Friedbeef’s Tech

BarcampMalaysia certainly lived up to its promise of being an unconference to remember!   Great people, open sharing, and a good amount of ideas bouncing around the room - and every auditorium for every session - packed to the brim.  To give you a lowdown of the events, I won’t give you a full blow by blow of the events, but instead, I’ll try to sum it up something useful for you to take away from all the sessions I attended:

10am: Life of a GSoC Student

Presented by Raj, this presentation was about the Google Summer of Code and his work on the BLOB Streaming for PHPMyAdmin

If you’re wondering what a BLOB is - here’s Wikipedia’s definition: A binary large object, also known as a blob, is a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database management system. Blobs are typically images, audio or other multimedia objects, though sometimes binary executable code is stored as a blob. Database support for blobs is not universal.

Quick takeout: BLOBs really benefit from streaming especially when dealing with large media files, and Raj showed us how its done with his demo.

11am: OpenMalaysia Blog Story

Presented by YoonKit, this presentation was about the struggle of Malaysia’s Open Source community in pitting the Open Document Format, which is free and open against Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be adopted as a national file standard.

It was a good job of stepping through the efforts taken, and obstacles faced to help the Malaysian government adopt a free and open format.  I think it certainly raised a lot of awareness in terms of bureaucracy within the Malaysian technology ministries and agencies,  and their unwillingness to go against Microsoft’s lawyers who were sent to defend OOXML. 

Quick takeout:  A government using free and open document formats is a government which is not beholden to any company ie. Microsoft, and its product cycles, and its prices, and its hardware/software requirements.  Open source ensures that the government is not held hostage, and tax dollars are well spent.  A big salute goes out to these guys.

12pm: Monetizing Youtube?

Presented by Roni of Eurekalabs, this presentation showcased Roni’s idea of ad placement within videos. 

For example, someone in a movie is holding generic can.  Then depending on the demographic of the user, advertisers can overlay a brand onto the can.  The image would vary from user to user based on user demographic.   There was also an interesting demo involving pattern recognition where the computer could- in real time recognize certain patterns and overlay images. 

I do no justice with these words as the demo was pretty interesting (yes - I should have taken a video of the demo).

Tech takeout: Technology is still at a very early stage where the overlays look nothing close to a real item good enough to put into a real video.  While the technology was fun to see, my main issue with this was that there was no distribution model.  That perhaps would be the most crucial aspect in terms of the success of this product.  This means that they would have to either depend on an entity like YouTube(Google) acquiring them, or starting their own network for videos.  Furthermore, because of the technology involved, this is not a cheap venture to do well in.  Nevertheless, this looks like one of the more interesting technologies showcased at BarCamp, so it would be good to see how this develops further. 

2pm: Monkeying Around With Yahoo! Search

Presented by Yahoo!’s regional director of engineering Sau Sheong, it showcased ‘rich-search results’ by mashing up Linked-in with Yahoo! results in Search Monkey. 

Tech takeout: While the results looked really good, the implementation seemed extremely technical to me, especially when I compared it to the Microsoft demo of Popfly I had a chance to see earlier in the year which was a simple as pie when it came to building mash ups. 

3pm: How to become 25% More Productive - Essential Free Tools for the Modern Office

This was my presentation where I shared 3 useful tips with the crowd:

Talking about:

1. Dealing with heavy loads of email without going nuts
2. 2nd chance outlook rule
3. FileHamster Portable

Check out the slides by clicking through below, but bear in mind these slides were meant to be presented in person, not read online so the latter parts may be confusing, so check out the posts I highlighted above, because my presentation was crafted from entries from this blog:

4pm: Putting the BAR into BARcamp

Hongkiat, K-Director, LiewCF, KP and I headed down to get a quick drink, and talk blogging.  No this wasn’t a session.  Not an official one anyway :)

Tech takeout: If you do text link ads, Google can get real tough and ban you… these guys are the cream of the crop of Malaysian blogging, and they’ve been burned before so they’re speaking from experience.  Time to reconsider my stance on paid posts, even if they’re disclosed and honest.

5pm: Blogging in Malaysia - Round Table Discussion

This was a round-table session, a free for all so to speak to bring up an issue, ANY blogging issue and talk about it.  Issues ranged from privacy, to money, to passion, to paid posts, and we covered a wide spectrum of topics. 

Tech takeout: On Advertisers: Advertisers do not have issues being on political blogs.   On Privacy: Anything you publish online, is archived forever and will not be private any longer.  On Passion: It’s the feedback which keeps us going. On paid posts: It’s good quick money for the short run, but it may hurt you in Google.

6pm: Pole Dancing for Health

This was an adhoc presentation on the benefits of pole dancing for health.  Of course, there was no pole in the lecture hall, but Carmen (Thanks Daniel for the correction of her name) from Viva Vertical walked us through the benefits of pole dancing (core strength), how everything works in pole dancing, and walked us through numerous health tips.  Here’s a quick video of her pulling off some tough side planks:

Tech takeout: Tech CEOs will do planks in public.

So that’s a quick wrap of the days events on my side.  Everybody coming together in the spirit of sharing.  That’s what BarCamp Malaysia’s all about. 

Do drop in tomorrow for more interesting sessions throughout the morning!

ps. All pix taken with my n82

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The world’s most famous ‘unconference‘ will be coming to Kuala Lumpur this weekend!

What is Barcamp?

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.   BarCamp Malaysia is an ad-hoc conference and is part of the larger BarCamp movement.  It will be a social melting pot for people passionate enough about any particular topic to share their knowledge with others.  Topics range are wide ranging and will include:

• Digital Photography
• Google Android
• Monkeying around with Yahoo! Search
• The Malaysian Free Software Movement: The Way Forward
• Building data-driven applications with Drupal
• Firefox browser extension and theme development
• Monetizing Youtube
• Music 2.0: Community Building & Survival Guide
• Recruitment & Social Networking
• Blogging in Malaysia
• Interesting Web 2.0/Mobile services in China, Japan, India, Kenya and Korea

…and so much more!

Clickthru to find out more about the event, venue, and other frequently asked questions.  Entrance is free - so you can walk in on the day itself!

In the spirit of participation, I’ll be sharing a short session on Saturday 3pm on ‘How to become 25% more productive: Essential free tools for the modern office’, so do drop by and say hi…  Hope to see you there :)

UPDATE: I will be blogging the event as it unfolds so do check out www.friedbeef.com for regular updates both Saturday and Sunday!

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Universal Document Converter (UDC) is a piece of software that will allow you to convert documents of any type can be exported into Adobe PDF or graphical files in 7 popular formats: TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PCX, DCX, GIF or BMP.  Once installed, UDC will be listed alongside your printers, so within any application, just click print and select UDC and you’ll export that document to the file format of your choice.

The good:

• The fact that the application functions as a virtual printer means that you can convert files directly from any application which supports printing.  This saves an extra step of having to launch a separate conversion program every time you want to generate a file in a different output.
• Support for less popular but industry formats like Autocad & QuarkXpress.  These file types are usually forgotten by many of the other converters out there.

• High resolution. The ability to export documents with a resolution up to 2,400 DPI enables you to save all elements of design of advertising materials and the minutest details of drawings and electronic diagrams.

• Automatic margin cropping. The function of automatic cropping of empty margins makes it unnecessary to edit graphical copies of tables and diagrams before placing them in presentations or text documents.

• Scalability. The possibility to share Universal Document Converter over a network and use it from workstations allows for a significant increase in speed for the conversion of documents.

• Ease of use.  The software is pretty intuitive, and the tutorials are very straightforward in case you every get stuck.  If all else fails, there’s also software support.

What could be better:

Price.  For the most popular conversions like document to PDF, there are free alternatives which function the same way (acting as a virtual printer) and work just as well.  Even for other conversions, PDF to picture etc. there are other alternatives as well.  With prices starting at USD$69, UDC can be too steep for most people.

Tipping point:

Is it worth the price?  The key consideration in this decision is - how often you convert files.  Due to its universal nature and software support, over a long run, this will save you time (and as a result - money) if you convert files on a very regular basis.   My advice would be to try out the demo version first, and then try the free alternatives for PDF writers (they another here), and and other converters.   - then make your decision.

Links: Universal Document Converter

What do you use to convert documents?  Tell us in the comments!

Disclaimer: UDC has paid me to test and review their service - and to give an honest opinion. Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by UDC in any way.

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