I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the …

I spent a bit of time today organizing myself for a bunch of trips next month.

Contrary to my blog posting earlier, I will be at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, which is on the 24th-27th April. But I’m getting into San Francisco in the week before, so if you’re up to meeting me, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I have a feeling that I’ll actually be staying in Santa Clara as opposed to San Francisco proper, but there should be public transport, right?

I should also be with my colleague, Arjen, who’s speaking at the Free OSS Forum Day, organized by Open Source Tasmania. He tells me that Pia should also be there, which should rock. So Hobart, here I come on …

Today, there seemed to be several interesting news items, so let me elaborate on a couple of them.

Besides the fact that the Mandrake founder Gael Duval isn’t part of Mandriva anymore, the part that interested me was the fact that he was running Mandriva’s Community Department. Their goal was “to improve Mandriva’s image in the open source arena.” Swap Mandriva, with MySQL, and thats me. From engineering grit right up to attending conferences, thats what Community does. Its funny thats what Mandriva chose to close first, seeing their dismal quarter results - basically without an OSS community, you’re nowhere in the OSS world.

I’m a regular lurker on #conary, and reading rPath Creates Malleable, Serviceable Linux Distribution made me …

I’m going to be at my first MySQL Meetup tomorrow. Its at the Mercat Cross, 456 Queen St at 7pm. This is quite near Melbourne Central, and definitely has a good view of the Vic Market night market. I hear (from AdamF) that there’s lots of beer on tap, if that catches your fancy.

We can talk about all things MySQL, and get more users into MySQL 5.1. Hello event scheduling! Hello partitioning! Hello tables in information_schema!

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm …

In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large - going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.

Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!

So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something …

As Kaj has mentioned, I’ll be at Linux Asia 2006, from the 8th till the 10th of February 2006. FUDCon Delhi 2006 is happening on the 9th, and I’ll be speaking on MySQL and Fedora: A Developer’s Overview. I think this fits well with the “developer, developer, developer!” theme thats going around these days…

David Axmark is also going to be around at the main conference, both at the Intellectual Property & Open Source panel, and giving us a conference keynote on Friday.

Plan on meeting a lot of people, have a few MySQL-related meetings and am generally excited to see Greg and the rest of the Fedora crew again (we saw each other this time …

Red Hat Magazine this month (well, okay, last month, I’m clearing out my tabs), has a feature on Linux and Asia. Of interest were:

• What does open source mean in India? - an interview with Javed Tapia (Director, Red Hat India), showing why India finds OSS important (software costs too much), how localisation works, and a bit about Red Hat India.
• Asia, the questions we ask - a great read, written by Michael Tiemann about his experiences in Asia. A question of interest: “What will be Singapore’s role in the technology industry of the 21st century?” I think thats the question most countries want the answer to, be it Malaysia or Australia. Its …