Open Malaysia

Note: We have been featured in the news. w00t!

Taking a break from the entire OOXML saga, some of us decided to execute an elaborate April Fool's plan on Dinesh Arnold Nair, our collective QubeConnect boss and a (self proclaimed) Sith Lord. The plan ("Operation Coverup") involved wrapping up all items in the Sith Lord's office with aluminum foil. It's one those things that is actually a lot harder then it sounds (who knew wrapping cables in aluminum foil would be such a bitching effort, eh?).

I brought up the idea initially several months to some of the Sith Lord minions. It was initially a simple effort to wrap up all belongings of the Sith Lord. Over teh tarik (Malay sugared tea) and many beers, the idea expanded to wrapping his furniture in aluminum foil, plastering his walls with brown wrapping paper, covering his car with even more brown paper, adapting the Star Wars intro crawl text video for the finishing touch and dressing up in Ku-Klux-Klan style robes. At one point, we discussed involving his wife into a more elaborate scam involving wrapping up stuff in his apartment, but decided against it when we realized his wife is truly Sith and we may end up getting skewered in the process.

Anyway, as  the plan grew and grew, before I realized, there were more volunteers then there was room in his office. No problem, we could always parallelize the wrapping tasks, right? I thought we could have been done in a couple hours with seven of us. Hah, that turned out to be woefully over-optimistic.

31st March 2008 arrived and three minions marched over to the nearest hypermart to buy the supplies. We ran into our first hurdle - who knew that there were so many grades of aluminum foil? We decided on the smartest engineering decision that made sense to us then and bought six rolls of the cheapest foil available. It later turned out to be not such a bright idea as the cheapest foil also was the thinnest which made wrapping a tad bit difficult. Oh well. We also bought a roll of brown wrapping paper which came with 10 pieces of 1x1 meter sized paper.

So, evening came and SMS's were flying wildly, planning this and organizing that, but mostly we were jumping with excitement. We waited for everybody to leave, and waited a bit more, and waited some more and everybody left except for the Sith Lord. Oh all days, he decided to spend this day running load tests on the QubeTalk (our IP-PBX). Grrrr. No matter, we left for an early dinner hoping that he would have left by the time we got back.

At 8pm approximat-ish, we get back (all seven of us!) and apparently he had left for the day, so we start in all earnestness. Fuck, it was tiring work. We wrapped, and wrapped, and wrapped, and wrapped. We wrapped his ashray, his loose change, his lighter, his papers, his laptop, his picture frame (hey Sith Lord, there's a surprise waiting for you underneath that foil), his wastepaper basket, his awards and god knows what else. And while we were wrapping, one of us was working on creating the Star Wars intro crawl text video (I had adapted the original Star Wars text earlier in the day).

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Thanks to Soo Hoe who described to us in the MNCC OSSIG (Malaysian National Computer Confederation Open Source Special Interest Group) group email the CNN screening of a feature on open source.  Thanks to Ditesh who informed us of the transcript of the Linus Trovalds interview, most of which CNN included in the TV feature.

I believe CNN International is screening it in Asia just one more time at 7:30pm today, Malaysia time. I just watched the 2:30am screening. (Normally I only watch live football past midnight. I was told that World Cup matches will be mostly not past midnight, luckily).

OK, Soo Hoe already described the documentary, which is definitely positive depiction of open source, so there is no controversy on the production approach like in the recent BBC's screening of "Code Breakers" (see Fouad Riaz Bajwa's views on it). Heartening to note CNN's highlighting of the open source model being adopted in non-software domains, including Wikipedia, mass customization of Lego and especially Soo Hoe's favourite, Superflex (though I'll need to look for the non-alcoholic version).

Linus Trovalds said in the interview when commenting on the Linux developers, "...At least from the developers' standpoint, nobody does it because they hate Microsoft... They do it because they love doing what they do." I can echo that for myself (basically I have not found myself hating anyone, although I have not really been tested with someone doing "bad" unto me) -- the passion for promoting openness (see banner above) is more because of my belief in it rather than the irritation of needing to debate with detractors. It's all exciting, nevertheless!