I’m going a bit off tangent today and focus on Malaysias latest 4G broadband. Recently I moved house and my new area didn’t yet have UniFi, so to avoid locking myself down to contracts I decided to go for a pre-paid wireless service offered by YTL called Yes.

Initially I was a bit skeptical on the performance of yes, but it did have some things going for it. Firstly it was prepaid meaning I could terminate the usage anytime without incurring any fines. Secondly it was wireless so no wiring for my new house, and finally it a usage based thing, so if I was bit-torrenting then I could get pretty high mileage from just RM30.

So you heard about Crowdsourcing from a TED talk you just watched online, and now you’re wondering what Crowdsourcing is. Well here’s the lowdown, Crowdsourcing is a phenomena where ultra rich companies rely on many lowly underpaid serfs to gather data, process it and then produce a result where the ultra rich companies can then use to make them richer…well in not so many words of course, but obviously I’m joking.

Jokes aside, Crowdsourcing is a pretty cool thing, it’s getting the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making process and relying on the fact that many people working together can produce much better results one single person or organization can. Think of crowdsourcing as brainstorming with an unlimited number of people, and where anyone can join (and leave) the group providing you the influx (and reflux) of ideas necessary to produce truly lateral thinking.

Pick&Zip is an amazing app that allows you to copy over your entire Facebook photo albums all at once in one zip file. The application even allows you to view ALL the photos you’re tagged in and download those as well, especially apt if you’re looking to migrate this stuff to Google+. It also act as a great picture viewer for all your photos on Facebook.

Vanity URLs are URLs that have some sort of meaning to them rather than a random collection of numbers and letters, so instead of getting http://plus.google.com/18923937194123, you get a much nicer http://plus.google.com/keith , now that’s way cooler. It’s sort of like vanity plates for Online Social Networks.

Facebook has been offering this for some time, and so has LinkedIN, but the new kid on the block Google+ doesn’t. Or does it?

When I first heard about Fetch.io I was really excited, I thought finally I could collate all my downloads through one interface, and I could speed up my bit-torrent downloads by downloading my torrents through fetch.io and using blazing http to download from fetch. I was so excited I jumped on an subscribed to one month the moment it launched.

Buffer is a great tool that helps your organize and schedule your tweets to maximize your shameless attempts to promote your website on twitter.

Well let’s face it, I’m on twitter but with only 39 followers its not really adding any hits to my website…well maybe one or two. What’s clear though is that good blog content without any social media promotion on twitterr , LinkedIN or facebook means I have to rely on Google bringing in the hits, that’s like starting a company with only 1 customer and then relying on that customer only. If I’m going to get 1000 hits/ month, then I’m going to have to get serious on twitter and start churning out content that aligns with what my followers on twitter want to see.

Working for a Multinational company means I have colleagues from all over the globe, some of whom I’ve developed a friendly relationship with, friendly enough to ‘friend’ them on facebook. Today I received the tragic news of the Oslo bombings not from CNN or BBC, not even from the Google news, but over a facebook status update from a colleague of mine in Norway. The sad news of such an atrocity was heart-wrenching, but in the midst of this I decided to do a small study to see how twitter was reporting the news as opposed to the usual mainstream internet news companies.

So going online I searched twitter for Norway and saw the very first tweet on the list, a condolence message from BO himself:

These past few weeks has been hectic, I’ve been moving into my new house which inevitably involved talking to a lot of contractors/plumbers/repairmen and I had a very busy go-live period for my project. (Go-Live refers to the point of an IT project when it successfully becomes available to the users). To top it off I upgraded my blog from wordpress 3.1.1 to 3.2 and the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.

Reflecting on my blogging and my goal to reach 1000 hits/month, I think there’s a lot I learnt from this blogging experience so far from a technical perspective (setting up a website/installing a database..etc etc), but there’s a whole lot more I learnt about other things as well. Here’s the top 3 things I learnt from blogging that have nothing to do with programming.

Ever get tired of your office network administrator blocking youtube or facebook? Wished you could surf and get your daily dose of facebook and blogs from your office? Well there are many ways around this…most straightforward would be using a web-based proxy service like hidemyass .com or proxy4free.com. However, contrary to general opinion, your network administrators aren’t lazy(or stupid!). If you know about these proxies they probably know about it as well, so they’ve probably have a whole loooong list of sites categorized as ‘proxies’ that are completely blocked from access. So how do you access those web-sites your administrators have deemed…unworthy?

The solution is  simple. Host your own proxy. This too can be blocked, but if you work in a fairly large company your own little private proxy is unlikely to generate enough traffic to warrant investigation and ultimately be blocked. So if I hosted my proxy on http://proxy.keithrozario.com its unlikely the traffic it generates would warrant anyone looking into it and eventually blocking it.So you have to strike a balance, surfing too much via proxy will arouse suspicion, too little and it defeats the purpose.

So how do you host your own proxy?

My wordpress RSS feed has always been a bit dull without the accompanying pictures I scour flickr for. However, today there is promise as I stumbled across a post by the wordpress geniuses at catswhocode, there was a wordpress hack to include pictures in your RSS feed, and all it requires is to post the following code into your themes functions.php file.