Continuing my series on bigdata and Google bigquery, I’ve decided to share a rather interesting snippet of information regarding our very own Malaysian Airlines and their wikipedia page.

First, just to illustrate how important Wikipedia is in general, the Malaysian Airlines Wikipedia page gets roughly 30,000 hits per month. That’s just one page of Wikipedia getting more hits than my entire website, I can’t tell you how frustrated that makes me.

Having a negative sounding Wikipedia page is pretty bad for business, particularly if 30,000 potential customers view it every month. That’s a web page that needs some serious attention if you’re the marketing manager of Malaysian Airlines.

Unfortunately for MAS (and every business organization there is), Wikipedia has a policy about updating your own Wikipedia page–you’re not allowed to do it. Wikipedia has to keep to it’s original intention of being an online repository of information that is fair, balanced and neutral. Having marketing gurus or corporate big wigs updating their own Wikipedia entry isn’t exactly in the best intentions of anyone, however Wikipedia doesn’t strictly enforce the policy and leave it up to the crowd.

Fortunately, the crowd have responded, sites like WikiScanner allow users to see which IP addresses updated which Wikipedia articles. Some have gone to the extent of correlating those IP addresses to the owners and determining if companies are updating their own Wikipedia pages against the general guidelines. Let’s see if Malaysian Airlines can join that group of companies who’ve been slapped on the wrist for changing the Wikipedia pages of their organizations.

Wikipedia is quite possibly the greatest repository of information mankind has ever seen. It’s built around an amazing concept of allowing anyone the ability to create, document and moderate information in real-time, and so far the concept has proven successful–some may even argue that it’s too successful.

For the past two days, I’ve been writing about Bigquery and Big Data in general, and for the most part I’ve been using the freely available wikipedia dataset in Bigquery to perform some queries and analysis. The results were so interesting, that they warrant a post on their own–and this is that post!

For instance, I was curious who Aiman Abmajid was. For those who aren’t following the blog, Aiman is the undisputed King of Wikipedia in Malaysia. Aiman has single-handedly helped update Malaysian articles on Wikipedia a mind-blowing 13 THOUSAND times–and that’s just the English articles. Almost 6 times more than his closest Malaysian rival.

I was intrigued as to who he was and why was he updating so many Wikipedia entries (some more than 900 times per article), and more I dug the more intriguing it got.

A quick Google search, brought me his Wikipedia which led me to the following:

There are other more popular tools for big data, but today we’ll focus on Google BigQuery for a very good reason. It’s the only one I know how to use.

Google BigQuery is a full fledge big data tool developed by google and stored on the cloud. There’s a lot more information you can glean from their presentation here. The short story is that Google created this tool online where you can analyze your bigdata for a per use fee, similar to other cloud offerings. Google currently charges $0.035 per GB of data processed or $35 per TB of data. That seems like a small fee, but it adds up pretty quickly, so for the moment bigdata and bigquery aren’t exactly end-user offerings.

I’m just going to quickly jump into a worked example of Google BigQuery before making some remarks. To use BigQuery, you’re first going to have to create an API project in Google and then go to https://bigquery.cloud.google.com

It’s obvious that people have gotten bigger these past few decades, what’s less obvious is how data has grown bigger in the past few years. In fact, 90% of the digital data we have today, was created in the last 2 years. Put another way, in 2010 we had just 10% of the digital data we have today.

In 2011, an estimated 1.2 TRILLION Gigabytes of data was created. That’s roughly 200GB for every man women and child in the world–In just one year. That’s every person in the world watching almost 300 feature length films every day, and this is the average.

The reason is simple, we now keep digital records of our transactions (e-banking and credit cards), our running patterns, our spending habits and even our wedding photos–and that’s just commercial end user applications.

What about corporations who track thousands of data points per second for their manufacturing plants and supermarkets tracking the purchases of customers. We’re creating and gobbling far more data than before, and the trend doesn’t look to be stopping. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

Now It’s quite clear from a previous post I did how about easy it was to hack a Unifi Dlink DIR-615 Wi-Fi router, that the least you should do is change your standard router password to something that’s more than the regular 8 digit Pin Unifi gives you by default.

Let’s take a look at how to change your unifi password, or how to find it in case you’ve forgotten.

Step 1: Login to your router

First you’ll need to login to your router. For this open up Internet Explorer or Firefox or Chrome to access the internet. Then instead of typing something like http://www.google.com in the address bar to visit google, type http://192.168.0.1 in the address bar to visit your routers web server. Your router actually has a webpage that allows you configure you, but this web page is only visible from within your home network so don’t worry.

You can just click the link here to take your there as well.

Once you see the page look something like the picture above, enter admin for the username. For the password, use the default password Unifi has given you, when in doubt, look at the bottom of your router (that’s the orange color device with the 2 antennas) and look for an 8 digit PIN. That’s your default password. It’s printed there in big bold letters–you can’t miss it.

Now don’t be confused, this is merely the password to access the router, not your Wi-Fi password, for now their the same password, but they could be different. That’s what we’re going to do.

If the password at the bottom of your router doesn’t work, try the following. Depending on your router firmware, one of them is bound to work:

Username: Management Password: TestingR2

Username : operator Password : h566UniFi

Username : operator Password : telekom

[caption id=“attachment_2505” align=“aligncenter” width=“271”]

Maxis VPN Setting[/caption]

Just a quick post for a Wednesday, as most of you know I just recently purchased my Samsung Galaxy S3 courtesy of the Maxis One Club. With that S3, I also purchased a RM68/month mobile data plan for 3G.

Now for those of you with an Android phone that tethering on the Phone is super easy. Tethering is when I use my phone as a wireless router for my laptop (or any other device). So I’m connecting my laptop to the internet via my phone and the Maxis network.

If you didn’t already know, there’s something on the sidebar of this site, something that hasn’t been there before. Something that I’m not particularly happy to put on my site– it is – an Advertisement!!! (gasp!)

To be more specific it’s a nuffnang add, about 10 lines of javascript code that will for the next couple of months display ads to visitors of this sites. I’m not too familiar with ads, but from what I gather I have little control over who will display ads on this site, and that’s the part I’m not particularly happy with. Aside from the usual “No alcohol” and “No tobacco” options, I couldn’t really control who I would not like to advertise on my site.

So why put ads, especially when I claim the blog cost under $4 a month?

First the blog does cost less than 4USD per month, and second it isn’t about making money–but money is still nice to have – it’s about taking this to the next level.

What is Nuffnang anyway?