Recently in Technology Category

So you got your iPad and you heard that your favourite telco has those handy microsim cards on hand. If you already have a broadband plan on your mobile phone and intend to use it with your new iPad 3G, you’re out of luck. The Singtel guy at the counter told me that I had to sign a separate 2 year data plan with Stinktel just so I can use 3G internet on the iPad. That’s the only way they’d give me a microsim card.

But this is how you get around it. Sorta.

Tell your telco you want a multisim. This just means you’ll be given 2 sim cards on the same plan you currently have. Singtel charged me a one-time $30 fee, and a $5 monthly. You’ll be handed 2 similar simcards. 1 card will go into your existing phone, the other on to your desk, where you will have to perform some minor surgery to convert it to a microsim.

My iPad came from the States, so there was an AT&T microsim card already inside the machine. I used a marker to draw an outline of the microsim on top of the simcard, used a pair of scissors to cut the outside of the outline, and a nail-file to bring it down to size. Be careful not to cut any portion of the metal contacts at the end (they’re extremely small). Good tutorials can be found on ihackintosh and Macrumors.

Once you managed to squeeze your homemade microsim into your iPad, be patient. Singtel takes about 2 days to activate your multisim account, so you’ll have to wait till then to see the results of your surgery.

When the account is activated, you’ll notice the words “Singtel 3G” on the top left of your iPad, much like the iPhone. You’ll probably try to fire up your browser or Twitter and find that you can’t connect to the internet. “Cellular Data not subscribed” or some such message appeared for me. You’ll need to go to “Settings > Cellular Data > APN Settings”, and put in your APN, Username and Password. If you already have a data plan working on your iPhone, you can get these fields at “Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network”.

Once you set these fields on your iPad, give it a while to get all set up. Not sure if you have to, but I restarted my iPad.

When your multisim account is activated, be sure to put the other simcard into your phone. Your original simcard doesn’t work anymore.

Important: One thing Singtel didn’t tell me was that the 2 simcards are not identical. One of them is a Primary simcard which allows it to function like a normal simcard. The Secondary simcard does not take incoming calls. So if your phone hasn’t rung since the multisim account was activated, it’s highly likely that you put the primary card into your iPad.

Panic. Panic. Hyperventilate. I…cut…up…my…primary…card.

No worries. If your secondary simcard is in your phone, dial *141# to set the simcard in the phone as the primary simcard.

There! You’re done.

On a sidenote, one question I was asked is whether it was worth getting a 3G iPad rather than just the Wifi one. If you’re serious about using the internet, yes. I was foolhardy at first to think I could tether the iPad to my iPhone etc, but the hassle would pretty much kill the amazing internet device the iPad is.

It is so liberating to hit the switch on the iPad and have internet connectivity almost anywhere. Well worth the extra cost, in my opinion.

A good gauge is how you use your iPhone, if you have one. If you use it like an iPod, maybe the Wifi-only iPad is for you. And if that’s so, I don’t think you fully grasped the whole concept of the iPhone.

Even my mother has a twitter account.

Photo credit: Kominyetska on Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License.

February and March was supposed to be a time of rest before I head to the new job, but opportunity often knocks on the door when you least expect it.

When I met Mark Surman in Singapore last December, I had no idea I would eventually become involved in shaping the Open Web Career Track Drumbeat Project along with John Britton and Philipp Schmidt.

It was one of those requests that made me feel woefully inadequate, but I felt a deep affinity to its cause of providing accessible education to inculcate skills within the tech community — skills necessary to keep the web open and non-proprietary. John and Phlipp were extremely patient and kind to bring me up to speed.

So when Mark asked if I could present the Open Web Career Track project at Mozilla Developer Day in Bangalore, I agreed.

It is regrettable that I’ve never really traveled within Asia, and it would be my first time to India.

The crowd that showed up for MozDevDay was amazing. A full-house of about 300 people, on a Saturday, some coming from quite a distance away.

It was an eclectic experience: we talked pretty cutting edge tech in the hall — thanks to Arun — and ate sitting down on the grass patch under the noon sun. It was a departure from the sterile environment Singapore tech meetups are often held in, where the main complaint was always “why no wifi?”.

It was a blast speaking to the audience. The Indian and Chinese cultures share so many similarities it was easy to point out (and subsequently joke about) our common idiosyncrasies.

I’ve learned so much from the amazing people I met. In a land where there are places in poverty, open-source software means so much more than “why does OpenOffice mess up my Powerpoint slides?”. It is a means by which the poor can make themselves relevant in an increasingly technological world; where the oppressed can broadcast their plight to the rest of the world despite the best efforts of the oppressors to silence them.

The web has changed the way in which we communicate and connect with each other. It has the potential to be a lot more than a giant corporate marketplace. We need to consciously keep it inclusive and available to everyone.

Taken from the CNet article Sony PIctures CEO hates the internet: Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said,

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

The internet levels the playing fields for big corporations and small startups.

These are my perspectives:

I’m a guy who sees amazing opportunities coming from the internet. The fact that I can now do business anytime, in any timezone, to anyone who wants to buy my product on impulse is a wonderful notion. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day, and Madison Avenue were found in every connected household, and on every broadband-enabled mobile. My customers and purveyors of my content are empowered to connect with me, giving me constant feedback on how I can better serve their needs or improve my product. Best of all, where once I had to pay a lot of money to agencies running focus groups, I now get all this feedback for free. This goes a long way into helping me create a product that is useful to my customers, a product they are happy to pay for.

I’m a guy who sees the internet as the emancipator of the consumer. No longer are we bound to buy more than we need. We have been persecuted by corporations long enough, made to buy 19 tracks of garbage music for the 1 track we really want. They have forced their advertisements on our DVDs, disabling our right to skip content we have no interest in; wasted our time in the movie theatres and on the radio. They have grown fat on extorting us and blame us now that their unsustainable business model is collapsing. Many of us do not expect content to be free forever - we are wiling to pay a reasonable price for the content and services we consume. Spend less time branding us as pirates, and more time building the infrastructure to sell us content free of the boardroom’s control. It’s a simple business transaction - I want what I pay for, and am willing to pay reasonably for what I want.

My name is Lucian Teo. And if you are reading this for free, you are the consumer. You are the resistance.

Today’s keynote from George Wright, Vice-President Marketing and Sales at Blendtec, who brought us the unforgettable answer to the question, will it blend?

Their most famous blend, an iPhone:

What I didn’t know was they sold the blended iPhone on eBay for around $1000 and donated it to a children’s hospital.

Anyway, I digress.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote at the New Media Expo here in Las Vegas wasn’t particularly illuminating, but reiterated the principles which we all know.

People want authentic content. Consumers are tired of corporate speak. They are tired of companies and organisations spamming them with perfectly edited copies and hiding behind a mask of disconnectedness. “Why else do they watch reality TV?”, Gary hammers home, almost shouting.

Points he brought up:

• Produce authentic content. Have less, or no editing.
• Care about your community. Answer every email. Be thankful they took time off their lives to read, watch or listen to your content.
• If you’re wrong, apologise. Everyone loves people who can admit their mistakes. If you’re right but someone else says you’re wrong, correct them gently.
• You are not going to be defined by the content you produce. You will be defined by the universe, and what they think of you. The ship has sailed - you can no longer control the message.
• Focus on what you’re good at. It helps prevent burning out.
• There is no niche too small. Dominate it. Know who the players are and dominate the space.

Many airlines in the United states have moved towards installing self-serve automated check-in machines directly in front of their counters at the airport. A small number of airline staff would be positioned behind these machines to handle the checking in of luggage, specifically the attaching of the sticky tag and then passing you the baggage claim stub.

While these machines means more service points for passengers needing a check-in, it has created a mess at the more crowded airports (namely LAX where I flew out of) as most passengers standing in line wait for the two or three counter staff to attend to them, rather than moving in to use the machines.

Is this a case of user education, or is it a process problem?

The check-in process, from the perspective of the airline, is fairly standard. From the passenger point of view, it is vastly different. They are likely to think of their needs as non-standard. They may not read English, have small children, be wheelchair-bound, or are simply uncomfortable using the touchscreen interface that frankly, needs to be improved.

The largest obstacle I see is that of checking in one’s luggage. Nowhere have I seen a single sign saying how check-in luggage is addressed. Common-sense on the part of the passenger would lead them to deduce that the automated check-in counters do not handle the checking-in of luggage, as it would constitute a grave security risk, not to mention the possibility of them losing their luggage and unable to place that responsibility on someone actually paid to handle these things.

Perhaps it takes a while for passengers to warm up to the idea of helping themselves to the machines, but the path of least resistance definitely goes through the airline staff. It is the established method of checking yourself in.

Instead, I find myself at Tucson International’s Southwest Airlines counter, checking myself and my luggage at the machine while the two counter staff chat with each other directly in front of me because there is no one else in line. It feels like I’m not being attended to. Or that they’re not doing their jobs. But this is the new process which creates a negative customer experience.

Maybe a human-first, machine as backup process of checking people in?

Streetdirectory.com was a kind of guilty necessity. We’d rail about how they made us pay for maps, and cheered when Singapore Land Authority hammered them for us, but SLA’s provision of Singapore maps was lacking. It’s pretty good for a gahmen site, but in these parts it’s like an able-bodied man coming in first at the paralympics. I should know, I run one of these gahmen puppies.

But I digress. We still crawled back to Streetdirectory in the dead of night, because that was the only way to get bus information. SBS’s journey planner does a terrible job at helping us get from point A to point B. We needed Streetdirectory like we needed pocket money from an abusive parent.

Needed. Until now.

Gothere.sg rocks. And I don’t mean conceptually - it rocks right now. You can change your destination by dragging markers on the map, and the bus route is changed dynamically. How cool is that!

Sure, the trains could be brought in to make a better journey planner, but that’s a small gripe. My main suggestion to Dominic who runs gothere.sg is this: Pair with Singeo. We don’t need 2 kickass Singaporean web guys cannibalising each other. A partnership would really bring the house down.

An example of how clued in Dominic is: I twittered how much I liked gothere.sg yesterday, and Dominic emailed me out of the blue to thank me for the tweet and also cited my work at MOE. That’s savvy customer relationship building for you.

We sold ourselves to the underdog. Then when the dog grew up, it bit us.

I was one of the early adopters who purchased the iPod Touch. I didn’t really need one - I already had an older iPod Video.

The iPod touch was the first time I felt shortchanged from the get-go. Apple always had this wonderful glow about them - their products would deliver the best technology had to offer in a sleek beautiful package. The iPod Touch could have been so much more, but Apple chose to cripple many features, delivering a merely passable product. I held on to the hope future software updates from Apple would fully realise the iPod Touch’s potential. I jailbroke my iPod Touch once and experienced the fullness of a real programmable device in my hand. I chose to update the firmware, disabling all the amazing 3rd party applications I had installed because I foolishly believed that Apple would eventually come through and outshine anything these 3rd party developers could produce.

I believed in the altruistic front Apple put up. I believed Steve Jobs when he said he was forced to incorporate DRM into all mp3s sold on iTunes because the record labels dictated so. I knew full well that the inclusion of DRM also locked us all into only using iPods for our music. But iPods would be the best players the technological world could possibly offer, right?

So forgive me if I was terribly upset last night when Steve Jobs announced some new enhancements for my iPod Touch. I’d get five new applications: email, stocks, google maps, notes and weather. They’re not mind-blowing by any standards. I’d have expected Microsoft to wow me more. The best part was that Apple expected iPod Touch owners to shell out $20 to have them installed, while anyone who bought a new iPod Touch would have them for free. Microsoft added functionality to their Zune product line for free. Hell has frozen over.

We were penalised for jumping in early. Exactly what Apple did when they made early adopters of the iPhone pay $200 more than customers who bought it 2 months after it was launched.

It doesn’t pay to be a Mac zealot. It doesn’t pay to believe in Apple, or any corporation. We all knew corporations exist solely to make money, but we hoped our Apple would be different.

Now we know better than to blindly believe. Apple will no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt - it will have to earn our dollars the hard way.

I’m now using nokia’s wifi zone on a bus. Connection isn’t the fastest, but the fact that I have Internet access while on the move, while not using 3G or GPRS is quite liberating. The iPod’s error correction is amazing. I’m typing everything wrongly, but in blind faith the iPod gets pretty much everything right.

To me the best thing about all this web 2.0 fanfare is the push towards open information. RSS, mashups, Google - all made possible because of information sharing.

The tricky bit arises when drawing the line between sharing and stealing. In his latest post, Greg Storey from Airbag calls theft on Flickr user Allig8torx for poaching photos from File Magazine (see FM’s Untitled by Byron Barett and Allig8tor’s astica3). Several Airbag readers defend Allig8tor (the nick is becoming such a pain to type), as it is possible that he’s just using Flickr as an online repository, rather than passing the photos off as his own.

Regardless of intention, the publication of someone else’s photos are a violation of intellectual property rights, unless permission is sought and obtained.

But what of aggregation? Surely there is added value when these individuals scour and collect the best resources out there and compile them for the rest of us. Patrick Haney’s Web Design Inspiration, also hosted on Flickr, is an invaluable resource. The works displayed aren’t his. I doubt expressed permission was sought in these cases as well.

The main difference is that Patrick attributes his sources. The URL of every site is listed; nothing was done to obscure the brand of the website. Not only does Allig8tor not name his sources or attribute the creators of the photos, he renames them in his set. It’s not exactly claiming them to be his own, but it removes all trace of ownership.

Overheard on television a few minutes ago.

Timothy Goh, Vice-President of Mediacorp’s New Media Business unit said we’re in 2.0 right now and going into web 2.5.

I can’t help rolling my eyeballs at people who talk about the certainty of web 2.0++. Most can’t define web 2.0 comprehensively (I know I probably can’t).

He also talked about how traditional ads were primarily one-way communication, but with the web it was different. It allows one to put up images…

Gosh. I know a picture says a thousand words, but that’s still one-way to me.

How did these people become decision-makers in online space?

Before you pick up the pitchfork and torches, listen to me: I love Flickr. I love that it has opened a world of digital photography that has made our lives so much richer. It has helped forge relationships by providing tools for communities of photographers to band together, whether professional or amateur.

But you see, I had a photolog before Flickr came along. So did Derek. So did a lot of people. Some of us made ours by hand, others bent blogging engines like Movabletype and Wordpress to suit our needs. Then Flickr came along, and we subsequently surrendered. We didn’t have the expertise to build anything as ajaxy or web 2.0ry. We didn’t have drag-and-drop uploaders and on-the-fly resizing. Our photologs started to look so old. So web 1.0.

So we got ourselves Flickr accounts, uploaded our collections and melded with the crowd. Photologs that once graced the internet stopped being updated. Our photos were now in the largest photo repository in the world, in a container that looked exactly like everybody elses’.

I love Flickr, but it isn’t home. My photos call out to me.

When I spoke at Opera Software’s Web Standards Conference, I started with “it is a good time to be a geek”.

And it is. Where we were once unpopular and cast as social misfits, many of us shape the world our children will grow up in. The beauty of this is that it doesn’t take many geeks to change the world. Small groups like 37 Signals are making web applications used by tens of thousands around the world. Websites like Digg start off as merely ideas made alive on the digital canvas by single individuals, then somehow changing the way we all read, learn and look at the world around us.

The traditional frameworks - businesses, governments - need to understand that the control they once had over information is now largely defunct. They stand at a crossroads of either coming clean or engaging in tainting the waters with misinformation, re-establishing the old methods of communication as authoritative.

Took half a day’s leave to spend time with Faith on her birthday. I didn’t have anything special planned, so we had ourselves a nice sandwich lunch before dropping by the IT show to take a look-see.

Microsoft was there promoting Vista, and to put it quite bluntly, doing a terrible job at it. What Microsoft needs to understand is that operating systems aren’t very exciting. The general populace does not care if you now have 128-bit encryption over the old 64-bit. We just want our operating systems to work. The guy at the booth seemed was banging home the fact that Vista came with 24/7 online support.

“A group of mechanics are on call with every purchase of a Bentley”. Woohoo.

Steve Jobs on the other hand, has it nailed down. Rather than promising you the “wow”, his presentations traditionally end with Steve saying, “just one more thing”, and he produces something that blows everyone’s mind.

Rather than selling the customer an attribute of the product, Apple does a fine job of concentrating on what the customer can do with the new product. It’s about applications, not operating systems. What can I now do that I couldn’t do before? That’s the important question, because that’s what would make me cool. And that’s what people would pay for.

Two of the latest Vista stories almost next to each other on Digg’s homepage:

• Bill Gates: Vista is so secure it could run life support systems
• Latest Vista Security Hole - It deletes files itself

Things don’t bode too well for Vista at the moment.

The sales of music via the internet has doubled in 2006. It is now a $2b (USD) market.

But the rise, which represents 10% of all sales, has not reached the music companies’ “holy grail” of offsetting the fall in CD sales.

…

IFPI chairman John Kennedy said: “The pace of transformation in our industry is breathtaking, but at the moment the holy grail is evading us.

I think it’s about time someone told the music industry to take the holy grail and shove it. Back in the “good old days” we were forced by buy loads of crappy music from them because they packaged 1 good song in CDs which had 20 songs. We had to pay for the other 19 which we did not want.

Music executives, the “good old days” are over. Please understand that just because you ripped us off before, it doesn’t mean we’ll let you do it again.

A few hours before the iPhone was announced, I bought a Nokia e61. The purchase was largely spurred on by my upcoming reservist training and the army’s insistence that no image-capturing devices be brought into military installations.

Instructions on how to make the Nokia e61 sync with iSync can be found on the Nokia e61 blog.

Thanks to MacTomster for the plugin!

I’m sitting here getting live updates on Steve Job’s keynote via Mac Rumors Live. He’s announcing the new full-screen, touchscreen video iPod / iPhone, and I’m wondering what the Microsoft Zune folks are thinking while watching this.

For Flycub.

It wasn't too long ago I installed MAMP on my Macbook. Everything worked as advertised - straight out of installation. I popped Joomla!, Expression Engine and WordPress in and they all ran like happy little puppies.

Installing MovableType required me to install DBI in order to have MAMP parse Perl.

Good thing I found Nargalzius' post. His step by step instructions helped a ton. The DBI module was installed.

The DBD::MySQL module, on the other hand, was a royal pain in the behind.

For starters, Nagalzius' post was written more than a year ago and MAMP seems to have evolved quite a bit since then.

Back in 2000 when I started this blog, Blogger was a godsend. It made life easier. I’d no longer need to edit my archive pages whenever I added an entry, or cut and paste the little pieces of javascript I modified from a guestbook that enabled comments. It automated my online ramblings. And ramble I did.

There’s an odd weariness in the online air. Grandfather Zeldman is tired, and if you look around, Doug Bowman and Ryan Sims have stopped writing, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea update once every solar eclipse.

I find myself sapped of enthusiasm, not because I have nothing to say, but because I seem to have outgrown the blog format. Greg sums it up best:

When content is forced through a entry-commment-trackback-pagerank strainer it all comes out looking the same no matter how the templates are designed. Sure this format is functional but it’s more like a Maersk shipping container than a Volvo s50. This is fine for commercial purposes, the blog is certainly the must-have online marketing device, but I miss those days when content wasn’t confined to categories, calendars, and links to vote a piece of content into a popularity contest.

I’ve grown as a designer over the years, and I feel the need to express myself in richer, fuller ways. There have been so many times I’ve wanted to design an entire page around something I blogged about. It’d have visual elements relevant to what I wanted to say. I eventually took, like I’m taking now, the lazy way out.

There is so much I want to tell you, but words got in the way.

Maybe it’s time to unblog. We have unconferences like Barcamp. It’s time to shake things up and code like it’s 1995 again.

One stop FAQ solutions like Flexanswer are gaining ground. The one question, from an information point of view, is where do FAQs begin and where do webpages end? These solutions sell themselves as content management systems capable of manipulating databases of thousands upon thousands of frequently asked questions. They have search engine solutions that allow the user to find the specific answer to the question they have in mind.

Shouldn’t every page of information, every paragraph, or even every sentence you publish on the web address a question someone might ask? Every sentence, or phrase is either a question, or a statement. I see that the question - answer is probably what the atom or the molecule is: the smallest unit of conversation. While the FAQ solutions try not to position themselves as content management systems per se, could we eventually see a CMS for people that love to micromanage?

Every phrase like “FAQ solutions try not to position themselves as content management systems per se” could be flagged as an answer to a list of possible questions. It would take a tremendous amount of discipline to generate content with such a metadata structure, but the model would seem to hold water on sites where data integrity and accuracy are paramount. If the answer to a question were changed, an update could be carried out on the admin module and the specific sentence or phrase in the website would be updated.

It might be hard to change an answer without affecting its phrasing, for changing its phrasing may be a shift that renders the parent sentence incoherent or grammatically incorrect. But there’d be freakazoids out there who might take particular well to this level of micromanagement.

I think they’re called librarians.

Facebook opens to the world.

Among the standard options like searching for folks you might know, you can “poke” them. I’m not the expert of sexual innuendos or anything, but even I get this one, courtesy of the rather contaminated minds I am forced to mingle with at work.

Faith, Anne and I were having breakfast downstairs this morning. After a few mouthfuls of toast and a few spoonfuls of soft-boiled egg Anne decides to grab a spoon and help herself to the egg. She’s not really making great progress, but manages to smear her face with egg. Things get a little messy and we end up using half a pack of tissue paper to clean up the mess.

A train of thought ensued:

1. Maybe we should buy toy utensils so Anne could play with them and practice feeding herself without the mess of splattered food.
2. What if she associates all utensils with play? That’d make a heck of a scene in a restaurant.
3. Should we stop her from playing with utensils altogether?
4. But it’s a necessary skill that comes with growing up.
5. Maybe she already is old enough to feed herself real food, and there’s no need for the plastic toys.

This was, in my own opinion, a perfect analogy of the decisions the Singapore government have before them with regards to online publishing. Are they going to take a sandbox approach? They would have to realise that online publishing has and will continue to step into mainstream media. Will they clamp down on it with an iron fist? This would definitely stifle the maturity of Singaporeans and cause a mass exodus of the slightly more intellectually adventurous.

But the big question is, are we mature enough we feed ourselves?

Anne, with a face full of egg, thinks she is.

Attended last night’s E27. It was nice to see that there is a growing surge of energy in the younger geeks, even in pragmatic Singapore. Among the presentations were Yearbook.com.sg, XShare and RSSFwd. For me the main discourse of the night was spurred on by the question and answer session after Xshare’s presentation.

XShare is a mobile phone application that allows you to share photos, ringtones, data files, or publish your photos unto your own repository, most notably Flickr. At some point in the presentation, Anoj (the presenter) said jokingly that it enabled you to share all your “crap”.It works on a subscription model, where users pay a nominal fee per month. The question raised by the member of the audience was this: Why would people bother sharing photos on impulse, when they can come home, download it unto their computers, and publish it there for free? It’s all “crap” anyway.

Immediacy (brought up by the member of the audience as “impulse”) is a commodity that is fast gaining value in our society. People are turning to blogs as an alternative news source primarily because of its immediacy, not its quality, though in a few cases the quality of blog posts surpasses that of the traditional media outlets. Immediacy is also the reason why people subscribe to the football channel at an extra cost. You could wait till the morning to catch the highlights, but living in the moment has become the catch-phrase of our time.

Other notable quotes:

Lionel Yeo, on the Singapore Government’s skepticism of open-source software:

“Cheap is ok, but free is no good”

Nickpan on my job as a webmaster:

“They should call it web-slave”

Nokia’s advertisement looks like the precursor to more NYP-esque videos. Maybe Singaporeans can enlighten these western folk on the ramifications of putting your life on your phone.

I’ve been thinking of getting a console for some time now. I’m a PC gamer, having used customised rigs since the beginning of time. When most kids my age owned a Super Nintendo, I was saving up for the first 3D accelerated graphics card available on the market. I just had to see MechWarrior constructed out of huge jaggied 3D polygons. The console seemed like a step back - throwing everything I’ve learned over more than 3 quarters of my life and taking the easy way out.

Now older and increasingly less energetic, the console means not having to think of upgrading my PC, which is now 3 years old and has a graphics card (GeForce 5200) Felix just described as “bleeding old”. I don’t play as many games as I used to, mostly switching between NBA Live and…. well, NBA Live. I no longer have the inclination to take on epic games that require many hours straight. NBA Live in 30 minute installments before reading up on the countless stuff I have interests in (damn you Digg!) and picking up skills to create web solutions to fully flesh out ideas I have at work.

Anyway, back to consoles. I’ve been holding out on the Xbox 360 because the Playstation 3 was supposed to be out. It’s now slated for November, which isn’t too far away, but comes with a $599 USD pricetag, which in my opinion is too much for my wallet to bear. Sony’s Ken Kutaragi saying that the PS3’s announced price was too cheap was rubbing salt in my imaginary wound. The 360, to be quite honest, is a steal.

As you probably already know, I’m not a big Microsoft fan. But with the whole Sony rootkit fiasco, we can safely say that both companies aren’t exactly the whitest of sheep.

Who comes out the winner? From the blind side comes the Nintendo Wii. Sure, it’s a stupid name, but there’s something very disarming about it. While Sony and Microsoft go for war, Nintendo seems to have the focus right - they come across as really wanting to make great games for their users. It may not have the graphical power the other two consoles boast, but graphics only get you so far. Now older and wiser, I’m in it for gameplay and storytelling. Dynamic lighting and transparency effects are nice, but they get old quick.

I’m still thinking of getting the 360 though. It’s a great price for what is essentially a souped up PC.

A lot has been said about how the new Macs’ ability to dual-boot into Windows XP has opened the flood-gates for viruses. I agree that having Windows on board makes it easier, but one great motivation for hackers would be the iSight Apple has included in all their iMacs and Macbook Pros.

Hacking into another person’s computer is an act of power - taking it away from someone, which is very similar to voyuerism. I’m willing to bet my pants that a ton of hackers out there are already working on how to turn iSight on remotely.

Steve, if you’re listening, I’d like my iSight on the side, please.

For no apparent reason, the larger videos I encoded for my iPod video would freeze for a bit, then continue without sound. I was almost about to send the iPod in for repairs, suspecting some damage to the cache, then I found that it was the new iPod update that sucked.

Given that I used iSquint, rather than buying Quicktime Pro for the encoding of videos, it might seem a little Bill-Gatesey to note that videos encoded by QT Pro continued to work after the new update while 3rd party encoded videos did not.

Did Apple bite more than just a chip of Intel’s block?

“Reply All” is probably the most abused feature in all email applications. The extent of its abuse is a good indicator as to how committed people are to the noble cause of covering their behinds.

We all saw it coming. But I’m sure many of us didn’t see it coming this fast.

The MacBookPro. Dual core Intel chips. Up to 4 times faster than the fastest last generation Powerbooks.

A design side note: Apple is done with pure silky white. It’s sleek, shiny black, topped up with extra gloss and silver edges.

This season, black is the new black.

When talking about user interfaces that encourage the user to sign up, it is common knowledge to remove as many obstacles hindering the process as possible. Yahoo! Mail is probably one of the smoothest interfaces out there. It was going fine for me until the interface told me to go and

I’m not superstitious or anything. But I smell Skynet’s pawprints on Web 2.0.

MSN launches Live Local, so now mapping apps are up to three with Google Local and Yahoo! Maps (still in beta). Yahoo! buys over del.iciou.us, launches Yahoo! Answers. Google brings out Google Transit (also beta).

The cards are on the table. We live in exciting geeky times.

Tribolum ranks first on Google for “Making light of things”, a search that yields 24.4 million results.

No flash intro, no animated gifs and no stars dancing around the cursor.

Just hard work and clean code. No two ways about it.

Received an email from Paypal today saying that my account has been used for a purchase I did not make. The email goes like this:

Fraud Alert ID : 0026654 You have recieve this email because you or someone had tried to used your paypal account at http://www.springbok-computers.co.uk/. Below is the detail about the transaction made: Transaction site : http://www.springbok-computers.co.uk/ Order ID : FMO12446465 Amount : $850 Date : Fri, 19 Dec 2003 20:41:09 +1100 To confirm or decline this transaction, please follow the link provide below. Please save the fraud alert id for your reference. http://www.paypal.com/fraud?_alert_id=paypal&user=0026654 Your account will be block after 2 days you recieve this email if we didnt get comfirmation from you. Do not reply as this is a notification only. Thanks for using PayPal! Copyright© 2005 PayPal Inc. All rights reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

Of course the beautiful thing is when you click on the paypal link, it brings you to http://vds-364198.amen-pro.com/.www.paypal.com.form/, a perfect paypal-lookalike site, but whose URL does not start with Paypal. Being sleepy and forgetful, I key in a wrong password but get “in” anyway. The page asks for your information: your name, address, credit card number.

Anytime anyone asks you for your credit card number. Please have the alarm bells go off. If you have a Paypal account, they already have your number.

If you received this email, please do NOT respond or give your information. Don’t even use your real Paypal password to log in. I’m pretty sure that too is being tracked.

Why do all software manufacturers automatically assume you want a directory named after their company? For example, if you install Leisure Suit Larry, the default directory would be program files/sierra/leisure suit larry/. Don’t they know that most of us are ambivalent when it comes to software companies?

My beloved Powerbook is dead. I suspect it’s a harddisk failure. I was initially pissed that Xaverri (my powerbook) seemed to be slowing down rapidly the moment Tiger was released.

Need to get it fixed soon.

The new iPod Photo.

Yeah, I know that viewing photos on your mp3 player isn’t new. The Archos player, which I eyed before I got the iPod, was revolutionary in its time. While Apple’s new offering isn’t ground-breaking, you got to hand it to them for allowing you to have it all in a mp3 player the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Thanks to Tedfox, I’ve been informed that my prediction came true. Jay Allen joins SixApart.

Maybe if I blogged that I’d get hired, I would. But it’s not on me crystal ball at the moment.

Never thought I’d say this, but I was betrayed by my Powerbook.

I was what you would call an early adopter, being one of the first few to purchase the Powerbook 12”. I’ve absolutely loved it since, and I firmly believe now that PCs are meant to function mainly as gaming machines.

The 12” Powerbook I bought came with a mini-VGA output, rather than the mini-DVI outputs on all the other Powerbook models. While on the verge of purchasing a very expensive Apple Display, I discovered that my powerbook wouldn’t connect to any. I would have to continue buying huge CRT monitors that used VGA. I wanted to splurge so badly on an Apple screen, but their own design overlook cost them this customer.

Stuck at a newly bought office computer, I discovered that Microsoft Internet Explorer is good for one particular task.

Downloading Mozilla.

MT 3.1. Dynamic. About time.

I switched back to Apple because it meant not having to upgrade your computer every six months.

I was wrong.

Mena wrote not too long ago that if she had a chance to go back in the past and choose differently, she would have spent more for help and worked less (can’t seem to find the particular post). That was all I needed to know that I would be staying with Six Apart. Though we geeks have the tendency to be biased towards open-source software, I knew that my familiarisation with MovableType meant that I had in my hands a pretty robust CMS to start work on. And now that Ben and Mena weren’t “doing it all”, MT would be headed upwards.

Just when you thought the boatload of talent had all disembarked unto Six Apart, Brad Choate steps on its shores. I’m sure there are a whole lot of us who have named a directory after him in the dark shadows of our cgi-bins.

My prediction for 6A’s next hiring: Jay Allen’s G5 will come with an invitation to join 6A.

Multiply looks like a piece of interesting social software.

I recently purchased OmniGraffle. After trying out their one-day trials (you can download one everyday if you’re that cheap), it was easy to come to the conclusion that the software was worth every cent of its purchase price.

I don’t do schematics very much now in my job, but I still do the occassional freelance gig, and properly printed schemas make work look more appealing, both to me and my clients.

Glad I stuck around. MovableType 3.1.

I repeat: only Apple makes my jaw drop. 4.1 million pixels.

Yahoo! Mail now has 100mb of email space. While it’s small compared to Gmail’s 1GB, it’s clear that Yahoo! isn’t giving up without a fight.

Airport Express. I want.

You’ll want to be buying that Mac very soon, people.

pMachine has been wonderful to me. They gave me a free copy of Expression Engine!

It is perfect timing on their part, giving away their software when MovableType ran themselves into a ditch. I’m not saying I now hate the MT folks or anything. They certainly opened up a world for me. I supported and continue to support them. While their personal license raised a few eyebrows, I still think their commercial license rocks.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that I’ve been around the block as far as blogging is concerned. I started off hand-coding my pages (which looks like crap), moved to Blogger and bought the t-shirt. Then I paid for Blogger Pro because I thought having a place to put a title was cool. Greymatter appeared and I tried it for a while, then moved to MT because I could create multiple blogs on a single installation. I’ve been toying around with WordPress and Textpattern. Sub-categories. Yummy stuff.

Now with SixApart’s announcement of MT3 and Mena’s reassurance that they’re still committed to making MT free while getting their pricing right I think I’m not the only feeling royally screwed.

The free version only allows one author and three blogs. When I was using Blogger, I used multiple logins to create multiple blogs, and then server-side-includes to pull them all into one page. Don’t think I can possibly live with the three-blog limitation.

You can’t give something away and then take it back. If they offered something more substantial than the free version of MovableType, I may feel compelled to buy it.

I have always outgrown my software. It feels this time like my software has outgrown me.

I installed a trial version of Expression Engine and I am thoroughly impressed. It has truly expanded a blogging tool to a full customisable content mangement system.

It allows the creation of sub-categories, the addition and modification of input fields. While I may not (not yet at least) need all this for Tribolum, I am certainly looking at this to manage my client’s (currently my employer’s) websites.

I’ve been tinkering around with a lot of blogging tools, and so far this looks to be the future.

I’m sure if you’ve been on any kind of instant messaging for some time you’ve received messages from Irina or Helen telling you to go to their adult websites. Having been “spammed” the last two days I received a message from an unknown person.

221777822: hi there!
Me: vewve
221777822: ��??
Me: just testing.
Me: who’s this?
221777822: my name is JC, and I’m contacting you from CB Systems, a company that is dedicated to providing Internet services. Do you, or your company, have a web site?
Me: why are you asking?
221777822: because our company offers them…
Me: amazing…icq telemarketing.
221777822: new age stuff…
Me: sure is.
Me: would suck if i told you that you’re talking to a web designer huh.
Me: so does your company need a website done?
221777822: actually, that’s good to know. so i’m guessing that if i offer you a high impact website for a really cheap price, you won’t say yes…
Me: well…i’m free…so unless you’re going to pay me to have you make a website for me…
221777822: hehehe… anyway, thanks for your time, always good to chat with a fellow worker…
Me: have a good one J.

I typed nonsense to see if the automated bot (I assumed) would give the standard introduction. But wow, this is a real living breathing person on the other side trying all possible ICQ numbers in hopes of landing a job. Since the insurance agents haven’t done this, I’m assuming (again) that the web design market is more saturated than insurance. They call it “financial advising” these days.

It was good to talk to J. Somehow I knew that I provided him that little bit of real (friendly) human contact in what has to be a really long tedious task.

We’ve all been waiting for MoveableType Pro (sorry, the British education in me insists there is an e in there). Alpha testing will begin soon. I’ve signed up, but I’m not a big time blogger like Kottke or Michelle though I’ve been around longer than most.

I’m hoping that MoveableType 3 is as good (or better) than Pmachine’s very intriguing Expression Engine and carries a smaller pricetag than EE’s $199 USD.

Update: Here’s sending some love to Matt’s Wordpress. I’ve been keeping an eye on it.

In the promotion of Apple’s new iLife, Apple acknowledges that Microsoft Office is the yardstick of a complete package. The graphic can be found on the Apple homepage (Rotating image, refresh if necessary). But here’s a screenshot of it.

Nick Bradbury, author of Topstyle, one of the most used CSS-editors around, writes on software piracy and how it affects him.

Aaron Swartz, accomplished teenage coder, calls Nick an amazing idiot.

The debate on the use of software (legal vs illegal) is interesting, but I must admit that Aaron’s arguments don’t quite hold water. A full blown-out war (exaggeration ©me) ensues on Schoolblog.

It was tricky when CSS files of Zen Garden submissions were copied wholesale or when Nick Denton “stole” Noel Jackson’s Fleshbot CSS experiment. People argued that the construction of CSS files took only “one of two hours in a text editor” (can’t remember where I read the comment), and therefore wasn’t a big deal.

Topstyle isn’t a few hours on a text editor. If it was even vaguely morally wrong to steal CSS files wholesale, there is no question about Topstyle. Some of the arguments on Schoolblog are disappointing, to say the least.

Aaron wrote on Schoolblog:

What�s the moral problem with me downloading Nick�s software when there was no chance of me buying it? I get the software, Nick doesn�t lose any money and possibly gets some free advertising. It seems everyone is better off; how could this be immoral?

It’s almost like a guy saying it’s ok to walk into the ladies’ because he gets some exercise walking about too.

Unlike the record companies that spend countless hours and dollars to track down every last doting father who downloads “Happy Birthday” without buying 19 other worthless songs compiled together with it in a CD, Sony Pictures has learnt to embrace technology rather than fight it.

With a potential mega-blockbuster coming up, they’re offering Blogger and Livejournal templates. What better superhero to champion the use of the web than our friendly neighbourhood Spiderman?

Spammers are a clever bunch. Downright evil, but just as porn launched a thousand technological breakthroughs on the web, spammers are showing us how things can be done.

I received a comment spam on one of my entries. Nothing particularly new, you say. I have my comments emailed to me and when I saw that this user “had problems displaying my stylesheet on his Safari / OSX setup”, I emailed back to clarify what problems.

Then I looked at the URL given. A life-insurance spam. I should have known better. A good mix of psychology and innovation can revive even the oldest and most archaic of technologies.

After posting about referral spamming this afternoon, it seems that Amateur X Pass, a porn site, has used referral spamming to reach number 5 on Blogdex, an index of sites most linked to by blogs.

This was achieved because a large number of bloggers display their referral logs on their main page. As of tonight there are 17 links to the porn site. I expect it to hit the number one spot by tomorrow morning.

Update: A link to the Paris Hilton sex video has reached number 11.

After the implementation of Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist that would solve the problem of spammers clogging up the comments on this blog, we began to talk about how MovableType’s Trackback feature could be next on the target list of the spammer mastermind.

I read Mark Pilgrim’s post about how the spamming industry was headed by a mafia-type organisation and originally thought it quite the stretch, but I’m now thoroughly convinced that Mark hit it right on the head.

The next big avenue of spam will probably through the referral logs. Bloggers use referral logs to tell us who reads our site and where they came from. I’ve already received a few links leading to pornographic websites on my logs, which means that they’re already out there.

Ever watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? J.K. Rowling gave us an illustration of spam when she wrote about how letters for Harry were pouring in through the windows and the chimney. Just as Uncle Vernon was unable to stop the influx of mail by nailing the mailbox shut, we need to find alternative ways of stopping spam.

Matt Haughey posted about how we ought to be attacking the spam business model rather than building walls to block it. Slashdot posted an innovative idea on attacking spammers: If we all responded to a particular spam mail (comment, trackback etc) in a coordinated attack, we could drown the spammer in bogus responses that leads to no sales, not to mention taking up an extraordinary amount of bandwidth or mailbox space.

It is possible that a Rebellion will soon be formed, not unlike the one in Star Wars.

After two clean (erase hard-drive and install) installations of Panther, I finally have what I think is a relatively stable working environment. My initial upgrade (over the older version Jaguar) disabled my browser. The clean installations resolved that issue, but the time / date icons, along with all the other icons on the menu bar refused to display. I surfed up and down the Internet for solutions, but not many people seemed to have that problem.

I finally found the solution on the Macosxhints forum. It was because I had put in Singapore as my place of residence. The difference between the way we display dates (dd/mm/yy) and the American (mm/dd/yy) somehow meant that the date had to be rendered in unicode (that’s what the browser told me) and therefore display on the menu bar was impossible.

So falsely reporting a residence in USA solved the problem. It worked for many refugees. It saved me this time.

I’ve moved on to the next evolution of the Mac OSX cats. Panther (Mac OSX 10.3) comes after Jaguar (10.2) and Cheetah (10.1). I don’t know what they’re going to name future upgrades. In my opinion they should have started with something small, like Lynx or Ocelot, which I think are still really cool names.

Panther boasts 150 new features, but it would be wise to remember that it is hardly a version 11. It is very much like the Jaguar of old with some improvements. Exposé which every reviewer seems so dazzled with, does the same thing the “Show Desktop” icon in Windows XP does, only loaded with the Apple eye-candy we have all come to expect. It is hardly ground-breaking in nature.

While it is nice to see that Apple isn’t too proud to pick up pointers from the common WinXP, Panther still hasn’t quite figured out the Alt-Tab function. In WinXP, Alt-Tab allows you to move from window to window, regardless of application. Command-Tab in Panther brings up the cool taskbar thingie in the middle of the screen that allows you to select the application (not the window or document) you need to get to. This means that if I have five Word documents open, I’d still need to go through Exposé, or window / document1 on Word’s menu.

Safari has stopped working. It doesn’t crash in the way Windows applications crash. Crash would be too inelegant a word for Apple applications. It “quits unexpectedly”, and the OS is quick to point out that it’s uninformed resignation did not affect the morale of the other applications still hard at work.

I’m running on Camino now, and though my Apple-developed analistic sense of design doesn’t sit well with the fact that Camino’s white iBookish interface doesn’t match the brushed-metal look of Panther or my sweet Powerbook, I’m generally happy with the way it’s performing.

The reason why no new photos have been displayed are two-fold: I haven’t been taking many new ones; and iPhoto sucks as a backup tool.

Like Adam and the many others who groused about how iTunes messed up their mp3 directory structure, iPhoto implements its own scheme of things. Photos would be sorted out by year, month, then day.

The problem is that iPhoto uses the day the photos were last modified, ignoring the metadata (the exif data) that tells me when the photos were taken. Who cares when I photoshopped / cropped / converted to jpg? I want to know if the photo was taken Homecoming 2001 or 2002.

Forcing me to use its own directory structure meant that I had come to rely solely upon iPhoto as my photo-organiser. It’s all fine and dandy, as long as I can get what I want when I want it. Much as it is a thorn to my side, I’ll let the internal directory structure go if I could have an interface that made sense to me.

Problem arises when too many photos are in the iPhoto. I’ve more than 5 gigabytes of photos. The startup time for iPhoto now rivals that of Mac OSX after it delivers me the semi-transculent screen of death (in multiple languages, no less).

So now when I show my clients their photos I need to arrive a good hour early just to fire up iPhoto. You could say I’m exaggerating, or that I’m merely extrapolating what would actually happen when my photos reach 10 gigs.

Anyone knows of a better (preferably free) photo-organising tool? iView MediaPro looks industrial-grade, but it comes with an industrial price. Not to mention anything that starts with an “i” has always tried to reorganise my life.

Faith and I got ourselves a desktop PC. My last PC ran Win98 and I never bothered to upgrade to WinXP, only using it to play NBA Live 2003 on my sister’s PC every once in a while (ok, almost every day). After having been spoilt silly by Mac OSX, using WinXP almost forces me to remap my intuition towards GUI navigation.

I’m thankful for Cleartype in WinXP. Antialiased text make websites look so much better (one of the main reasons why I got myself a Mac). Now I remember how much I miss the Alt-Tab function in Windows. Mac OSX (only lately) allows you to switch between the last two applications used, but not three.

For PC users who’ve always envied the iTunes music store. A iTunes music store for Windows debuts next week.

Typepad is out of beta and officially in business.

Maybe now the Six Apart crew can start working on MovableType Pro after tonight’s champagne.

Update: Thanks Matt, for pointing out the errant link.

As one who has been previously hit by Verisign’s unethical business practices, I’m doubly miffed that they’re literally monopolising the Internet.

Type in the URL of any unregistered domain (that don’t exist) and you’ll be automatically brought to a Verisign managed page. Some ignorami report this as a friendly service that makes the net more usable. Goodness knows what they do with the marketing information they glean, not to mention the wonderful redirection they provide to spam spiders.

Dammit Verisign!

Links via StopDesign.