open – Made by Mikal

MythTV talk at Google

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 14, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

I'm giving a MythTV talk at Google in the next week (although I can't find it on the events calendar at the moment, I'll update this post when I do) so I've been playing with MythTV 0.21 a little more than I have in the past. Its pretty cool. I'm still writing the talk, so I don't know 100% what it will cover, but I'm thinking it would be good to include some of the stuff from 0.21 as a teaser. Storage groups, the flash player in MythWeb, and the tweaks to the theme system seem like good things to include. Does anyone have other things they think are really cool in 0.21? Oh, and I'll have to cover guide data for the US, so it might be time to catch up with my MythTV email backlog once again. Hopefully in you live near Silicon Valley you can come along to the talk and we can chat afterwards. Update: I found a Google blog post with the details. To quote the most important information: Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Michael's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at…

This would be me pimping tcmalloc

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 16, 2006
Post category:Link

Uber cool Google written malloc implementation saves day at Wikipedia. Rusty objects to the 6mb memory overhead. I guess the overhead is a big deal if you run lots of binaries, which isn't always the case.

Open Source document management from Alfresco

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 11, 2006
Post category:Link

An Alfresco employee (Alfrescoer?) posts about some of the interesting things they've learnt about being an open source company along the way. The comments about PR being more effective the cold sales calls is especially interesting. I argued for years at TOWER that we should be paying more attention to people searching for our product, instead of paying pretty boys to drive sports cars to sales presentations that everyone secretly hates. If your product has a good reputation and people can find it online, surely the customers will come to you?

Lego Mindstorms NXT and open source

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 2, 2006
Post category:Link

I had a gander at the Mindstorms NXT at the Maker Faire and it looked cool. It looks cooler now that it's firmware is being open sourced.

Thoughts on the first day of the MySQL user’s conference

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 26, 2006
Post category:Mysql

So, I attended the first day of the MySQL user's conference yesterday, which was the tutorial day. Overall I was fairly impressed. Registration was easy, the actual rooms presentations are given in are comfortable, the PA system seemed to work after some initial problems in the morning tutorial I attended. The conference center seems to be big on retirees hanging around, which I thought was weird. Each room comes with a little old lady, whose job appears to be to read a fiction novel at the door. I really have no idea what else they were achieving. They seemed to be having fun though. I did find it a bit odd that the only drinks provided by the catering staff during the day were acidic, and most of them caffinated. For example, we had choices between coffee, tea, soda water, coke, diet coke, pepsi and diet pepsi. Some fruit juice or even plain water would have been a nice change by the end of the day. The food was good, unless you're a vegan like Stewart at which time the catering staff looked confused and had to go off and get him something special (which didn't look all that special…

Thoughts on the first day of the MySQL user’s conference

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 26, 2006
Post category:Mysql

So, I attended the first day of the MySQL user's conference yesterday, which was the tutorial day. Overall I was fairly impressed. Registration was easy, the actual rooms presentations are given in are comfortable, the PA system seemed to work after some initial problems in the morning tutorial I attended. The conference center seems to be big on retirees hanging around, which I thought was weird. Each room comes with a little old lady, whose job appears to be to read a fiction novel at the door. I really have no idea what else they were achieving. They seemed to be having fun though. I did find it a bit odd that the only drinks provided by the catering staff during the day were acidic, and most of them caffinated. For example, we had choices between coffee, tea, soda water, coke, diet coke, pepsi and diet pepsi. Some fruit juice or even plain water would have been a nice change by the end of the day. The food was good, unless you're a vegan like Stewart at which time the catering staff looked confused and had to go off and get him something special (which didn't look all that special…