right. You should be there. Look at all the amazing sessions, all the amazing networking opportunities, and more? He clearly specifies that the tutorial selection this year is pretty incredible, so make sure you’re signed up for Monday! Plan your sessions ahead, otherwise you might miss out some of the important things.

The MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 runs from April 20-23, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre. Don’t hesitate to register as there are plenty of interesting sessions there, next week.

We were at the University of California, Berkeley, yesterday. Dups picked me up from the Hyatt, and we headed out there (despite the traffic jams caused by the major winds the night before — 50+mph winds!). Lunch was in Berkeley, and we met up with our Sun counterpart who deals with University Relations.

At about 3.50pm, we were told that our talk which was scheduled from 5-6pm, was actually meant to be at 4-5pm. Oops. I immediately sent a text message to Farhan, and he told me he was a few minutes away.

While the attendees all sat down and ate the pizza, we put on a little show for them, and then started at about 4.10pm. Farhan walked in a little later, and by 4.30pm, it was Q&A time.

Lots of interesting questions: why did Sun acquire you, how do you make money, is it true that MySQL cannot scale (surprised this question was asked after the presentation showing all the big ticket sites using it), is BigTable better, what new features can there possibly be to add, and more.

After that, Volker Oboda (from PrimeBase, the folk that bring you PBXT, and more – a picture of Volker and Dups talking earlier), Dups and I headed to grab a beer at the university pub, before heading back. All in all, good fun. A few photos are here.

So, the minor snag of it being an hour earlier, was taken by us in good stride. Today, Dups will visit San Jose State University, while Farhan and I will visit Stanford University. I had wished that the attendance was greater than the 20-25 or so that we had, but oh well. The slide deck is one prepared by Dups, that is pretty standard, that even Sheeri and Giuseppe are using.

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

My trek to the USA this time around, was mired with issues.

First up, I was flying a new airline – Cathay Pacific. I had generally flown United or Singapore Airlines to the States, because it just seems to work better — plus they’re Star Alliance, and I like keeping my status there.

So, I now register for their Asia Miles. My travel agent (the venerable AMEX travel) tell me that the flight they booked me, the seats can’t be pre-booked, so I’ll have to wing it at the airport. Nifty. Thankfully, I get an aisle seat.

Now, as soon as I get on the plane from Hong Kong to San Francisco (delayed, might I add, by a few hours — where’s my compensation, oh wait, AMEX booked the flight, I can’t ask my credit card company for money now), I get a tad shocked. I have an aisle seat towards the back of the plane. The seats don’t recline. OK, they do, but they are a new design, and they recline inwards. This means that if you carry any height, you’re screwed. Sure this means no one ever gets towards your laptop screen, as they can’t recline backwards, but is this really what I want on a long haul flight?

OK, the seats have in-flight power. There are nice screens, and the in-flight entertainment is great. All this reminds me of Singapore Airlines (in fact, SIA’s flights to SFO via HKG/ICN still sometimes tend to not have power, unless you fly the new Airbus). Heck, the whiskey they serve on-board is great – Chivas Regal 12yo, and Johnnie Walker Black Label (not the Red Label crap you tend to get) — pity I don’t drink in-flight. But the seats not reclining?

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has encountered this: Cathay Pacific’s New Coach Seats (I’d focus on the comments, if I were you – and yes, I too am 180cm tall, just shy of 6-feet), Economy class seat comfort review (hardest seat, bad for lower back, “seats were the worst”), and the list goes on.

No one seems to want to fly Cathay on a repeated basis, on long haul flights. Don’t believe their marketing hype. SeatGuru doesn’t have much info on the best seat to snag either — because there is no best seat.

So, I have to fly Cathay back again from the US soon. But let it be known that this is the last time I will fly them on a long haul flight. I don’t care if you can shave a couple hundred bucks off, I was useless and not at my optimum for two days since arriving, and I’m sure the productivity lost, outweighs the cost of the savings in the ticket.