Matt Casters on Data Integration

Dear Linux fans,

Last weekend I saw an ad for a netbook in a Carrefour superstore leaflet that I guess was just too good to refuse.

Unlike other netbooks, this one was priced really low: €199,00 (including taxes which makes it cost my company €164.46 or about 200 $USD).  For me, that’s the price point where a netbook makes sense, not €400-500 what you see all over the place.

Now, for that low price, you get the following machine:

• 1.6Ghz VIA C7-M CPU
• 512MB RAM (DDR2 667, shared with video, 384 available)
• 120GB hard disk (2.5″, 7200rpm)
• 1024×600 LCD screen (pretty good quality actually)
• Webcam
• WIFI b/g
• 2xUSB 2.0
• VGA port
• a multi-format card reader (SD, SDHC, MMC)
• Microphone
• Sound in/out
• Mandriva Linux 2009.1

It was very interesting to see that “Windows 2007 Home Premium” was priced at exactly the same price.  Talk about a total waste of money on the Microsoft side.

OK, back to the netbook.  The memory issue is not a problem.  I already ordered a 2GB DDR2 RAM module for the machine at €39.

UPDATE 10/27 : the RAM arrived, was installed in 5 minutes and all works fine now.  With 1.9GB available the machine is a lot snappier too.

Performance is obviously not stellar but I didn’t expect this either.  I paid less for it then my current cell phone.  However, it plays full screen AVI without a glitch.

The only real problem the box has is that it comes with … Mandriva Linux.  Maybe I’m spoiled by years of Ubuntu use, but this distribution really sucks.  Can I please just install some software, customize the UI a bit?  Please?  I don’t recall the last time I couldn’t install a piece of software on Ubuntu because a package couldn’t be downloaded.  WTF?  And charge €28 just to get a couple of codecs to play audio/video? I can legally use these drivers in Europe without a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, all hardware is supported and works fine, including audio, the webcam, skype, flash, etc.

Anyway, I tried to put Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 on it by booting from a USB stick.  Unfortunately, either the image or the stick has an issue since it freezes upon installer boot.  The live system boots but has a nasty video problem.  So I’m going to retry later next week.  Heck, maybe it’s better to just wait until Kubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix comes out next week.

Feel free to leave advice on what distro to pick and how to best handle the install.  Also feel free to leave tips on how to explain the kids that this is not a toy.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

Matt

8 Comments »

Dear Kettle fans,

There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t find myself amazed by the number of contributions and help that the Pentaho Data Integration project receives in all kinds of forms.  There are people contributing anything from small patches to complete steps, folks helping out others on the forum, writing documentation, writing books, translating PDI, etc.  Without any question, this has been a truly amazing experience, not just for me but for the whole Kettle project.

It’s because of that overwhelmingly positive experience that I’ve always tried to be accessible and in contact with my community in all sorts of possible ways.  And because of that positive vibe I have refrained from commenting on the negative flip side to that story for the longest time.

The problem is really that lately things have been changing.  It’s probably caused in general by an increasing attention to open source and specifically by an increase in popularity of Kettle.  In any case, certain types of people do the following:

• Send me personal email
• IM me on skype/Yahoo!/MSN/AIM/…
• Send me all sorts of messages and questions through the forums
• Ask questions on this blog
• …

Usually it’s a combination of any of the above.  Any time now I expect folks to be sending me direct twitter messages.  The questions are always the same:

I have an urgent Pentaho porblem.  I am incapable of using the forum for some stupid reason and so you have to help me, preferable now or within the next 15 minutes!!!!

This way, the meaning of “The kindness of strangers” becomes more and more like the one from the Nick Cave song.

I’ve just finished reading Linus‘ book “Just for fun” (Thanks again Domingo!) and his approach to the problem of staying in reach for people to contribute code and at the same time allowing yourself to have a life and a job is simple : if it ain’t fun, don’t do it.  Well, the barrage of this sort of questions has stopped being fun for me a long time ago.

As such, I’m going to try this approach: any question that could or should be asked on the forum is from now on silently ignored and deleted from my mailbox.  Any person that is not part of my “community” and that needlessly contacts me over IM gets blocked indefinitely.  And yes, that goes for twitter as well.  Off-topic questions on this blog go to the spam folder as well.  I will simply refuse to spend time on non-interesting topics.

I thought about creating a standard response e-mail, but any sort of replying is simply an encouragement to certain types of people and will only make matter worse. (been there, done that)

I’m sure everyone understands that this is the only way to free up time to work on the real problems at hand.  Thank you for your understanding in any case.

Until next time,

Matt

8 Comments »

Perhaps now I can do a micro-blog entry about my blog to make the circle complete?

Twitter! I guess I still don’t get it but I’m going to try if for a while to see if I get hooked.

Until next time,
Matt

5 Comments »

I just heard from cry for help from fellow countryman Jochen Maes on planet grep.  Apparently Freenode, the service that provides us with our ##pentaho IRC channel is in need of a bit of money.

So obviously I donated a couple of GBP.  After all, they aren’t worth what they used to be so it’s cheap to donate!  I hope that if you use Freenode, you’ll find the time to do this too.

Until next time,

Matt

3 Comments »

Dear Data Integration fans,

A few weeks ago, Yves de Montcheuil from Talend took a shot across the bow of Gartner for not including Talend in their Magic Quadrant (MQ) for data integration.  After that post, Andreas Bitter from Gartner (rightfully) felt personally under assault and felt the need to set the record straight.

I think the discussion itself is very interesting, but misses very important point:

The Magic Quadrant contains companies not trends nor communities nor people nor software!

Think about it for a second.  In the early days of JBoss there were complaints from Marc Fleury about the fact that only a small percentage of the “JBoss the software” users paid anything to “JBoss the company”.  Numbers that floated around back then were 0.01% or 0.1%, can’t remember exactly.

Those numbers make sense, I’ve heard about similar figures from other commercial open source companies.  Anything in the range 0.01% to 1% is possible.

Let’s be “optimistic” here and claim that a company like Pentaho converts 1% of all users into customers. (trust me, that figure would be really great given the millions of users out there :-))  That would mean that we’re disturbing the market of our competitors for the turnover x 100.  So if Pentaho would do a dollar turnover, we’re disturbing the closed source vendors for 100 dollars.

Pentaho and yes indeed Talend see that they are being a serious disturbance to the market dominance from the traditional DI vendors.  And that is why Yves feels a bit mistreated by Gartner.  However, since companies like Pentaho and Talend use a disruptive business model it is only normal that the Gartner MQ itself is also disrupted by our models. You simply can’t be part of the system if you want to disrupt it I guess. (*)

All that being said, it’s only a matter of time before something has got to give: open source or the Gartner DI MQ.  Yves, Andreas, let it be noted I’m betting on the former to come out of this as a winner.

Until next time,

Matt

(*) This also partly explains why Kettle and TOS are not really competitors: we’re using the same business model and are not disrupting each other.  We offer 2 completely different choices to our users.

2 Comments »