In 2009 I did a year in review and today (on Christmas Eve), I’m hoping to look back at my year and savor my accomplishments and even failures in preparation for my next project which I’m hoping to commence next year.

So most of time this year was spent doing many things, among others I moved out of my parents place into a new house I bought, while this may sound strange to most Westerners staying with your parents till you get married is quite common in just about all of Asia. I started a blog, delivered some successful projects for Shell, went for my first job interview in nearly 5 years, got a great job offer but turned it down , started using twitter and LinkedIn, and even tried my hand at cooking.

In what I hope is my last post about this ridiculous bill, I hope to ask and answer an important question I’m surprised no one has asked yet…

Why do we need such a bill?

Now I understand that we’d always need to raise standards, and provide assurances, but in the greater scheme of things is it really that necessary to do it now, or can we expend our energies and effort elsewhere for the IT community to get the value from our actions. This should be at the core of the discussions, this is the WHY of the bill, if I don’t believe in the WHY of the bill, then there’s no need talk about the who, what,where and how.

If the objective of the bill isn’t agreed upon, then it doesn’t matter how we achieve the objective. I feel a lot of IT professionals have bypassed this and zoomed down immediately to the details, pointing out flaws in the bill and a lack of clarity and specifics, however I’m not even sold at the high level of the bill let alone the specifics, and I struggle to understand why the bill is around in the first place, let alone how it will achieve it’s WHY.

My blog & name was mentioned on BFMs tech talk today. Woo hoo!! I’m so happy!!

You can download the podcast of the show at BFMs website here , and it’s fantastic (partially because it mentions my blog).

So while MOSTI still hasn’t given up on the bill, apparently no one in the Industry wants the bill except MOSTI, and they’re just a Government Ministry. Where were the Industry players MOSTI engaged before proposing the bill? The sad part is that even drafting out the proposal of the bill would have cost money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere…sad!

The Thais have had a rough couple of months. With floods inundating entire swaths of the country, Bangkok had to revise its GDP estimates for the year and even hard-disk prices spiked due to limited supply. There is some good news though, Western Digital recently started up it’s plant in Thailand (although no news on when it’ll be resuming operations) and many other companies are following suit as flood waters appear to have subsided.

Some laws you have to fight wars to keep….others you have to fight wars to be repealed. This is one of those laws you have to fight to prevent from ever being made a law…

On April 12th , 1861 Confederate forces attacked Union Military installation named Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The attacked marked the beginning of the American Civil War, and the United States of America would never be the same. The war was about more than just a secession from a Union, it was about preserving the right that every man was created equal and that no man or woman would ever be ‘owned’ again. In just over 140 years later, the United States of America elected their first Black president.If ever there was a war worth fighting for, it was the American Civil War. The Abolition of slavery was a law worth fighting for, it was worth preserving, even till death.

One of my favorite blogs, nakedsecurity recently published an article that Google "offering to stop mapping wireless access point location data, granting network owner s worldwide the choice to opt out from its Wi-Fi geolocation mapping". The problem is, that Google is asking users who want to opt-out of their service to change the SSIDs of their Wi-Fi and add a _nomap postfix. This means that all Wi-Fi networks without the _nomap postfix would automatically be added to Googles database of Wi-Fi access points.

What does this all mean? Well apart from the obvious icky feeling you have in your stomach right now, the main summary is that Wi-Fi access points that aren’t changed will automatically be added to Googles database (the Google Location Server). In short, the default setting is that you give permission to Google to store your Wi-Fis SSID until otherwise stated….eeeyeew.

According to a New York Times article today, the world has apparently shrunk beyond our imagination. The latest study uses facebook as the base for their study, and used it to study the separation of people.  Previously I blogged about the amazing study conducting by (even more amazing) Stanley Milgram and how he came up with the concept of 6 degrees of separation. The latest study not only re-inforces the original study, but goes further to explain that the number is now only 4.74.

It really is a great opportunity we have now with facebook being the Hyper-Social network, with little competition. What this means is, at least for now, everybody online has a facebook account. That would certainly change in the nest 2-5 years, but what’s really interesting is that with facebooks great popularity, we have now have a wonderful chance to perform these kinds of research, and kudos to facebook for actually initiating it. The data from the research can be found on facebooks data page. Now onto the research:

On day 4 of my 30-day challenge to blog everyday, and I’m already running out of stuff to say. However, as with most things, inspiration seems to spring out when it is most required. I’m sitting in front of TV, watching BBC Dateline and one of the panel members is Henry Chu, the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in London.

The topic of the discussion was something along the lines of “Are newspapers going out of date, and what is the future of newspapers?”. Henry answered in a rather poignant way, circulation of newspapers throughout the world including the Los Angeles Times is decreasing, but the irony is that while circulation is decreasing, readership has increased. So think about it, less people are buying the newspapers but more people are reading it, and the newspapers have actually become a lot more interactive. For instance content of the LA Times is now not only being read by people outside of Los Angeles (or even the US) but actually being commented on by people from Australia and Malaysia.

The reality is that while newspaper circulations have been reducing over the years, the appetite for news has not decreased, and neither has the demand for it. What has happened is the nature of the demand has changed, and consumers now demand that their news sources fulfil these new demands or they’ll take their business elsewhere.

I recently purchased a yes mobile account, and was pretty happy the results. In my past review I mentioned that the speed was great followed by good stability. However, there have been some downsides to the service, and here’s some reasons why you should avoid yes mobile.

While Yes is great, there are overall flaws with the service, and below is my review of 3 reasons why you shouldn't use YTL Yes 4G.

Before I move to the reasons, let me explain the kind of user I am. I work from home 3 times a week and use my laptop for just about all my working needs which include late night teleconferences, phone calls (via my companies VOIP) and even for webcast and presentations that I do on a regularly basis. Working from home has it's advantages, for one I don't travel too often and can usually get a lot of work done. However, if my internet connection is down, I'm completely cut-off from the office, with no office communicator and email, there's very little I can do at home. Even worse, if the internet connection goes down before a teleconference (or even during a teleconference), things get pretty ugly pretty fast. I absolutely need a stable and reliable internet connection and chose Yes 4G because I thought it would provide me that, turns out I was wrong.

The internet Corporation for assigned Names and Numbers (more affectionately known as evil ICANN) has recently announced a new .xxx domain specifically for adult content online. Basically a safe place we can store porn on the internet away from our children. What’s interesting though, is that a .xxx domain are by definition associated with pornography and smut, that certain corporations and even people would not want to be a part of. For instance, I’m quite sure everyone’s lining up for www.BillClinton.xxx but Bill Clinton may not be too happy about it. So in light of this rather special domain name, comes a very special process that involves ensuring regular tax-paying adult content providers can bid for domain names they want, while allowing the rest of us to also work towards preventing others from getting our names tarnished with an .xxx post-fix.

So can we work on preventing my name from being associated with pornography?