Colin Charles Agenda

It’s over! I can’t speak for the others, but I know I’m still recovering. In summary: the event was awesome.

The Organising Committee

First, a word of thanks, to the people that didn’t get enough of it – the amazing organising committee, who scurried around for both the days (and much before that too – besides, we only had 43 days), to make sure things were a-happening. In no particular order:

• Aizat – You rock. From handling the registrations (since we don’t have a good payment gateway in Malaysia, he had to see photos, scanned receipts, and a lot more crap), to handling the registration desk, to writing “updates?” to the mailing list, to creating the initial website, to updating the website as and when I tell him to, to handling the volunteers and probably so much more – you rock. Thank you. You are now officially the foss.my registration and website dude.
• Ditesh – From the initial website, right down to monitoring the halls, to giving suggestions to whom might be great local speakers, to dropping in and giving a most fabulous keynote, you rock.
• Angch – Hall monitor, to bank account bootstrapper, and all around great help, you rock. Thanks for also getting your company to be a sponsor!
• Yoon Kit – From the press, right down to the speaker gifts, if it wasn’t for you, there would be no opening keynote. You rock!
• Kaeru – From the initial idea, to handling the PR, for sponsoring the event, and for giving a last minute talk about ORCA, while the speaker was down with a bad fever, you rock. And folk, he did this all while changing jobs!
• Izhar – You did the posters. You did the amazing “I Love…” badges. You handled the food preparation. You also participated in a “side session”. You sorted out hotels. And you had exams on Monday (the day after foss.my). You rock for being an all round gopher! Your mother also rocks :)
• Yondie – You’re Mr. Subway. Thank you for sorting out the food, and thank you for harnessing the power of volunteers to make sure things ran smoothly. You are now officially the foss.my food dude (probably alongside Izhar :P).
• Wariola – You’re Mr. T-Shirts. Without you, there will be no foss.my t-shirts, so you rock!
• Gurdip – Not enough can be said about you. Thank you for giving us the great location, that was APIIT, to sorting out the logistics, the driver, the booking of hotels, to getting the nice (and easy on the eyes) volunteers, to making sure the network worked, to ensuring we had power sockets, you rock!
• Suanie – Without you, we would have no speaker/organiser/volunteer party. Without you, there would be no press. You rock, and we’re sorry you couldn’t be at the event (hope the weekend in Singapore was productive, though).
• Firdaus – For registering foss.my events, with the RoS, and for also going to get that bank account, you rock.

The Volunteers
Thank you for taking time off from your busy weekend, to come spend time with a bunch of free and open source lovers. There has to also be a special mention to Sean, who single-handedly sorted out the logo for us, early in the game.

The rest
Speakers, you rock. Without you, there would be no event in under 45 days (on Sunday, led the 45th day).

Sponsors, you rock. Without you, this event would have to cost a lot more money, and nobody would have liked that.

If I missed anyone, E&OE.

In conclusion
I believe foss.my has been deemed as a technical conference. Fluffy talks weren’t taken kindly to, even during the lighting talk sessions.

I believe foss.my will continue to exist in 2009.

I believe foss.my will be longer than two days, to ensure that there is enough time to move in between rooms, hack while you’re there, and so on.

So, to foss.my 2009, bigger and better, and a lot more well planned, than foss.my 2008 :) Don’t forget to give us feedback.

I don’t know if what the EpiCentre folk told me is true (about sustained sales of RM5 million/month for 3 months), but Apple has created the Apple Store (Malaysia).

I consider this a positive first step. For me now, I will not have to order engraved iPod’s through the Singapore Apple Store – I’ll do it right here in Malaysia (after all shipping in 1-2 days, is OK). In fact, I can’t imagine why I would order too much from physical Apple stores like EpiCentre or Machines anymore – unless I wanted to take advantage of their 12 months 0% interest-free credit card plans (Maybank, HSBC, American Express, Citibank, and probably a few more participate in this).

I said it before, and I’ll say it again – its a positive first step. Why? There’s a good chance, that they’re setting this up for the magical iPhone to come into the market. And in no time, we might see an iTunes Music Store. We might have crippled access, with no music/TV/movies, but its always a progression.

Not needing any Apple products yet (latest purchase: pink iPod Nano; latest gift arrival: new iPod Touch – thanks Sun), I am however still tempted to buy something from their online store. Why?

1. There’s a limited edition t-shirt up for grabs before November 24
2. Supporting their online initiative, to show that there’s a market for this sort of thing, and they should bring in more (like the iTunes Music Store, et al)

It seems there’s only one remaining iPod Classic, with a nice big disk (120GB). The last Classic I had, had a 30GB disk (and couldn’t store my complete music collection). Maybe this is what I need? Its sub-RM1,000, so an easy purchase to make ;)

They even have an education store, which is supposed to normally provide discounts, but from my cursory inspection, seems to suggest otherwise.

What are you waiting for? Go buy your Apple gear already.

Last week I found out about the Open Source Economy Conference 2008 held in Putrajaya, Malaysia on the 19th of November 2008. Its co-organised by Sun and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). Its also the “launch” of MySQL in Malaysia.

I only mention this because I’m speaking – check the agenda out. Don’t hesitate to register now.

my memory is fading. the last week has been really long, with sleep sometimes a luxury i didn’t get. it was filled with work (lots of it), and on tuesday, i had an interesting lunch with the maybank2u folk…

heavy rains… and then there was a nice, long, chat with sk2. it was so nice and long, that i’d completely forgotten when i was supposed to fly off the next morning. fifteen minutes after sleeping, the alarm rang, and there i was off to start the morning to head to jakarta.

its ok, slept on the taxi to the airport, checked in, slept at gates (no lounge access unless i take the train to the other terminal), slept on plane, arrived in jakarta. found my way to a taxi, and had another good 1.5hr sleep (fail distance from airport->location). arrived, found some lunch (event was oversubscribed, there was no more food for me, so i wandered to a starbucks), then gave my talk. the event ended after, and one of the locals took me to a mall to buy about five dozen krispy kremes.

then took a cab back to the airport, found an earlier flight, sms’ed sk2 on the off chance that she’d see me, got on the plane and slept some more. all in all, i think i slept most of the day, because all i was doing was being in transit, and my laptop wasn’t even juiced up (they had no internet or power adapters for me in indonesia, sadly). saw sk2, which is always fun.

thursday. spoke at a malaysian government event. then went to see sk2 again. fun ensued, while at the bookstore. lets see how far/often we go places. we sat at starbucks at the end of it all, trying to beat blogger into shape, and failing massively (me, that is). if it were straight html, it’d be easier, but the widgets are seriously fubar… say hello to wordpress soon. but starbucks was fun otherwise – hot flushes, is all i will say.

friday, work, and then straight off to the event location in bkt. jalil. long day, since we also had to do airport duty. saturday+sunday = conference. great success (as borat would say). sunday evening we (ruben, john, carmen) tried to find some sup kambing but failed – ended up in alexis.

and we’re back to monday. i’m tired. yet, pumped with energy all at the same time.

As a heads up, we’re one day towards foss.my and the wheel’s a turning. Our numbers are good – i.e. we’ve officially been oversubscribed. Looking at statistics last generated by Aizat, we have about 20 t-shirts left for those that have already paid to attend the event. That means if you’re still in the unpaid status, don’t hesitate to hop on over and drop us some much needed moolah.

The schwag report: Novell carry bags. Mozilla stickers, pins, tattoos, and more. The very nice foss.my t-shirt.

Just remember, schwag are of course for a first registered, first paid, first given basis :) There’s a limited amount of schwag, so what are you waiting for? Go on and pay us already.

You can also of course walk in to the event and pay on the spot. Its just that schwag will almost definitely be limited/non-existent!

Less than 20 hours to the event, or so says the countdown on foss.my. Excited!
Update: Just to be clear. If you’ve paid up, you’re getting your schwag. Officially, there are about 20 more slots to completion till we hit schwag fatigue, so beyond that, there are no guarantees of goodies. So pay up, and pay early!

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck – MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.