So Maxis launched their new ebook portal aptly title www.ebuuk.com.my, far be it from me to point out that an ebook portal should at least have the word book spelled correctly (don’t you think so Maxis), also judging by the SSL certificate it appears wanted to go for a more generic myebooks.com.my domain name before switching to ebuuk.com.my.

I’m an avid reader and was excited when I heard the news, so I headed over to the Maxis ebuuk page, and noticed that it wasn’t up to my expectations. I was completely annoyed by the fact that in some cases the prices for ebooks via the ebuuk page was about twice the price of books you could download from Amazon. And the proof is below, it includes a book I’m about to purchase called The Progress Principle, retailing for USD9.99 on the Kindle for Amazon, while Maxis ebuuk retails it for Rm68.99. Now USD9.99 is about Rm30 or RM32, and Maxis is retailing it for about twice the price, that’s ridiculous. This is an ebook we’re talking about.

The Lowyat.net forum is abuzz with news and photos of a broken down Proton Preve. Not good news for a car Dr. Mahathir called the best proton ever. The rumour mill is abuzz with the reasons for the breakdown, but as of now it looks clear that the Proton in question didn't crash, but rather than some part 'lower arm assembly' gave way, or something like that.

I remember graduating from university and heading over to Intel for my first job interview. I can’t remember most of the interview (and maybe that’s why I never got the job), but I do remember telling the interviewer my dream was to work for Google, in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have said that.

Even then, and more so now, I had a huge admiration for Google. I admire they way they walk the talk in terms of innovation, but it’s becoming increasing hard to ignore the privacy concerns of having nearly all the worlds search traffic focused on just one engine. It could be argued that Google has more data than any other organization in existence… Governments included.

There are other search engines, of course, but they’re no where close to Googles precision or popularity (those two are actually intertwined), and Bing has recently offered to pay me to search with them and I might just take them up on the offer.

So how much do we trust Google?

A reader nicely pointed me to this wonderful infographic that I’d thought I’d share.

*update: there’s been an announcement that the organizers are setting up a second show due to the huge demand. I’d recommend waiting for that before you start buying 2nd hand tickets.

Dissapointed you didn’t get your hands on Russell Peters tickets for the KL show?

Upset because you spent the whole night waiting for it, only to find out that the 7000+ tickets were sold almost instantly?

Update 1: Russell Peters World Tour in Malaysia was sold out in hours. I failed to get a ticket online, couldn’t even log in. A friend of mine lining up in KLCC was told at around 10-ish in the morning that only platinum tickets were available. 

Update 2: There are ‘strong’ rumors suggesting there will be a 2nd show due to the overwhelming response. stay tuned.

I remember watching my first Russell Peters video at my cousins place, and that was the classic gig which included “be a man” and “Chop some bong”. I remember laughing so hard my stomach hurt, and I also remember asking my cousin to burn me a copy of the video onto the CD so that I could watch it over and over again.

Then I remember sharing it with my friends. Again burning a whole bunch of ‘illegal’ cds.

Then I remember going onto youtube to get more Russell Peters, for free and technically illegal as well.

Finally I remember bit-torrenting Red, White and Brown, and laughing my ass off in front of my PC monitor.

And Lastly, I remember watching a Russell Peters video where Russell calls guys like me “fucking downloaders!’, as a direct reference to us getting all our material online rather than watching his show.

Well guess what, Russell Peters is coming to Malaysia, and the only thing I’m worried about is whether I’ll be able to get a ticket. Cause I know of at least 100 people who are just waiting for April 18th so that they can finally buy their Russell Peters Tickets. The Russell Peters Dubai show sold out in 8 minutes…..8 minutes. My family PC at home takes 10 minutes to boot into windows, AirAsias free Air tickets don’t sell out that fast…it’s every man for himself here people. I wonder if Russell gives Indian discounts?

I’m a big fan of Nearlyfreespeech. I think they’re a great webhost, and so far I haven’t been proven wrong. Sure their interface is a bit ‘simplistic’ and they’re site looks a bit dated, but overall I like the speed the provide, their infrastructure hasn’t failed me and their security hasn’t been compromised. The same can’t be said about my dreamhost account, for which I happen to pay nearly USD7/month for.

The best part about nearlyfreespeech however, is their pricing plan. Unlike other webhost that charge a flat fee per month, nearlyfreespeech charges on a pay as you go model. Basically if you don’t start a website, or nobody visits it, you don’t pay a thing. While many beginners look on the pricing plan as ‘risky’ since you could end up paying a lot of money once your site ‘really starts take off’, the real risk beginners should consider is subscribing to a 3-year plan for a blog they’ll stop updating past the first 3 months. The real risk is paying these webhost large one-off payments and use no where near the amount of bandwidth or storage to justify the $5-$10 dollar per month price tag…for the next 3 years.

If you don’t know what RSS is, prepare to have your mind blown. If you’ve never used RSS, chances are you’re still bookmarking your favorite websites and blogs and visiting them on a regular basis painfully one at a time. RSS feeds allow you to magically consolidate all the content you read online, into one platform where you can get your daily dose of information all at one go.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it was designed as a simple way for web authors to syndicate their content across the internet. Conversely (and more importantly), it also provides a way for web users to consolidate all their favorites blogs, searches and forum threads onto one single platform.

So what is it really? Well I’m not too sure of the technical specifications to be honest, but here’s how I think it operates.

This blog is about Technology, but in these past few years it’s become impossible to talk about technology without touching on the subjects of copyright and censorship. Very few people have a clear cut definition of what is acceptable copyright infringement and what isn’t. Not too long ago I wrote about how a wordpress theme designer was being sued because he created a facebook theme, did you also know that facebook has already trademarked the term ‘face’ and is looking to trademark ‘book’ as well. Most readers of this blog know where I stand on copyrights, patents and intellectual property, where I draw the line however is trademark violations. A trademark is part of a brand, and usually trademark violations are a clear-cut attempt to fraud consumers by passing off a product or service as something it’s not.

So what about business ideas and business models. Is it OK to make a clone of Facebook, and call it mukabuku– maybe. Is it OK to use the blue and white hues that we’ve come to associate only to Facebook– that’s a bit uncomfortable as you may be tricking users to sign up for mukabuku by misleading them into believing mukabuku is a Facebook product. Well how about if you deploying mukabuku to a country that doesn’t have Facebook?

So what about the Samwer brothers and their new online retail site Lazada, that was just launched in Malaysia? It’s got all the hall marks of Amazon, is that OK?

After doing some research on Malaysian Cloud offerings particularly the IaaS offerings, I noticed something rather interesting from Skali. Now I always remembered Skali as an early web startup some time back in the 90s trying to ride the internet wave but failing all along the way, this however has some promise.

Skali takes cloud scalability to a whole different level with their cloud offerings, unlike other IaaS providers who offer a fixed number of machine types Skali offers a fully scalable machine that you can add processing power, Memory and Disk independently. In essence near unlimited amounts of options in terms of machine type compared to just 3 from Maxis Cloud.

The pricing still seems high, but it can go toe-to-toe with Maxis although it would depend on the specific requirements. From just the high level you can sense that these IaaS providers are going to compete for Malaysian customers but they’re competing with very niche offerings. Maxis ace up it’s sleeve would be the unlimited data transfer, which Skali charges at a mind-blowing Rm2/GB. Skali on the other hand offers an entire range of machine types (possibly in the hundreds), while Maxis offers just 3.

The choice between Maxis or Skali would be a simple one that would come down to how much data transfer or scalability you need in your application. That being said, let’s take a look at some other offerings from Skali Cloud.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a long post on the Maxis Cloud comparing it to other IaaS providers like Amazon and rackspace. That post wasn’t too kind to Maxis, and I did mention that there was no reason to use it…unless the data transfer was free.

As it turns out, data transfer on the Maxis IS FREE!!

This is a good step in the right direction for 2 reasons. Firstly, it means for high end cloud computing users that require lots and lots of data transfers, you’re looking at one of a IaaS provider that gives you unlimited data transfer inward and outward. Secondly, it means that there is a IaaS provider in Malaysia, that offers something that can be considered reasonably price, particularly if you’re hoping to be dealing with a lot of data transfer.