Author Archives: Arjen Lentz

The new car, going greener

Posted on by

Just before christmas I finally managed to get the old Subaru Outback all fixed up and shiny ready to sell. Dealers weren’t offering much but it sold within a week on carsales.com.au for a decent price. This was to a couple at the North coast, after a few others had called about it and several had had a test drive. The process was actually pretty painless!

So the next day I went car-hunting at dealers in Brisbane who had the cars I was interested in. I’d done my research, and decided I wanted

  • a smaller car – obvious, the Outback was just massive and not really necesary;
  • second hand – couple of years old, good safety features but not paying for the “new”;
  • good fuel economy;
  • something with less environmental impact… this lead me to diesel, because you can run cars on 100% biodiesel which means it’s no longer dependent on fossil resources at all. Hybrids generally use petrol, and with 100% electric (which is unaffordable as yet) it depends on the electricity source;
  • price below $20k. That was a bit more than I got for the Outback, but within decent range of what I could pay cash (I don’t borrow for this kind of expenditure – if I can’t afford it, I wouldn’t buy it) and also realistic in terms of finding something within budget.

With the diesel option, the choice was actually severely limited for the simple fact that most small cars just don’t come in a diesel variant. For instance, the Toyota Yaris has fantastic specs and fuel economy, but no diesel (at least not in Australia). Mazda 2 is great but again no diesel. Serious fail, dear AU car manufacturers/distributors!

The few I did find were Volkswagen Polo (tiny), Volkswagen Golf (expensive), and the like. However, someone pointed out the Hyundai i30 to me. I’d been disregarding Hyundai because the Excel is known as a “crumplezone” – bad safety. But the i30 is of a whole new generation, you can tell they’ve been looking at the design of Opel, Mazda, Volkswagen, Ford… the 2008+ models have a 5 star ANCAP (safety) rating which is top-notch. I hadn’t driven one yet, but at the first testdrive I was sold. Very nice. So, within a day I had a “new” car – I don’t mess about! ;-)

I’m still re-adjusting to the manual gears (the Outback was an automatic) but I’d learnt in manuals so fundamentally I do know how to do it and my license allows. More on the diesel and fuel economy in a following post.

Arjen’s personal blog on lentz.com.au

Posted on by

Just a note that my personal blog resides on lentz.com.au/

The story is this… I first started my blog when at MySQL AB, the Community Relations gig. It was a mix of personal and MySQL-related stuff, and hosted at LiveJournal. Last year we managed to migrate all the LiveJournal data to the Open Query blog instance, but naturally there it’s not really suitable to write about non-OQ stuff. So I’ve cloned that instance and am deleting the posts that are really only OQ/MySQL-related. Some business/development topics that refer to MySQL as an example will stay.

In any case, this allows me to scribble about my (bio)diesel car, gardening, cooking, bushwalking and all that without bothering the Open Query blog readers ;-) Those of you who are interested can subscribe to both. Easy!

Announcing Upstarta Camp – Brisbane Tue 24 Nov 2009

Posted on by

When: Tuesday 24 November (afternoon before first OSDC day), 12pm-5pm
Where: Brisbane, Mt Coot-Tha / Bardon area (near OSDC venue)

What is it? A picnic in the park. Yes, literally! It’s a workshop, but we’re doing a barbecue beforehand. The afternoon (including the barbecue) is $10 for members, $20 for non-members. We haven’t set a firm cap on numbers but we will have to limit it somewhat.

After a joint introduction to get everybody tuned in, we’ll split the attendees into smaller groups, each utilising the Upstarta principles and related strategies to accomplish tasks.
Among other things, we’re going to develop (fictitious but potentially viable) complete products/services including surrounding aspects such as business model, market positioning, pricing, distribution, marketing, etc. Then we’ll recombine, present and discuss what each group came up with.
It’ll be educational, challenging, and fun!

For more info and registration, go to the Upstarta Camp page.

It’s the day before the Open Source Developers’ Conference starts at the nearby Bardon Centre, so if you’re travelling to the conference you have an opportunity to join the Upstarta Camp also. Simply pick a flight earlier in the day!

It’s separate events, but you will want to (also) get to OSDC, earlybird registration ends this week!

OSS Ability to Accept Contributions

Posted on by

Clayton Christensen has some excellent insights on Modularity vs Integration in “The Innovator’s Solution”. I wrote about this for Upstarta.biz. Particularly in the realm of Open Source, modularity is regarded as a panacea – a product, service or design must be modular. But  modularity is not better (or worse) than integration. Like tools, they each have their place, depending on the state of the market/ecosystem where the process/product/service operates. Part of a system can be in a modular phase, where another part of the same system needs integration!

In this context, think of an Open Source project or company’s ability to handle contributions. If the process of interaction between a contributor and the core is not (for whatever reason) clearly defined and predictable, it won’t work. Jamming an additional [in this case external, but that’s irrelevant to the issue] interface for contributions somewhere in existing business processes can be doomed to fail.

We see the results of this in many projects that are Open Source, but find themselves unable to process contributions, or just don’t get any contributions. It’s quite likely that the underlying cause is not apathy (from the contributor’s end) or malice (from the receipient’s end), but it’s important to understand the underlying processes at work. It’s not necessarily the modularity of the software itself that’s an issue (tightly integrated code can receive contributions too!), but the surrounding business processes.

I had this realisation while camping with my good friend Steve Dalton and our kids this weekend. So a big thanks to Steve! I think it may help with understanding why Sun/MySQL (and MySQL AB before it) have had such difficulty dealing with contributions. And proper understanding could help resolve the problem. Good intent on its own does not suffice, otherwise it’d have been highly effective long ago!

#songsincode on Twitter, SongsInCodeDB

Posted on by

Looking at twitter #songsincode (just search on #songsincode tag), it appears a large chunk of geeky/nerdy world has come to a halt while spending the day expression song titles in code. So far we’ve seen most programming languages as well as CSS and SQL come by. I think it’s a nice example of how “the collective” can become very creative. My favourite SQL ones so far (by @john_chr): SELECT * FROM walk WHERE gait LIKE '%EGYPTIAN%'

Update: a good friend of mine, Stephen Thorne (@Jerub), wanted to set up a site for this, so we hacked one up – since the meme has long passed, it’s now hosted at SongsInCode Archive.