Skype just launch their 2.0 beta which comes build in with Video support a week ago. From their FAQ:

* Best ever call quality.
* One-to-one video conversations with anyone, anywhere in the world.
* Contact list grouping – organize your Skype contacts anyway you like by creating groups for ‘colleagues’, ‘friends’ and ‘family’,etc.
* Mood message and local time display – so your contacts know where you’re at and how you feel.
* Improved web presence through Skype buttons – display your Skype status on your blog or webpage.

I remember using Video4IM few months ago and I am pretty impressed. Skype 2.0 is promising (altho I wish they would spend more effort on their Skype-in…)

Christmas Eve Dinner for Two plus One.

A quiet Christmas dinner with my wife and little daughter…and marveling at One billion Internet Users. Merry Christmas!

Got this article from Dewayne Hendricks:

At the same time, the Internet’s shortcomings have resulted in plunging security and a decreased ability to accommodate new technologies. “We are at an inflection point, a revolution point,” Clark now argues. And he delivers a strikingly pessimistic assessment of where the Internet will end up without dramatic intervention. “We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls — and perhaps turns downward.”

Reminded me of what I said in my previous entry altho Clark is much more explicit and direct in claiming “The Internet is Borken”. It is not new…I heard it couple of times from various people, but mostly in whispers along the corridors.

But before you write this off as a yet another crackpot, remember Clark is one of the inventors of the Internet. And I also remember Dave Farber saying something similar during one of our dinner few months ago.

Think about it.

I remember attending Supernova last year and there is this small company demostrating a little web-based Email client they developed which looks and behave like Microsoft Outlook except it runs on a browser. After a very boring presentation which shows us nothing what Outlook cannot do, I remember Marc Canter finally not so politely shoo them off the stage. A few week later, Yahoo! quietly acquired them and recently launch it as Yahoo! Mail Beta.

Ever since then, I have being thinking about AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the technology that allows a web-based application to behave like a native application. Since then, a lot of AJAX applications have become extremely popular like Google Mail, Google Maps, Flickr etc. Many people already feel the magic, how “un-weblike” it makes the web application to be.

There are also many other interesting AJAX applications, like word processor, calendar, presentation, all in one office suite or even a desktop! (See more here and here).
Read the rest of this entry »

My Dream Machine..when I was a kid

Arstechnica has an article recapping the 30 years of personal computer history. (via Slashdot)

Very nice article with photos of old computers (oh gosh, how I missed them…) and also market share chart!

This story apparently has been floating on the net since early this year. I just got to know about it recently as a friend forward me an article published in Sept 05 issue of PC Gamer.

At 5am on APril 18, 2005, the CEO of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation (Eve’s equivalent of a guild) emerged through a stargate in the Haras system, accompanied by her most trusted lieutenant. She wouldnt leave alive. CEO Mirial didnt know it, but the contract on her life had been signed more than a year ago. Over the past 12 months, agents of the Guiding Hand Social Club (speciality : assatination to order) had infiltraded every level of Mirial’s powerful organisation.”

Mirial took her most valuble ship out with her lieutenant. The lieutenant worked for the GHSC, and at one moment, they all attacked. Destroying her ship AND her pod, forcing her to loose lots of skill, items and money. Meanwhile the rest of the GHSC attacked other places destroying lots of the corperations ships. They were paid 1 billion ISK to do it, their net gain was 20 billion ISK and they did 30 billion ISK in damges. 30 billion ISK is valued at roughly $16,000 (£8000).

The story sound like science fiction. Even the “press release” from GHSC sound unreal…infilteration, assassination, raiding of spacecraft, 30 billions of ISK…

But the story is real. It happens in a MMORPG game known EVE Online. The gish is there is this very powerful corporation (guild) called “Ubiqua Seraph” in EVE Online and someone placed a contract a year ago tasking GHSC (another guild specialized in assassination) to take the whole corporation down. GHSC carried out the task via infliteration gaining trust within Ubiqua Seraph, and then at a single moment, assassinated the CEO and raided the corporation. A feat performed by a dozen of GHSC operatives but involving several hundreds players.

At the end of the day, GHSC earned 30 billions ISK for their almost one year operation. 30 billions ISK converted to real cash is approximately 16k USD.

Crazy but absolutely real.

Just got back from the wake for Sondra aka La Idler. She is one of the editors of Tomorrow and went missing several weeks ago. Many of us was wondering where she went and was very worried. We were just told this morning she pass away…

I don’t really know her well beyond her blog and our work together on Tomorrow. In fact, we quarrel alot. We are like the yin and yang – I am the emotionless one and she is the carebear. But still, we find peace and the differences we have made us better rather then divide us. But all the arguments we had before now seem so meaningless now. I regretted not knowing her better. And I already miss her.

I am sorry to hear what she has to go through the last few weeks. The only comfort is she is now in God’s hand.

Sondra, I’ll pray for you tonight. May you rest in peace. Amem.

I just come back from the MoU signing ceremony between JGN II and SingAREN, marking a beginning of a new high-speed 155mbps R&D link between Singapore and Japan. Early last year, I paid a courtesy visit to MIC/JGN office in Japan requesting them to open their 20mbps link to the R&D community¹ but I was politely turned down. However, they promised to include the R&D community if they managed to secure funding for the next phase. I am glad this little seed I planted comes to something :-)

Anyway, JGN II is project managed by NICT (which has an annual budget of 560M USD wow!). The original purpose of JGN is to provide dark fibers and L3 (IPv4 and IPv6) services connecting up the Japanese universities. Last year, they expanded their network with a OC192 (10Gbps) to StarLight (US) and a 20mbps to Singapore. Today, they expanded the 20mbps to 155mbps and also another 45mbps to Thailand.

So what are all these high-speed network used for? Well, it is basically up to our blue-sky imagination. But to start, in addition to the ongoing media industry projects, they lined up two more projects:

(1) a e-Learning project between Catholic High School and Primary/Secondary schools in Mitaka City – Students can attend virtual classes that seem as if they are attending in the same classroom.

(2) e-Health project between Singapore National Eye Centre and Asahikawa Medical College Hospital – Basically using 3D HDTV technology to allow eye patients to be examine and even operated remotely.

If you got any more ideas, I would love to hear them!

¹ Credit should also go to Konishi-sensei who has been urging me to talk to MIC.

I installed Google Analytics on several of the blogs I managed. So after collecting data for a week, it gave me some nice charts and one of them look like this:

Pretty cool but I was wondering why I am getting so much traffic from pbs.org. So going through my logs, I discovered one of my (very) old entry on Internet Peering was featured by I, Cringely Link of the Week. Wow, thanks!

Anyway, if you haven’t install Google Analytics, I highly recommend you to do so. It is a nifty little tool.

First, congratulations to mrbrown on his third child. I received an email this afternoon from an excited mrbrown with his baby photo attached using his handphone. God knows how many other people he sent it to so let me also congratulate his mobile phone operator too.

Back to topic, I wanted to write about Singapore blogosphere. I know it is really so-2002 to blog about blogging but something puzzled me for a while with respect to Singapore blogosphere, specifically Tomorrow.sg, and Technorati.

The observation I had is there seem to be a “Tomorrow-effect” on Technorati top 10 searches. The first time it happens was Sarong Party Girl in June and in July, the NKF incident actually made become #1 search on Technorati for a few days. As of writing this, the top 10 searches on Technorati includes “Daphne Teo” (#2) and “Dawn Yang” (#8) both featured on Tomorrow.sg here and here.

The simple conclusion is that a lot of Singaporean (bloggers and blog readers) knows Technorati and are using it actively. But what puzzled me is how is it a small country like Singapore with 4M people (and thus a much smaller blogging community) could have such an impact on an International blog search engine like Technorati?