Colin Charles Agenda

I was at the December foss.my meetup, something I haven’t been to in a while. I had told Aizat that I’d attempt to record the session, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t find the AC adapter for my video camera!

With less than an hour to spare, I decided to give Qik a try. It seemed to work in my initial testing, so I headed to the location and decided to give it a twirl.

Executive summary? It just worked. AeU had a good enough WiFi connection, and broadcasting Mohan speak live, just worked.

The MyOSS Meetup
Mohan talked to us about oAuth. His slides are online – Mohanraj – Securing Your Web Api With OAuth. If you want to grab the video, don’t hesitate to look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Note that there are also comments from the live chat feature – very cool.

Why is it in 3 parts? I received three phone calls during that one hour session, and everytime the phone rang, and I cancelled the call, it would end up in me having to restart the streaming. Oh woe!

Live chat? Allowed a few others to join in on a myoss meetup, without actually being there… There might have been five people chatting, with two actually being in the room ;)

My initial thoughts on Qik

• Its dead easy to setup. I broadcast video now at my Qik account.
• It allows export to .3gp (which I presume will work in real player on my Nokia), and mp4 (which may work on an iPod?). It doesn’t do .ogg, but neither does anything you can find hardware for commonly…
• It doesn’t seem to playback in my phone, in browser (with OperaMini or even the standard Series 60 browser). It also looks like playback in the iPhone doesn’t work. I understand kyte.tv fixes that (but its woefully slow in Malaysia, so a waste of my time)
• It seems to be pretty choppy on my UMTS connection. Bad Maxis… So there’s lots of buffering, before
• When it buffers, it uses the phone memory, instead of the memory on the memory card… this means that with about 100+MB free on the e71, you run out of memory after about 10 minutes of video… and then it kind of hangs the phone (typical of S60 devices). It involved rebooting my phone once
• The moment the connection resumes to qik.com though, everything buffered gets uploaded in an instant. Great!
• 1 hour of video knocked 2 bars off my battery, while using WiFi
• Receiving phone calls, breaks video streaming. This is annoying. Continue recording, please!
• There seems to be no way to concatenate videos together. It would be wise, considering the problem above, where you actually get phone calls…
• It integrates with Twitter. So those following me there, or on FriendFeed can know when I’m broadcasting something live. Smart.
• There is mapping capabilities on the website… but it didn’t seem to integrate with the GPS in the phone. Why? Maybe I need to look harder
• It looks like it integrates well with iTunes… so this is a great tool for video bloggers and video podcasters… with enough adoption, I see this as being crowd-sourced JenniCAM… a way for the current camwhores to become videowhores!

There seems to be a little trend of Qik users now… han and aizat are broadcasting BarCampJB live on Qik. All in all, hat tip to @thechannelc, whom gave me that “aha moment” before going to the meetup – I saw her short clip of StartupCampKL, and was amazed that it was live, coming off an e61i…

I give a lot of talks, but not a lot of pitches to VCs. But if I were planning to, I’d definitely recommend you to watch David S. Rose on pitching to VCs from TED. It’ll eat up fifteen minutes of your life, but the pitch coach, is simply fabulous. Heck, you can learn a thing or two for normal presentations too…

I took some notes:

* People – convince them that you are the people and convince them you are the one they are going to invest it
** 15-30 minutes at most
* Convey integrity, passion, experience, knowledge, skill, leadership, commitment, vision, realism, coach-ability (ability to listen)
* Business models, financial requirements – this is normal
* Timeline: 10-30s to get attention (grab the emotional attention), and keep on getting better, better, better, and then knock them out. A logical progression (think like a staircase)
** validation, believable upside (don’t lie!), things I know or understand, things that make one think, no typos/errors/etc.
* when speaking? use images, or something like what steve jobs does
* slide deck: company logo, business overview, management team, market, product, business model, strategic relationships, competition, barriers to entry, financial overview, use of proceeds, capital & valuation
* always use presentation mode, always use a remote control, hand outs are NOT your presentation (lots more information as it has to stand without you), don’t read your speech, never, ever look at the screen

Thanks to @ditesh for pointing this out.

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

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

With my MacBook Air, I aim to have less tabs open… Its got something to do with having 2GB of RAM, maybe.

Yebber
Maybe I like somewhat ditsy looking girls, but if you’ve never seen Lunch with Yebber I highly recommend it. Good food within Singapore is the aim. Only complaint? I have to watch it in-browser, and not on my iPod. I find it interesting that Yebber is aiming to pay people in “Yebber dollars” for reviews. Its definitely a motivator….

At the e27 Unconference, it was asked if Wikipedia was started in Singapore, would it have been that successful? I think if the Wikipedia equivalent that is Mahalo, was started in Asia, and there was monetary gain, it will be very successful.

PDF Import in OpenOffice.org
First up, you know that OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 is out now, right? In that case, take a gander at the Sun PDF Import Extension. Its limited: no PDF form support, no editing say in Writer (it just works in Draw and Impress), but its a good start.

Charlene Li leaves Forrester
Its an interesting reason:

I was once asked what was the best career advice I ever received — and it was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months, because research showed that people typically master a job in that time period and fall into a routine.

I’ve yet to post a review of Groundswell, but in short, its an excellent book.

Religious Social Networking
ZoeCity is a network for Christan folk. The idea behind it is sensible (shared values, etc. – get in the mind of an evangelical person, its “interesting”), and I know what database they’re powered by, and I’m hoping there’s traction for them to hit scalability issues so it’ll be an interesting story to talk about :)

Shinsei embraces open courseware too
Shinsei Bank is releasing their banking methods (normally a closely guarded secret), as open courseware. Of course, it will be licensed under the Creative Commons. They’re on YouTube, so don’t hesitate to watch their video about them announcing the release of their IT methods. Hat tip, Joi Ito.