I’m going a bit off tangent today and focus on Malaysias latest 4G broadband. Recently I moved house and my new area didn’t yet have UniFi, so to avoid locking myself down to contracts I decided to go for a pre-paid wireless service offered by YTL called Yes.

Initially I was a bit skeptical on the performance of yes, but it did have some things going for it. Firstly it was prepaid meaning I could terminate the usage anytime without incurring any fines. Secondly it was wireless so no wiring for my new house, and finally it a usage based thing, so if I was bit-torrenting then I could get pretty high mileage from just RM30.

So you heard about Crowdsourcing from a TED talk you just watched online, and now you’re wondering what Crowdsourcing is. Well here’s the lowdown, Crowdsourcing is a phenomena where ultra rich companies rely on many lowly underpaid serfs to gather data, process it and then produce a result where the ultra rich companies can then use to make them richer…well in not so many words of course, but obviously I’m joking.

Jokes aside, Crowdsourcing is a pretty cool thing, it’s getting the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making process and relying on the fact that many people working together can produce much better results one single person or organization can. Think of crowdsourcing as brainstorming with an unlimited number of people, and where anyone can join (and leave) the group providing you the influx (and reflux) of ideas necessary to produce truly lateral thinking.

When I first heard about Fetch.io I was really excited, I thought finally I could collate all my downloads through one interface, and I could speed up my bit-torrent downloads by downloading my torrents through fetch.io and using blazing http to download from fetch. I was so excited I jumped on an subscribed to one month the moment it launched.

Working for a Multinational company means I have colleagues from all over the globe, some of whom I’ve developed a friendly relationship with, friendly enough to ‘friend’ them on facebook. Today I received the tragic news of the Oslo bombings not from CNN or BBC, not even from the Google news, but over a facebook status update from a colleague of mine in Norway. The sad news of such an atrocity was heart-wrenching, but in the midst of this I decided to do a small study to see how twitter was reporting the news as opposed to the usual mainstream internet news companies.

So going online I searched twitter for Norway and saw the very first tweet on the list, a condolence message from BO himself:

My wordpress RSS feed has always been a bit dull without the accompanying pictures I scour flickr for. However, today there is promise as I stumbled across a post by the wordpress geniuses at catswhocode, there was a wordpress hack to include pictures in your RSS feed, and all it requires is to post the following code into your themes functions.php file.

Troy Hunt a Software Engineer, Microsoft MVP and the genius behind the website www.troyhunt.com, did a huge analysis on recent password hacks on Sony and Gawker to come up with a pretty daunting conclusions on how people choose passwords and why email accounts are easily hacked.

When the web was starting up and I was still using a 14.4kBps line for dial-up I used hotmail as my default web-based email service. Back then it gave out nearly 4MB of storage (wow!), then about 5-6 years later I migrated my email account to Yahoo Mail! as it offered nearly 250MB of storage, finally about 2 years later, I switched to Gmail that offered 2GB of storage, and I haven’t maxed it out since (it’s nearly 7 years of email now).

Google went the way of Apple, instead of supplying mediocre storage Google supplied 2GB and made Gmail accounts invite only, which took a while to get viral but it eventually did. Apple did the same thing when they launched the 20GB ipod back when iriver was offering paltry 128MB.

Want to figure out how long your site loads across the globe. This great app called Loads.in provide a simple straightforward interface to time your webpage load time from various locations across the globe.

Besides having a very apt url, loads.in actually has a great looking design. The app is design to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s to let you know how many seconds your webpage will load depending on location. I found the app pretty impressive and would definitely recommend giving it a go to see how fast your page loads.

Fox news, the great TV channel that brought us the Simpsons and Bill O’ Reilly today had it’s twitter account hacked. Hackers manage to break into @foxnewspolitics twitter account and start posting bogus tweets, one notably about an assassination of Barack Obama. The hackers painstakingly painted a picture of Obama dying from two shots to the head over the course of 3-5 tweets separated by a couple of minutes.

Recently I registered at fetch.io for a free account to try out it’s service. For those who don’t know, fetch.io was a site that ‘fetches’ files for you from rapidshare, megaupload and a host of ofther file sharing websites and ‘Full Speed’. What that means is, no waiting 5 minutes for the file to begin download or throttled speeds. Fetch.io will get the file at full speed and store it on its servers for you to download. You can then download the file…once again at full speed (presumably).