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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If the 5 of you can’t decide where to eat lunch without saying the dreaded words “up to you”, how in world can 100,000 or even 1 million people combine together to solve a problem? The answer is through a mixture of the right collaborative systems enabled by the right technology and people with the right skill-sets motivated by the right things. Get all 4 components right, and you’ve got yourself the answer to any problem.

However, getting these 4 components right is very very tricky.Some might argue it’s more difficult than solving the task at hand, but a handful of successful crowdsourcing projects have broken the mold and set the tone for others to follow. Today I want to focus on what is quite possibly the biggest crowdsourcing project ever, and with the exception of wikipedia is probably the most successful as well. ReCaptcha.

My blog & name was mentioned on BFMs tech talk today. Woo hoo!! I’m so happy!!

You can download the podcast of the show at BFMs website here , and it’s fantastic (partially because it mentions my blog).

So while MOSTI still hasn’t given up on the bill, apparently no one in the Industry wants the bill except MOSTI, and they’re just a Government Ministry. Where were the Industry players MOSTI engaged before proposing the bill? The sad part is that even drafting out the proposal of the bill would have cost money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere…sad!

So there’s a lot being said about the new Computing professional bill, even on this blog. For now though, if you’re really interested in finding out about the legal implications of the law, check out this amazing article here from the Bar Council Website written by ‘The Awesome’ LoyarBurok. Or if you’re in the mood for some petition, try signing this petition here, they’re aiming for 2000 signatures, so far they’re about half way through.

You might also want to digest a point by Tony Pua (opposition MP from PJ Utara):

The Thais have had a rough couple of months. With floods inundating entire swaths of the country, Bangkok had to revise its GDP estimates for the year and even hard-disk prices spiked due to limited supply. There is some good news though, Western Digital recently started up it’s plant in Thailand (although no news on when it’ll be resuming operations) and many other companies are following suit as flood waters appear to have subsided.

Some laws you have to fight wars to keep….others you have to fight wars to be repealed. This is one of those laws you have to fight to prevent from ever being made a law…

On April 12th , 1861 Confederate forces attacked Union Military installation named Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The attacked marked the beginning of the American Civil War, and the United States of America would never be the same. The war was about more than just a secession from a Union, it was about preserving the right that every man was created equal and that no man or woman would ever be ‘owned’ again. In just over 140 years later, the United States of America elected their first Black president.If ever there was a war worth fighting for, it was the American Civil War. The Abolition of slavery was a law worth fighting for, it was worth preserving, even till death.

Cloud computing is already lowering the barrier to entry for new startups to essentially $0 hardware cost. Of course the cost itself isn’t zero, but what cloud computing has done is turn that cost from a Capital Expenditure to a Operating Expenditure. So instead of buying expensive servers, switches, racks and house them in expensive data centers, you can instead rent these devices …with no money down, and in most cases a lot cheaper than if you rented the actual physical hardware yourself.

So what’s the catch?

Large Corporations usually have service providers that provide services to us that we otherwise ‘would prefer not to run’. These services are core components of our business and critical for business operations…but it’s just that we’d rather not invest money/resources and expertise running the servers and software. We’d prefer someone else to do it for us.

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says: