BarcampKL was simply a blast. Not only did we get to listen to geek-talk, but also much more.
First off, I get to finally meet some folks. Such as Andy Goh , Haresh, Jaya, Michael Leow from carlist.my and many more. Some whom I have met at last year’s FOSS camp and the recent Open Source meetup in Kuala Lumpur, such Chee Aun, Chee Meng, Aizat and Daniel Cervetus. And also some dudes whose article I enjoy reading, Gen Kanai of Mozilla and Colin Charles of MySQL. Oh yea, and not forgetting Preetam-the-barcamp-hopper.
Photo of the list of track, by Marvin Lee.
Aizat: Presentation 101
Ok, first off. I arrived at 10 plus on the first day to manage to get a 10 minute of Aizat’s Presentation 101. Aizat is always an attention-grabber, given his very distinct American accent. So he was there teaching about how to present.
I presented Browser War Part 2: Standard strikes back. This prsentation is about how the so-called 2nd browser war is taking shape, and it’s a competition between non-standard close web and a open standard web.
Haresh & Jaya : Running your Linux on USB / Comparing Vista to Linux(Ubuntu)
This dynamic duo that are working hard to put up a open source review site called avoinsource.They first presented in running your OS on a USB. Basically it take around 700mb to install it in a USB. They were using USB1.1 running linux dreamhost but there was hardly any delay. Got hold of a copy of the installer and went check out the USB price around KL. RM49 for 8gb, wow…I didn’t know prices have dropped so much.
Gen Kanai: Firefox Bahasa Localization Effort
On the next day, again I arrived late to see Gen pushed his session an hour early. Well, at least I get the gist of the idea. There are around 60+ Firefox language pack but none yet for Bahasa Malaysia. Gen shared in his blog that there are already works going on. I was a little surprised to hear the crowd responding slightly negatively to the idea of localizing a bahasa version.
Someone cited the case of Friendster. When friendter started feeeding user the Bahasa version, it actually alienated the users. Why? foreigner might ask, that Malaysian don’t like to see their national language used as the default language. That’s because most malaysians are english-literate and have been used to the English version for all these years. Changing all this changes a user behaviour. Also, not to mention that many Malaysians use english more than Malay language.
Well, I have to beg to differ on this because really, a localized version will serve a very different market. What we don’t want is to force the local version to anyone that doesn’t want it. Simple.
Colin Charles: Blogger and PR
Colin Charles presented about blogger and PR. Well, I don’t really understand the market, but it sounds very interesting as many people are giving lots of comments. One discussion was how pagerank is more important that user hits when it comes to ads? Maybe, not sure.
There are just way too many things. Not to mention “how to have better sex” or something like that. Check out some of the other reviews. Colin Charles’s blog post about Advertising and PR, Bloggers and Integrity: Making Money, While Being Honest, Andy Goh’s day1 and day2 of Barcamp. Also prentation-of-day’s blog about mobile office.
Hyperlink for the text http://www.opera.com/developer/
in presentation is pointing to http://www.opera.com/develper
Add missing ‘o’ to correct this one. :)
Thanks Faruk! :-)
I wish I am as observant as you