Late last year the Government announced the Kampung Wi-Fi (or Village Wi-Fi initiative). The initiative was mooted by The Information, Communications and Culture Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Rais Yatim. Currently there are already 1,400 villages with Wi-Fi access and the Government hopes to increase that to 4,000 by year end.

That’s good news to a lot of villagers, broadband penetration is considered a right in certain countries, and bring internet access to rural Malaysia is a moved to be applauded. However, there doesn’t seem to be much on the technical aspect of the project available to the public.

According to this report from the Borneo Post, the Kampung Wi-Fi is a public-private sector initiative that involved expertise from Pernec Paypoint Sdn Bhd, so that’s an unknown company to me. The cost of the Kampung Wi-Fi initiative is anywhere from Rm25,000 to Rm32,000 per village, which for the additional 2,600 villages we plan to deploy to brings total cost of the project to RM65 million (onwards).

Sounds surprising and

quite convenient, that a company that reports a loss of Rm17 million, goes on to report that they have a lifeline, in the form of  a Rm6 million dollar contract from the police to “maintain the Royal Malaysian Police’s (PDRM) mobile systems for two years starting January 1”.

Quoting this Malaysian Insider Report :

“In a filing to Bursa Malaysia today, the company said TricubesNCR JV Sdn Bhd bagged the deal to maintain the Enhanced Mobile Management System (EMMS) and Mobile Card Acceptance Device (MCAD) on December 30, 2011.

TricubesNCR JV Sdn Bhd is 70 per cent owned by Tricubes.”

Wordpress 3.3.1 was released today. This latest version of wordpress comes fresh of the heels of the 3.3 release and fixes 15 issues including a security vulnerability fix which Wordpress doesn’t fully disclose.

Wordpress admins should see the prompt to update their blogs, and a update can be done fairly quickly via the automated update from within the admin panel itself.

One thing that caught my attention was the blog post on the update from the wordpress team:

File Sharing seems to be the next big thing , with email servers hitting maximum attachment sizes of 50MB pretty often, a lot of professionals are opting for web-based file sharing services. I previously wrote about how much I loved the interface at ge.tt, plus I absolutely adore it’s name. With more and more competition out there to share your files, what’s a poor danish company to do?

Venturebeat today reported that Ge.tt just got 350,000 euros of funding from skype founder Niklas Zennström, with dropbox currently valued at $5 Billion and box.net being used by about 75% of Fortune 500 companies, is there place for one more file sharing service. I think there’s place for a whole lot more.

All these file sharing services have pros and cons attached to them, and file sharing has it’s nuanced differences. Freelance photographers sharing photos with clients have different requirements from friends sharing videos or documents with each other, file sharing is a diverse business, and the differences between free, premium and even free-mium means there’s a lot of place for everyone to play. I think Ge.tt is filling in some niches that neither dropbox or box.net is hoping to go to. In terms of security, usability, price and scalability, (these are just some of the metrics people use to decide which service to use), there’s a lot of untapped markets to be found and exploited!

A couple of hundred years ago, if you wanted to find out what was inside a horses mouth, you’d go to a quite corner and sit for a while and contemplate what was in a horses mouth. This sounds anathema to anyone reading a blog in the 21st century, but it was quite common in the days of Aristotle. Our brains are hard-wired for imagination, in fact happiness expert Daniel Gilbert actually goes further and says we’re the only species that can imagine our future selves. It’s the reason he says, why Ben and Jerrys doesn’t have Liver and Onion flavored ice-cream. It isn’t because someone actually made Liver and Onion flavored ice-cream it’s because we can predict that Liver and Onion flavored ice cream is probably not a good idea.

About 2 years ago

if you typed “miserable failure” on Google the first listed webpage would be the wikipedia entry for President George W. Bush, apparently a few guys found out how Google ranks their pages and decided (with a little help from friends) to push up the GWBs Wikipedia page for the search entry “miserable failure”. Google has since changed it’s algorithm to prevent a few kiddie hackers from being able to control the page ranks of sites which have dire consequences of a pages visibility online.

I wonder if we could get miserable failure to point to the Tricubes website instead.

Tricubes is in the news again, this time for a ’typo’. Apparently the public listed company that was awarded the 1Malaysia email program and was also appointed the traffic fines collection agent by the police last month, can’t get their annual report in order. You would think that if there is just one document a public listed company would get absolutely correct it would be it’s financial report, Tricubes however is bucking the trend and inserting typos in their Annual Reportin what could be the shrewdest move ever to gain public attention. It’s probably a good thing, considering the ‘surprisingly low’ take up rate for the 1Malaysia email project. Tricubes aimed to get 5.4million email accounts, but according to the Malaysian Insider “ has so far only managed to register several thousand, most of whom were ported over from trial accounts”. This typo could be a cunning but ingenious ploy to get Malaysian more aware of the project, or it could be a error by a company that isn’t well run. Either way, there’s no such thing as bad publicity right? (sarcasm level at an all-year high).

Trey Ratcliff is a professional photographer who photographs ooze with talent, he also blogs at stuckincustoms.com. It’s an amazing blog, but what’s even more amazing is that Trey chooses to release his works of art under the creative commons non-commercial license, which has it’s restrictions but allows free usage of the photos as long as its used for non-commercial purposes. Now that’s like a programmer offering free programs, or a writer offering free-content. It’s not unheard off, but it’s rare. However, in todays economy more and more professionals are taking this step towards similar licensing of their works.

Treys photos aren’t customized for a specific purpose, he post them on his blog and if you like them you can use them. It’s not customized in the sense that he didn’t take the photograph of you or for you. Similarly a lot of programmers are offering free programs they wrote as a challenge or a dare and shared not just the program, but the source code that any other programmer can build further upon. They didn’t build it for a specific purpose, just something general that they thought would be best shared rather than sold. So in that sense, Trey can use photos of a holiday or a scenery and offer that for free.

I mention Trey not because I love his work (although it IS amazing), and not because Trey is a top level photographer that he shares his work online. I mention Trey because he has synthesized in short post on Google+ what he thinks of Online Piracy, and it really has struck a chord with people, especially since Trey is on a different end of the piracy war and he’s saying that pirates aren’t bad people. WHAT?

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.

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