Colin Charles Agenda

Seth Vidal meant a lot to many people. He touched lives without even meeting people in the flesh. I’m lucky to have met and worked with a great man. 

I met Seth on IRC, affectionately known as skvidal sometime in 2002/2003. We worked on The Fedora Project while we were both outsiders (i.e. non-Red Hat employees). He was a sysadmin at Duke University back then.

Seth was funny, charming, and very welcoming. He always offered great advice and provided good direction. He was a leader without seeking a position. He was a great mentor. When times got tough, it was private chats with Seth (and a select few) that made me continue. Volunteering is tough, and in the opensource world there are plenty of egos to deal with; Seth came with no ego, no airs, and was always down-to-earth and an awesome chap to make sure that the bad things would soon pass.

We had many conversations from IRC, to private mailing lists, to in-person meetings. It probably happened at the very first FUDCon in Boston (a time that Boston was quite snowed in). We met, chatted, and I’ll never forget all the amazing people who organised it because I was underage in the USA then, and couldn’t legally drink – workarounds were found. I met Seth’s partner as well. The early days of the Fedora Project, we were all like family.

Over time, families grow and tend to move on. The Fedora Project grew by leaps and bounds. I moved on to work on other things, leaving me less time to work on Fedora. 

With Seth however, we were always connected. He would occasionally drop a comment on Flickr. With the advent of Google Plus, Seth and I chatted more. Sometimes he’d surprise me with a reply on Twitter.

Two weeks ago, we lamented on a Google Hangout how we hadn’t seen each other, in the flesh, for quite some time. We decided to rectify it at Flock in August.

One month to the date, right before boarding a plane from Frankfurt to Sao Paulo, I find out that Seth was killed in a hit-and-run while biking. A horrid way to go for someone who was only 36, filled with so much potential and a very bright future. I read the note that Red Hat posted, and I’d encourage all to read it. It will only bring tears to your eyes.

Its sad to note that his warm welcome and mentorship will not be felt by new contributors. It’s sad to know I’ve lost a friend. It’s sad to note that I never told him how much his mentorship and chats meant to me. Whenever I run yum, I am forever going to remember Seth, and what he meant to me. 

“Mr. Maduro’s presidency is still viewed as illegitimate by roughly half of the Venezuelan electorate, who voted for challenger Henrique Capriles in April.” – Mary Anastasia O’Grady in Why Venezuela Offers Asylum to Snowden.

So in Malaysia, 51% voted for the opposition, but thanks to the constituency-based voting system, the ruling coalition secured 60% of the seats.

Do Malaysians view Mr. Najib’s leadership as illegitimate?

I recently spoke to some emigrants who left Malaysia for Australia about five years ago. They are settled in, and have given up their Malaysian citizenship so are no longer voters. Many friends that I know whom have started families end up giving up their Malaysian citizenship to become Australian.

So Malaysia has over a million emigrants. How many of them are still Malaysian?

This all came back to me when I read: The Best Hope for France’s Young? Get Out.

THE French aren’t used to the idea that their country, like so many others in Europe, might be one of emigration – that people might actually want to leave. To many French people, it’s a completely foreign notion that, around the world and throughout history, voting with one’s feet has been the most widely available means to vote at all.

Leave that kind of voting to others, they think, to the Portuguese, the Italians, the Spaniards and the Africans – to all those waves of immigrants who came to France over the course of the last century. France has always been a land to which people dream of coming. Not leaving.

I just read that MCMC blocked 6,640 websites since 2008. That’s an average of about 1,300 sites blocked a year. Reasons to get blocked:

• fake bank websites
• copyright infringement (I presume these are torrent search engines, MP3/MP4 hosts, etc)
• pornography 
• insulting the royal institution

I have less issue with blocking fake bank websites; but rather than blocking them, they should be prosecuting them to shutdown. This is the same with sites infringing copyright – you get the content removed via a takedown notice, failing which you attempt to shut the site down. You don’t use resources to block the site.

Now, what about pornography? Isn’t it bad enough you can’t pick up pornography at your friendly local magazine store? Malaysians seem to have an appetite for porn, and I wish they woke up to realise that this isn’t a bad thing. Its much worse to have an urge and rape your child/sister/in-law/a stranger. 

The royal institution – does the MCMC know how to draw a line between insults and discourse? Malaysian authority generally has no clue of the difference between disloyalty and dissent. There is no institution that is off bounds for questioning – all societies deserve the right to ask questions in an open fashion.

Insults and slander on the Internet will not disrupt the political stability of the country. Insults and slander are published in mainstream media, by politicians, so I doubt the average Joe on the street is going to make a change. But if enough people start thinking and their minds start opening up, what it can do is impact a regime change. And remember, slander and defamation have their own laws that can be applied from the real world. Sedition needs to just go.

Why do we pay the MCMC to police the Internet when really, the onus should be on the user? If I’m a concerned parent, I could install (and pay for – i.e. spur economies) software that filters my own connection. 

A question no one has asked or received an answer for: Where is this complete list of 6,400 websites?

Is the Malaysian economy experiencing a boom or is the economy experiencing inflation? All the Maybank ATM’s I’ve visited recently have begun dispensing RM100 and RM20 notes as opposed to RM50 and RM10. 

Timing is everything. I wrote about how MySQL man pages were silently relicensed away from the GPL. It was picked up by a lot of sites: Hacker News, Slashdot, LWN, and probably more. That led to a bug report in Debian (#712730) to complain that MySQL is no longer compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). That prompted Norvald Ryeng who’s active in Debian (thanks Oracle!) to file MySQL bug #69512. Almost immediately Oracle said it was a bug, where Yngve Svedsen pointed to the buildsystem: “This is indeed a bug, where the build system erroneously and silently started pulling in man pages with the wrong set of copyright headers.” That then prompted Tomas Ulin to write about how The MySQL Man Pages ARE Available under the GPL. Case closed, many on Hacker News attributed it to Hanlon’s razor. Most news sites updated it with the bug, and The H also wrote an article: Oracle bug accidentally removes GPL licence from MySQL man pages.

We learned about this issue from MariaDB Jira and spent some time looking at it. We looked at the MySQL source tarballs, and looked at 5.5.30/5.5.31/5.5.32. This issue is present in a release since 18 April 2013 (5.5.31) and a subsequent release on 3 June 2013 (5.5.32). What is clear is that this also affects 5.1, 5.6, and 5.7. This has been an issue for about two months.

So this issue is written off as a bug. Great. Its fixed because it was noticed. It’s noticed not because it was just reported in the bugs system, but because there was a huge amount of traffic around it. While Tomas might say, “Reporting a bug is always a good way to communicate with us,” I doubt this would have been fixed in record time any other way. Also, I don’t need to rehash all the issues with the public bugs system.

I’m not about to start conspiracy theories here because that isn’t my goal. Our frame of mind since last week’s RHEL Software Collections news has been focused on documentation as well. Sheeri Cabral, an Oracle ACE Director, has had a rather interesting conversation on Twitter about our documentation. man pages aside, we’re improving documentation tremendously, and have over 2,700 articles in the Knowledgebase.

One thing is for sure with Oracle as steward for MySQL: the public perception of Oracle isn’t at its best and generally no one assumed this to be an accident.

Now let’s focus on something celebratory and positive: MySQL (NDB) Cluster 7.3 is now a GA. I’m excited by the node.js connector and the auto-installer. Can’t wait to give it a try. Congratulations all round to the Cluster Team at Oracle.