A couple of months back, I wrote a small article about the Skali Cloud and how I liked the niche approach they took to cloud computing. Skali offers a very unique ultra-scalable instances that can be attached to physical machines of variable performances and storage space. In normal English, that just means you can actually the processor speed, amount of RAM and even storage space of your machine (ok that wasn’t ’normal’ English).

In contrast, Amazon and every other cloud offering I know of, offer a specific number of machine types (usually 3 to 8) that come in fixed configurations with respect to processor speed, RAM and storage. The great thing about Skali is that if you have certain applications that would require high processing speed with minimum RAM, you can literally create a physical machine that fit your needs exactly. If you used Amazon for example, you’d have to acquire very large instance types on Amazon and usually pay a high premium for storage and memory that you really don’t need. Similarly for applications that don’t require high processing speed, but high amounts of memory instead could equally benefit from creating highly customized virtual machines to suit your performance needs.

A couple of weeks back, a commenter on my Skali cloud post and thanked me for the post, that commenter turned out to be Tengku Farith, the founder of Skali. So I wrote back requesting a small trial setup, and within a few days I manage to setup a trial account with Rm200 credit on the Skali cloud. (pretty awesome!) So I manage to wriggle a couple of hours to spend time toying around with the Skali cloud and here’s what I found:

Some of you might have heard, but if you haven’t then brace yourself– I won the #DigiWWWOW awards!! WOO HOO!!

I’m still trying to come to grips on how I manage to beat out competitors like Amanz,  MrPiratz.Com, Droid.my and of course Technology, Design,Inspiration. All of whom garner more hits than me, and are far more popular. Mr.Piratz was the first person to congratulate me in the backstage room.

Hey all, as many of you know I submitted my blog to the Digi WWWOW awards, and a couple of weeks back I received confirmation that my blog was top 10–woo hoo!!

Being nominated for the top 10 meant that I was invited for the awards night, and I got to bring as many as 3 guest. However, at the last minute 2 of my guest had to cancel and now I’m looking at possibly 2 empty seats at my table.

[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210356987576324096”]

Security Analyst today reported that as many as 6 million LinkedIn passwords have been leaked, the 161 million strong Social network focused on creating professional relationships have since confirmed the leak and have taken steps to mitigate the issues.

All compromised accounts will no longer have their old passwords working, and so the first thing you want to do is logon to your linkedin account and check if your password is still working.

A study by the Harvard Business School published in april 2012 via it’s online portal HBS Working Knowledge, confirms that “Expert ratings are correlated with Amazon ratings, suggesting that experts and consumers tend to agree in aggregate about the quality of a book. However, there are systematic differences between these sets of reviews.” In layman terms that just means that expert ratings are just as good as the average joe commenting on Amazon. It’s something I’ve suspected all along, that crowdsourced reviews from Amazon, tripadvisor, goodreads and IMDB is just as good as the ‘professional’ reviewer you see in magazines and paid adverts.

The study, which can be downloaded in it’s entirety here, is a really great read, that’s not too technical, but it’s not overly simplistic either so be prepared with some of your high school statistics for this one.

As you know, I’m not really happy with Maxis. I was utterly disappointed by their latest S3 launch, I don’t think their cloud offerings of ebook portal is anything to shout at, and the if my wifes office would get decent Digi coverage, I’d switch in a heartbeat.

That being said, this is one of the times I think Maxis has done a decent job on their Loker offering. It is quite well executed, and if I do say so myself, getting 25GB of free online storage space when you purchase an S3 from Maxis is quite an enticing offer.

So what is Loker?

It’s also important to note that Maxis is offering the full 25GB to anyone who signs up for the Samsung Galaxy S3 package, which to me is a great value adding tool.

The service however, is only available to Maxis customers, and you need a Maxis phone number to register.

First off, let me come clean and say that I’m not really to please with Maxis today. I drove all the way to my local Maxis store on Friday to get an S3 at the offer price of Rm999, the phone was out of stock (which was acceptable for the hype around the phone) but I was told I couldn’t even pre-order or book the phone. Meaning, that when if I eventually get the phone – probably only after this weekend, I would have to pay the regular price of RM1399.

I remember playing with a plane cards and car cards. It’s a deck of cards where they list out certain specific traits of airplanes or cars like speed, weight, acceleration etc etc. The objective of the game was to get all the cards in the deck by trumping the other based on a trait called out.

This little kickstarter project though, took that particular game play and layered on it a CPUs. Here’s the cool story:

Today marks a crucial point in the crusade against freedom on the internet in Malaysia. We’ve had SOPA in the US, ACTA in Europe and the TPP has brought the fight closer to our borders. Today in a brilliant tactical move by the enemy of Freedom,  Malaysians will be subjected to an amended evidence act that would shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. It is a black day indeed, and the words John Fogerty ring in my ears–I see a bad moon rising.

Cloud Storage seems to the in thing these days. With the launch of Google Drive, my previous post on how to create a site to share large files seem a bit irrelevant, and with the even hotter news that Google and Microsoft may launch their own IaaS initiatives to compete with Amazon it looks a foregone conclusion that cloud storage will become ridiculously cheap in the years to come. So cheap in fact, it may make the large Hard Disk in your home seem as irrelevant as my post.

Now, although Cloud Storage is cheap and can only get cheaper, I am – by all accounts– the cheapest cheap skate I know, and I’m always ready to try a new deal even when the new deal is just $0.03 less than the old deal.