Just watched The Day After Tomorrow. I just realized this is the first movie I watch since my baby girl is born! Anyway, the movie is entertaining but as typical, the science is questionable. But hey, it is a movie! I enjoy it and thats good enough for me ;-)
According to the article from Reuters (via Internet Policy), Khaled Fattal of MINC is asking 6M USD to solve the Arabic Domain Names.
WTF!? 6M USD to do Arabic Domain Names1? I suppose CJK has 1000x more characters then Arabic, we probably should ask 6B USD to produce RFC 3743. Okay, maybe it is not fair to compare by absolute character count so lets just say 50x. I will settle for 300M USD okay? :-)
I was one of founding member of MINC. The original vision is to have an organization that can help faciliate and resolve the language issues with IDN that will not be tackled by the IETF IDN-WG. But after been hijacked by certain commerical interests, and then hijack again and again, I stayed away from them as far as I can.
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Today is the first day of LinuxWorld Singapore which I am chairing. Actually my chair job is pretty simple: introduce speakers, keeping time, doing housekeeping announcement, ask some questions (if there is none which is very likely) and probably entertain the audiences if we have some delay here and there. Not really a joker myself, I think I pretty screw up the last part :P I guess my “Chairman” badge could be replace with “High-level MC” and no one will notice any difference.
We got some pretty interesting speakers today like Rusty Russel of iptables & kernel module loader fame. Highlight of the day is Looking Glass demo by Terrence Ng from SUN which really dazzle the audiences with its effect (yo yo…I seen it so many times now! Can we download it now…please?)
Anyway, the summary is (1) Less people are asking questions compared to 18months ago and more real deployment (2) Total market size is still small (10%) but growth rate is huge (25-30% compound) (3) Lots of improvement on the kernel to make it more reliable and scalable (4) Many of middleware and application developers are making Linux as their platform.
The pleasant surprise was the number of hands raised (more then 80% of the room) when Steven Tan asked how many people are thinking of adopting or migrating to Linux. :-)
ps: Oh yea, Drupal 4 Bloggers is still alive. I just send in my patches to the patch queue for Drupal 4.5 on sat and also just uploaded upload.module and blogadmin.module to the contributions directory. Morbus iff is also working on a migration tool from MT which would really save a lot of my time ;-)
Finally! One of my my team work has gone public today :-)
To reduce e-mail spam in Singapore, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has worked closely with the three major Internet Service Providers, Consumer Association of Singapore (CASE), Direct Marketing Association of Singapore (DMAS), Singapore Business Federation (SBF) and Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) to introduce a multi-pronged approach to tackle e-mail spam. The various anti-spam measures developed aim to protect the interests of e-mail users from the impact of e-mail spam.
Other then bringing spam as an issue for the power-to-be, we also put together the National Antispam Website. :-)
Incidently, also check out the survey IDA conduct last year on spam problem in Singapore. Quite a lot of interesting statistic there…
Saw this incredible news yesterday! (via Joiito via Gen Kanai)
Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers.
Who could advocate blogging better then Bill to Buffer, Bezos, Dell, Fiorina! I am speechless! According to the article, they have “more than 700 employee bloggers talking up its products and software in development, is embracing blogs and RSS technology because they are yet another potential threat and opportunity“. Well well…how true :-)
This reminded me of the conversation I have with Shin over dinner last night. Apparently, all the new estates in Korea now comes with average 50mbps Internet connection, with a switch on almost every floor! Apparently, teenagers are raging over blogging! No, not blogging like I do, but more of sharing of pictures, photos, video clips, etc. With a name and probably a birthday, you can find almost any Korean teenager blog or webpia. Hmm…
This reminded me of my previous entry where I discussed that ISPs should stop viewing users as “consumer” but producer of contents. So please provide a decent upload pipe!
This is my second day in Brunei for the APT-ITU workshop. I am here to give two presentation, ENUM yesterday and IDN today. The experience so far has so-so but I am glad to catch up with so many friends and have many interesting conversations.
Particularly, yesterday APEET dinner/meeting was fun! After the quick and boring go through of the stuff to do for APEET, we settle down quickly to small talk..you know simple stuff like RFID (Oh Richard Shockey gave an very evil account what Neustar did to Verisign haha), MGCP (700K user in France!??), SIP/ENUM devices, VDSL (or rather, beyond VDSL in Korea), FTTH (Japan growth). Ya..just typical simple small talk you expect when a bunch of technies got together.
Hotta-san has kindly paid for the dinner and then we retreat for coffee (no beer in Brunei :P) where we do some Bush bashing. (Seem like a fav hobby for many these days…)
ps: Oh, I have a very interesting conversation with Bob Shaw (ITU) during lunch about how Internet Interconnection is a timebomb, when enough developing countries is using the Internet enough to feel the pitch of the tier-1 bullies…
I am flying to Brunei in a few hours time for the APT-ITU IDN/ENUM Workshop. The workshop is kind of perfect for me since it deals with two of my area of interests. I am giving presentation on both track, on IDN and also ENUM. And I will be catching up with old friends…and going to have our 2nd APEET face-to-face meeting.
Oh, I havent forgot about the Drupal 4 Bloggers. I intended to finish hacking blogapi.module (so it is upgraded to support some of the new features in Drupal 4 Bloggers) before next release but I better release a cut today before I leave.
So grab your V0.5 which includes some bugfixes on blog module and some enhancement on taxonomy. You will also see some patches to blogapi.module but that’s not complete yet!
I will be gone for 3-4 days. But I already setup my Mac (thanks to PHP Apache Module for Mac OS) with Druapl installation so I can do some programming on the plane. Todos on the list is Blogapi, and MT Migration tools.
Update: 18th May – Just release V0.4 which includes Simple Blog Admin, ISO 8601 bug fix for syndication, taxonomy hacks to make it easier to use.
I just release V0.3 of the Drupal for Bloggers. The major work I done over the weekend is the an upload module which allows bloggers to upload and manage files. (Entries, Comments, Trackbacks and Pings are already working as of V0.2) I think I have 4 major things on the todos before I can switch over to Drupal and start eating my own dog food – Blogger API, Simple Admin Function, MT Migration functions and Templates. But things will slow down a bit this week as I have to prepare for the APT-ITU IDN/ENUM Workshop this weekend in Brunei.
I understand there is a outcry from users about SixApart new pricing plan for MT 3.0. But for the record, I am with Dave winer (via Loic). and I couldn’t put any it better. I am not upset with SixApart and in fact, pity their predictment. (similar to ISC with their BIND). Folks, pay them if you like and use their software!
My decision to switch has nothing to do with their pricing plan. It is because i have outgrow MT and need a more powerful system, one where I dont need to constantly rebuild and ability to zap comments spams on the fly.
Another reason is their lack of empathy of people who developed plugins for them. For a company that develop social tools, their inability to bring people who develops add-on together is an irony.
Okay, I am ready to release 0.1 version of the Drupal for (MT) bloggers. You can give it a test run at my development site and you can download drupal4blog-0.2.tar.gz now :-) (Update: 16th May: 0.2 has been release :-)
I can’t claim it has all the features of MT yet but for those features I have, it is definately better then MT. For all the missing features, I am working towards it.
And yes, I need help! If you willing to help in this project, drop me an email at jseng_at_pobox.org.sg.
I love drupal. The source code is elegant and beautiful, and plugins are properly design, de-coupled and as-independent as you can get.
But as powerful as drupal. is, it is still fairly complex for a typical non-geek blogger. So instead of waiting around for it to be matured, I decided to start modifying drupal to make it suitable for bloggers to be at least good enough to replace MT.
Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for MT as it introduces me to the world of blogging. But many little things in MT is getting on my nerves lately, like comments spams and the constant need to rebuild, makes drupal a God-sent. Above all, despite all my time and effort to write plugins for MT for comment spams, I still feel like an outsider, which makes me wonder why I even bother.
So I am going to stop working on MT from now and move over to Drupal with the focus to make Drupal “good enough” to replace MT. You can see some work in progress here and the list of todos.
Email me at jseng_at_pobox.org.sg if you interested in this project or better, interested to help out ;-)
ps: Somehow, I having a lot of trouble posting this entry. Arggh!