Colin Charles Agenda

The really big difference is that I don’t have to participate in interminable conference calls. That in itself makes a job worth quiting.

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Passion/Poppy, you failure of epic proportions.

Poppy is downstairs, Passion is upstairs. Today, is Thursday, traditionally lady’s night everywhere, right? Passion is closed, Poppy is virtually empty. This alone should have alarm bells ringing in your head. But my experience there, takes the cake.

Firstly, it took a grand total of 35 minutes to find our bottle of stashed Chivas. In the end, they admitted to not being able to find the bottle (they admitted that someone has stolen it), they gave us someone else’s bottle, scratched out their details and put my name on it. We noticed that there was less alcohol than what the custody card stated, and they gave us a couple of free glasses of drinks to boot.

Service, for an empty night club, SUCKED. Getting the lethargic wait staff to do anything, was mostly a waste of time.

So after all this waiting, guess what? They refused entry for a friend of mine. He so happens to have tried to come in via the main entrance (I just walked in from the side entrance, post valet parking). The excuse? Its ladies night and men have to pay.

I call a waiter over (the same guy that fumbled for 35 minutes to get me a bottle that wasn’t mine) to talk to the staff at the door. There are about four of them. Two beefy guys, and one spectacled fool who kept on insisting that they had procedure to follow. This after the waiter saying a bottle was inside.

I start to speak. I inform them that there is no one in the night club and there is really no reason why anyone should pay. Spectacled fool, insists its procedure and there’s a cover charge. I honestly feel like going in, taking my bottle out, and smashing it on his face.

But, some sense comes over them… Because one of the beefy guys decides that we mean business. My friend, and the three girls that accompanied him, come in with no hassle now. I say, rather loudly, “You did the right thing, or else…” The bespectacled guy isn’t impressed.

We finish the bottle as soon as we can, and this marks my vow to never go there again if I can avoid it. In fact, you should never go there again, if you can avoid it too. They are apparently only popular on Friday and Saturday nights, anyway. I recommend them to close, if possible.

If you need to go somewhere, in that area, might I highly recommend Thai Club (two floors of entertainment - upstairs is heavily air-conditioned, and serves a younger crowd), or even Rum Jungle. I know, I know, I considered Rum Jungle harmful before, but that was before they were opposite Poppy. They’ve now moved to the side, and are so much more sensible. Rum Jungle and Thai Club also have got good bands… Passion/Poppy? Just a DJ. Want eye candy? Definitely skip Passion/Poppy. Besides, only Passion/Poppy have a “dress code” even - Rum Jungle have learned from their ways, and I can walk in in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals (okay, Crocs nowadays).

monday, public holiday. some work, quick visit to pavillion, some food - we decided it was time for nice japanese, so kampachi it was. parents enjoyed it. rains were pretty bad, lots of flooding, rather annoying drive back.

tuesday, was more work, reading copy, wrapping up stuff, etc. i’m behind on looking into bugs affecting some distributions, so i should really get my act on that together. afternoon brought an sms that suggested dinner at klcc, with sk2, so naturally the day got brighter. left the house at 5pm, to reach klcc at 5.50pm. this normally is a 12 minute journey, too long, it was. motorcycles using tunnels they shouldn’t be in, disrupting cars changing lanes, with the cheek to honk? i can’t wait to report this to the traffic police when time permits.

managed to go grab some moleskines. mine’s running out, and kinokuniya sells it too. free gift wrapping as well, ftw! they’re prohibitively expensive here in kl, the next time i visit the states, i’ll just buy them for usd$10 that they’re worth (here its marked up like by rm20 or so).

i haven’t bought a t-shirt for myself in over eight or nine years. i attribute this to the fact that i get lots of clothing for free, and i’m usually happy to walk around advertising open source goodness. so a little surprised when i realised that a polo tee, is now about rm360. i’ll be sure to wear it at some stage…i think it might still be in its bag… my stack of bags and things getting lost in my room, is getting scary :)

dinner, nippon tei. i like their fried oysters. after that, meeting at old town. its good to hack on things together.

wednesday, brought on more work, some fiascos, and the fact that i now write on a wiki page internally, a little blog of my activities. it’ll serve as a useful reminder for any other conference chair, imho. back at old town for more hacking in the evening, and before that, was in mont kiara coffee bean, digging risk management.

today, is thursday. social scene looks bleak. just realised that there’s a bottle of liquor at passion that expires tonight. there’s some positivity in recent times - my liquor intake has dropped to nearly zero. quite likely, there might be a trip to passion tonight

oh, before i forget, caught big stan. its a decent comedy. i should admit that this wasn’t in the cinema, but at my friend’s place, with what must have been a pirated DVD; after all, its not out in the cinemas yet. rob schneider made it worthy, and jennifer morrison (from house) played her role well too

now, i want to find goldfish memory and see it. who knew it was a movie?

p/s: this living in the tropics, with the rain thing sucks! its still humid, i still wear shorts most of the time… grr

Old Town White Coffee is a place we’ve been hanging out a lot at. Its got wifi, power sockets, couches, good food and drink, great eye candy (bonus!), and is open till late.

Today, we found out that all their PCs that hold the orders (order{1,2,3,4}) have Samba shares. Open to all, naturally.

They use Crystal Reports. Have a custom front-end, with appropriate touch screen drivers, but the back-end is pretty stock. They use MySQL, Connector/ODBC 3.51.12 and also use SQLyog 5.30. I know the system is designed and deployed by NIT, it looks like their F&B POS.

Their use of MySQL (schema wise), includes using VIEWs, stored procedures and triggers (on UPDATE and DELETE).

I wonder how many point of sales systems are powered by open source software. This one runs Windows, but at least within the stack, there’s open source MySQL!

P/S: if you’re from NIT or Old Town, secure your order systems.

Calling all students!

Here’s an easy way to make USD$500 (grand prize), or USD$250 (five runners up). All you have to do is use the MySQL database (5.1) and the GlassFish application server (v2 Update Release 2) to develop a cool web application and write a review of your experience using these products.

The deadline for this is October 22, 2008. Remember to read the contest details, as it lists eligibility criteria, and how we’re judging the entries.

As a judge, here’s my advice:

• Make me go “wow!”
• Use some of the new features in MySQL 5.1 - think XML, event scheduler, table logging, etc.
• Make it ridiculously easy for me to judge the application - good documentation is going to help, but if the application itself is intuitive, it’d rock harder
• There’s no time limit you need to spend… 5 hours for ace coders, 20 hours for average coders… its up to you. Extra effort, usually means you’ll get a high rank

If you want to get started quickly, there’s a NetBeans IDE 6.1 with GlassFish and MySQL bundle. It only comes with MySQL 5.0, so you’ll still have to get MySQL 5.1, but that should be a piece of cake. NetBeans is after all, a seriously good IDE.

At a university? Got a notice board? Go ahead, and print the flyer. Spread the love.

Good luck!

I first heard of Stephen Fry when he narrated The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then, I saw him in V for Vendetta. Today, I can only highly recommend you look at Freedom Fry - Happy Birthday to GNU.

GNU is 25 years old. Wow, it has come a long way. The Hurd is nowhere to be reckoned with, but Stephen does talk about Linux being a pillar. I have no idea why he seems to mention gNewSense, as I’m sure the non-free binary blobs usually entails something like working wireless, or working video, etc. Ubuntu with is non-free blobs, IMHO, is the best choice for new users…

Its interesting to see the MacBook Air perched on his coffee table (try running gNewSense on that baby). Its also useful to note that the video is played using the Fluendo Cortado Java app.

Must watch video. And Happy Birthday GNU… you definitely shaped my professional life for the better

I’d rather have one breath of her hair, one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it. ONE.

… because I saw it again today and realised how its one of the movies I really enjoy the most

For a long time, I managed to use a feature in GAIM Pidgin that was known as the Buddy Pounce. Its described as:

When you set a pounce on someone, you can choose from a number of events, such as sign on or status change, and then you choose from a number of actions. These actions include everything from playing a sound (like an alert would do) to sending a message to the person, to executing a command. This action will occur the next time pidgin detects the event, i.e. the next time the person in your buddy list who you have pounced signs on.

I hardly use Pidgin any longer. I use its cousin, AdiumX, on the Mac (work IM? There’s skype and IRC). To do it in Adium, you have to right click on the contact, select Get Info, then set up a pounce in the Events tab.

Great, now you can hear when someone you care about signs in… With reference to ticket#921. Not very intuitive, but maybe I was seasoned to look for “Buddy Pounce”.