malaysia on SWiK

MAS saves millions with LAMP stack

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:13:16 -0700

Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

?This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)?

I couldn’t help but grin inside, a little. After all, Sun do own the M in LAMP ;-)

Next up, wonder if they will open source it, ala MyMeeting? After all, MAS services AirAsia and JetStar planes, I wonder who else will benefit from such software.

Some notes: Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:11:27 -0700

I would’ve written sooner about Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008, but I spent most of Sunday cringed in between the bed and the toilet. Here are a bunch of quick notes I took at the event, with some thoughts tacked on to it.

Overall impressions? It was good for a Joomla! beginner. While I would consider myself a Joomla! beginner, I’ve seen many a CMS and maybe am a tad bit jaded. There is a great amount of interest in Joomla! - about 200 people registered for a paid for event (not cheap either - RM70 for a Joomla! forum member, and RM150 for regular visitors). So there’s definitely money to be made in Joomla! and CMSes in general.

Location? This is the first time I’ve been to the rather infamous Cititel hotel, tacked to MidValley. Held at the 5th floor, I noticed that people were allowed to smoke within the corridors. I consider this a massive FAIL for a hotel - a smoke free environment within air-conditioning is so much better. I couldn’t find a single power socket, which was rather woeful considering I’d have wanted to write more notes had my battery lasted longer. WiFi seemed non-existent, but I had my broadband modem.

On to it. The day started of with Toby Patterson, from Green Mountain Information Technology and Consulting, a joomla.org developer for the last year and a half, and all round nice guy, who seems to be based in Thailand. It was an introduction to Joomla! 1.5, in where I learned that Joomla! finally makes use of UTF-8 by default.

The templating system is simple: it just makes use of HTML and PHP. I was wondering if it also made use of CSS, so a quick Google showed me that it did (duh to me!).

I then learned that Joomla! is really three separate, yet related applications:

Installer Application
Site Application
Administrative Application

Apparently, you can use the Administrative app, without ever touching the Site app. Interesting.

In Joomla! 1.6, access control lists will exist. I’m wondering, why not just use database GRANTs, but from what I understand they want some group grants and so on…

Today, you can authenticate against your GMail account. I’d also like to presume that OpenID is supported (a quick Google sort of tells me it is) . Apparently, there is also logging in against LDAP.

Next up, I found out that azrul.com isn’t actually a one man show, but an eight person company! They describe themselves as “The Joomla Expert” (really, should be experts now!), and one of their most popular products are Jom Comment.

Its interesting to know that the Joomla! community has got an active amount of extensions, and some are commercial while some are open source/free. A lot of the extensions also have a similar Enterprise/Community model attached to it.

There was a HOWTO install Joomla! which seemed easy enough. The guy from azrul.com, a Mark, mentioned that you could use ext/MySQL or ext/MySQLi, and mentioned that you get some benefits from ext/MySQLi, but didn’t go deeply into it. During the example, he went on to use ext/MySQL, so during the Q&A, I chimed in on why ext/MySQLi would rock harder.

Later on, I found out that Joomla! URLs by default are not human readable, so you have to use some form of plugin, to enhance your SEO. The speaker, Syed Ahmad Fuqaha mentioned that his site had a Google PageRank of 3 when he started, and its now moved up to a PageRank of 5 after using SEO tactics (kudos! I wonder if I should apply some SEO magic to my blog and get it up from a PageRank of 6 to maybe a 7? I wonder if I’ll even be bothered…).

The SEF-url engine comes with every installation of Joomla!, but it has no URL caching (so the server will take the load). It can work with or without Apache mod_rewrite. A cached URL is created and saved in the database… its faster, there’s a little overhead to parse the URL, and it requires a single database call. Apparently, the preferred magic is: sh404SEF.

There was good chat on security, and while I’ve not audited the Joomla! code, its safe to assume that an SQL injection means the code needs some fixing. There were suggestions for security through obscurity. There were also bits about configuring PHP, MySQL and Apache “correctly”.

Joomla! also has got compatibility issues between versions. There is some old compatibility mode that exists now in 1.5, with 1.0, but come 1.6, the old compatibility mode will only exist with 1.5, so if you’ve got a 1.0 site, its soon to become EOL - start porting your stuff now!

Lunch was provided, buffet style. Imagine competing with 200 folk… There were t-shirts, but surprisingly, no more Large ones available the moment I got to it.

A little later, @wariola Twittered that there was some interesting message on the Joomla! forums by a Sam. Interesting reading, but it was deleted (sigh!). Azrul has a good response, and I have a few quick suggestions:

The entrance fee is costly, and can be made cheaper if it wasn’t held at a hotel. Do it at a university hall, or something.
Community event vs. “training” session. If it was meant to be a community event (ala Barcamp), its usually free. If people fork money out, they expect to be trained. Its simple economics.
I wish I had known about the CfP before. I’d have definitely submitted a talk topic.
While Azrul totally expected speakers to suck at presenting, I didn’t find them to suck in general. But for first time speakers, some form of “speaker training” might have been appropriate. No harm, no foul, public speaking in front of 200 people even trips up experienced speakers from time to time.
Google is useful. It was even more useful at the event, as I could not only learn from the speakers, but go on and absorb further via the Interwebs
Assuming everyone paid RM70 (untrue, I’m sure), and there were 200 registrants, that’s RM14,000 (lowest bar - highest bar, RM30,000). Throw in sponsors, and if run well, there can definitely be a profit in there for the organisers. Naturally, I don’t know what the hotel costs, but a hotel tends not to be the best location for a community event…

All in all, here’s to the next Joomla! Day. Remember folk, there’s money to be made here (and in CMS’es in general). /me smells a DrupalCon, etc. coming up :)

Malaysian Government releases first Open Source software package - MyMeeting

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:10:19 -0700

Today marks a big day in the history of the Malaysian Government - they’ve released their first fully open source software package, MyMeeting.

Poking around their Trac installation, they use PHP and MySQL 5 (5.0.51a from Ubuntu, even!). Of course their install documentation suggests a lot of Windows usage, but this is a step in the right direction.

Give it a twirl. Report bugs. How many more governments out there are writing and releasing open source software packages? Or is this a first?

Malaysia University Days

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:47:51 -0700

Here’s a packed schedule. There will be a Sun crew visiting these universities between 16-17 July 2008. Will you be there? Where you’ll meet the rock stars:

Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 9am - noon: Multimedia University, Cyberjaya
Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 2pm - 5pm: Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam
Thursday, 17 July 2008, 9am - noon: Management & Science University, Shah Alam
Thursday, 17 July 2008, 2pm - 5pm: INTI, Subang

And what exactly will we be talking about? Besides the keynote, and tech demos, there will be focus on NetBeans (a fabulous IDE), an introduction to OpenSolaris, JavaFX, and of course, MySQL.

We all have 30 minute session slots, and the focus is rather developer centric, so I’m wondering what is best to cover in 30 minutes (what one can probably talk about in 5 days even)? Condensed talk on storage engines, index types, etc. ?

My fear is that I’ll largely be talking to a crowd that has seen and used a database, and its called Access. MySQL will be new to them. Not having a “front-end” per se, ala Access, might be scary. Then again, hooking up OpenOffice.org Base and Workbench might be the way to go for a glitzy presentation…

Wei Chong's Blog: Using Linux TV card in Malaysia

Thu, 29 May 2008 09:09:14 -0700

Need to get frequencies in Malaysia? Good link nearby. For the future myth box...

strange symphonies

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:20:38 -0700

Creative Commons Photography Workshop " Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:34:34 -0800

3xb055 - Bandar Baru Bangi Open Source Software Group

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:54:24 -0700

Open Malaysia

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:04:37 -0700

Komuniti Pengguna Joomla Malaysia - Utama

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:16:51 -0700

Joomla Day Malaysia 2007 - Joomla Day Malaysia Report

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:37:10 -0700

Planet MYOSS: The Malaysian Open Source Community Speaks

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:43:27 -0700

Philip Golingai

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:18:36 -0700

Malaysia sets up $36m open source fund — Openia

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:13:19 -0800

Malaysia sets up $36m open source fund - Operating Systems - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:13:19 -0800

Joomla Day Malaysia 2007

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 11:27:13 -0800

OSCC - Open Source Competency Centre

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:31:36 -0800

Linux News: Infrastructure: Asian Countries Making the Switch to Open Source

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:41:42 -0800

myoss Info Page

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:58:54 -0800

MyOSS Meetup July 2006 — Free/Open Source Software Society Malaysia

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:48:08 -0800

Welcome to Free and Open Source Software Society Malaysia — Free/Open Source Software Society Malaysia

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:48:08 -0800

Open Malaysia

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:48:08 -0800

OpenOffice BM Spell Checker

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:29:12 -0700

The BM Spell Checker is targeted for users who need to spell check BM words in their documents. These users can be government officers, BM writers, publishers, digital divide community and/or anybody who needs spell checker to spell check BM words.

KL Stream :: FreeTalkin'

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 23:11:21 -0700

Jeff Ooi and Oon Yeoh do short interviews each Mon. thru Fri. Interview with musician Zainal Abidin is a good one. Dig that Malaysian accent, lah.

Home - MyOSS Magazine

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 21:13:43 -0700

3xb055 - Bandar Baru Bangi Open Source Software Group

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:09:07 -0700

Welcome to Free and Open Source Software Society Malaysia — Free/Open Source Software Society Malaysia

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 07:48:52 -0700

PCFAIR-2006-August-KL - Wikizatto

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:58:08 -0700

Malasya CIOs speak opensource

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:22:47 -0700

Malaysian Free and Open Source Group

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:26:25 -0700