Monday, December 27, 2010

video and games

Duke Nukem Fan Movie

watch it with your unlocked Radeon HD6950

and did you play Zelda once upon a time?

and yea, Daft Punk is on form for the Tron soundtrack..

Monday, December 20, 2010

fresh from the oven - Google Shared Spaces

a little bit like, maybe a little bit like kerio workspace, a lot like etherpad..i hope it builds from here. was like a holy grail for me. until facebook killed it.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

of internet freedom...

about china..
why don't governments, and the rest of the folks who don't like the internet as it is, build their own?

wikileaks mirrored on >300 domains..
something about the 4th estate, i think, was lost some time ago...

and comscore scores for USA smartphone almost up to parity with ios...
like the internet vs. governments...

Thursday, December 2, 2010

streaming my game

This is but one of the projects doing stuff along these lines...

and actually, seriously, other than the interface design, the processing power of phones is not much different from onlive's little console...all these things could be sharing games or something.....


Monday, November 1, 2010

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Worst outcome possible.. is no more. Facebook has bought them and they're ending the service! This is so horrible I don't know what to say.

Google disappeared from the 2010 internal social software magic quadrant?!? anyways, i'm totally waiting for people to build stuff with etherpad functionality, and for Wave-in-a-box to be released..

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

tool for the job...

attention: Ministry of Education

and then as i was looking into ulteo recently..these came to mind/attention...


Tuesday, October 26, 2010

messing with messaging..
list of botnet isps and countries.
3 firms providing roughly the same thing. stop the sending out invite to meeting, and then keep amending the time because xyz cannot make it. everyone connect their calendars to them, they show you time slots that everyone is free.
juniper is into it too. there is a gap. only bb does phone security properly. winmo and symbian are the only alternatives.
mostly its hard to do it on iphone because it depends on apple's mood, or something like that.
but wonder why nobody's rolled their own enterprise android yet..remove the google bits and don't call it android and you can do exactly what you like with it. you can even install the google bits doens't bother google so long as those bits are not on the rom.

and winpho7..if they do it properly, it looks quite attractive...

although the playstation phone running android would be the one to beat, i guess...

Friday, October 22, 2010

A big bakery delivery!

Android fans rejoice!!!

Walkman fans will miss it..

finally, another tool to help solve the fundamental economics problem of distribution...

Monday, October 11, 2010

i do wish tonido would keep up a bit with pogoplug..

The way we read the tea leaves, Microsoft has a very good chance in the SMB space

and these people are still around!

i believe Global Warming is real. But i also believe there needs to be honest debate. if only to gauge how bad it is.

lastly, i think they're running away with the prize..and Tonido, which i like alot, may be left in its dust at this rate...

Friday, October 1, 2010

download it you can do anything u like with it. Buy it and you can't play it anywhere.

remember copyright what is for : " To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to theirrespective Writings and Discoveries."

Alice in Wonderland is already in public domain. does that stop publishers from making money off it?

There is only so long that you can continue to abuse someone while telling them it is for their own good before they decide to throw reason to the wind and stab you 72 times.

reportedly this is what sky charges the trolling law firms for ip address discovery :

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

eve no jikan

watched this recently. good stuff. you know how the japanese are fascinated by the idea of 'what makes a human?'...
and the state of the art now, seiko-chan, from murata.

security and obscurity

how soon before someone evil finds the backdoor?

whack-a-mole? and what about its utility to other users?

Monday, September 27, 2010

chatting within the firm

yammer , and i wonder how is Opzi different.

unrelated :

xmarks is about to close down...


Tuesday, September 21, 2010

i say..


A bit of venting here today..

1. when an isp blocks any specific port, can it do so with a little bit of courtesy and say 'port blocked by xyz isp' when i telnet there? thats all i ask for at this point. i shall not go into the question of what difference does it make to them whether i run my server on 80 or 88 or 8080 or 1337. nor shall i go into the question of my paying $70/mth for 100mbps, unlimited usage, when blocking port 80 is definitely a limitation.

i'm not even going to complain that selling 'up to' 100mbps is disingenuous if i only get that occasionally - its a number that has exactly zero use for predicting what i will get most of the time.

2. all over the world, the media industries are trying to influence governments to take an active stance in enforcing i.p. rights. like the 3-strikes law in france. why would law enforcement do something like that is beyond me.

i believe its a purely civil matter. if anyone infringed on any patent or copyright, it should be up to the owner of the copyright to sue the infringer in court to recover damages. the government is not supposed to be handling disputes between you and your neighbour, it protects its people. disputes between you and your neighbour, you have to sue your neighbour yourself.

the government enforcing i.p. rights is like the police arresting people for being late with their phone bills. its entirely up to the telecoms firm to recover the bills you owe them. and so it should be entirely up to the recording and movie industries to recover their losses caused by infringements on their copyrights.

3. i.p. protections like copyrights and patents are temporary monopolies on the distribution of the protected item given to the creator to let them earn some money off it so that it encourages them to continue creating more things, and to encourage others to create. at the end of the temporary monopoly, the work goes to public domain. the idea is once anything is published, its in public domain. we the people pitied the starving artists and let them earn a bit of coin to feed themselves, thats all. if they didn't like handing over the work to the public, then they could jolly well keep it private. like what kfc and coca cola do for their recipes, for example.

so i don't understand why film studios own the rights to films and not directors, why recording companies own the rights to the music and not the singers and bands. nor why the copyright on music has grown from 12yrs to life+99yrs now. especially since the pharmaceutical companies spends billions every year on research, and their products get only a 5 year patent(extendable to 10 for specialised use cases).

4. if, impossible as it may seem, the governments actually get it, and restore copyrights to what they once were - 12 yrs long, and require the creators to do their own enforcement just like everyone else, then they may be forced to see their real problem.

throughout history consumers really ever paid for content. content is literally free. what consumers paid for was distribution. and copyright was about the distribution. not content.

think about the newspaper industry - the readers pay the cover price of the newspapers and the advertisers pay for the right to advertise to those readers.
tv - viewers pay the tv license and advertisers pay for the right , again, to advertise to those viewers.
we only pay for books because they needed to be carted from the printer to the bookshop and that costs money.

but now with digital content, the cost of distributing an addition copy is essentially nothing. only the copyright prevents the second copy from being distributed at a price reasonable to what its distribution costs.

fair enough that authors and song writers should have the protection of copyrights - and they should be allowed to enforce them. but the copyrights should be nearer 12 years and not 100 years long, and the authors and song writers should do it for themselves.

and if they thought that it was not realistic to do so, then they should come up with a new business model like what everyone else had to do. if they cannot adapt to digital media then they deserve to go out of business, like how the horse-carriage makers went out of business after Ford made cars affordable for everyone.

moreover, even the authors and song writers adapted to new conditions before. they survived the photocopying machine, the phonograph, the cassette tape, the VHS tape, the CDR and the DVD-R/RW. the real problem is this time they're just too lazy or too powerful, and they're not adapting to the advent of the internet. thats all.

5. besides capping copyright periods to 12 yrs and allowing creators to enforce their rights, the government should also look into the consumers' rights, i think.
if i bought a dvd, i expect to be able to watch it anywhere in the world, on my pc and on my dvd-player. i should be persecutable by the movie studio if i distributed copies of that dvd to my friends or other people. but since i bought that dvd, i should be able to enjoy it however/whenever/wherever i damn well please.
this right to do whatever i damn well please with things that are mine, i do hope that governments will take more seriously. but then again, that seems to be impossible in today's climate.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

darth zynga? ahahahahha..

i was once asked in a course as to what a firm should do if manufacturing in china was much cheaper but i.p. could be stolen. i answered that the firm should just give up r&d and go set up in china and make copies. it wasnt a popular answer at all.

p.s. it was many years ago. in the same course, i was asked also what ben&jerry's should do. i answered that they should sell the firm since they are in a no-win situation against nestle/haagen-dazs. i think the very next year they did(to unilever?).

Thursday, September 9, 2010

stuff to think about...
clipperz..available as a online service, or roll your own server with the community edition..a single-sign-on for the webs...
native app to do the same thing..interestingly the linux port got ported back to windows or something like that...
opportunity to eventually roll your own dropbox/ u can only sign up to their server, use it on linux only and use storage on gitorious or github...

Friday, September 3, 2010

run your own Google...wave, that is....

i was looking at news that Consumer Watchdog is running a big video ad in Times Square, nyc, dissing Google. and then the issue, i think, is...
1. credit card companies will sell ur details and ur buying habits for money. u can't actually buy that info from Google. why not complain about the cc companies first?
2. your isp also know where exactly you've been and what sites you've gone to.
3. companies like Sony leave rootkits on your machine. Game firms, even blizzard, often leave a tool to monitor your system processes in the name of anti-cheating and a bit torrent client to steal your bandwidth to deliver patches and game downloads. often without telling you.
4. you can opt out of google , or just use yahoo or bing.
5. think about facebook.
6. i would actually like for Google to succeed. in the sense that when they do, i shld have RELEVANT ads delivered to me. like when i'm looking at exakta mount lenses, maybe they show me an ad for a camera shop nearby my house that carries an exakta-to-canon EF-adaptor ring...knowing that i already have a EF-mount body... that'd be SWEET!

in other news
i) twitter's implementation of OAuth is shit..
ii) govts are often clueless about things. i wonder if its especially true for tech? they awarded a us$2.3b contract without mentioning redundancy/backup...
iii) i wanna my own Google Wave!!!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010


the thing is, if apple succeeds in getting people familiar with the idea of internet on tv, then the next device they get may be Google TV, since its now probably not alien to them, and Google TV would do more than what Apple TV can do..

stuff like RIAA/MPAA and patent trolls are not new.

fiber plans are out!

singtel is selling at :

M1 is selling at :

new provider superinternet is selling at : , and their commercial offering(best effort! no SLA!) is

likely by the end of my current 6mth-$70 100mbps contract i'll switch to the new fiber based one, also from m1...and save myself 20 odd $ a month in the process...

Obama : piracry is theft! Me : i support this idea unreservedly!

1. if pirating a cd is exactly the same thing as stealing a cd, then no more $22500/per song awards. something closer to a $200 fine or community service would be more in line with the punishment for petty theft.

2. the copyright holder will have to prove that the copyright violation has deprived him/her of property - the central problem in theft. in so far as i can see, no matter how many copies of your book/picture/song that i make, you still have your book/picture/song with you.

3. lets be clear about this : copyright is a temporary* monopoly on redistribution of intellectual property granted by the government on behalf of society, so that the creators can earn temporary income off their work, and encourage the creation of more intellectual property. once published, the work belongs to the public - only a temporary monopoly on redistribution of that work is given to the creator.

4. so lets abolish copyrights altogether and try all these cases of 'piracy' as theft! i support this idea unreservedly!

*the current death of creator+99yrs copyright period on songs, for example, is stretching temporary abit..especially when medicine costing billions in R&D has only 5-10 years of patent protection - and patents have a screening/registration process while copyrights are automatically assumed.

Monday, August 30, 2010

i got FROYO! froyo! Froyo! FroYo!

when's gingerbread?!?

anyways, singapore/singtel's HTC Desires just got their android 2.2 update today! yay!

and with that i finally tried out Fennec..a bit slow..but add-ons are a good thing..and no other mobile browser has them now...

on the other, low-end front, Android may get a even bigger audience when the chinese phone-makers (and everyone else?) start to take advantage of cheaper chinese

Sunday, August 29, 2010

ffmpeg on android

so now besides yxplayer, theres rockplayer...all round good news then...

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Fennec alpha is OUT officially!
nice recap of what happened to storage after vmware..
better idea of hp vs dell + 3par - why not compellent?

besides that, HDS recently bought parascale, but caringo seems to be independent still..

Their government is doing this, and they think Google is violating their privacy when it recorded the broadcasts they were operating from their wifi equipment..

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

wither a light meter? anyone?

1. camera phones have cameras on them
2. the cameras on phones, like all cameras, need to meter to work
3. i just want to know what they metered
4. is that so hard???????????????????
5. as a bonus, use the camera interface to let me do cool stuff like multispot or multisegment metering.
6. profit!

Saturday, July 31, 2010


i've setup homepipe on my web-server-machine and attached 2 usb hdds to it. now i can stream mp3s from those disks to my phone. but other files, including my videos, have to be downloaded. downloading a 1gb movie before watching it on a phone is crazy. for now at least.

i've also attempted to use vlc to stream the videos. on my 1st attempt, it didnt work. maybe next time. and the app called vlc stream and remote or something like only works thru lan not wan.

anyway, trying to make anime stream over wan to my phone will be an ongoing thing..i shld be exploring vlc more first...

the other stuff i'm also exploring is vnc and rdp control of my pc from the phone.

and i'm curious whether i can use an android vnc client to control a machine running gbridge, which uses vnc... or do i have to use realvnc or tightvnc...

and lastly, gladinet is an interesting app that allows you to mount your ms skydrive, google apps, gmail, picassa storage(as well as more serious stuff like s3,atmos,azure,webdav,ftp storage locations) as folders in a drive...wonder if there'd be a phone app next time?

for now i have homepipe to access the drives at home, and also dropbox and zumodrive...but wonder if more could be done...

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Friday, July 23, 2010

So cute!!!

it lacks 3g, wifi and runs some rtos probably. but still...imagine its a gameboy with phone function baked in!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

starving artists II

as a follow up to Hollywood Accounting, this is Recording Industry Accounting. Artists are not starving because you download the music and don't buy the CD.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

starving artists..

and ,

not as if buying anything will get the artist paid..seems a good bet it does keep the production firm paid and thats all.

and, its still cheaper to steal a cd than to copyright-infringe on it..

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

i don't really mind if i could attach my ultron to my desire.. - someone please sell me a m42 mount + tripod for my htc desire for less than $100!!!

i suspect that both android phones and iphones haven't really reached the business market? its still dominated by blackberry? and perhaps by symbian outside the usa and supplemented by windows mobile?

in time to come(especially given the pace of development), android will gain acceptance there, being open and all that. meanwhile, its anybody's guess what apple is going to do for that market.

its possible that in the future a whole class of workers will be carrying android phones, because they're somewhat cooler than blackberrys, and because corporate i.t. supports them.

meanwhile, because its free(as in beer), theres probably a new android device being launched in china every day. who knows how big the chinese android market will become? and when will they start exporting cheap android phones in numbers? lenovo already has their lephone; but who knows if one or more of the chinese manufacturers would find acceptance worldwide and grow into a international brand like lenovo? zte and huawei are already huge, but have little consumer may do it for them perhaps?

i suspect blackberry and nokia are probably going to be vulnerable to android's growth into their markets, if future versions bring enterprise features that only blackberry and symbian now have. and also for nokia, android's attractiveness to low cost manufacturers may be a threat to their low end symbian phones.

but iphones will probably never become marginalised, because android will never be as cool and will never appeal to the kids and the ladies as much.
a good read into the disclosure vs security-through-obscurity debate, which has been going on for a few hundred years already, since the day we invented the padlock and the occupation of the locksmith.
fyi, info on security software 'market' shares..

and finally, Not your mother's JavaScript!

just what the fuck is wrong with old people???!

"What is happening to our young
Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?" - Plato

the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless
beyond words.
elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of
--- Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.

The world is passing through troublous times.The young people of
today think of nothing but themselves.They have no reverence for
parents or old age.They are impatient of all restraint.They talk as
foolishness with them.As for the girls,they are forward,immodest
and unladylike in speech,behavior and dress."
Peter the Hermit
A.D. 1274

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

i am copyrighting my name now.

and no newspaper shall be allowed to report my name without my licensed agreement.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

must see! must watch!

1. must see! pin-ups in full detail!!!

2. must watch! whats wrong with patents now...(now now, patents are only for what? 5 yrs? copyrights are like 99yrs or more..that seems to be an even bigger problem to me..)

3. good stuff ~1. openVBX...but u gotta sign up for a free account.

4. good stuff ~2. ocarina embedded..when will it be embedded on the hdd directly?

5. good stuff ~3. samsung beam. 1800mah batt on 800mhz cpu - it'll last nearly forever if u don't use the projector...

meego looks great!

just a few days ago seamicro put 512 atom cores on 1 we got thats left is for them to make a lamp stack to run on it..

just a point to x25m is about us$200...

nice, meego. looks like it could be a good contest between it and android for tablets, if only they can get traction..which looks like 'no'.

and then back to copyright...the issue with the current state of affairs with the content producers sueing everyone in sight seems to be that they haven't found a business model to make money now that they don't have to distribute physical copies of their output anymore...its not like people are not willing to pay at all....

finally, take a read and laugh...

Monday, June 21, 2010

because, u know, before copyright was invented..

nobody wrote anything or did any art..and nothing was invented before patents were invented, you know? and also, of course open source and creative commons don't exist except in your imagination.

ars technica on the effect of filesharing on society..

pff on the same topic...

anyway, this opscode stuff sounds pretty cool...

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

iPad! proxy! flash!

more about the at&t ipad leak.

and..a new at&t leak with the new iphone?

dunno why i came across this. supposedly more interesting than squid.

and what the inquirer thinks of jobs' antagonism with adobe/flash...

Sunday, June 13, 2010

it came back today!


2. sounds great. as they say...There's not much not to like in spamd.

3. old news, but just came to my attention again, as google is now talking about "chromoting"...

4. Must Read! steven pinker on technology and intelligence.

5. looks damn cool...

6. and finally, about that 'retina' display of the iphone 4...its about what squeezing a bigger resolution onto a smaller screen then?

LG-LU1400 800x480 on 2.8in = 333PPI! more than the iphone4(326PPI)!!!...

Toshiba Portege G900 800x480 on 3in = 313PPI... , and both this and the LG are not new...while the LG is a dumb phone with its only outstanding feature a TV-tuner, the G900 is a passable smart phone. runs winmo 6 on a 512mhz chip.

i think the point is that PPI has not been very interesting at all. and i think is still not.

Monday, June 7, 2010

i'm happy that my phone can play 800x450 xvid clips just fine. for now.

Penny Arcade eXpo has strict rules about booth babes...6000+ visitors to their forum respond on a poll about their ban on booth babes...

a comparison of the iphone 4 vs its android competition at the top end. "adobe flash - never."

office is now live on skydrive!

soon we can email our printer to print across the internet...but its going to print the email? the attachment? hmm..

a good article about android fragmentation...

and finally, spot the satelites above!

Sunday, June 6, 2010

absolutely nothing to do with transformers

"Simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin,"

so what has the USA been doing? will wikileaks reveal?

"Straightforward legal blackmail"

google is talking up their security...

local media should watch this...

similiarly, another impressive idea, textbook rentals...

how cheap! a compaq cq62z!

do the schools use any of these?
















16. warriors of the net

Saturday, June 5, 2010

HTC Desire

well then, i've been using my new phone for about a week now.

its a HTC Desire.

my main issue with it is still its capacitive screen. well, its more sensitive and all that. very nice for interacting with big icons and all. but inferior to a good resistive screen for typing. especially if you got long fingernails.

long fingernails means that you could be very precise as to what you are pressing on a resistive screen. while the same fingernails make it extremely hard to use a capacitive screen. moreover, you simply cannot get the same level of precision on a capacitive screen - i think thats why the HTCs and BBs all have a physical trackball - to put the cursor behind the exact letter/comma/number so that you can backspace from there. thats hard to do even after i trimmed my nails.

moreover, my old LG had a physical qwerty keyboard which makes it even better - if fingernails fail, i could use the 5 row qwerty with direction keys and physical numeric keys.

other than that the Desire has been a good thing.

i have yxplayer installed so that i can play divx and xvid clips like i used to. i could probably get better resolution on my clips given the extra horsepower, but i'm still on my previous batch of converted clips. and they play and look just fine.

the screen is bigger 3.7 vs 3.0 in. and has more colours too. 16m vs 256k. if i'm not wrong.

i'm still using bsoft monitor and ebuddy as before.

the built-in mail is ok..i've separated my gmail from my work mail now...they used to be accessed from the same mobile mail app when i was using the LG..its fuller featured mail now that it hasnt been passed thru a mobile mail server...i think.....

the HTC friend stream thing allows me to read/post comments on the phone, which is a step up from the LG..though i suppose i would have found an app to do that anyway, if i were more keen on facebook...i'm not...

there is still nothing to beat RssQ with its ability to import opml files...though the HTC newsreader's ability to search for feeds is still not bad...

finally, all that extra computing power is really for the eye candy i suppose...the HTC weather app and its animations are pretty cool...and android 2.1's support for Live Wallpapers is nicely showed off too...

and i get to use flyscreen as well...

p.s. although i get to use juicedefender now..battery life is still noticeably shorter than before..after all the htc has a more powerful chip, bigger and more colourful screen and a smaller battery than the LG...

Sunday, May 23, 2010

a blue monday

the great henry spencer himself is responsible for 2 of the quotes personally...

thats hilarious too...

just to know the alternatives. theres actually nothing wrong with sharepoint.

just to know about...

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

obligatory car analogy

the thing is. now maybe software has a 3 month or 6 month or whatever release cycle. there is always testing and qc to make sure it performs to certain expectations* before the software is released.

*i suppose the problem there is that what the i.t. people expect and what consumers expect is different.

and then usually there is the alpha, beta and release candidate routine. where users are invited to test the software in a more 'real world' setting. before anyone gets to buy it.

the idea is that software will always have bugs. and if everyone in the rc stage thinks its useable, it should be good enough to be used by most of the target audience.

in fact, you could think of software as forever in beta. its a release cycle thing. whether its a bug fix or a new feature, it could be released as a patch or a new version. and the thing is, now theres more new feature than bug fix, thats all.

thats as far as testing goes. desktop software interacts with more unknowns than server software. so generally for desktop software, you could expect more issues. and server software is usually run by more knowledgeable people - who also know enough to limit what can run on their servers. so generally servers have less issues than desktops.

if software were to be treated as a normal product, with real warranties, then it simply means that developers will have to do alot, alot more bug fix than new feature. thats all.

in my imagination, new features would come alot more sparsely. and release cycles will take much longer. its easier to implement a new feature than to look for bugs.

the constant adding of new features is exactly what is so amazing about software.

IBM AIX(a unix) is the most reliable os platform we know of. it was very important long ago, but by now few use it. other platforms have superceded it.

its not that hard to change the platform you are using to something else. not like attempting to change your utilities provider.

and i wonder about network effects actually. people switched from windows 98 to XP to vista and then now to windows 7 without much issue. drivers, programs and all had to be changed between the versions of windows. its like switching between windows and mac or linux. those are NOT different versions of windows actually, but new OSes(except for the switch from vista to 7; stuff is generally interoperable between those 2).

yes, when more people use your platform more other people will want to use your platform too. but microsoft had to rebuild the platform several times in between.

and although you could say microsoft is still the default desktop os, apple has managed to shift people's attention away from the desktop to their phone, with the iphone. the iphone is every bit as big a product as windows. the iphone is 1/2 of apple's revenue, and the ipod about 1/3. and look how big apple is now.

there is now a competing computing platform.

and did that come about from legislation or regulation? did Google come about from legislation or regulation? was microsoft able to make everyone use internet explorer?

anyway, my point is that its the constant innovation, or "adding new features", that is the defining thing about the i.t. industry. nobody stays around if they don't get it right. someone else will take their pie.

now legislation and regulation is attempting to curb that, to make them fix bugs.

comparing the value to society that i.t. has produced thus far against the cost caused by bugs, imho, the former is far greater than the latter.

and we want to stop that golden goose because some people don't know enough about i.t. and are scared of it?!

why do i say that some people don't know enough about i.t.?

2 things:

firstly, whenever software is used, there are assumptions being made as to its usage and operating environment. usually that is as far as what the beta testers and rc users use it for. and that there will always be problems.

and secondly, there is a whole industry dedicated to fixing those problems. a part of the i.t. industry, just that its a different part of the i.t. industry.

that separate , different part of the i.t. industry does testing, security and disaster recovery, among other things.

right now, if one paid for it, its possible to get relatively bug free software. by hiring his own developers. the space shuttle uses software that generally has 300 times less bugs than off-the-shelf software. many firms develop in-house apps too.

(as an aside, its also possible to use 'better' software than windows and microsoft office or whatever - AIX is still sold by IBM, and theres lots of hardened linuxes and bsds.. its just that most people prefer the insecure but more 'useful' windows platform to the more secure but less 'useful' linux/bsd platforms - and nevermind that most of these linuxes and bsds are free)

right now, if one paid for it(or found free alternatives), one could get solutions that help make systems more secure. like anti virus, firewalls, encryption systems and such..

the effect of legislating that software has to be fixed (much better fixed, relatively, than before) simply means that we want to integrate that second part of the industry, the testing and security parts of it, that are optional now, into every single piece of software by fiat.

and for the software developers, they would then only allow their software to work only in certain environments - because anything outside of that, they would not know for sure it would work. so only vista32bit/corei5/kingstonDDR667/x58 certified programs would be allowed to install on that combination of os, chip, chipset and ram. it really depends on how narrowly they will scope it. nowadays its very broadly scoped - only that its supposed to work on vista 32 bit, but in the future, they may have to prevent the users from installing their app on anything other than what they have tested on already.

so instead of before when we could choose not to use space-shuttle-bug-free software at windows xp home prices and let NASA alone with their bug-freedom, in the future everyone is supposed to use space shuttle software.

that hasn't changed its scope of operation in 20 years and i have no idea costs how much.

and then we could go back to the issue of some people don't know enough about i.t.

you know, i find the idea that, like cars, if software were blatantly defective, like when its really useless(faulty brakes?), then the manufacturers should be oblidged to recall and replace their shoddy products, somewhat attractive..

i can think of McAfee and its update that actually broke the users' systems. they were actually negligent, and should be made to pay. which i think they have offered to.

but i also think, like cars, only half(i suspect less than that) the problem of people getting hurt in accidents is due to faulty car components or lack of safety features in the cars - driving is the other half of the problem.

which is why drivers have to take tests to get licensed before they are allowed to drive on public roads, isn't it?

then it only makes sense that if a computer user(driver) were to want to connect his/her computer(car) to the internet(public road), he/she should have to pass a test and obtained a license first.

and you would be required to have a vista user-license(go for a 3 mth course for it!) to use vista, and a pdf-user license(2 weeks?) to open pdf files and so on so forth... i mean, how else would the software developers know if you are doing it correctly?

p.s. i think, a long time ago, when motorised vehicles were first introduced in britain, a person was supposed to walk in front of a motorised coach to warn the other road users because it was considered dangerous....



1. what admob's competitors and developers(customers) say about the FTC and its investigation into the Google Admob purchase..


well. so their credibility has taken a hit because they did something they said they didn't.
but what did they actually collect??? nothing that was not public information anyway!!!
your mac address and i.p. address are public information anyway!
its like someone going down every road and taking a picture of the houses and jotting down the address.
what the hell is wrong with that?


The internet is NOT your friendly neighbourhood. Who invited you?


so these thoma bravo people think they can put together a serious business continuity outfit?

5. ahahaha..this is by far the best thing to say about Google...

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears

Sunday, May 16, 2010

software liability,0

i think. in a car analogy. if car manufacturers are liable for product defects, then drivers will have to be licensed too. since either of them will cause harm to other innocent parties. same as with computer users in a networked world. someone with poor security practices could be using a machine that is infected by malware bots and spamming everyone else with virus attachments. so computer users will have to be licensed too.

my sympathy for fud

in general, without any market research whatsoever, i think end-users are using computers like they're driving without licenses. or any idea how a car works. all of them know about the ignition switch,the steering wheel,the brake pedal and the gas pedal - and thats about it. a few know about the gear shift, clutch, indicators and what the instrument panel is saying. that seems to be about it. back in computerland, it means that machines are unpatched, no av(or if its there, its not updated) or software firewall is running, browse the web without any idea what looks like a dodgy site, click on anything and everything, and open any email they take a fancy to. and probably click on whatever the emails ask them to click too.

and until the machine literally dies or works just short of that, they don't know they have any problem.

telling them they are the problem is a no go area - they get pissed at you. learning more about computers is no go too - they don't want to know more about it, because they think its a small part of their lives and they have better things to do.

and before everything dies on them, you could not convince them to buy any protection they don't need.

and when they buy that protection - be it a utm, a firewall, an av, or whatever - they think its a magic bullet that will solve everything.

so generally you could not sell anti spam to these people. they don't see a problem.

you can only sell anti spam to their sysadmins.

yet, the sysadmins have to answer to the end-users, actually usually just one of them - his boss. and though sometimes they are like the god of i.t. to these end-users, often they are like serfs. they too, have problems convincing their end-users of what computers can and cannot do, and how to and how not to use them.

as it is, i hardly begrudge the fud being spread by some vendors, since that seems to be the easiest way to get anything done.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

odin is a free backup tool, you know?

1. A good response to the anti-piracy people..Time Warner Cable says we can only do about 28 requests a month. Or in fact, why don't you submit each subpoena separately instead of requesting 100s of user records with each one?

2. amazing chip that does hd video and everything a media player needs...

3. remember what j.robert oppenheimer said :


4. not very big firm doing disaster recovery...

5. they're saying ssds can be much faster than hdds..well....didn't LSI say that already?

6. i mean, seriously, this is quite cool. taking isps off the internet. everyone just needs to edit their routing tables a little?

7. this is so funny i want to die...

"We can sit by and watch Apple continue to use our patented inventions without paying, or we can do something about it," Gould Bear said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "Synergy between inventors and manufacturers is healthy, and we love that Apple believes in our technology. We simply prefer open communications and fair compensation."

Gould Bear's sentiments are remarkably similar to those of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it," Jobs commented when launching Apple's suit against HTC. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

8. i can put your email and web hosting on google apps standard. thats free. and you get document collaboration too. if u have more than 50 users then you can run your own mail and webservers. hmail is free. as is xmail and a few others. theres also quite a good number of wamp stacks out there for free download, not least the acquaia drupal stack.

and then your own mailserver could run clamwin and spamassassin. and even have mail filtered by safensec first.

for the desktops, you could use anything from the open source moon secure av and winpooch+clamwin to the freeware avira, avg and avast. and run comodo, online armour, zonealarm and even coreforce, as the software firewall. even the dyndns updater does phishing protection nowadays. and you could use opendns too.

and finally, if your machine can be turned off, you could use clonezilla or kleo to clone it. or odin, to do it live. and then besides duplicity and syncback theres dozens of free/freeware sync/data backup tools out there...

which is to say that it costs almost nothing to provide for most of the software requirements of a small business.

but nobody is going to sell them any of the free solutions because theres nothing in it for them.

so they will continue using their windows server 2008 with exchange and iis, barracuda spam appliance, norton 360 and acronis truimage..and pay for it.

Monday, May 10, 2010

android fragmentation thought

I know that alot of experts have been saying that for android to truly 'win' then Google must reign in Android. Have ONE consistent user experience. they say right now some android phones are really poor and give Google a bad name. While many others cannot update to new versions of the OS, and many new apps won't run on older versions of the OS, and manufacturers have been customizing the OS to suit themselves and they're sometimes not fully compatible with all stuff "android" and quite a few of them update their custom Androids too slowly to keep up with the developments of the main Android project.


this potential for "fragmentation" is exactly why i want an android phone!!!

the ability to install some other OS than the official Google one...thats CHOICE.

the rapid releases of new versions of the OS..thats A Good Thing...

if you're asking for apps to work across different versions of the OS now, then when will you demand that they work on different OSes altogether? you're one of those who demanded that windows vista run windows 98 programs because theres the string "windows" in their names?

even though the specs already say they're different?

to solve "fragmentation" issues like this, i can only think of 1 solution. to stop development. then everything JUST WORKS!

how about this? why don't Google release 2 OSes? one should be called "Android" and the other they can call "Robot" or something, both initially based on the same code.

"Robot" would NEVER change unless EVERYTHING worked EXACTLY the same. and will run on phones with EXACTLY the same hardware - revisions will be called Service Packs, or part of a silent update process so that end users will not need to trouble their heads about what version it was. you could buy those clones and love them.

"Android" would be updated every 3 mths and run on practically any hardware. and have version numbers like 1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and so on...and people like me could buy phones that run on the "Android" platform appreciating that code that runs on Android 2.1 may not run on Android 1.0.

There is already a platform that already does what the Robot OS does. its called the iphone OS. many people use it, actually.

an update

1. Android has hit 28% of the us smartphone market. thats more than the iphone OS's 21% but less than BB's 36%. but i think it should only increase...

2. Some people will always pirate, even when the thing is FREE. and even when you do all you can to copy protect it. So, why not just throw away all the copy protection that hinders legitimate users - hey those are your real customers and why not try giving them better service or value for money for once?

3. nice us$250 ion2 machine..what can i run on it?

4. subscription billing services for merchants..

5. integrate all your messaging..

6. notes/rational/sharepoint/outlook/google docs integration...


Tuesday, May 4, 2010

the pot and the kettle

1. its extremely disingenuos of steve jobs to accuse adobe of being less than open when apple is similiarly closed, and furthermore suggesting that h264 over html 5 is the answer, since h264 is also again not open source.

2. if it were about necessary evils, then i'd live with flash, since flash solved the problem of cross platform content distribution, while html 5 will unsolve it all over again. and h264 is actually the unsolution.

we have opera and chrome and mozilla which will all support ogg theora. but i.e. and safari, which will not. i know which side i prefer.

and google has open sourced the vp8 codec. which i hope will get built into ogg theora, which is currently based on vp2.

and then everybody could drop the argument that ogg is a patent lawsuit waiting to happen because youtube uses it, google owns it, and now the public can explicitly use it.

unlike h264, which has to be licensed from the mpeg group, whose partners include microsoft (wonder why i.e. would support h264?) and apple (ditto steve's diatribe against flash and support for h264)..

then we can maybe finally escape the necessary evil that is flash and settle for open ogg theora on html 5.

unless apple and ms continue insisting on h264, which will mean half the internet watching h264/html5 and the other half using ogg theora/html5 in time to come if we actually got rid of flash - how would we actually get rid of actually cross platform flash by suggesting decidedly un-cross-platform-as-it-is-now html5 i don't know....

but anyway, i.e.'s share of the browser 'market' has been dropping, and is now below 60% for the first time ever, with chrome making the most gains recently. and before that it'd been opera. so i think as time goes by, more people would actually be choosing to use opera, chrome and firefox, and that would swing the html5 argument in favour of ogg..


and yes, its the tech minded people who prefer open source. the public could well like apple's way of doing things. but the programmers certainly don't.
maybe supply side economics can win in the end. when there are more android apps(past 50k) than iphone apps(>100k) and apple can shut up about their 'theres an app for that' already.

Monday, May 3, 2010

i lack fiber

1. M1 and singnet both are not admitting to planning to sell any fiber based internet access plan. I'll wait til wednesday for opennet to reply me and see if theres anyone willing to take my money for fiber internet.
But the feeling of the matter is that at the end of 2009, 15% of households and businesses were wired up for fiber.
At the end of this year, that should rise to 60%. and it will take til june 2012 to hit 95%.
The thing is that Singtel is one of the 4 JV partners of opennet. and it will most likely be them to launch fiber based access plans first. Starhub has their docsis 3.0. And M1 may wait and see if theres demand. But Singtel has already invested money into it - they probably would like to make some money off it.
But huge corporate bureaucracy that they are, they'd probably want to do a multi million marketing campaign for it, and do a big and loud nationwide rollout thing. And to not 'waste' marketing dollars on it, they may well wait til they think enough locations are fibered before they started the marketing campaign. i wonder if "enough" means 60% or 95%?
oh no, they wouldn't be selling these access plans just as yet another access plan and make some money now off people who have fiber installed already..they need a big marketing campaign.
2. why fiber? i'm not entirely sure, but i think each main fiber cable carries 10gbps. and resellers opennet should have given residential areas a 1:24 split and non-residential ones a 1:16 split.
1/24 of 10gbps is nearly 400mbps.
and the process of getting the free fiber wiring is opt-in. so alot of people would have missed it.
i could get 10gbps to myself???!
anyways, the 100mbps docsis 3.0 plan from starhub costs like $124/mth. but opennet is supposed to be heavily subsidised. i don't know what prices ida required opennet to sell at, but ida's remit is to expand internet usage in singapore i guess - they say the idea of opennet is to offer everyone at least 1gbps(huh? 1/24 of 10gbps is NOT 1gbps!) i'm thinking opennet based access plans should be cheaper than starhub's $124 plan because starhub paid for their own docsis 3.0 upgrades...
3. i also think that at the very start singnet will be the only offering around. and because theres no competition they'd only compare with starhub's docsis thing. and so it may be cheaper than starhub, but not necessarily the cheapest they can go.
then, competition would start to appear, and prices will be reduced.
this is the best time to have fiber access i think. because lots of people still wouldn't have had the fiber installed, but competition is keeping a lid on prices.
but the $50-$200 to wire their homes may keep people away from opennet based plans..they'll stick to adsl or 3g internet access..since they wouldn't know the difference if they were only web browsing.
so, singnet and its competitors may have to offer free cabling at this point again! and i don't think i would get a rebate if i were to have my cabling already. the cost of the access plans will rise because everyone will have to subsidise the new round of free cabling.
and speeds will drop as more people join the network.
4. signing up for singtel's english football iptv package for 2010-2011 will cost $24/mth i think.
but if i signed for their Mio Home bundle now, i could get 6mbps adsl with that for $35/mth. $40 for 10mbps, and $44 for 15mbps.
and i could nominate 1 mobile phone contract to be part of the bundle too, and that phone line would be eligible to change handsets every 12mths instead of the usual 21. and get free caller i.d. too.
i think i would go for the adsl+tv at least. i may get the mobile phone deal if a nice phone comes along...i have a phone line thats going to expire in 3mths, that my dad doesnt want...
i could use that phone line..and if i were to use it, i'd make it something with data access..which would cost $39/mth...nearly $500/year...selling a new phone yearly wouldn't recoup that money, nevermind selling a 1-yr old phone yearly.
if i do get that mobile phone plan, then the current setup i'm with, which is a data sim card that i swap between phone and modem when i go out or return home, would be excess to requirements...
5. the problem with this data sim is not the sim or the service, but the router it comes free with. the huawei b970b has all the nice functions in its admin page. but even though they're there in the interface, port forwarding and dmz do not work. the settings go in and show up in the interface, but theres no effect whatsoever. telnet via outside gets timed out, and port 80 visits with the browser via the internet bring up the router's own admin page without fail.
i would either swap the modem/router with the usb dongle i use at my workplace. or flash it with the firmware image i found. the only alternative firmware for this machine that i can find - its supposed to make port forwarding work..but i'm not totally confident...
i think swapping the modem and the dongle is the easiest option - the workplace could use a standalone router instead of ics, but i still do not really know what to do with an extra internet connection..
6. so i may just give up the phone upgrades in the end, and continue using the data sim as my phone line... and keep my monthly costs low as well...