Colin Charles Agenda

Today, I acquired a Dell S2409W 24″ full HD LCD monitor. Its been a while since I’ve connected external displays to my laptop (on Linux, they are fun to work with), so today, I thought as one of the tests, I should see how VLC performed, on the 24″ monitor.

Video -> Video Device

But then, how does one get VLC to display on the secondary monitor at full screen? My repeated attempts were getting me to only see it on my main 13″ display. A little prodding brought me to the Video -> Video Device menu option. There, you can choose either Screen 1 (your LCD panel on the laptop) or Screen 2 (the external monitor). Immediate win!

Just wish this was automatic (ala, the Mac way), or a little more obvious.

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database – so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out – they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka Merlin), offered in the cloud, with advisors.

No word if they’re actually running Merlin, or what kind of MySQL builds they’re running. They have a FAQ that I suggest you read, pricing has not been released, but I think this stuff is totally cool and has a future. I mean, you can run your database using their services and EC2, and if you need to do load balancing (Proxy, anyone?), or replication, they’ll set it up for you.

Its going to be real useful for startups, that are already embracing the cloud and going the EC2 way. This is just yet another service, they’ll probably pay for. Because scaling your database, sometimes, isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Can’t wait for a beta invite. If I get one, I’ll give it a twirl and tell you how it went.

Note: This is a Y Combinator company, I first read about this in TechCrunch, and apparently, there was some mention of this during their cloud event last week, where Lew Tucker, Sun’s VP and CTO of Sun’s cloud computing initiative was at. I however don’t know anymore than what I’ve seen online, and lack any other insider knowledge.

A couple interesting things coming out of startup land.

For one, Posterous has a little writeup on Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way. Good things to take away include using Sphinx/Solr for search, but the real important takeaway for the MySQL crowd is Storage engine matters, and you should probably use InnoDB. If you’re writing an application, know your storage engines. There are also bits to tell you how to use query_viewer and New Relic to help you fix database bottlenecks, use memcached later, and more. Its a great read.

Next up, there’s How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. I hope Bret from FriendFeed writes more on their infrastructure over time. Its interesting to see that they thought of going the CouchDB route, but never saw it as “proven” technology (in comparison to MySQL).

Found a cool Malaysian company, eoe. They apparently have physical stores, but what’s cool about them is online printing of photos — something which I believe is totally new in Malaysia.

They’re cheap – RM0.30/4R print. They’re even trying the viral marketing thing – get bloggers to write about them (no, I am not participating) in exchange for free photos.

I might try there services at some stage, but not today. Why? Because I have to upload photos through my browser. Their “Easy Upload” app displays a silly message saying they don’t support Firefox (so I don’t get the fancy pants editing of images, et al.).

<free advice>If they want to be a smarter Malaysian company, they would partner with Flickr, and harness the Flickr API, so that people can make easy prints from Flickr. After all, advertising for Flickr is already done for free, thanks to Maxis (they love advertising Flickr and how easy it is to use on their phone network). Printing images that are already there, rather than re-uploading (with slow, unreliable Streamyx) will make a whole lot more sense. Besides, each photo coming out of my camera, is probably 5MB in size — so I’ll pass.</free advice>

Here’s wishing Eoe much success, and hope they partner with the likes of Flickr, or just harness their darned API, for easy printing.

Two weekends ago, for Valentine’s Day, Sara and I decided to spend it up in the mountains, and the closest one we found, with enough fun, was Genting Highlands (going down to 18°C is good for us living near the Equator). Besides the trip being absolutely fun, we had intentions of visiting the casino to try our hand on the tables — unfortunately for us, it was crowded and there wasn’t even a single seat free on any table!

She asked me about card counting and how its done. I explained a little, and somehow we got onto conversation that you cannot bring laptops into casinos (I remember Crown Casino, in Melbourne will ask you to keep it at the coat check). Genting was surprisingly lax. She then asked me what about if it was on her iPhone or something – since these phones are significantly powerful enough.

I thought about it for a bit, and said, “Yeah, its definitely possible”. Upon further thinking, I figured it can’t be that hard to hack up even. So it comes to me as no surprise to see that someone else has already done so :-)

It seems Hi Lo does this and more. Available from the iTunes App Store for a mere USD$0.99, even! Its most definitely illegal (two more apps, Card Counter, and Blackjack Card Counter exist even), and you can be thrown out of the casino for this.

Today, maybe an astute casino security manager will look for iPhones. But tomorrow, there may be apps like this on Android phones, heck, even on Nokia’s Symbian platform (the 5800 XpressMusic has a touch screen that may be ideal for this). I wonder when casinos will start sending mobile phones to the coat check (the guards are already looking out for camera phones, etc. that point to the casino floor — this is especially the case at Crown where there are restaurants inside the casino grounds).

What about a mobile application that communicates with the cloud? Offload processing, and you can run simulations that are even more demanding for games like baccarat or roulette. Or is the common smartphone today, capable of it? Hmm…

So, I don’t read dead tree newspapers (dislike newsprint, think I get more unbiased news online, anyway), but I wish I had got The Star from a few days ago. Why?

Because Anas Zubedy published an amazing ad. He spent about RM40,000 on it. The gist of the message?

Please stop the power chase, call for a truce and focus on the economy.

Malaysia is about the only country that seems to focus largely on political power plays in this time of day. Every other country has a news service and a government that focuses on the economy. Our economic news seems to hardly cover the mainstream — lowering interest rates, losing value to the USD, job loss, and more. Politics though, still the focus.

Stop the fighting. Its childish. We didn’t elect a government to lead us into more screwups. Fix the economy. If you’re Malaysian, read the ad. If you’re not, realise that we might say we’re “Truly Asia” and multicultural, but that’s just on the surface — finding a “Malaysian” is hard (note: I feel for Zubedy, because I too like to call myself Malaysian — but I’m a rare breed), so maybe you’ll get a true picture from reading the ad.

And if you want to know more about this colourful character, there’s an interview with Zubedy, where he focuses and strives on unity. We need more forward-thinking Malaysians like Zubedy. We need Malaysians, period (you know, stop focusing on racial lines — stop race based parties, etc.).