Some JUG Politics or "Why doesn't a community grow under farcism"

A group with no/poor leadership is like a ship without a rudder.

I have been trying to reboot MyJUG (at a tangible level, a site and some blogs) for years with no avail, to take lead but got beaten down (continue reading), and when I wanted to talk about some MNCC stuff to the group just now, I found out that I was banned.

MyJUG is established since 1999, founded by Loke KS, owned by Loke, bossed by Loke. Once in a short while, some new faces come and new motivation generated to create new discussions and some ambitious to live up the group and technical talks. Most recently, before 2011, we were told by Loke that he's working something out with Oracle (and now, being the mid of 2011, the group still haven't yet organized a single activity) and looking for volunteers to help out (I have no idea why we have never formed a board or committee to have some balance of power and management, I raised it), and I did,

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Yuen-Chi Lian wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I created two polls in Doodle, just click, no hassle registration:
>
> Vote for new platform
> Vote for next talk
>
> I wrote a blog post too, let's make some change to the group for 2011.

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 8:54 AM, Loke KS wrote:
>
> Yuen, why don't you take the lead in organising some talks?

Very good, I got a tap on the shoulder to go for it.

And I moved fast again, including finding a right place to document the activities of the group, to vote for topics, etc. (so I also started a Google Sites, as the earlier work I did is hosted in my ex-company server). Most importantly, I kept things transparent in the mailing list and opened them for better suggestions.

Then?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Loke KS wrote:
> Can you discuss with me first before you take any action on any matter?

Come on, what the fuck?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Yuen-Chi Lian wrote:
> I was acting based on the votes. I didn't know there was a concern,
> enlighten me.

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Loke KS wrote:
>
> If you want to work as a team, then we work as a team else we work
> individually, separately. What does working in a team means? What if I have
> other plans that I am working with other people?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Yuen-Chi Lian wrote:
>
> Then always share with us.
>
> Secret agenda is no longer a weapon but stumbling block of a community.
> Being open and transparent is the initial driving force to start or change a
> community in this era. You can learn from some successful stories, GitHub is
> one, how Apache/Hudson/MySQL/OpenOffice left Oracle is another.
>
> There's just too much legacy to drag us from moving forward. When we
> sacrifice more individualistic controls over things back to community decision,
> you will see how things can be different.
>
> I'm sure you get my point. Oracle doesn't.
>
> It's not about working as a team, but working with the community.

Things went quiet again, until Bernie (great Android developer) started similar topic, but Loke, this time, never looked into the problem nor contributed anything practical to realize the members' desire.

About a week plus ago, I was told that Chee Aun is working on Connections.my, and thus I brought it up in MyJUG (although I misunderstood what the site is actually for in the beginning, but that's not important) and also mentioned about having a breakaway JUG, as, at that point of time, I was frustrated that Loke still hasn't yet done any real deal with the great Oracle. When emotion goes wrong, bad things can happen - I'm banned:

You have been banned from this group by the group moderator (Yahoo! ID banned: yuenchi.lian). You may not join the group myjug.

I'm not sure if I'm the first one to be banned, but I am seriously tired of dealing with one's fascism (there's only one owner and moderator to maintain the Yahoo! group) but nothing else every time I wanted to realize something.

So, here's an idea, is anyone up for a breakaway, to start clean, with no boss but the people?

At the same time, while the old Facebook page is deprecating, I have spawned a new one here, please join.

MNCC 23rd AGM

It has been quite a while since last blogging, been using Twitter and Weibo to deliver my ideas but not this time.

I joined the MNCC since almost a year ago, suggested by one of its then-member of council Ditesh. I have a strong belief that there's something I can contribute to the country through this platform, although nothing real has been done yet.

The annual meeting was held at Armada Hotel, with its annual report available here. And, I remember that we talked about the lack of funds, the low turn-outs to organized conferences and seminars, and most important, the lack of youngsters. I suppose 3 or less fingers can count those who're at or below the age of 30 out of ~40 attendances tonight.

I do have some opinions but I do not want to provide any analysis on MNCC at this stage to make myself judgmental and critical. Instead, I need to lend some helping hands.

Take a look at its website, very 90's, very unattractive. But I was shocked to find out that it has been maintained by Syed, someone who could be double of your age, knows enough of HTML to get the content up.

So here comes the purpose of this blog post, I am looking for a volunteer to set up a CMS and administrate the site (hosted at Exabytes according to Syed, but this is not important), the best person who can do this job better than me.

Anyone?

The Malaysian Java User Group can be more than just a mailing list

Is simply just a mailing list for years. Continue reading.

Recently, I received an email (with a few in the loop, not through the mailing list) from Loke to discuss about some aspects of MyJUG. I found it hard to respond to most posted questions (such as "Best Practices" and "Strengths and Opportunities" of this group), simply because - the cruelest fact - there's nothing much to describe.

I join the mailing list about 4 to 5 years ago, when I innocently thought getting to know more people there could get some new hires for my former employer. It doesn't work that way (or at least at the moment), so if you happen to have the same intention, you may want to readjust or quit.

Every now and then, I whine and whine to some people about the lack of substantive committee to move forward the group, the lack of activities, etc. Then, every now and then, we voted for topics and things go silent. Then, recur.

StackOverflowError not yet.

To run a successful technical/user group seems really hard in Malaysia. FOSS-SM used to have consistent monthly meetup when Aizat was active. Chee Seng runs the Flex UG (MyFlex) but the number of participants is really low (also given the fact that Flex is barely a killer). Umm, the PHP UG seems pretty successful though. Why?

I don't know.

The community can change it.

• Vote for next topics
• Vote for new platform

Steve Ballmer is.. funny but great

Went to the FOSS.my 2008 and one of the sessions that I attended was Microsoft on Open Source and Silverlight. When the speaker, Chris Levanes, talked about the open source involvement of Microsoft and their peguins and lab, I remembered Steve Ballmer's "Linux is a cancer" comment. I found it irony, but.. then again, business is business and Ballmer said that like 7 years ago. The world has changed.

Ballmer (the monkey boy that most guys would call) is a passionate guy and that's the quality he has. These videos are amusing and they will really make you to remember him.

• Classic Ballmer's "developers" chant
  
• Ballmer advertises Microsoft 1.0
• Ballmer danced!

Now.. before we laugh at him, here're some facts:

• Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft.
  
• Ballmer is fucking passionate, or, he can really express himself in a crazy manner.
  
• Ballmer is one of the richest men in the world.

Can you do better than him?

- yc

Invitation to Bloggers Buff 2008

A blogging forum/workshop for Malaysians is back this year. Read more about it at its website.

- yc

Second Day of BarCamp Malaysia - Awesome!

The second day of BarCamp was simply.. Awesome! I talked about being a newbie wireless user yesterday and I have another newbie experience today on OpenOffice Presentation. We are newbies in certain areas of our life at every single day to learn new things, aren't we?

I started my day by attending a wireless network hacking session by the iTrain guys. A very great and rich session indeed, with a speaker who couldn't stop reminding us that he has a longer toy than us, he showed a number of tools to make wireless hacking easier. And not to forget, Linux is the best platform to launch attacks. It's a shame that the demo didn't work and the session dragged quite a while to make my slot left with 30 minutes time.

Yes, my talk on CDN fell in the same lecture room. Being a big fan of Steve Jobs' style presentation, I made my slides as clean as possible with just keywords, although I didn't deliver a smooth one like his (hopefully next time), thanks God that the decision to make the presentation short saved me from rushing given such limited time (of course, the reason wasn't to run into Ditesh's talk but to have more QnA and interactions).

Followed by it, it was Talat's talk on "Hidden Impact of Higher Mathematics on the World Wide Web". Talat and his talk reminded me of the Oxford Murders.

After having our Subway lunch, I ran into (once again) the Lecture Room 1 as Kamal and Aizat planned to run a ligthning talk session there. So, when I thought I would finish up my day all in Lecture Room 1, we got the news that the session got forked and we just merged with folks in another room.. which started with a talk on hiding porn video files.

It's so excited to see how much information people could share in that one hour time!

- yc, in and out.

First Day of BarCamp Malaysia

Was ruined, by my own paranoia, which I will talk about it later.

Quickly run through, my camping started from Gavin Bong's "Google Android" talk. A pure technical talk on Android which got us hanging to decide whether we shall go for this toy.

The second and third talk that I attended fell in the same time in the schedule, Chee Seng "Flex and JRuby on Rails" and Yoon Kit's "The OpenMalaysiaBlog Story", attended just half of each of them. I liked how Yoon Kit's presented the stories in a mind-mapping-like diagram.

As I slept pretty late last night, my brain wasn't in any good condition to absorb more knowledge, I ended up looking for my friend in a Silverlight's talk, by the Silverlight guy. I blogged about Silverlight last year by the way. The product is quite interesting, slides were pretty, but the presentation was pretty screwed as the speaker came late and more than 50% of the slides were skipped.

The fifth talk, "Mobile Future" by Henry from Nokia. This is the talk that got me (bored) to hook into the IRC to chat with the #myoss guys. What went wrong? Henry was not actually being at the wrong place but there were just too many technical guys being in the room to generate him some problems.

IRC? I then realized that I have some applications running and they were trying to authenticate with servers and some of them were using plain text authentication. If they were ever sent, they were sent to the network set up by KageSenshi. Browsing is pretty safe on this laptop, as everything is tunneled over SSH to a server, but not other applications! I was not sure at all how they worked, but I could guess that the applications would check for availability of the servers before sending authentication information.

Now, why waste time guessing if I could just run back home with a cab in 10 minutes? That's how I finished my camping today. Can't blame KageSenshi if he really got my passwords. ;-) Of course, the biggest mistake was ever telling him that it happened. That was really a stupid ~20-minute, everything uses SOCKS now at my end and I feel fitter and happier.

I'm done, first-day Barcamp journey of a newbie wireless user.

- yc

Things do Go Wrong Sometimes

Chuk Munn is a Sun Evangelist who I met last week, a comment from him in the Malaysian Java User Group lately, however, went very wrong and was found in strong disagreement by a number of us.

It's a topic on class-loading which he shared based on his past experience that "(you shall) never use a functionality from an open source project if it is available unless you absolutely have to."

I'm not sure what he was trying to sell, maybe the Java Logging API provided by the SDK versus Log4J. But certainly from me, I would rather put the blame on the container of not doing a good isolation work instead of blaming open source.

- yc

A Networking Session with Sun / Java Evangelists

There was an invitation sent to MyJUG, to a networking session with the Sun / Java Evangelists last Wednesday at Monash University. The turn-up wasn't that high and I reached there pretty late too, I guess everyone was pretty stuck at work or in the jam. Thanks Chee Seng for the ride, otherwise I would have stuck 'til the event had ended.

Good to see familiar face like Colin Charles (the MySQL guy) and Loke there, and finally met up with Monica Ng (the Marketing Communication Consultant of Sun). The evangelists in list anyway, were, Matt Thompson, Reginald Hutcherson, Lee Chuk Munn, Peter Karlsson, Colin and Naveen Asrani.

Sitting alongside with the evangelists was fun. We started our technical conversation when Chee Seng introduced himself as a Flex guy. Chuk Munn and other folks started to bash Flex to promote JavaFx, something that I did not show much interest on which I might give a try now after being told that the beta release will be a very fine product.

We also touched on the performance enhancement of Java 6 SE Update 10 as well as the new Open Solaris. We all left after some folks distributed the live CD of the OS.

It would have been a greater event without the nearly 2-hour jam. Hopefully Sun will make it a weekend next time.

- yc

Catch Aflexi + CDN Talk in Barcamp Malaysia

Mentioned in my earlier blog that I will be presenting at Barcamp Malaysia this weekend (Sunday) on the topic "Content Delivery Network".

The agenda shall go like this:

• Problems of the current state of the Internet
  
• Introduction to CDN
• Existing CDN Providers
• Who use CDN?
• Aflexi CDN model

I will put up the content of the slide as soon as I have completed it. Still fixing up stuff for prototype development here.

- yc

FOSS-SM April 2008 Meetup, Selenium Web Testing Tool

I will be giving a presentation on Selenium this Thursday at the FOSS-SM meeting, more details can be found here:

• http://www.my-jug.org/calendar
• http://foss.org.my/projects/meetups/april-2008-meetup/myoss-april-2008-meetup-selenium-web-testing/view

Your support will definitely be appreciated, please join me to attend this.

- yc

Qi4J on the 13th

Supported by the Malaysian Java User Group, the FOSS-SM hosted the March meet-up with the presence of Rickard Oberg on the topic of Composite Oriented Programming in Java using Qi4J.

It's a good occasion to meet Rickard in person and other JUG guys -- Edward, Bernie, KC., ..

Qi4J in short is an implementation of Composited Oriented Programming (COP), an idea heavily influenced by the concept of Domain Driven Development (DDD). You can read more about its background from this page. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and Dependency Injection (DI) are essential parts of Qi4J to achieve DDD (you might want to check Matthew Podwysocki's blog).

In Qi4J, you no longer think about objects but composites. A Composite is a collection of fragments, where a fragment can be a Mixin that holds the state of the composite, a Constraint that validates the usage, a Concern that handles contextual behaviour or a SideEffect that is used for notification. Here are some resources to help you more with it:

• Qi4J Brochures and Diagrams
• Qi4J Concepts

I like the general idea personally, just like how I like AOP at the first time I got in touch with it. Clean code, domain centric, separation of concerns, and low coupling between components (that also promotes reusability).

There are some concerns from the ground too, that,

It is Hackish

To some people, the framework looks completely like a hack to achieve something can not be originally done by Java. I beg to differ with that point, programming to me is a lively and creative area of computer science, with a good design and deep thoughts, we are actually leveraging the Java platform to introduce a new programming style. Just like how people use Spring and its applicationContext.xml to do AOP.

Learning Curve and Adoption

Learning curve is a major concern too. The discussion focused on how long it would take for new and old Java programmers to adopt to this new programming style. My opinion is, what truly drives someone to do something to be different from the norm relies on how widespread and the quality of the new concept; as well as how conservative an individual would like to remain, a comfortability issue. Likewise, not everyone uses AOP, ORM, etc. because they do not see the point, accept the idea, or are comfortable with what they are currently doing. But certainly, Spring has a very good documentation and from the way I look at it, Qi4J is going to have one too. :-)

Performance

A realistic concern. I talked to Niclas and Edward (folks from Jayway, the core committers of Qi4J) after meeting. They shared with me that, which is also written in the website, Qi4J is not production ready. The product is still undergoing development and the team has not yet done any performance tuning. Take note that it doesn't even have a binary release at the moment. A more mature codebase should be ready by end of this year.

I am ending this blog entry here. Like I said, I like the idea of it and Qi4J definitely worth revisiting at a later time and since it is an OPS4J project, I will definitely find a time to contribute to the codebase.

Lastly, please visit our JUG's blog for a list of other blogs that discuss about the meeting.

- yc