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?

Just saw this news on Slashdot

A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that only exists in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers.

The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year.

Wohoo!

Just saw this at the world of warcraft forum with a damn funny subject title!

I bet the folks at Blizzard must be scratching their head wondering what this guy just said. Muhahahaah.

Everyone knows “wireless” has been the catchphrase in this decade - cordless phone, mobile phone, laptops, wifi and moving forward, wimax, uwb, etc etc. Wireless isn’t just a multi-billions dollar industry, it is has also change our way of life.

But I am sure we have friends or families who tell us how they feel giddy near a microwave; Or how they are concerned about turning on their mobile phone near their babies; Or they wont have wifi at home near their kids.

Many of those are urban myth. Power emission on wireless are regulated even in so-called “unregulated” ISM band at a level which is considered safe for human. Some people may be more sensitive but generally it is safe.

But what if urban myth is true? What if wireless is indeed harmful to human except the effects are unnoticable until decades later? I am not a doctor so I don’t claim to know the truth but as a technologist, it is an interesting scenario planning excerise. Ignoring the health disaster at hand, or that you have to forgo your mobile phone and doing wireless surfing, we will have class action suits against the whole wireless industry (handphone manufacturers, wireless operators), angry mobs at government regulators etc etc. It isn’t a pretty picture.

And this is why lawsuits like this scares the hell out of me…

A few days ago, while discussing WSIS, ICANN, DNS, and all stuff that is geeky over lunch, he commented: “Wow, the Internet is a messy place, isn’t it?”

To which I responded: “Yes. But this is the mess that gives us email, web, p2p and all things that is wonderful about the Internet”.