This is amazing!

Back on the OSX, I find myself in a confusion trying to use my Mobile Phone (Nokia N80/E60) to access the Internet. There wasn’t any problem connecting my Nokia Phone via Bluetooth to the Mac and iSync works great over Bluetooth too. However, all attempts to access the Internet via my Nokia phones failed.

I googled around and found some obscure instructions, and nothing specific for Singapore. But after some trial-and-error, I managed to get it working :-)

Here is how I did it.

1. Mac OSX does not comes with all the scripts (including Nokia N80 and E60). But luckily you can download the necessary scripts for your modem from Ross Barkman. After downloading the appropriate scripts for your mobile phone, you have to copy them to Library:Modem Scripts.

2. Go to System Preference:Network and then select Show: Bluetooth*. Then click on the “Bluetooth Modem” and you can select the appropriate modem script you downloaded from Ross Barkman.

In my particular case, I using Singtel GPRS so I tried Nokia 3G CID1.

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Meng Weng send me the above trendmap that he created for his new venture. Pretty cool stuff :-)

Yesterday, I arranged a visit for a friend to the Mixed Reality Lab (MXR). MXR is run by Dr. Adrian Cheok and is currently part of the new IDM Institute in NUS.

Dr Cheok is one of the advisor for Thymos Capital LLP. He is pretty famous among the geeks as he was slashdotted for his Poultry Internet that allows you to pet a chicken over the Internet. (See picture of the chicken suit on the right)

He is now working on a body suit so you can hug someone.

Dr Cheok showed us all sort of stuff, like the Human Pacman, an augmented reality game that you play the Pacman in the physical world.His student also founded a company of the same name, MXR Cube Pte Ltd that made a pretty cool game called WizCube.

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Relianace buying Yipes

mbitious Indian operator Reliance Communications Ltd. has furthered its international operations by striking a 12 billion rupees (US$297 million) cash deal to buy Ethernet service provider Yipes Enterprise Services Inc. (See Reliance Acquires Yipes.)

Expect to see more startups and consolations of Metro Ethernet players. ;-)

Taking videos and uploading them to Youtube isn’t a big deal. Kids do it all the time. Nevertheless, let me share three Video on Net stories here.

First, what got me writing this: George Yeo, Minister for Foreign Affairs, put up his speech at the World Economic Forum onto Youtube last night.

This reminded me of the New Media @ Art House event: We put up Dr. Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communication and the Arts, speech on New Media minutes after he finish delivering it.

Lastly, I didn’t know MyPaper, a bilingual newspaper, has a vodcast until they interviewed mrbrown and myself together with Run Tien from Zaobao. Sadly, they don’t use Youtube so it is a pain trying to embed the video clip here but you can watch it here: Segment 1, Segment 2 and Segment 3. Together with the vodcast, they also did an (front page) article on the same story: Can Netizen Talk Cock on the Net?

Incidentally, MyPaper website is pretty but it is a pain to navigate: Putting up their papers in PDF format that link to more PDFs which takes forever to load; Using their own media player thats is not embeddable, in today Youtube world is unacceptable; Worst of all, all sort of Javascript and thus making their papers unlinkable and thus un-Google-able, which makes it as good as does not exist since no one can find it.

On a unrelated note, I met Jennifer last week and told her of my disappointment on how ST handled Citizen Journalism story: ST has every right to advertise and promote STOMP. Slap your logo every page, do a frontpage story about your one year old party, but don’t encroach it as a story on Citizen Journalism, and worst, ignore everyone else. She understood and said she will feedback to the team. Yesterday, I got a request from ST from another reporter to do a story on Citizen Journalism again (this time in the form of Aggregators and Groupblog). And last night, Zaobao called and seem like they going to doing a story on Citizen Journalism too.

Nine months ago, I whined about how I was unable to get any wifi access in Funan, the IT hub in Singapore. With the launch of Wireless@SG in Dec last year, this is suppose to solve that problem.

Or is it more like this?

Thats what I got when I am back in the same place in Funan today. I spend 2 hours in the cafe in between my meetings and more than half of the time I am fighting to get connectivity. It is horrible and frustrating experience.

Now, you may say it is an one-off experience but actually it is pretty common.

I have seen being to places where it is suppose to have Wireless@SG coverage but no signal. I have gotten signal but the DHCP does not work. I have gotten both signal and IP address but no connectivity. I have gotten connectivity but DNS not functioning. I have gotten everything to work except it is extremely slow or with very high packet loses.

I like to hang out in Rochester Park lately and for the last 4 weeks, they have a non-functioning Wireless@SG signal there. It works for a couple of week before that. When it goes down, I thought the operator monitoring will pick up and get it fixed. 4 weeks now, I lost all hope they will ever get it fixed. I check with IDA website only to tell me to contact the operator. I email the operator and I get no response.

Finding a functioning Wireless@SG is as rare as striking lottery.

I cannot help but compare my experience in Kuala Lumpur. It is true that I get free wireless only at Starbuck (hence less coverage) but it works most of the time. A sharp contrast with a larger coverage Wireless@SG which DONT work most of the time. I rather take the former.

But heck, I shouldn’t complain right? It is “FREE” service.

No, sorry, it isnt free. It is paid for by IDA and some part of that money comes from the tax I pay. So long IDA pays for it, then make sure it actually works. This is not a community best-effort or FON network – it is a network paid for by tax-payer money.

ps: IDA already knew the problem, I am told. They had done their study on the quality of Wireless@SG. I am just ranting here because I am really frustrated at the 2 hours I wasted trying to get the Wireless@SG to work.

Bob Frankston saw my entry on Supernova and email me to ask if I have seen his latest blog entry. It was posted Dave Farber’s Interesting People list before so I have.

But I posted a longer rant to Bob that I would like to share here:

The core of the problem is the administration continues to believe in the myth of “universal service” and “minimal Quality of Service”, and thus lead to the only logical conclusion, an incumbent operator.

They have yet to accept the concept that a group of people to build their community network for their 100 homes, or a small operator servicing just this 1000 homes (and not interested anywhere else). And to do so means they must be willing to give right-of-way to lay infrastructure, be it fiber or wireless, to anyone big or small.

Until they do so, they will continue to believe in big and rich incumbent. To introduce “competition”, they issue a few more licenses to more big and rich incumbents and then to make them play nice with each another by regulating them. Its a never ending cycle.

At the same time, they would doing the opposite of what is needed to be done (de-regulations, opening up spectrum, giving right-of-ways). Sad but thats the reality today.

ps: Bob is the creator of the fame VisiCalc. We met several years ago at O’Reilly E-Tech.

Staying up at 3am watching supernova2007 live.

SharedCopy.com is in the news again, this time on Wall Street Journal

Now, eight years on, another Singaporean is back doing much the same
thing. James Seng has set up a service called SharedCopy, which allows
users to take a snapshot of a Web page and add and share comments and
even doodles on it. These pages can be public, or just shared with a
few friends. Mr. Seng isn’t alone: I counted at least a half-dozen
similar services, including zpeech, Trailfire, Stickis, i-Lighter and
Protonotes. All offer some variation on the idea that a Web page can
be commented on and those comments can be read by others.

Particularly, I am humbled at the quote: “SharedCopy, in my view, works the best of the bunch, but they’re all worth a shot. ”

Yes, we have a lot of competitors. We have a lot of things to do…and we arent hiring fast enough. Damn, I wish we have done the website revamp. We have the ugliest website of the bunch right now :-P