Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of ROC, late chairman of KMT (via Bing Feng)

I always have a soft spot for Chinese Calligraphy.

Blogging has been slow lately – I have too much fun doing Tomorrow.sg. I was involved a little doing mostly the technical infrastructure for Tomorrow and the last few days I have been fighting with a huge load problem.

The server running Tomorrow.sg is being pushed to its limits, thanks to all the traffic on the site. Under normal circumstances, the server could manage the stress, but as there are a couple of other high volume sites (like the Infantile podcast by mrbrown) on the same machine, so together, they can literally kill the machine.

While I’m embrassed that this happened, in certain ways, it is a great problem to have. We are now taking some emergency measure to move this to a dedicated machine.

Altho only a week old, Tomorrow.sg are already pushing several case into limelight, such as the scholar who made some racist remarks that subseqently got reported by MSM (mainstream media). Or the posting that label Singapore’s blogs as Infantile which caused the whole Singapore’s Blogosphere to go up in arms. And today, we got a nice pleasant surprise to see Tomorrow.sg quoted in the papers.

And we are barely a week old :-) It is going to be exciting Tomorrow.

On the latest Businessweek cover:

Blogs will change your business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.

How true how true!

Okay I admit I have been slow in the catching up with my blog last week. Tomorrow.sg is taking quite a bit of time (which btw, is coming along pretty well). But in my semi-absent last week, SIP was declared dead. Huh?

Now, Martin made a lot of good points and I agree with him mostly. And I also agree you cannot argue against numbers – Skype numbers and growth rate are just incredible. We, proponent of Open Standard, can only kick ourselves in the feet that no one build such a user friendly application like Skype on SIP instead. But to claim SIP is dead is pretty far fetching – considering SIP is just starting to take off.

Sure, the numbers aren’t as large as Skype but it is afterall the only Open Standard we have today. And I could not see any other alternatives yet (still watching IAX) at this moment. The bottomline is that even if Skype conquered the market, there is always a place in an Open Standard protocol; There will always be those who want an open platform where you can innovate without a commercial gatekeeper.

Skype could jolly well be the Microsoft for VoIP tomorrow but declaring SIP as dead now is like declaring Open Source is dead. IMHO, the fun haven’t started yet.

Stuart and myself did a podcast interview on VoIP two weeks ago. Man, I sound pretty bad in the beginning but if you hear beyond my first 15sec, I think I did okay.

Since Houlin Zhao (Director of ITU-TSB) proposed the country-based approach towards IPv6 allocation, there have been several forums with debates on the topic. As expected, many of the the “Internet people” rejected the idea outright mostly on prejudge bias. Few are able to put forward very concrete answer to ‘but what’s wrong with the idea to have multiple issuing authority technically speaking?‘

So I am glad when Paul Wilson and Geoff Hutson put together the paper Competitive Addressing:

In the case of the Internet, addressing lies at the very heart of the network. Without a framework of stable, unique and ubiquitous addresses there is no single cohesive network. Without a continuing stable supply of addresses further growth of the network simply cannot be sustained. Without absolute confidence in the continuing stability in this supply chain the communications industry will inevitably be forced to look elsewhere for a suitable technology platform for the needs of networked data communications.

Geoff always like good paper but sometimes a bit difficult to read (his paper has a prerequiste of been both English and IT major which is pretty rare :-). Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to spend a little effort to read it through.

I was one of the few more vocal opponent on the concept of country-based allocation of IP addresses because I believe it only increase country politizing and IP resources wastages. I believe in allocating resources to the places where it is needed the most, not by political boundary.

But lately, I’m questioning if that position is conflicting with my firm belief on free-market and competition. Afterall, Zhou’s proposal does not eliminate the current RIRs IP allocation plan and more competition, more innovation is good for the industry…

Okay, this maybe an old news, only found it in my email when I was clearing them out. (Sorry Bob!) – ITU has just released its new statistics on global broadband penetration as of 1 January 2005.

Not sure the rest of the statistic but the line for Singapore looks a bit funny – perhaps because we track per household and not per 100 inhabitants as they did but the ratio of DSL and cable is certainly not 50-50 – it is more 80-20 (DSL-Cable) the last time I looked. Maybe I should check it again.

Incidently, they managed to get their news-blog going again on dashblog after their old radio server collapsed. So remember to resubscribe to their feed again.

Something is going on today: Many of the blogs I read today has been redirected to pairNIC, a domain name registrar. None of them have expired domain names but they have some in common – registered by pairNIC and hosted on typepad.com redirected via blogs.com.

After some investigations, it seem that the problem is isolated to only Singtel ADSL users. For now, it looks more like either a isolated between Singtel and Typepad. Either Singtel has blocked Typepad or Typepad has blocked Singtel; I look into this further later.

mrbrown has a great summary of the blogger dinner we have last night (waliao! posted at 2:31am. you win!) so go check it out. The two pretty ladies on the right were the two most famous female bloggers in Singapore xiaxue and adri (actually i was sitting between them but you don’t want to spoilt the picture :-)

Anyway, two reasons we got together last night:

1) Singapore bloggers are working to put together an event to talk about blogging! We should have more details on this shortly once we ironed out a few more details.

2) finalizing and launching tomorrow.sg, a site by Singapore bloggers for Singapore bloggers. Think of it as Boing Boing for Singapore, linking to the various interesting articles in Singapore blogosphere. To keep it interesting and relevant, we will need you, the bloggers and readers, to recommend articles to us – anything so long it is related to Singapore.

Afterall, Malaysia bloggers have their petalingstreet, Singapore bloggers shall have a better tomorrow (erm…sound a bit corny).

¹ more photos available from adri

William posted one very interesting spam : Spam in ASCII art!

ps: William is one of the two rare programmers I come across in my entire carrer.