Ignorance is Curable

Further thoughts on digital audio playback

2010-04-24T01:27:00.001+08:00

I have come to realize there is a lot of emotion when it comes to high-end audio. Having been out of the market for some time, it was interesting to see that all the "psycho-acoustic" stuff that used to be debated about turntables has transferred to the digital domain, with audiophiles looking for ways to tweak their systems to improve the sound.

I have to say that as someone who has been building PC's since they were invented, I have a great deal of difficulty with some of the assertions being made about audible effects from various parts of the reproduction chain.

I am a big believer in fidelity to source, and transparency in path.

Since the CD contains a digital file, and the read mechanism is inferior to a hard disk (due to the Redbook (lack of) error correcting), any audible effect is going to come from a failure to read the data correctly, the quality of the DAC, and/or the quality of the analogue output from the CD player.

By eliminating the CD and working with a source digital file, one source of error is gone. With an external DAC, one has a choice based mostly on economics, and then the reason I bought high-end equipment like the Bryston BP26/MM and 4BSST2 is their mastery of the analogue space.

I went with the Logitech Transporter as my digital "player" because I was starting from the streaming problem, not the DAC problem.

I ripped to FLAC as my digital source. When you use a program like dbPoweramp or EAC to do the ripping, you start to see the "read" problem. It is possible to get a different digital file out of successive reads, which attests to the lack of robust error correction and the fragility of the CD as a source. The dpPoweramp software compares the rip against a database of other rips to give you an indication of whether or not you matched the most common result.

Once you do have a clean digital file and store it in the computer domain, there is no chance the source will be affected by moving it between components.

I do understand there is the issue of jitter, but before we go there, just remember that we are routinely typing on message boards using widely different source equipment (PC, MAC, software) across thousands of different networks containing tens of thousands of routers and switches, and yet somehow, without fail, when I hit an "a" I get an "a".

I suppose the digital player is also a possible variable - FLAC is a standard encoding format and lossless, and the decoder is also standard, so a proper implementation should deliver the same bitstream regardless of hardware. As long as you are in the digital domain there can't be anything affecting the source (remember the "a")

Now that I have the whole thing set up, the question would be whether an additional investment in another DAC would be audible to me. I accept that this is personal to everyone, so I only judge with a sample of one.

The real question for me is why the music industry won't sell me a high quality digital source file so that I don't have to go through all this rigmarole to listen to music.

Amazon.com - Home for subversive humour

2010-04-24T01:16:00.000+08:00

I have just stumbled on the fact that there are hilarious reviews on Amazon that have attracted huge followings, ensuring that they remain at the top of the review chain.

E-commerce meets enlightenment

One of my favourite objects of scorn is a piece of Ethernet cable sold by Denon as a magical music interconnect device. I wrote a blog entry about this some time back - http://www.waleedhanafi.com/2008/06/theres-one-born-every-minute.html, but now I find that it is being sold on Amazon with an indicated price of US$2,500!

The first two reviews are priceless, and it just keeps going. http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Next up, with have the story of Ping, the classic tale of a duck on the Yangtze.

The first review will appeal to the geek in all of us. http://www.amazon.com/Story-About-Ping-Marjorie-Flack/dp/0670672254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272028883&sr=1-1

Rounding up, we come to that most annoying of books, the American self-help tome. The first review is not only hilarious, it is educational (assuming you wanted to know more about prison life) http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Rhonda-Byrne/dp/1582701709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272038971&sr=1-1

Singapore - Guys holding purses - the secret is revealed

2010-02-07T16:09:00.001+08:00

One of the most peculiar cultural phenomenon one can observe in Singapore, is that of a couple walking down the street or through a mall, with the guy holding the girl's handbag.

I say peculiar, because in most places, a guy wouldn't be caught dead carrying a purse - his wife/girl friend's or anybody else's.

Guys just don't carry women's handbags.

So it has been with some interest that I have been conducting field research to discover what powerful incantation is being used by the female of the species to compel such non-compliant behaviour.

I am happy to announce that I have finally been privy to the moment of transfer, and was able to determine the simple but powerful phrase which results in guys with purses.

"You hol dis".

Book Recommendation - Daemon - Daniel Suarez

2009-12-20T17:20:00.000+08:00

So often when reading books described as "science fiction" or "techno-thriller", the problem is the science is bad, and the technology is worse.

I have no problem with postulating some suspension of the known laws of the universe, but if an authour is going to incorporate current technology into a novel, he should pay attention to detail and get it right.

Having an accurate description of "what is" sets the groundwork and provides the credibility for whatever stretch of the reader's imagination the authour is going to attempt with his story.

I am happy to say that Daniel Suarez has done just that with his first novel, Daemon. As a real life computing professional, he gets the details right, and then accelerates the pace and takes a direction that is both plausible and disturbing.

I was therefore pleased to see that his second novel is about to be published just after the New Year.

If you have any interest in the societal implications of pervasive computing and the intersection of automation with a generation raised on gaming, you need to read this book.

Fixing the banker bonus problem

2009-12-14T02:06:00.003+08:00

After having forced governments all over the world to take extraordinary measures to prevent a complete collapse of the financial system, bankers continue to behave as if nothing has happened. The squeals of outrage over the imposition of taxes on bonuses in the UK is symptomatic of a group of people who simply don’t get it.

Or do they? Are they just behaving predictably given the way their industry is currently organized? Is there a way to change that behaviour without resorting to demonizing the whole profession?

The modern investment banking business has a lot of parallels with professional sports. Bear with me here, because the question of how to rein in banker’s bad behavior and out-sized compensation has already been solved in professional sports. By applying some of the same analysis to banking, it is possible to come up with a solution.

If you consider the professional sports leagues, there is an interesting mix of government, ownership, and “talent”. The ownership is either private or public, but in all cases participates in what is a zero sum game – there is a limited amount of talent, and bidding for that talent with higher salaries and bonuses eventually destroys the business that employs the very talent being sought.

The cost of stadiums is so high, that governments, typically in the form of a city or state, are bullied into supporting construction costs under the dubious presumption that the team brings some sort of benefits to the community. Taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for borrowings which are typically financed against municipal or state tax revenues.

Having implicated the government into their business, the owners then face the “talent” who act as individuals seeking to maximize their income. There is no real loyalty between the talent and the employer, just a contractual relationship. In order to avoid ruinous bidding wars, most professional sports leagues have imposed salary caps and income re-distribution mechanisms to ensure that balance is retained between the competitors.

Now let’s look at banking. There is a limited pool of talent seeking to maximize individual income. There is no loyalty to the institution providing employment. The banks are so important to the community that governments regulate and support them through many different mechanisms, with taxpayers ultimately bearing the risk. The only things missing are the salary cap, and apparently, the common sense to realize what is going on.

The loser in the whole banking game today, apart from the taxpayer, is the shareholder. There is no discussion about the proper share of profits between the shareholder and the talent, because the management of the banks ARE the talent. They have no incentive to behave themselves or to protect the shareholders, because they are enriching themselves in the “stadium” provided by the shareholders and taxpayers.

Since there are no banking leagues to bring order, or realistic ways to impose salary caps (since they have to be global to be effective), a much simpler and more effective measure would be to limit total compensation to talent as a percentage of profits. The majority of the profits should go to shareholders who take all the risks (taxpayers should be compensated through profit tax). By insisting that talent get paid after tax and shareholders, and that shareholders should get the bulk of the profits, the talent bonus pool becomes a realistic reflection of the real surplus after expenses, taxes, and risk reserves.

Since bankers have demonstrated the ability to thrive under all conditions, they will certainly figure out mechanisms for distributing the remainder to themselves as inequitably as they do now, but that is the talent’s problem.

Singapore has a great opportunity to take the lead in this area. It has demonstrated the benefits of a simple and relatively flat income tax regime, now it can take the lead in solving a problem that is vexing the rest of the world.

And since I am not a banker (ever again), I offer the solution up without royalty payments being required.

Dear Singaporeans, we regret to inform you that you have been outsourced

2009-11-24T06:46:00.002+08:00

With all the sound and fury from Singaporeans over the issue of foreigners and (un)permanent residents, one has to ask what is the Government thinking? Normally conservative and risk averse, why would the PAP risk heartlander anger over a policy of importing foreign labour that is so clearly unpopular?

The answer lies not in an analysis of how governments react to public opinion in democracies – the description doesn’t fit. Rather, one needs to consider Singapore Inc. in all its glory to understand what is going on.

As a Family run enterprise, Singapore Inc. and its organs of administration are business oriented and pragmatic. Faced with a population that doesn’t want to work in an increasing number of job categories, indeed a population that has lost interest in even reproducing, the Family has been forced to do what any business in the same situation must do – outsource.

Since emptying the current incumbents from the Company housing flats (HDB) is troublesome, it is necessary to import labour to do the work that needs doing.

So all Singaporeans complaining about foreigners and PR’s, wake up and face reality – you have been outsourced.

Building the perfect music server

2009-11-09T18:32:00.012+08:00

The latest addition to the Haunt is the Shuttle X27, a tiny Intel Atom-based box with an external 60 watt power supply. Like BEAST, it is all black, but with a tasteful silver highlight on the front.

With all the other PC's and laptops floating around the place, one might usefully ask, "why?" There are of course two answers - "Not because we must, but because we can" and an invocation of Bell's Law - "There are only two reasons to buy things - your friends already have it, or your friends don't have it"

I have to blame Paul Chatfield for bringing to my attention a piece of software called VORTEXBOX., which can be found at http://www.vortexbox.org

This is a Fedora-based LINUX distribution that is specifically set up for running SqueezeBox Server, and for ripping CD's to FLAC and MP3. I was intrigued with the idea of having a low power, quiet box to take the place of the ReadyNAS (which proved too slow) or my main PC (which requires the PC to be left running and the software in the background at all times)

The Shuttle X27 as built, uses a mini-ITX motherboard with an Intel Atom 230 CPU, 2 gigs of memory, and a Hitachi 2.5" 500gb SATA drive. Everything is designed to be low power and passively cooled. Ironically, it is the Northbridge chipset that requires a fan, but this is inaudible. The case is heavy steel, perforated on the sides and top. The drive interface is SATA, but can only accommodate a laptop drive.

I chose not to put in a slim DVD drive, as I prefer to rip on the main PC using dbPoweramp. I used an external USB DVD drive to load the Vortexbox ISO image downloaded from the site and burned to a CD. It installed automatically, just asking for the time zone and a root password.

After installation, the box can run headless - no keyboard, mouse or display required. Instead, access is by web browser and invoking the IP address. The administration GUI is clean and simple, with icons for each of the major tasks.

Squeezebox Server looks exactly the same as it does under Windows. The current release of Vortexbox is 0.9, and after installation, I only had to configure Squeezebox Server and change the Workgroup name under SAMBA (I did this by editing the smb.conf file, but the option to change is actually available from the GUI) in order to be visible with the rest of my Windows PC's.

Since Slim Devices has just updated Squeezebox Server to 7.4.1, I ran the Vortexbox update routine, which connected to the Internet and downloaded 120 updates from the Fedora and Vortexbox repositiories.

The final job was to move all my FLAC files over to the Vortexbox. This was accomplished with a simple drag and drop - and about 5 hours of waiting to move the 240gb of data.

It is hard to describe how simple and painless the whole process of creating this music server turned out to be. I am no Linux geek, and the only questions I had were answered in the FAQ and/or some quick googling.

The result is a small, low power, near silent, music server running SqueezeBox Server and supporting 5 Logitech Slim Devices units (two SqueezeBox 3, one Boom, one Transporter, and one Duet). Of course, you can also just play music by navigating to the FLAC directory on the Vortexbox and using Winamp or similar software.

A very satisfactory result.
==============================

FORM FACTOR Mini ITX Form Factor

PROCESSOR Intel Atom 230 CPU CPU on board

CHIPSET Intel 945GC + ICH7

MEMORY 1 x 240 pin DDR2 DIMM Slots, 2GB per DIMM (Max 2GB) DDR2 533MHz supported

VGA Intel GMA 950 256bit 3D engine with a powerful 400MHz core

DirectX 9 3D hardware acceleration

Dynamic Video Memory Technology(DVMT)3.0 supports up to 224MB of Video memory

AUDIO Realtek ALC662 5.1 Channel High Definition audio

ETHERNET Marvell 88E8056 IEEE 802.3u 100Base-T specification compliant

10MB/s,100MB/s,1GB/s Support Wake-On-LAN function

STORAGE INTERFACE (1) UltraDMA100 IDE channel Master from ICH7

(2) On-board SATA connector

ONBOARD CONNECTORS (2) SATA connector

(1) ATA100 bus master IDE connector

(1) ATX main power connector

(1) ATX 12V power connector

(3) 4pin fan connectors

FRONT PANEL Power-On button

BACK PANEL (1) PS/2 keyboard

(1) PS/2 Mouse

(1) Gigabit LAN port

(1) Serial port

(1) D-sub port

(1) DVI port

(4) USB 2.0 ports

(1) Front out connector

(1) Rear Surround out connector

(1) Center / Bass connector

EXPANSION BAY (1) 2.5' bay

(1) Slim ODD bay

DIMENSIONS 250(L)x185(W)x70(H) mm

POWER 60W Adapter

Input:100- 240V AC

ACCESSORIES XPC User Gudie

XPC CD Driver(32/64bit)

(1) SATA cable

Other: Screws

Singapore - Becoming a nation of high-rise squash courts

2009-08-08T02:57:00.005+08:00

I have been watching with bemused fascination the return of crowds to the launch of new properties. There is a complete disconnect between the business press reporting about the economic crisis, and the reality of mob scenes at show flats and mall openings.

What is even more disturbing however is what people are buying. The size of the flats that are being marketed are absurdly small. Instead of looking at the utility of the space being offered, buying is reportedly based only on the total price.

This leads to some really bizarre outcomes - in order to keep the total price below 1 million dollars (which is supposed to be an acceptable price), flat sizes are shrinking. At the same time, the use of balconies, air con ledges, and planters is reducing the usable area dramatically.

I am unfortunate to have a number of construction projects surrounding my building, and I have been watching the erection of what can only be described as pigeon holes. Pre-cast concrete slabs are dropped into place by crane, allowing completion of floors in record time. I don't see where the structural integrity comes from, and I certainly wouldn't want to be in one of these structures if an earthquake hit.

One building nearby called the Vida has recently been completed and is being marketed as a luxury building. Driving by at night, I was struck by how much the place looked like a stack of squash courts. The flats have floor to ceiling glass walls, like a squash court, and appear to be roughly the same size.

Intrigued, I decided to check the facts. According to the World Squash Federation, the dimensions of a regulation squash court are 9.75m by 6.4m, yielding 62.4 square metres. For those more comfortable in square feet, this is 671 square feet. Since there are no balconies, aircon ledges or planters, a squash court is really 671 sq feet of usable space.

Looking at the marketing materials for the Vida on their web site, it appears that a 1 bedroom apartment is 517-527 square feet - with aircon ledges and other encumbrances. This is actually considerably smaller smaller than a squash court!

Another way of looking at this is that a standard 40' shipping container is 12.036m by 2.35m giving 28.28 square metres or 304 square feet.

And how much does one pay for the privilege of living in less space than a squash court?

The last transaction listed on the Singapore government property website shows a price of S$1,175,210, yielding the seller S$2,228 per square foot.

I wish I could offer some sage insight to what this all means.

I do know that a squash court or a shipping container is not a home, nor is it a suitable place to raise a family. Even a single individual living in such a small space is going to go stir crazy pretty quickly. The breakdown in family structures can only be accelerated by isolating people in tiny cubes.

This is not housing, this is storage.

Singapore - Red Traffic Signal is Optional

2009-05-03T07:50:00.006+08:00

What started as a sense of unease when crossing streets as a pedestrian and driving as a motorist has now become a fact - drivers in Singapore are treating amber and red signal lights as optional indicators to stop.

On my way home from work, I witnessed no fewer than three incidents which could have resulted in fatal accidents. Luckily for me, I was not the first car waiting at Upper Cross Street and Cecil, as a Comfort cab rocketed through the red light, narrowly missing the car in front of me. This was at least 5 seconds AFTER the light had turned green in our favour. Things continued badly as I barely avoided being hit by another taxi running a red light at Orchard Link, and then watched an SBS bus proceed through the red light at Orchard Blvd. and Scotts Road.

Amber appears to mean "accelerate", and Red is for closing one eye and continuing on.

There seems to be a perverse logic at play, in which the time spent waiting determines whether to proceed, not the state of the signal light. A driver forced to wait for pedestrians, or at the end of a long queue appears to believe that his "time served" is sufficient justification for running a red light.

The result is that it is no longer safe to assume one has the right of way because a traffic light is green in one's favour. It is essential to pause when a light turns green, and check to make sure that no vehicle is accelerating towards you.

What's going on?

There seems to be a positive correlation with the state of the economy - behaviour is deteriorating along with people's finances.

Or is it just another expression of the lack of social graces and sense of community that seems to plague residents of Singapore? Unable to connect personal behaviour with societal consequences, it is every man for himself.

Singapore
running red lights
Comfort Taxi

Miele Singapore - Avoid At All Costs

2009-04-04T08:48:00.005+08:00

I have long held the view that when it comes to tools, you either buy the cheapest or buy the best. This approach owes its origin to Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, which I first ran into the late '60s. The idea is that the best way to learn and decide about tools is to start cheap, then when you have determined which features/brands/quality is appropriate, you buy the best.

A domestic tool that we all have to deal with at some point or another is the washing machine. A visit to a local appliance dealer such as Best reveals a huge choice of models at widely varying prices. The question naturally arises as to whether or not there is a measurable difference between the cheapest machine and the best, which is presumably also the most expensive.

Having to set up a new flat some time back, I was faced with this challenge, and decided to purchase the best. Based on reviews and poking around the shops, I settled on a Miele W1514. They are obscenely expensive, but appear to be well built. In fact, Miele makes a big deal about the longevity a customer can expect from their products, as this excerpt from their website shows:

Long life expectancy

A test performed by wfk, Germany's renowned research institute based in Krefeld, proved that Miele appliances last 20 years. Appliances from 6 manufacturers were tested, the result: Only the three Miele washing machines survived in working order. Miele also subjects its appliances to in-house 10,000 hour endurance tests in which they operate day and night. Only Miele sets such a high benchmark.

OK, so we have the Rolls-Royce of washing machines, clearly worth the inflated price.

Except that it broke down after 18 months.

Getting ready to wash a load of clothes before a business trip, the machine turned out to be stone dead. After checking the electrical outlet and fuses, it was clear that the fault was within the machine's power control unit.

While annoying, it would be unreasonable to assume that a single fault is grounds for complaint. A call was placed to the Service number, and after some negotiation, a service man turned up.

Without parts.

It was 4 days later that another service man arrived with the proper part, and replaced the power control unit. Total cost - S$684.57

To put this in context, Best was advertising a Japanese 9.5 litre washing machine for S$320 on the same day. So for more than double the cost of a new washing machine, I had my Miele repaired.

Arriving back from my business trip to find that I had been ripped off by Miele, I wrote a polite letter to the General Manager of the firm in Singapore, requesting a refund based on the fact that the machine had barely been used, and the fault was in a non-moving part, clearly a design problem Miele has with the machine.

It has now been 2 months since I mailed and faxed the letter to Miele, and I have had exactly zero response.

It appears that Miele is trading on its (undeserved) reputation for quality, and simply ignoring customers with product problems.

My conclusion: Avoid Miele Singapore - they are unsafe to do business with.

Singapore - En Bloc Fallout

2009-02-27T03:22:00.006+08:00

Having fulminated against the stupidity of Singapore's en bloc legislation, it was my fate to experience the human impact when my home of 9 years was sold, and the building destroyed.

The story has now entered a new, and predictably futile stage.

Wing Tai, the property company that bought and demolished Ardmore Point, has now announced that they will not be building anything on the property. The neighbouring building, Anderson 18 which was also bought en bloc, has been emptied of residents, but will now stand empty as the developer is not going to demolish the building after all.

To the former senior civil servant, Ngiam Tong Dow, who is so proud of his en bloc legislation, notch up another failed outcome. Buildings that were once desirable homes have been turned into empty lots and ghost buildings.

By destroying existing buildings and creating artificial shortages, en bloc sales contributed to the property market bubble that took place over the last two years. The Deferred Payment Scheme, which allowed purchase of property with little money down and no financing in place to actually complete the deal, simply added gasoline to the fire.

The result has been neighbours fighting neighbours, law suits, families forced to leave their homes, buildings being allowed to run down due to lack of maintenance, and unhappiness all around.

To add an absurd touch to the whole sorry mess, I present a letter sent to me and returned as undeliverable by SingPost. You have to admire their efficiency in having made a chop for use by their employees which reads:

Reason for non-delivery: Building Demolished.

Only in Singapore

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK

2009-01-18T14:36:00.005+08:00

Unlike other types of farming, growing trees is a relatively leisurely pursuit. One doesn't have to worry about seasonal chores like planting and harvesting. It does require a rather longer time frame though, and patience, and money.

Having said that, it is still necessary to undertake occasional thinnings. Such a long overdue exercise is underway, and I have posted an update to the plantation page on my web site.

Oh, the Monty Python sketch can be seen here, and the lyrics here.

Dumping Pacific Internet

2008-11-09T16:33:00.004+08:00

I wrote before about my frustration with Pacific Internet and how they had been black listed as a source of spam. My outbound emails were being blocked, and there didn't seem to be any interest on the part of the Company to do anything about it.

I decided to give up my account, though at the cost of many, many change of address emails and web site configuration sessions. Ironically, it is easier to send change of address letters by snail mail than it is to find and change one's address on all the subscriptions and web sites that pile up over the years.

One side effect of stopping my pacific.net.sg account has been the massive drop in the amount of spam mail I receive. On a typical day, I would get 50-75 emails, of which 90% were spam. I have been using a very powerful and free spam filter called SpamBayes, which was handling the traffic well, so I didn't really notice the problem.

Now however, the time to download email is significantly shorter, and I can safely check email on my phone without being flooded with crap.

It is incredible to me that Pacific Internet would allow itself to fall so low. They are an international pariah ISP and provide lousy customer service by failing to filter spam at the gateway. Even from a business point of view, it would be cheaper to dump the spam rather than store and forward it to subscribers.

Goodbye and good riddance.

Book Recommendation - Halting State

2008-11-09T16:09:00.002+08:00

What are they putting in the water in Scotland?

For some reason I have not been able to discover, some of the best science fiction writing is coming out of Scotland these days. Wikipedia lists 19 writers, although I doubt most people would know Arthur Conan Doyle as a science fiction writer.

Whatever the cause, Charles Stross is writing extraordinary fiction that challenges, frightens, and provokes the reader. Like others before him, he takes societal trends and technologies that exist today and projects them into a future that is recognizable but definitely uncomfortable.

His latest book, "Halting State" is liberally strewn with Scottish words and geek speak, which can be difficult at times if you are unfamiliar with the vocabulary. It is worth persevering however, as the reward is a mind-bending journey through crime, virtual worlds, technology that changes laundry, and conspiracies, all wrapped in a good thriller.

Book Recommendation - Manhattan Nocturne

2008-11-09T15:53:00.006+08:00

I have recently "discovered" an author whose books are really quite wonderful.

Colin Harrison combines the standard elements of detective and mystery stories with absolutely riveting prose description. His muse is New York City, and while some of the plots have holes you could drive a truck through, all is forgiven when one is transported into the world he creates.

Picador is re-releasing Harrison's works, and so most of the back catalog is available. My favorite to date: Manhattan Nocturne.

His most recent effort, The Finder, is also well worth the read.

Digital Music, High-Fidelity, and making it all work

2008-10-27T11:56:00.010+08:00

The latest addition to my music system is the Slim Devices Transporter. It also represents the completion of my shift from spinning discs to digital music files as the music source.

I have been dismayed by the reduction in the quality of music reproduction driven by the move to MP3 and portable music players. If this had been just an extension of the music industry, it would not have mattered, but highly compressed "music" has dominated to the exclusion of all other forms.

The result has been the death of the music store, limiting access to the back catalog. It has also meant that producers are cranking up the volume and boosting the treble range to make their offerings sound better on MP3 players. This has left those wanting to play music, with what is now almost archaically referred to as high-fidelity, at a loss.

Things had gotten bad enough that I was tempted to give up on CD's and digital music and go back to vinyl LP's. I still have my original collection built up over the years, and with many Japanese pressings I bought while in Hong Kong. Others must have had the same reaction as vinyl sales are exploding, with Amazon listing tens of thousands of albums available.

After our last home move, I didn't get around to setting up my turntable. It is a fussy job at best, and many of the components are now well past their "use by" date. The idea of going back to cleaning vinyl, balancing tone arms, changing LP's every 15 minutes, and all the other annoying aspects of using record albums left me cold. Yes, the sound is often "better" when everything is setup perfectly, but it is a constant battle to derive an excellent outcome.

The final straw was looking at the prices of turntables and cartridges. The industry survived during the lean years by serving those with money - serious money. Prices are simply astronomical for good quality equipment. Indeed, even my current AV Amplifier lacks a phono input.

I decided to give digital another look. I have long used music streaming equipment from Slim Devices, from the original SliMP3, to the current Squeezebox. These devices stream digital music from a server to an amplifier using Ethernet, either wired or Wi-Fi.

The Squeezebox does a great job, but I had been using standard ripping programs to create MP3 files to be streamed. Even with high bit rate encoding, this is still a compressed music source and the impact is audible. It is actually quite tiring to listen to compressed music over any extended period of time.

Reading reviews of equipment for translating digitally encoded music to analogue for play back, it struck me that I was looking at the wrong end of the problem. Instead of investing in better CD management and better CD transports, the real opportunity was the data itself. Given that the CD is the medium on which a digitally encoded source is placed, the challenge was to get that data off the CD and stored in a format that was lossless and available for playback by a high quality analogue reproduction system.

It turns out that the CD player is attempting to read the CD and correct for read errors on the fly. The original standard for encoding does not have anywhere near the robustness of even the cheapest computer with a hard disk. Storing music on CD's, with their degradation over time, was simply the wrong way to go if the intent was to build a music collection.

It turns out that there are a huge variety of formats for ripping music, some with Digital Rights Management (DRM) and some without. Various levels of compression are possible, and different tagging is available. I started from the basic desire to have a lossless file format, non-proprietary, widely supported, and without DRM. The clear winner was FLAC.

Having chosen a format, the next issue is which tool to use in order to rip CD's to FLAC. The best ripping programs use plug-ins so that third party CODECS can be used, and improvements made without changing the whole system. After looking at a few of the most highly rated programs, I settled on dbPowerAmp. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is also a good choice if you are obsessive about tweaking every last detail.

For ease of use however, dbPowerAmp wins. It has a paid version which includes a subscription to AMG for automatic track and cover art look up, and this is the one to go for. By comparing all the rips of each CD, dbPowerAmp can determine the accuracy of your rip. It can also detect read errors and go sector by sector to obtain clean data.

After installing dbPowerAmp, I added a multi-rip CODEC that encodes both FLAC and MP3. With the software and ripping process determined, it was just a matter of pointing the SqueezeCenter server software at the FLAC directory, and firing up the Transporter.

The result is CD quality music streamed digitally over a Wi-Fi network to the Transporter, and playback that is as good as it gets. A great user interface and access to my entire music collection means that I am now listening to music I didn't even know I had.

Wonderful.

Singapore - ISP's to customers - "You are evil"

2008-08-05T04:17:00.005+08:00

On Monday, The Straits Times ran a half page shill piece for the ISP's on the front of the Money section.

The gist of the article is that some unspecified "bandwidth hogs" with "insatiable appetites" are ruining it for everybody else by consuming more than their fair share.

The article attempts to equate using the Internet with consuming more than one's fair share of water. This is emotional manipulation of the worst kind. Clearly the ISP's are getting ready to try and introduce volume-based pricing in Singapore, and they are using all their press contacts to smooth the way. The article even trots out the argument that it isn't price fixing and collusion if all the ISP's coincidentally introduce volume pricing.

Except data isn't water, and there is no shortage of bandwidth. The world still hasn't consumed most of the fibre capacity that was installed during the dot com boom, and new technology continues to increase the capacity of the fibre optic pipes.

The whole comparison to water usage is a deliberate attempt to mislead.

The standard telecom contract for data services has been based on bandwidth provided since the invention of data circuits. Indeed, the ISP's price their services based on the bandwidth to which one subscribes. If I have subscribed for an 8Mb/sec service, how can I be a "bandwidth hog" for using 8Mb/sec of bandwidth? I paid for it, and I have the right to use it.

Let's dump the adjectives and get down to what is really happening.

The ISP's in Singapore have been selling ever greater bandwidth packages to consumers, confident in their belief that nobody can actually use that much capacity. At the same time, they have also under-provisioned the bandwidth required to connect all those subscribers to the rest of the world, which explains the incredibly slow performance one suffers with on a daily basis when accessing any site outside Singapore.

With organizations like the BBC discontinuing short wave transmissions in favour of Internet broadcasts, the popularity of video sharing sites like YouTube, and the wide-spread use of gaming, the Internet has matured into a rich media network.

Actually that is what it is supposed to be, but in Singapore we only get a frustrating hint of what is possible because of the lack of international bandwidth provided by the ISP's.

The problem is not "bandwidth hogs", it is the lack of capacity installed by the ISP's. I can't watch YouTube, listen to the radio, or download files without interruptions and dropouts. When I measure the local loop capacity, there is indeed 8Mb/sec of capacity. But that rapidly disintegrates into a high-latency, high packet loss mess as all the subscribers who are already paying for service find themselves dumped into congested and under-specified international gateways.

In case you think I am being unduly harsh on the ISP's, and that they need to charge by volume in order to stay in business, let's have a look at an answer given during the Q1 2008 results meeting with investors held by Starhub. (I don't mean to pick on Starhub, all the ISP's are doing it, but I know this comment took place because I was listening)

StarHub -"Keep in mind that the data and Internet service is provisioned over an existing fibre optic network system. All the CAPEX is laid in, most of the capacity is laid in, so when we sell a bit of bandwidth on that fibre optic system, it delivers very high margins. You’re talking about gross margins that are in excess of 80%. The encouraging thing is, as Mike pointed out, there has been a very steady growth in the very high margin in the data internet business. In fact now the revenue for that part of the business almost equals to the revenue in prepaid, so it has become a very meaningful part of our business."

So "No", Straits Times and local ISP's, the problem is not "insatiable bandwidth hogs", the problem is the failure to provide sufficient international network bandwidth to handle the traffic you have promised subscribers to carry. Maintaining an 80% gross margin while complaining about "hogs" is just hypocritical.

Singapore
ISP
bandwidth hogs
volume-based charging

PacNet / Pacific Internet blocked as spam source

2008-07-07T10:17:00.006+08:00

I have been a customer of Pacific Internet for more than 12 years.

Back in the day, their dial-up service was good and relatively inexpensive. I switched to Max Online (Starhub) when broadband cable became available, but continued to subscribe to Pacific Internet because I didn't want to change my email address, and I was still using dial-up roaming when traveling overseas.

Over the past months however, I have had the experience of email being blocked by receivers outside Singapore. The status messages indicated that Pacific Internet was a spam host and no traffic would be accepted.

It is now happening again, and this time I got a definitive response from the overseas ISP:

The outgoing mail server used, smtpgate3.pacific.net.sg, was
blocked by spamrats.com. This means that all of Pacnet's customers using
this outgoing mail server would also be blocked by spamrats.

Pacnet's Email Server Information page,
http://www.pacific.net.sg/customerservice/server/index.htm , indicates you
could use the following outgoing mail server: mail.pacific.net.sg . At
the present time, this mail server isn't blacklisted by spamrats.com as well
as 124 other similar blacklist organizations.

The trouble is that I am using mail.pacific.net.sg as my outgoing mail server. It appears that PacNet is consolidating their outbound traffic on a server that has been blacklisted by pretty much the rest of the Internet world.

With no overall organization in charge of the Internet, individual ISP's have banded together to create blacklists of IP addresses and domains that originate spam. Once included on such a list, you are pretty much unable to get through to anybody else outside your own domain.

Pacific Internet has been bought and combined with Asia Netcom. The resulting company doesn't seem to want individual customers any longer, focusing on business instead. The lack of interest in fixing the problem, and the desultory tech support have led me to finally bite the bullet and move my business elsewhere.

Goodbye Pacific Internet.

Pacific Internet
PacNet
spam
spam blocking
blacklisted

There's one born every minute

2008-06-17T02:14:00.006+08:00

A friend and I recently sat through a presentation by an asthmatic stereo dealer at Adelphi who was trying to convince us that the power cables he was selling for thousands of dollars each made a difference to the sound.

He had a near death experience as he climbed in behind the equipment to switch out the cables and plug things back in. The wheezing made it sort of difficult to concentrate, but I actually thought I did a hear a difference - the normal cables sounded better.

Which brings me to this gem.

Denon is selling their AK-DL1 Premium Denon Link cable "designed for the audio enthusiast". As both the name and the picture testify, this is a 1.5 meter Ethernet cable. For US$499.

We are talking about moving a digital signal over wire. Digital.

Apparently the words "audio enthusiast" translate to "idiot" in normal English.

Denon's 1.5 meter (59 in.) ultra premium Denon Link cable was designed for the audio enthusiast. Made from high purity copper wire and high performance connection parts, the AK-DL1 will bring out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction from any of our Denon DVD players with the Denon Link feature. Attention to detail when building this cable was used by employing high quality insulation, tin-bearing alloy shielding and woven jacketing to reduce vibration and to add durability. Additionally, signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer. Rounded plug levers help prevent breakage.

Singapore
audiophile
Adelphi

Brother HL-2170W Laser Printer - PC Show 2008

2008-06-14T18:22:00.005+08:00

After a really unpleasant and expensive experience with an HP LaserJet 2300, I swore off HP and expensive laser printers. Even though it cost as much as its model number when purchased new, HP showed no interest in fixing a vertical streaking problem. The only advice was to buy a new toner cartridge, at S$210 dollars.

Which didn't fix the problem.

Instead of throwing more good money after bad, I threw out the laser printer and survived on my Brother MFC-4800 laser fax/printer. This device is quite capable, with PC to fax transmission as well as scanning and printing. It is not great for graphics, and tends to get cranky when asked to print more than 10 pages at a time. It also does not accommodate the printing of envelopes directly. You have to remove the normal paper, print the envelope, and then put back the paper.

I have been waiting for the MFC-4800 to die, giving me an excuse to upgrade, but the thing has been flawless for more than 5 years now. Which is extraordinary since it seems to be made completely of plastic. I have had to put my prejudices in favour of a heavy metal chassis on hold in light of the longevity of this unit.

My work tends to involve the preparation and review of lengthy documents, so having an ability to quickly produce hard copy is required. With the PC Show 2008 on this week and actually being in Singapore at the same time, I took the chance to scout for a new laser printer.

Interestingly, it was a Samsung and a Brother that showed up on the radar. The price of the machines and consumables were significantly lower than competitors, and customer reviews for the Brother were pretty positive. After looking specs over, I decided on the Brother HL-2170W, the top of a range of 3 printers.

The HL-2140 is the first model in the series which all feature a fast printing speed of 22 pages per minute. It has a USB interface, and is meant for direct attachment to a PC. The next model is the HL2150 which has a built-in Ethernet interface and 16Mb of memory.

The one I went for is the HL2170W, which doubles the memory to 32Mb, and adds a Wi-Fi interface. I was intrigued with the idea of being able to run a printer wirelessly - it means that you can move a printer around as required without worrying about Ethernet or USB cables. It also has a manual feed slot at the front, though without a tray, so envelopes or other odd sizes can be printed.

Being deeply respectful of the crowds at a Singapore PC Show, I went to Suntec on the opening day around 3:00pm, after the lunch crowd had left. It was busy, but not dangerously so, and I was able to locate the Brother booth and do the deal. The printer was on sale for S$100 less than normal, so it was S$298. They also threw in a trolley and USB cable.

Brother is unusual in splitting the toner from the cartridge. Instead of throwing away a print cartridge every time you run out of toner, Brother sells the toner separately, so the cost is lower. Consumables were 20% off at the Show, so I also picked up a high capacity toner refill at the same time. Everything was strapped to the trolley and I fought my way back down to the parking garage and home.

The "out of box" experience was great, just requiring the insertion of the cartridge, and plugging in the power cable. There is a CD with installation wizards, as well as a printed manual.

I was curious about how the Wi-Fi would be configured as a printer doesn't have any obvious way of entering data. Indeed, the manual suggests plugging the printer in temporarily using the Ethernet or USB ports. I connected it to my LAN, and let the installation software run.

The software immediately found the printer and asked how I wanted to install it. I chose wireless, and it then stepped me through entering my SSID and WEP key.

And that was it, the printer was now a shared network device visible to the whole LAN. Simple and sweet.

It turns out there is a tremendous amount of intelligence in the printer. You can use a browser to directly connect to it's built in web server which gives you access to a huge amount of configuration and diagnostic information. There is also a screen to setup email, but I haven't yet figured out if that is for the printer to send diagnostics, or to receive print jobs or both.

I have to say I am very impressed. Compared to the pain I went through with a supposedly corporate class HP printer, the Brother has been a joy to setup and work with. Having the speed and cleanliness of a laser at about the same price as a good ink jet is just amazing.

Oh yes, the print speed and quality appear to be as advertised - excellent.

Singapore
PC Show 2008
Brother HL-2170W
laser printer

Skype introduces "all-you-can-babble" price plans

2008-06-14T18:15:00.003+08:00

I have been a happy user of Skype since it came out. I have also used it heavily at work, first from China, now where ever I happen to end up in the world. Having a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection is all it takes to maintain voice and video contact.

With children overseas at university, it has also come in handy as a painless way of staying in touch. Far less intrusive than a blind call on a wireline phone, the presence feature lets you check status before calling.

However.

Even at reduced rates, my spend on long distance was still significant because many of the people being called did not have a computer or Skype. Using the SkypeOut service, I bought credits which then permitted the calling of any phone number in the world.

I am happy to say that Skype has now introduced a flat rate calling plan that gives you unlimited (OK, 10,000 minutes per month) calling to wire and mobile phones. The combination of the Linksys CT400 Cordless Skype phone, unlimited calling, and "free" internet through my Starhub HubStation is an unbeatable combo.

Email interviews - magical conversion to gibberish

2008-06-10T12:11:00.004+08:00

I occasionally get requests from journalists to provide answers to questions they send by email. The resulting exchange is then often printed as if you had been interviewed in person.

It can be annoying when perfectly good written sentences are often transformed into grammatically incorrect sentences that make you sound like a complete idiot. Or even worse, factual inaccuracies are introduced and it looks like you don't know what you are talking about.

Case in point. I ended up in the Digital Life PC Show supplement talking about how I use an Asus Eee PC. The picture seems to be lifted from another magazine (probably CIO).

The strangest edit came in the section where I had said that because the Eee PC used an SSD memory drive as a hard disk, it was more rugged. This became the phrase "the Eee PC is in a solid state".

I sure hope so. It would be bloody difficult to use in a liquid or gaseous state.

The resulting article that ran is here as a .PDF

ISPs in Singapore blocking BitTorrent traffic

2008-05-10T12:40:00.004+08:00

There has been a considerable amount of controversy over the practice of some ISPs in the U.S. to limit or block traffic. The target is typically VOIP or BitTorrent, and the excuse is that it is overloading their networks.

This brings up the obvious question of why you would be in a business if you don't intend to supply the service you are supposedly selling.

A group calling itself the "max planck institute for software systems" has created a web site and Java applet that allows you to test your connection to see if traffic is being blocked. A fair number of people from Singapore have used the test, and the results are in:

We found widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the U.S. and Singapore. Interestingly, even within these countries, blocking was observed by hosts belonging to a handful of large ISPs.

I tried the test using my connection which is (barely) served by Starhub Maxonline. The results show that traffic was not blocked, but the throughput speeds are pathetic. The results are as follows:

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

The BitTorrent upload (seeding) worked. Our tool was successful in uploading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There's no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 39 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 26 Kbps.

The good news is that the BitTorrent protocol is not being actively blocked. The bad news is the terrible speed achieved. What is supposed to be an 8 Mbps service is delivering 39 Kbps.

Starhub continues to under-provision international bandwidth into Singapore. Local speeds can and do achieve the advertised numbers, but try and access anything outside Singapore and you might as well be on dial-up.

Singapore
Starhub
ISP
BitTorrent Blocking

OCBC Securities - All your incomes are belong to us

2008-05-09T23:52:00.006+08:00

Our series on great moments in abusive legal terms and conditions visits with the fine folks at OCBC Securities.

The 54 page document that governs doing business with OCBC can be found here.

I bring to your attention a couple of gems. The first is Clause 17.

17. Investment of Monies received

(a) You agree that OSPL shall be entitled to retain all of the interest earned from the maintenance of any monies standing to the credit of any Account; and

(b) You agree that OSPL shall be entitled to retain all of the returns from the investment of monies received on your Account. Such investment of monies shall be carried out in accordance with the SFA.

which suggests that leaving money with these folks is unlikely to result in any gain - except for OCBC.

Clause 24 deals with OCBC's obligations to protect your personal information. Somewhat predictably, one is forced to agree to OCBC's right to disclose your data to third parties under a number of different circumstances. There are nine (9) of these, and then we get to the final nail in the coffin of privacy.

24. Consent to disclosure

(a) You hereby expressly authorise and permit OSPL and each of its officers to divulge, reveal or disclose any or all of your particulars of your Account, including but not limited to your information relating to any transaction or dealings between you and OSPL;-

(x) any other person or entity at any time:-

(1) which OSPL or any officer in good faith considers appropriate for any purpose in connection with these terms and conditions; or

(2) where such particulars of your Account was inadvertently divulged, revealed or disclosed to/or accessed by such persons or entities through no willful default of OSPL or relevant officer

This is pretty good stuff. Ignoring the bad grammar (your Account was), as a customer you basically agree that even if OCBC completely screws up and loses your data, has it stolen, compromised or otherwise purloined, they are off the hook.

Lawyers 2, Customers 0

Singapore
Banks
OCBC Securities

UOB does it again

2008-05-08T23:12:00.005+08:00

Credit crisis not withstanding, the banks and brokers have been up to their old tricks with bizarre and egregious terms and conditions buried in the fine print of forms.

Our example today comes courtesy of UOB. They are proud of their two factor authentication (required by the regulator) for Internet banking, which they trumpet on their home page. However, it seems the pride is tempered somewhat by fear.

If a customer applies to have their password changed, something one should do routinely as a good security practice, the following piece of legalese forms part of the agreement:

"In consideration of the Bank issuing to me a replacement Password, I confirm that I remain responsible for all transactions made with my old or deactivated Password"

Yes folks, UOB has managed to legally defeat the whole purpose of changing your password. Even if someone uses a deactivated or old password, you are responsible. One quick question for the brain trust at UOB - How does a password continue to function if it has been deactivated?

As a customer, I wonder just what kind of a computer department UOB is running if they require legal protection from deactivated passwords.

UOB
Singapore
Banks

Singapore - You are a foreigner, shut up

2008-02-18T12:30:00.005+08:00

In Singapore, whether on a work permit or with Permanent Residence status, you are never allowed to forget that you are a foreigner. You may live here for more than ten years, contribute to the CPF, pay taxes, and create employment for Singaporeans, but you are not eligible for any Government programs such as top-ups or tax rebates, and you pay higher fees for medical treatment.

More importantly, you have no right to speak. As has been made abundantly clear with refusals to permit speakers from overseas and the latest fiasco with the Complaints Choir, foreigners are expected to be invisible and quiet. There is an excellent review here of the situation, written by a Singaporean.

Which is all well and good from one point of view. If one is a guest, it is rude to criticize one's host.

Using the term "guest" stretches things more than a bit though. Moving to Singapore, raising a family, starting businesses, employing people, these are not the behaviours of a guest. There is clearly a commitment and permanence which makes the label "guest" inappropriate.

The Singapore government survives and prospers in no small part because of its disciplined and relentless organizational ability and focus on listening to the "HDB heartlanders". Given that set up, it is not hard to see how foreigners present a problem. They are too heterogeneous to be managed.

The reality is that there are now more than a million foreigners living in Singapore. And they are completely disenfranchised. To have almost a third of the population of a country relegated to invisible status is simply to breed trouble. There are no examples in history of disenfranchising major portions of a population leading to positive outcomes.

I doubt we will see British investment bankers rioting in the streets demanding their rights to be heard - they tend to riot only after extended sessions at Boat Quay. Instead, Singapore gets what it has created - a foreign population that feels no connection to their adopted country of residence, and a large group of people with no voice to air grievances or suggest improvements.

I contrast this with Hong Kong, where the expat population is proud of their adopted home, and serve as unofficial ambassadors for the Territory, creating and sustaining a positive image for Hong Kong throughout the world.

It is a shame that those in power today have made the policy calculation that they need to suppress foreign residents in Singapore in order to manage Singapore. There are other, more positive approaches which do not risk the Singapore identity, while providing those contributing to the growth of the country with an appropriate level of representation.

Hacking Bluetooth - We hear you

2008-01-06T12:34:00.000+08:00

The history of the Internet has been the story of connecting things together - machines, data, and people. We have all benefited from the almost frictionless access to information that now prevails.

There is a dark side however, whether it is spam, identity theft, or in this case, intrusion. Hackszine has an article and video on how to hack a Bluetooth connection. It turns out to be relatively simple to do. The really scary part is that the hack goes on to show how to activate a Bluetooth device remotely, and then monitor the data stream.

In plain English, that means that somebody can hack into your fancy Bluetooth headset, and listen to what you are saying, even when you are not in a phone call.

And yes, there are other hacks to turn on your web cam remotely and monitor the video stream.

Have a nice day.

Bluetooth
eavesdropping

ASUS - The Most Hated Company In the PC Industry

2008-01-05T16:25:00.000+08:00

Mile Elgan, of "Mike's List" fame, has an interesting piece here, where he looks at the impact ASUS is having on the PC industry by releasing the Eee PC.

The size, operating system, features, quality of construction, use of SSD storage, and price, all directly challenge the incumbent suppliers who have controlled the rate of change and pricing.

"The source of ire is a tiny laptop called the ASUS Eee PC. This open, flexible, relatively powerful, and very small laptop is notable for one feature above all: It's price. The Eee PC can be had for as little as $299. (Go here to read the reviews -- they're all positive.)

Let's take a moment to ponder how cheap that is. This full-featured laptop costs $69 less than the 16 GB Apple iPod Touch. It's $100 less than an Amazon Kindle e-book reader. The most expensive configuration for the ASUS Eee PC on Amazon.com is $499."

"The reason Microsoft hates Asustek couldn't be more obvious. The Eee PC runs Linux (Xandros running KDE) and uses an appealing and innovative tabbed-based user interface developed by Asustek. The device also comes with OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office replacement, and Firefox. The entire system -- hardware, OS, office suite and applications -- costs $30 less than Amazon.com's discounted price for Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate alone. The Asus Eee PC is demonstrating to the world that its success depends on aggressively *avoiding* any Microsoft product."

Well said, and very true.

ASUS Eee PC
Xandros
Linux
Singapore

Netgear ReadyNAS NV - Power Supply Burns Out

2008-01-04T23:57:00.000+08:00

Having gone through a number of low end network attached storage (NAS) devices, I finally opted to pay for a premium product that also happened to run the streaming music server software I use. That combination was the Infrant ReadyNAS NV, a toaster-sized unit that houses 4 hard disks and connects to your network to provide a common storage pool. I initially reviewed the unit here.

Everything was going along well until I received a technical support email informing me that overheating problems in some power supplies required a mod to the unit. As luck would have it, my unit was within the range of affected devices. I checked the temperature the unit was operating at by looking at the status screen of the built-in web server, and everything looked OK.

As my equipment room at home is reasonably well ventilated and air conditioned, I figured that would be the end of the story. Unfortunately not. Coming home from dinner out one evening, I was greeted with the unmistakable and panic inducing smell of electrical burning. The sniff test revealed the ReadyNAS as the culprit.

I did a quick system shutdown, and then unplugged the unit. Checking the online support forum, it was clear this was a common problem, and the new owners of Infrant, Netgear, were replacing faulty power supplies. My challenge was that I had imported three of the units from the United States directly, and the Netgear support call centre, which turned out to be in Australia, didn't know or want to know anything about the problem.

After getting increasingly frustrated, the tech finally suggested that if I called the Netgear support number after 6pm local time, I would get the US call centre instead of Australia. That actually worked, and I was able to walk the phone jockey through the problem and get an RMA. Since I was going to be in the US anyway, I figured I would have the replacement power supply shipped to me there and then bring it home and do the swap myself.

All of which was great, except that Netgear never shipped the replacement, and charged my credit card for shipping.

On returning to Singapore, I was able to make contact with the local Netgear office, and the extremely helpful Andrew Tan. In the end, I was able to do a swap with him at their office in Raffles Place, and install the new power supply myself.

So a happy ending, but a few insights as well.

I had always thought of the NAS as extremely safe archival storage because of the 4 disks and RAID arrangement that allows data to be recovered even if there is a disk failure.

What I didn't consider was that a power supply failure would cause all the data to be inaccessible because the RAID controller and software format are essentially proprietary. I did find some forum posts about using Linux and some utilities to get at the data, but that is way too hard for most.

Netgear
ReadyNAS NV
NAS
Infrant
Singapore

StarHub - Smart TV HubStation Set Top Box Update

2008-01-04T11:47:00.001+08:00

I was one of the early adopters of Starhub's Smart TV HubStation DVR set-top box back in March, 2006. I did a review at the time. And it was dreadful. The unit was consigned to the dead box and forgotten.

Having moved to a new apartment, and re-installed the home theatre at our new place, the Starhub box ended up connected again.

After powering up and loading new firmware, I am happy to report the thing actually, mostly, works properly now. The firmware revision has moved from 1.10 to 1.23, so there have obviously been continuous attempts to fix the problems.

The freezing that happened every time one fast forwarded through recorded material is gone. The scheduled recordings now actually take place. The time to move between channels is still too slow, and of course there is no way to burn DVD's of the recorded material. The user interface has a couple of bugs, particularly the inability to select a channel from the schedule screen, which the normal digital set-top box allows.

All in all, a pedestrian offering, but one that is now functional.

Starhub
Smart TV
Singapore

Tweaking the Asus Eee Pc

2008-01-04T02:46:00.000+08:00

Further to my review of the Asus Eee PC, I have now had the chance to try a few more tweaks, both software and hardware.

Following instructions given on Eeeuser.com, I managed to reveal the Start button and create a filled menu structure for it. Going a step further, I also applied the mod that gives access to the underlying Xandros Linux interface, which is well described here. Feeling lucky, I used the Synaptic package manager to install a couple of additional repositories and then installed VLC, the excellent multi-codec media player.

On the hardware front, I decided to add additional memory to the unit. The model 4G which I have, ships with 512Mb. There is absolutely no reason to add more memory with the existing applications, but since it was possible....

The memory slot is under a cover on the rear, and just takes the removal of two screws to access. Remember to remove the battery and ground yourself before playing with the guts. There is only one memory slot, so you are throwing away the 512Mb SO-DIMM that comes with the unit, and replacing it with a 1 or 2Gb SO-DIMM DDR2 5300 667Mhz RAM card.

I chose the 1Gb size as it was relatively cheap, and the Linux image only recognizes 1Gb. A check on Hardwarezone showed the current pricing for memory of this type, which was followed by a quick trip to Fuwell at Funan, resulting in the exchange of S$32 for the SO-DIMM.

Installation took all of 30 secs, and the Eee PC was back in operation and proudly displaying its new memory total in the System Information panel. As expected, no visible benefits, but I haven't worked with multiple applications open yet.

Anyway, we do this because we can, not because we must.

ASUS Eee PC
Xandros
Linux
Singapore

Linksys CIT400 Skype Phone - Firmware Upgrade

2008-01-04T02:08:00.000+08:00

I've reviewed the Linksys CIT400 Skype Phone before, and it continues to see heavy use by the wife, proving its high SAF (Spousal Acceptance Factor). There have been a few nagging bumps along the way, and I finally got around to checking for a firmware update to see if anything had been fixed.

The Singapore Linksys web site is useless when it comes to firmware, and a conversation with a Linksys support tech confirmed that one basically has to use the US site for firmware updates. A quick check showed that there was indeed a new firmware release here, dated 2007 06 29 and taking the code to version 1.0.4.8.

Upgrading is done by downloading the firmware to a PC, then accessing the CIT400 base unit by typing its IP address into a browser. The base unit has a built in web server that gives access to various status and administration pages. By browsing to the downloaded firmware file and clicking the update button, the unit performs the firmware upgrade.

All that worked fine, and things seem a bit more stable with the new firmware.

One other discovery. Starhub announced that subscribers with the HubStation Smart TV Set-top box have "free" internet access through the built in Ethernet port on the back. I didn't really have a use for that until I thought of putting the CIT400 base station there instead of on my normal Maxonline service.

It turns out the 1Mb bandwidth is enough to support good quality Skype calls, and it gets the traffic off my regular network, along with any lingering security fears.

CIT400
Linksys
Skype
Starhub
Smart TV
Singapore

Searching E-mail

2007-12-29T09:38:00.000+08:00

As a certified packrat, I have accumulated vast quantities of e-mail over the years. Working on the assumption that bits are cheap, I have a relatively complete record of my electronic communications.

The problem with the bit bucket approach to data storage is retrieval. How do you find what you are looking for in that huge pile of information?

A number of search programs exist, all with various flaws. Google Desktop leaks information back to the mother ship. Lookout, a search plug-in for Outlook crashes things regularly. Microsoft bought the company, and now offers Windows Search.

The problem with all these programs and plug-ins is that they only do literal search. If you are looking for a phone number, but the word "phone" does not appear in an email, you will not get a result. The solution is to use semantic search, and a researcher at IBM has created just that - a semantic search solution for Outlook and Lotus Notes called IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search.

What I particularly like about this program is that it is free (for now), fast, and clean. When installed in Outlook, a small search button is added to the toolbar. The search results are presented in a simple web browser page that looks very similar to Google.

Downloading requires registration with IBM.

e-mail search

Toy Alert - ASUS Eee PC

2007-12-29T01:38:00.001+08:00

ASUS have managed to create something for which I have been waiting for a very long time - an inexpensive (S$598), usable, small form (225 × 165 × 21mm), notebook computer called the Eee PC. When you consider a Nokia N series or Windows Mobile smart phone is over S$1,200, the value proposition for the Eee PC is compelling.

Even more interesting is the market reaction. Sales are way ahead of projections, with the Taipei Times reporting more than 350 thousand units sold, and predictions of 5 million to be shipped in 2008. The user community is already huge, with web sites, forums, wikis, and articles proliferating all over the 'net. That puts the Eee PC in iPod territory.

I won't bother to go into all the specs or provide a detailed review as that ground has already been well covered by others. It comes with Wi-Fi, a solid-state disk for storage, 3 USB slots, Ethernet port, integrated web cam and microphone, an external VGA connector, a removable battery, and a decent keyboard and touchpad. The 7 inch LCD screen is fantastic, and the default fonts and type sizes are very comfortable for my old eyes, unlike the more expensive UMPC's like the Toshiba Libretto, Sony Vaio, and OQO.

This little device is really going to shake things up in the operating system world. The model I bought came with Xandros Linux wrapped in a particularly simple and easy to use menu system. All the applications you need (to surf the web, send and receive email, use Skype, create and read documents, play games) are already installed. Linux is suddenly on the desktop and actually being used in anger.

Although I have installed Linux systems over the years in order to have a look, I am a firm Windows XP user. Linux just seems too fiddly and time consuming compared to Windows. The default installation of Linux on the Eee PC is anything but fiddly. It just works, and that is what good software should do.

Using hints and instructions I found by googling support forums, I have already modified the OS to reveal the advanced desktop which ASUS decided to hide, and installed my favourite media player, VLC.

It is also possible to install Windows XP on the unit. A DVD disk is provided which contains the Xandros image and the drivers necessary to complete a Windows installation. ASUS is shipping models that have more memory, storage, and XP natively installed, but they have not appeared in Singapore yet. I was so taken with the device that I didn't want to wait for the higher spec units.

The ultimate recommendation I can give is that I was so impressed with the Eee PC, I left my usual ThinkPad behind and only took the Eee PC along on a recent 8 day holiday. I was able to access all my email accounts, check the weather forecast, and complete an Internet check-in for the return flight.

ASUS Eee PC
Xandros
Linux

We do love our SMS

2007-12-29T01:12:00.000+08:00

ZDNet Asia reporter Victoria Ho has a story about SMS growth based on findings from Gartner.

The numbers are truly staggering. Asia accounted for 1.5 trillion messages in 2007 out of a total of 1.9 trillion messages transmitted world-wide. The Gartner analysts are predicting growth of over 19% in 2008.

There are approximately 6.6 billion people in the world, and most of those don't have cell phones. Those that do, have very busy thumbs.

Add to the messaging total all the Blackberry users pushing email, all the IM conversations taking place on MSN, AOL, Yahoo and the like, and all the Skype and VOIP services, and one gets the strong impression that the human animal craves communication. The future of social networking seems secure, even as it evolves and mutates to take advantage of new channels.

SMS
cellular
mobile phone
social networking

Smoking is an IQ test you fail in public

2007-12-13T20:22:00.000+08:00

With all the evidence linking smoking to a range of health impacts, and with that evidence particularly pointing to the effects on women, I am astonished at the number of girls and women who continue to smoke.

I was heading out for lunch today, and had to pass through a group of otherwise attractive women, all puffing away on cigarettes. My first thought was how pathetic it is to have to reveal an addiction in front of strangers, and then I wondered at the thought process that led them to take up smoking in the first place.

Which led to the bumper sticker:

Smoking is an IQ test you fail in public

Come out of the cage - GSM in North America

2007-12-12T07:37:00.000+08:00

Like animals kept in a cage so long they are scared to come out when the door is left open, North American cellular users seem unable to grasp the concept of a standards-based cellular network.

There has been a lot of press calling for open networks recently, kicked off in an op-ed piece by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal demanding cellphone perestroika. American cellcos have adopted a business model in which they tightly control which handsets are sold, and heavily discount the equipment by locking subscribers into long term contracts.

Whenever choice is limited, the result is rather predictable. The range of handsets available in the most technologically advanced country in the world is tiny compared to places like China, Hong Kong and Singapore, where hundreds of handsets are available at retail shops and from the cellcos directly.

Verizon, one of the main cellcos in America, and famously the one that passed on the iPhone, has now announced that it will "open" its network to external devices. In a bizarre twist, AT&T, which operates using the GSM standard, has announced that it is open too. I say bizarre, because by definition, GSM is open. People all over the world move between carriers everyday, with any device certified as GSM compliant.

It's called roaming. And no, you don't have to have permission to activate.

In an article in Infoworld, an AT&T spokesman is quoted as warning "We can't guarantee the performance of the device, of course."

Which is nonsense. If a GSM-certified handset fails to perform on AT&T's GSM network, the problem is with a non-compliant AT&T.

Knowing that the situation in the US and Canada was not competitive, I equipped eldest daughter with the latest Nokia handset purchased in Singapore before sending her off to university in Canada.

Like AT&T, Rogers, the operator of the GSM network in Canada, has kept a stranglehold over handsets. Unlike other countries with GSM coverage, it is almost impossible and certainly uneconomic to purchase a prepay SIM card for use while in Canada. The staff at the shops don't seem to even understand the concept. You can however, sign up for a normal post-pay account.

And guess what. That foreign, unlocked, non-tested, unblessed handset works perfectly.

Who knew.

cellcos
GSM
AT&T
Rogers
unlocked cellphones

Who needs a computer anyway?

2007-12-04T11:31:00.000+08:00

There was a post on Good Morning Silicon Valley today referencing an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the fact that half of the top ten books in Japan in the last 6 months were written on cellphones. As usual when exploring cultural trends, the Japanese tend to be out there first. Not everything starts in Japan, but if you want to look for unexpected societal implications of technology, Japan bears a look.

As someone who started using computers during a compulsory statistics course while at university, the journey from punching holes in cards on a keypunch to writing novels on cellphones is quite extraordinary. What I have also noticed is that the time to progress from one dominant method to the next has compressed beyond recognition.

If you consider that writing and paper go back thousands of years, printing goes back hundreds of years, the typewriter was invented just over a hundred years ago (1868), and the Teletype was in mass use in the 1950's, there is a pace of change that is exponential.

Within my own family, my grandparents had a discipline of writing letters to the family on Sunday nights. Each of them had portable typewriters that had traveled with them all over the world. I also learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, but it was the IBM Selectric that greeted me by the time I started work. Within 5 years, AES word-processing machines started to show up, and it was only 10 years later that PC's had completely replaced stand-alone typewriters and word-processors.

My dominant method of writing and communicating has been the PC and email. Although I did use typewriters and carbon paper when I first joined the diplomatic service, I rapidly shifted to PC's and WordStar, when I started assembling my own computers in the mid '80's. This was the time of the first modems running at a glorious 300 baud, and the advent of the free Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with their forums and messaging.

For my children, only two years apart in age, I can see a difference already in their approach to written communications. The eldest grew up with instant messaging and gaming, and she barely uses email. For the youngest, email is already a thing of the past. She lives exclusively on her cellphone, using SMS for written communications.

Which challenges the whole idea of "the written record".

Our ideas of permanence and persistence are not keeping up with the change in technology. Carving marks on rocks gives you a pretty permanent record. Papyrus has lasted for milennia. Paper, if made acid free, last hundreds of years. But now we have thermal printing, laser printing, and ink jet printing, all with lives measured in tens of years. Our written record is becoming ephemeral, lasting only temporarily.

While electronic records seem permanent, the reality is that the storage media - disk, tape, optical disc - are fragile and easily corrupted. More importantly, even if the data survives, there is a dependence on the continued existence of computers, operating systems, and application programs in order to access the data. Although we are awash in information, our historical record is surprisingly delicate.

What has replaced persistence is presence. I don't care what you said in the past, I just want to know if you are online. Services such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and Skype have changed the rules of the communication game from content to contact.

There is an assumption that there is no record - what I say to you will disappear when we stop talking. Nothing is permanent. This accelerates with SMS, in which even the device being used to communicate, the cell phone, is viewed as a fashion item rather than a communication channel. Replaced on a whim, the record of messages is erased without a thought.

The same behaviour can be seen on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, where pictures of people doing things they would probably rather forget about are routinely posted. There seems to be a genuine sense of surprise when warnings are given that these photos may come back to haunt one later in life.

After all, isn't stuff supposed to go away when you disconnect?

social networks
SMS
persistence

In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage

Justin Norrie
December 3, 2007 - 10:29AM

It seems improbable, even at this early stage, that 21-year-old Rin (a nom de plume) might one day be granted a place alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky in the pantheon of literary giants.

The nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan's south, is celebrated for her skill with stichomythia and crude colloquialisms but not, like the great Dostoevsky, the extent to which her writing illuminates the darkest machinations of the mind.

For the time being at least, however, she is entrenched alongside the Russian master in Japan, where the two have become major best-sellers of fiction this year.

A new translation of Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karamazov, released in July, has surprised its publisher by notching up more than 300,000 sales already - but it is Rin's rather less challenging Moshimo Kimiga (If You ...), a 142-page hardback book about a high-school romance, that has caused the bigger fuss.

"I typed it all on my mobile phone," Rin explains matter-of-factly over the same device. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long. I never planned to be a novelist, if that's what you'd call me, so I'm still quite shocked at how successful it's turned out."

So successful that one volume of her book, which began its life in a series of instalments uploaded to an internet site and sent out to the phones of thousands of young subscribers, has sold more than 420,000 copies since it was converted into hardcopy format in January.

Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".

Conservative literary academics in Australia who have been huffing about the "radical" study in high-school English courses of SMS messages as "text" have cause to be anxious.

In just a few years, mobile phone novels - or keitai shousetsu - have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.

Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers - who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing.

Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released in book format last October. The story, about a high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant and has a miscarriage in a saga of near-Biblical proportions, will soon be made into a movie.

Mayumi Sato, a 37-year-old editor at Goma Books who turned Rin's episodic melodrama into a bestselling book, says it is also her favourite of the new generation. "I was actually crying at one point while I was working on that one," she says about the story of a high-school girl's fight against HIV.

"It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they've already read the story on their mobile. Often it's because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they've contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it."

Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), a site that has free tools to help readers create their own mobile phone novels, has accumulated nearly 1 million works since it was set up seven years ago.

Predictably, the surge in popularity of crude, cellular storytelling has raised eyebrows in academic circles.

Toru Ishikawa, a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Keio University, points out that Japanese mobile phones allow their owners only a limited selection of kanji, the Chinese characters regarded by Japanese as more intellectually demanding than their native syllabary. "The size of the screen also necessitates that [authors] use short, simple sentences with basic words. If that's how you measure the quality of literature, then yes, the prevalence of writing like this will water down Japanese literature.

"But it could also encourage writers to be inventive with language in new ways. Language must always evolve."

Rin says she often reads more challenging Japanese classics and acknowledges that her work is deliberately aimed at young people.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/12/03/1196530522543.html

Achieving Karmic Environmental Balance

2007-11-18T17:25:00.000+08:00

View Larger Map

In 1966, my grandfather, William Arthur Wall, decided that he wanted to grow trees. With the help of the Ontario government, he located 195 acres of abandoned farm land that was available from a tax sale, and had the land plowed into furrows for a tree farm or plantation.

Using seedlings grown at the Kemptville Nursery, he planted Red Pine and White Spruce. The initial planting was done by machine, but the quality was poor, and my grandfather decided that the planting should be done by hand in future. And so we did. With a bucket containing bundles of 2-3 year old seedlings, and a shovel, we walked the rows, ultimately planting 150,000 trees.

As a 10 year old kid, the work seemed impossibly hard. The buckets were heavy, the mosquitoes relentless, the weather cold. While I retreated to the car to recover, my grandfather would just keep working.

I learned a few important life lessons from the experience:

You need to work hard to get something you want,

It is never too late to start (what was an old man doing planting trees??)

Some things take longer than next week or next month to accomplish.

It is difficult to adequately describe the sense of accomplishment one gets when looking at a forest, knowing that before, there was only scrub. The transformation of the area has been incredible, with a big increase in wildlife as well - birds, groundhogs, porcupines, and signs of other larger animals.

Having spent most of my working life involved with information technology, the one constant has been change. I read, research, and learn, aware that the useful life of what I know will likely expire in less than 24 months.

It is some comfort to know that by acting as the steward of a forest, I have something in my life to counter-balance the pace and waste of IT. When I think of all the paper that is consumed by the process of automating information processing, I take karmic relief in the knowledge that the big ledger in the sky is balanced by the contribution of biomass, habitat, carbon sink, and whatever other environmental factors forests contribute.

I have to say though, the personal benefits are limited to the non-financial. The economics of growing trees are not pretty. One has all the capital costs up front, running costs in the form of property taxes, and event costs in the form of pest control and natural disasters such as ice storms and fires. The bottom line is that this is a labour of love. So far, it has been a money pit.

If you feel the need to redress your environmental karmic balance, send money, and I will plant a tree in your honour.

Tree Farm
Tree Plantation
Red Pine
Kemptville

V-Gear LanDisk Firmware - Version 024

2007-11-15T19:27:00.000+08:00

It seems that V-Gear has indeed disappeared.

I have received a number of requests to post a copy of the last firmware update I have, which is version 024.

Since Blogger doesn't allow posting of files directly, I have created a page on my web site. The firmware is available as a .zip file, since Homestead doesn't allow posting of .bin files (notice a theme developing here?)

To download the firmware, click here: V-Gear LanDisk firmware version 024

V-Gear LanDisk firmware
V-Gear
LanDisk firmware

Car-Sharing firms merge

2007-11-05T12:10:00.000+08:00

The technology magazine RedHerring is reporting that two car-sharing firms in the U.S. are merging. The result gives an operator with a footprint that covers a significant number of metropolitan areas in the U.S.

Zipcar Carpools with Flexcar

Venture-backed Zipcar, whose by-the-hour car-sharing service is used by college students and urban dwellers, is merging with Flexcar, a cross-continent rival service funded by Steve Case’s Revolution, the companies said Wednesday.

In a conference call, Scott Griffith, chairman and chief executive of the combined company, said the top post-merger shareholders will be venture capital funders Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, and Revolution. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jonathan Seelig, a managing director at Boston-based Globespan, said in a telephone interview that bigger is better in the car-share business. "This business is better at scale," he said. "I love that I can use cars in San Francisco, where I travel frequently and Seattle, where I also spend some time. It’s about more people, more cars, more places."

The only markets where the companies compete head-to-head are San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Zipcar operates in markets including New York City, Boston, Toronto, and London. Flexcar operates in Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Seattle, where its headquarters were located.

“There’s very little geographic overlap between the two companies,” said Mark Norman, former chief executive of Flexcar, who becomes president and chief operating officer of the combined company, which will take the Zipcar name and be based in Cambridge.

Mr. Griffith said the combined company will have about 180,000 users, about 120,000 of whom were Zipcar members. The deal is expected to close by week’s end.

"When we acquired Flexcar in 2005, our goal was to bring car sharing to more people in more places," Mr. Case said in a statement. "The Zipcar merger will accelerate this effort."

In July 2005, Zipcar raised $10 million in a funding round led by Benchmark, followed by a $25 million round in November 2006. Officials said the combined company has sufficient funding to take it through the merger and beyond.

In New York City, Zipcar’s rates start at $5.85 per hour and $58.65 per day for frequent users and $10 per hour or $69 per day for occasional users.

car-sharing

What Happened to V-Gear?

2007-10-24T22:26:00.001+08:00

I was doing a routine check for firmware updates the other night (trust me, this is what nerds do for entertainment), when I got a "Page Not Found" message from V-Gear. This is the company that makes the low-cost, low-end NAS enclosure that I have written about before.

Thinking that I had got the address wrong, I tried all the variations, including adding a Taiwan suffix(.tw) and even trying the website for the parent company, Asiamajor. All came up dead. Using Google's cache facility, I was able to confirm that the pages used to be there, and that the address was correct.

Not sure if they have gone out of business or just suffered some sort of catastrophic web site failure.

As far as I know, the last firmware update for the LanDisk was 024. It appears that they released an updated model of the equipment sometime last year called the LandDisk Pro, but the firmware is different.

LanDisk
V-Gear

Heads We Win, Tails You Lose - Singapore's CPF

2007-10-24T16:17:00.000+08:00

Singapore has, since 1955, had a particularly good solution to the problem of providing a social safety net. Rather than simply have the government as provider of last refuge, the Singapore government instituted a transparent and relatively straightforward compulsory system for the collection and administration of social security monies.

The Central Provident Fund, or CPF, to give it its normal TLA, assigns every working citizen and permanent resident an account into which a portion of wages are paid, with contributions from the employer and employee. With online access, one's CPF account looks very much like a bank account, meeting the tests of transparency and good order.

That's the good news.

The bad news comes, predictably, whenever governments have large pools of money sitting around. There is a primal itch to do something with the funds. And so the CPF has been tweaked, stretched, re-purposed, and generally abused into the service of a number of different goals deemed worthy by the administration of the day.

One only has to look at the Mission and Values statement on the CPF web site to see the distance that has arisen between the primary mission:

Mission

“To enable Singaporeans to save for a secure retirement.”

Vision

“A world-class social security organisation providing the best national savings scheme for Singaporeans to enjoy a secure retirement.”

and the current Corporate Philosophy:

"The basic purpose of the CPF is to help members meet primary needs like shelter, food, clothing and health services in their old age or when they are no longer able to work."

The mission has been extended from saving for retirement, to cover shelter, health services, and unemployment. Investing in shares of Singapore Telecom, and providing funds for education have also featured over the years.

Once it was decided in 1968 that home ownership was a national goal, the CPF was modified to allow use of savings for home mortgages. This has spawned a whole bureaucracy to handle the movement of funds between CPF and banks and the Housing Development Board.

Singaporeans don't have sufficient medical insurance? In 1984, the CPF was used to fund Medisave, and in the process, create two accounts where there used to be one, so now CPF has an Ordinary Account, and a Medisave account.

Worried that people are putting too much of their savings into housing (ah, the law of unintended consequences), create a third account - the Special Account - to remove funds available for housing.

By 1988, worries were expressed that people would run out of money for their retirement before they died, and so a Minimum Sum Scheme was introduced, forcing contributors to leave money with CPF even though they had retired and presumably earned the right to their money.

Worried that people are relying too heavily on government for their retirement and need to take more responsibility for their future? Create the CPF Investment Scheme (CPFIS) in 1997 to allow a certain portion of funds to be used to buy certain "qualified" investments. Oh, and give the three local banks a monopoly on handling the accounts created, allow them to charge whatever they want, and don't insist on any service standards.

The economy has also played a role in CPF changes. When the government became worried that contribution rates were making Singapore uncompetitive, the employer contribution rate was reduced, restored, and then reduced again.

And so CPF has grown and mutated, serving whatever hot issue of the day needs a solution. What should be a straight forward retirement savings system, has become a multi-headed hydra with tentacles into most areas of Singapore life. Which is all well and good. Governments can do whatever they want, and people deserve the governments they get.

The effect of constantly tweaking a system set up to do one thing in order to make it do other things is complexity and the destruction of predictability. With each new mission, the original CPF has become more complex, more rigid, and more unpredictable.

But now to the latest assault on the CPF. Having done the numbers, the government actuaries are staring at a shortfall in CPF funds for members even though the Minimum Sum has been raised every year. The driver in this case is an increase in life expectancy. Although the official retirement age remains at 60, people are living into their 80's, destroying the underlying actuarial assumptions for the CPF.

What to do? One obvious solution would be to raise the retirement age. There are few societies that can afford to have a large portion of their population unproductive and attempting to live off savings.

Instead of taking this somewhat unpopular step, the government is proposing to break the basic promise of the CPF.

To quote from a paper comparing the CPF with the US Social Security system,

"the most salient features of the [CPF] scheme have not changed since 1955: it is compulsory, its basic principle is thrift and self help; and the contributions made by each member are earmarked for the benefit of the individual, with no redistribution among members"

The basic principle of each individual being the beneficiary of his own contributions is about to be violated by the proposed introduction of compulsory annuities which will commingle contributors funds into an external risk pool. Instead of having access to the money you worked for and saved, you will be forced to turn it over to an insurance company that will pay you a monthly sum. If you die the day after, tough, you lose everything.

Unless you have the luck of Methuselah and live longer than the actuarial tables predict, this is a pretty lousy deal. With interest rates among some of the lowest in the world and below the inflation rate, a Singaporean annuity is a financial disaster.

More importantly, these sudden changes to the rules destroy any planning that a prudent person has made for his own retirement. Funds that are earmarked for retirement are long term and patient money. We are also lectured about the power of compounding interest and the futility of market timing. Save now, and you will be fine later.

Except when "they" keep changing the rules. How is one supposed to plan, or trust, the guardian of one's retirement funds when the rules change unpredictably?

Ironically, there is still one situation in which the CPF achieves its original promise of funds for retirement. You can get all of your money, without any hold backs. Just promise to leave Singapore and never come back .

History of the CPF
Analysis of the CPF

Central Provident Fund
CPF
annuity
CPF Annuity
Singapore

Deferred Gratification

2007-10-14T19:21:00.000+08:00

There is considerable research about the way in which humans tend to prefer immediate gratification over deferred reward. Just try offering a child a choice between one candy now, or two candies in 15 minutes. The choice is almost always immediate gratification.

Having had the opportunity to receive share options while negotiating employment contracts, I have always tried to take the more cerebral approach and defer immediate compensation (salary) for the larger potential payoff of stock appreciation. Sadly, my track record has been 1-3 so far, with the options expiring worthless for various reasons.

So it was with considerable wariness that I approached the decision the last time it was required. I still wanted the options, but decided to balance things more to the immediate gratification side.

Too bad, the options actually paid off this time.

Apart from the financial gain, which is always welcome, the more important result has been the feeling of ownership and the resulting subtle modification to behaviour. It is really hard to talk about "them" when you are an owner. If more companies understood the sense of inclusion and responsibility that ownership brings, there would be a lot more empowered and committed employees.

Going Mobile

2007-10-14T18:33:00.000+08:00

Apart from a brief period when I had an employer provided car, I have been without wheels in Singapore. This has been a matter of rational choice and some emotional regret.

The rational choice comes from the absurd price of motoring in Singapore. To purchase a car is not just a matter of putting one's cash on the table, but rather a complex journey through permits, taxes, monopoly dealerships, and financing options that make the U.S. sub-prime mess look like child's play.

To buy a car in Singapore is to commit funds which would secure shelter in any other country. If one can mentally dispose of that ugly thought, there is also the matter of bidding for a Certificate of Entitlement (COE), which fluctuates in price in a way that would warm the heart of any commodity trader.

Having secured permission to buy a vehicle, there is then the dealer, who basically tells you what you will get and at what price. Add insurance, road tax, radio tax, gas at almost S$2 a litre, parking at S$4 an hour, and you have an economic disaster on your hands.

In the end, it is much quicker and cheaper to just take taxis, or use the car sharing schemes around town. Except on the eve of public holidays. Or when it is raining. Or in the CBD at 6PM.

Which leads to the emotional regret. The car was always the symbol of freedom for any kid coming of age. Growing up, 16 was not the age of majority, it was the age you could get your driver's license, the real moment of adulthood for a Canadian teenager. Relying on other people to drive you around is a drag, even if they are limo drivers.

Having been forced out of our home by an en bloc sale, the long balance between rational thought and emotional regret fractured with our new location. Instead of a steady stream of taxis cruising by our front door, we are now in a taxi-free zone that makes spur of the moment travel impossible.

And so the car as saviour. It still doesn't make economic sense, but it sure helps soothe the trauma of missing mobility.

Which leads to the next decision. Put simply, "What car are you?"

In Asia, cars are an extension of "face" or status, hence the quite absurd market share of Mercedes, BMW, and other luxury brands. Thankfully, I am not wired that way, and could care less about brand. OK, I wouldn't voluntarily drive a Hyundai. There, I said it.

And beyond brand, what type of car should one buy? In an urban environment, what possible use is there for a Porsche Cayenne SUV? Given that most parking lots in Singapore are so narrow they seem designed for bicycles, not cars, the effort of parking an SUV is intimidating at best. A mini-van screams "soccer mom", so that doesn't work.

With SUV's and mini-vans off the list, a good mid-life crisis would argue for a Porsche, or Corvette. Luckily, the first is too expensive and the second is not available, narrowing the search to something sporty, small externally, large internally, and preferably somewhat cheaper than a house.

Enter the MINI Cooper S. 175BHP, 0-100 in 7.1 seconds, and generally a hoot to drive. Easy to park, and very comfortable to sit in.

I know, rationally it makes no sense at all. Emotionally however, my face aches from smiling so much.

Singapore
MINI Cooper S
COE

Aviation Milestones

2007-05-06T13:48:00.000+08:00

Having just landed in Singapore after taking the world's longest non-stop commercial flight (18.5 hours, Newark to Singapore on an Airbus A340-500), I was thinking about all the flying I have done.

I have been flying on commercial aircraft for a very long time, starting with Vickers Viscounts and Vanguards with Trans Canada Airlines back in the '60's. Also the DC-3, landing on a grass strip at Whitehorse, in the Yukon.

DC-9's were the main aircraft of Air Canada for inter-city routes, and of course, the Boeing 707 for intercontinental flights. I remember flying Pan Am from New York to Lagos, Nigeria, which seemed interminable, particularly as the in-flight entertainment was a 1 hour music loop that repeated 10 times.

By the time I got posted to Hong Kong in 1982, the Boeing 747 was the dominant aircraft for long distance flights, and it has been my favorite through all of its variants. I was on the first Cathay Pacific non-stop flight between Hong Kong and Vancouver, using the new 747-300 with Rolls-Royce engines. With the relatively short runway at Kai Tak, and the fuel load required for the distance, we started the take-off roll with the tail almost touching the fence at the beginning of the runway. Today, such a flight is routine, but it sure was exciting the first time.

British Airways ran a promotion in the late '80's in which you could get a flight on the Concorde if you flew into London on a first class BA flight. At the time, I had an office in Hong Kong, one in London, and a supplier in the States, so it was easy to arrange an around the world ticket to take advantage of the offer. After finishing up a deal in Columbus, Ohio with Compuserve, I caught the shuttle to NY, and boarded the Concorde flight to London.

I wish I could say the flight was wonderful, because the plane was wonderful - a Formula 1 race car to everybody else's minivans. The reality was less than stellar. The Concorde was so small inside, it was like flying coach on a discount narrow-body. Even the port holes were smaller than usual. The ride was OK when at cruising altitude, but the landing was pretty rough. The plane made the landing approach in a tail down/nose up attitude, which meant you were basically looking up the aisle as you landed. It was noisy and rough, and not something I ever wanted to do again. I am glad I had the experience, but the idea was better than the reality.

I was on the last flight out of Kai Tak, Hong Kong, a very bitter sweet moment. As we taxied out, I could see tens of thousands of people lined up along the airport fence and in the parking garage. It really was the end of an era, with the airport shutting down after we took off, and all personnel and equipment shifting to Chek Lap Kok over night.

The relatively recent addition of the Boeing 777 with its long range versions has made things even more comfortable, with more headroom and storage. The Singapore Airlines cabin treatment in Business and First for the 777-300ER is amazing, with a huge seat that lays flat, big LCD display, power point, and sliding table/desk. It is never a pleasure to fly, but this is the closest to "normal" that any airline has come. It has allowed me to keep my sanity while maintaining a monthly commute to Europe from Singapore.

SingPass goes down - what's up?

2007-04-13T23:44:00.000+08:00

Finally gathered in one place all the information I needed to file my income tax, and went to the IRAS web site only to be greeted by the following:

SingPass login is temporarily unavailable, please login using IRAS PIN.
We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

myTax Portal is jointly developed with Accenture, NCS, Avanade and Microsoft.

It is nice to see the people responsible so clearly identified when a major system fails. So IRAS, Accenture, NCS, Avanade and Microsoft, what is going on?

For those not familiar with Singapore's government computing environment, SingPass is a national ID and password system. It is used as a common authentication point for accessing all secure services provided by the Government.

Having SingPass go down is inconvenient at the best of times, but this is April 13, and there are only two days left to file income tax returns. The income tax system has become so dependent on SingPass and electronic filing, that individual taxpayers are no longer issued tax return forms or tax info from their employers. It is all online, and only online.

What is interesting about the error message is that it suggests using an IRAS PIN instead of the SingPass.

Great idea except that in it's letter to taxpayers this year, IRAS states "IRAS will not be sending any paper return or IRAS PIN to you this year"

So IRAS, what is plan B?

Singapore

Singapore - En bloc Behaviour

2007-04-05T19:07:00.000+08:00

The building I live in has been sold en bloc, and the countdown clock is ticking. As a tenant, I do not benefit from the supposed riches that have been created, rather I lose my home and have to find somewhere else to live.

Other commentators have painted a pretty bleak picture of what happens once the official sales date takes place. In our case, things have started declining even before the official date. What was a well maintained building is now plastered with posters and leaflets ranging from real estate advertisements and financial planning seminars to transcendental yogis offering to help newly rich owners avoid the temptations of sudden wealth (presumably by giving the wealth to them).

When I queried the guards as to why they were suddenly permitting outsiders to post ads on the walls and in the lifts, I was told that the "management" had given instructions.

Right.

This is not going to be pretty.

Freezing Hell

2007-04-04T15:47:00.000+08:00

I had to wait until after April 1 to post this, or nobody would believe I was serious.

Hell froze over last month.

I am now the slightly bemused owner of an Apple Macbook.

As someone who owned the first Osborne computer, and who happily built PC's running CP/M and DOS, Apple has always been the computer equivalent of Scientology - a cult with lots of publicity and scary, rabid fans.

So why the trip to the dark side?

With the switch to Intel, and the availability of virtualization software, the distance between a "normal" computer and an Apple has dropped to insignificance. It is now possible to run a mixed environment on a single machine, which eliminates the main pain point of losing well understood applications. If you have something that only runs under Windows, it is possible to maintain a Windows virtual machine and still run on the Apple.

Which is all good and rational, but I didn't really need a new notebook, and it is an Apple.

My only excuse is that as an IT professional, I need to stay current with technology, and the damn things keep showing up at work, and people keep asking questions. So it was professional curiosity. Yeah. That's it. Professional curiosity.

So what is the upside of owning an Apple?

Well you get to belong to the cult. Your equipment is all white. The "out-of-box" experience is definitely better than a Wintel machine. It has the best Wi-Fi connect process I have ever seen. It connected to my existing Windows-based network without a problem and I was able to access files on my NAS. The screen really is impressive. The thing actually seems to work OK.

The downside?

It is heavy. It is white. You belong to a cult. The Macbook throws off enough heat to fry eggs. You have to click an eject button to remove a USB drive or the file system gets trashed. To buy accessories, you have to go to Apple stores, and your friends might see you. It doesn't actually do anything I can't already do on my "normal" computers. It is an Apple.

Just When You Thought You Had Arrived...

2007-03-24T15:32:00.000+08:00

The definiition of "rich" can be very personal. It is often based on something that seemed out of reach growing up, or on comparisons with others. Most people have some sort of number they hold internally that indicates to themselves whether they are well off or not.

Since governement plays such a large role in our lives, it seems appropriate that the American SEC has just changed their definition of "accreditied investor", which is a euphimisim for someone who can afford to lose large sums of money, and who presumably is smart enough to make his own investment decisions.

The Wall Street Journal reported it thusly:

"Now, the government has weighed in. As part of its effort to better regulate hedge funds, the SEC has proposed a new definition for “accredited investor” — someone rich enough to invest in private investment pools without needing protection from government regulators. To invest in hedge funds today, investors need to have $1 million in net worth (including the value of their primary residence), or income of at least $200,000 for individuals or $300,000 for households. The SEC has proposed raising the bar, requiring investors to have $2.5 million in investible assets.

So many people are now worth $1 million (especially if you include the value of homes) that being a millionaire may no longer buy a ticket to that rarified world called “rich.”"

Singapore - En bloc madness and Economics 101

2007-03-24T01:50:00.000+08:00

I had an economics professor in university who put a single question on a mid-term exam. What is the most effective way of destroying a city - carpet bombing or rent controls?

Singapore has managed to come up with a third alternative - the abrogation of private property rights through the forced sale of one's home. The governing law for all this is referred to as en bloc sales.

I have already written about the disruption and waste caused when developers, real estate agents and speculators are allowed to force the sale and destruction of buildings.

I can now also confirm that the economic theory which predicts that investment will cease when returns are no longer certain holds as well. Whether it is rent controls which cause landlords to stop investing in their buildings, or en bloc sales, the result is the same. Perfectly good buildings are being allowed to deteriorate because owners are afraid to invest in case they are forced to sell before they can recoup their money.

The evidence is clear to anyone who is trying to rent an apartment. If there is any chance the building can be forced en bloc, landlords are simply refusing to do any upgrading or repairs. I have been offered apartments in otherwise desirable buildings at very low rents, as long as I am willing to take the apartment as is.

Most of these apartments are coming off lease, and the landlord would normally do a full renovation.

Not any more.

When is the Singapore government going to admit that they made a mistake and that en bloc sales have gone out of control? The number of apartments destroyed in the Orchard area has now exceeded 4,000, and new en bloc sales are announced weekly.

This will eventually stop on its own of course - when all the buildings have been torn down.

en bloc
Singapore
property rights
eminent domain

Infrant ReadyNAS NV Network Attached Storage

2007-03-24T00:35:00.000+08:00

After trying to use a few different low end NAS devices on my home network, I had mostly given up on the category as interesting but immature, and not reliable enough for archival backups.

Most, if not all, the different boxes run a variant of the same Linux-based application to provide Windows file services. The problem is that cobbling together open-source code to produce something that is seamless and mature takes work and care. That just wasn't the case, with unexplained crashes, occasional hangs, and at one point, corruption of the data.

None of that is acceptable when the device is supposed to be the backup of last resort.

A NAS is basically a bunch of disks attached to one's network instead of directly to a computer. This means that it can be seen and used by all computers on the network. The penalty comes with performance, where the speed of the network limits the rate at which data can be written and read from the NAS.

With the growing number of digital images, music files, and videos being stored on computers, along with the usual data generated by word processing, spreadsheet, email, and finance programs, there is a pressing need for keeping a backup that sits outside the primary machine.

A NAS fits the bill perfectly, unlike tape or optical storage, as it is quick to access, and comes in capacities that are at least as large as the primary. Using various flavours of RAID to protect the data, the NAS can also tolerate the failure of a single disk without losing any data.

Which leads me to Infrant. I had never heard of the company until Slim Devices, the company that sells the Squeezebox music streaming device offered a bundle deal with an Infrant NAS and 3 Sqeezeboxes.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV is a toaster-sized device that contains four 3.5 inch hard disks. As shipped with the Slim Devices bundle, the Infrant was equipped with 1TB of disk, (4*250Gb), yielding approximately 660Gb of usable space.

Doing some research on the 'net, I found that Infrant routinely wins Editor's Choice awards.

The setup of the ReadyNAS NV demonstrated why. All that is required is to plug in the power, and plug in an Ethernet cable. A supplied software utility is run on any PC attached to the same network which "discovers" the IP address of the unit, and launches a setup wizard. There are a huge number of things that can be set and tweaked, but even a novice user should have no trouble completing the setup.

If an email address is provided, the ReadyNAS NV even sends an email every time there is a change in status or if there is a problem.

After the initial setup, all the settings are accessible at any time by using a web browser to access the Infrant's built in web server. The screens are clear and easy to understand.

The whole thing is slick, smooth, and a pleasure to work with.

My unit has now been running for more than 6 months without any problems. It has essentially become invisible, just doing what it was designed for, and providing me with secure, reliable storage.

Highly recommended.

Linksys CIT400 Skype Phone

2007-03-24T00:15:00.000+08:00

I just got around to posting a review of the dual-mode (Skype and land-line) CIT300, and now Linksys in Singapore has released a further twist on the idea with the CIT400.

All the Skype phones released up to now have required a PC to be on, and a base station to be connected through a USB port. A piece of software is required to tie the base station to Skype. This mostly works, but it does mean that you have to leave your PC running all the time.

Now, with the CIT400, Linksys has released a new Skype cordless phone and base station that connects to a land-line and and Ethernet connection. As long as you have an active Internet connection, the CIT400 is active and you can use the Skype phone.

I was skeptical at first, because connecting a base station without a PC means that all network settings have to be done through the handset. Entering logins, IP addresses, and other necessary data for an Ethernet device can be very tedious with just a numerical keypad.

To their credit, Linksys has done an excellent job with the user interface. The screen on the phone is high res and beautiful to look at. The colours are rich, and the text looks like it is written on paper. The menu choices are logical and clear.

It took only a moment to connect the base station and register the phone. Using DHCP, the base station obtained an IP address automatically and the phone prompted for location and then a Skype user name and password.

And that was it. I was online with a fully functional Skype phone.

If you want to do more sophisticated network setups or to upgrade the firmware, the base station of the CIT400 provides a web interface that gives access to all the settings. It just requires pointing a web browser at the IP address of the base station.

We have now seen Linksys evolve the phone from the first model, the CIT200,which was Skype only, to the CIT300 which supported land-line as well, and now to the CIT400 which eliminates the need for a PC completely.

It is hard to argue with good product evolution, I just wish they had started with the CIT400, and I would have saved some money and time.

CIO Asia Conference and Awards 2007

2007-03-23T16:10:00.000+08:00

Got roped in as a judge for this year's CIO awards. There were quite a few good submissions, and it was a pleasure to meet some of the winners.

For my sins, I was also asked to be the afternoon keynote speaker. That was fine, and I took the responsibility seriously, as I have often complained about conferences where all the speakers are marketing managers for vendors.

Unfortunately, the topic was Innovation, the latest thing that CIO's are supposed to do, in-between being aligned with the business, being strategic, being tactical, being customer focused, and all the myriad other things that vendors and consultants have dreamed up.

To his credit, Teng Fang Yih, the editor of CIO Asia Magazine, was supportive of the idea of presenting a critical opinion, and so the following speech is the result.
====================================================

I thought it wise to start with a definition of innovation, since that is what we are going to be talking about for the next while.

And what better place to get a definition than from Wikipedia, the innovative online encyclopedia that combines Wikis and user-generated content.

The classic definitions of innovation include:

1. the process of making improvements by introducing something new

2. the act of introducing something new: something newly introduced (The American Heritage Dictionary).

3. the introduction of something new. (Merriam-Webster Online)

4. a new idea, method or device. (Merriam-Webster Online)

5. the successful exploitation of new ideas (Department of Trade and Industry, UK).

6. change that creates a new dimension of performance Peter Drucker (Hesselbein, 2002)

7. A creative idea that is realized [(Frans Johansson)] (Harvard Business School Press, 2004)

The article goes on to look at the role of innovation and how to determine if something is really innovative:

In economics, business and government policy, something new must be substantially different, not an insignificant change. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. Innovations are intended to make someone better off, and the succession of many innovations grows the whole economy.

The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental changes to products, processes or services. In the organisational context, innovation may be linked to performance and growth through improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitive positioning, market share, etc. All organisations can innovate, including for example hospitals, universities, and local governments.

Innovation is a process, and the "innovator" is often an organisation of people providing a diverse range of complementary skills and knowledge. Consequently, it is rare for just one individual to be an innovator. Innovation always comes with a potential risk and it is the responsibility of the innovators to assess and manage that risk. Innovation aims to introduce new benefits, which exceed those available from current "best practice". Innovation also introduces some degree of new, and possibly unforeseen, impact on the innovative organisation and others.

OK, so I guess we can all agree that Innovation is a good thing. It only requires a new idea, and everybody can do it.

Actually it is more than a good thing, It is fundamental to humans as a species that we seek out the new. Our heroes are those who conquer new territories and who make discoveries, whether geographic, scientific, or in business.

But we are CIO's. What does innovation have to do with us? Are we in the innovation business, or do we have a different role to play in our organizations?

For those of us who have responsibility for Information Technology investments and operations, our employers look to us to ensure that things keep running. In most cases, success can be measured by our ability to remain invisible. Like suppliers of water or electricity, we only make the headlines when something goes wrong. There is not much upside, and lots of downside, to running a complex back office or IT infrastructure.

We all know the statistics, and they all sort of blend together after a while. 55-70% of CRM projects fail. 70% of ERP projects fail, 70% of Supply Chain Management projects fail, and software projects always costs twice as much and take twice as long as predicted. Less than 10% of projects in large American corporations are delivered with the functionality specified at the beginning.

And yet we still come to work everyday, ready to be convinced that this time it will be different, this time we will have learnt from our mistakes. It may not be innovation, but it is definitely optimism.

But the topic is innovation, not reality. Before I depress everybody, let’s look at how innovation works in a real IT shop. Our budgets, and therefore our financial resources for innovation are usually set by others. If you are organized as a cost-centre reporting to a CFO, then innovation is unlikely to be in your vocabulary unless it is about cutting costs. If you are a cost-centre in the slightly luckier position of reporting to the CEO, then budgets can usually accommodate some R&D funds, but for the most part, it is still about cost.

When a CIO sits as a member of the management team, the scope for innovation becomes more realistic. Now you are talking about business, not costs of technology. You are there because you can contribute solutions and ideas by using technology to meet business requirements.

But our definition for innovation includes something as simple as introducing a new process. And here is where I need to take a contrary position. Real innovation is not just change.

Actually, change is the enemy of the very thing we are trying to be, which is invisible. Change brings risk. Unmanaged change brings chaos. Change makes employees uncomfortable to the point of quitting, and change messes up documentation and process. The happiest IT manager is usually the one in whose shop nothing has changed for the past year, and whose SLA’s are all being met as a consequence.

Let me take this a little bit further.

Unless we build and operate our own test and development labs, our primary sources of information abut our own profession, are trade publications, conferences such as this, and vendors.

And guess what, the vendors are paying for the trade publications and conferences. Which means that we really rely on a single source for information, our vendors.

Luckily, they are very generous, and supply us with white papers, templates with business cases that show to persuade our boss to approve the purchase, advice, and an endless stream of nice people to talk to. Actually, the nice people go away unless you buy stuff, but they don’t hold grudges and come back very quickly when you place an order.

We are actually faced with close to a mono-culture in our suppliers of tools. There is one dominant supplier of operating systems, a couple of database suppliers, a handful of ERP vendors. And every week seems to bring another news story about another take-over. The market for business intelligence tools just shrank with another acquisition, this time of Hyperion.

In my own workplace, I have seen the choices dwindle dramatically. Every time we locate a small independent vendor, they seem to get swallowed up by one of the big serial acquirers. In fact, innovation in these large vendors seems to have completely stopped, and they rely entirely on acquisitions for new products, new ideas, and new talent.

One could conclude that size is the enemy of innovation, and that only small, nimble teams are in a position to innovate. Another way of saying this is that only someone with very little to lose can afford to take chances.

In our real world of daily IT operations and challenges, we are lucky to be able to evaluate and deploy, let alone research and develop. Most of us simply don’t have the people, time, or money to launch speculative projects that may or may not work.

And yet, we are told that we should be innovative. Since the source of this advice is the trade journals, conferences, and vendors, permit me a bit of skepticism. Is it possible that in IT, innovation has become another euphemism for upgrades?

We were told during the dot com boom that if we didn’t have a web-enabled business we were going to be road-kill on the information super-highway. And yet, the ones doing the fear mongering have imploded, and here we still are, some of us with shiny new systems, and some of us with what has always worked.

Our vendors look at us as a market to be sold to. We are segmented, CRMed, analyzed and influenced. If we don't naturally buy their product, then they need to stimulate demand. And that demand is classically based on FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

This is a great term that describes a major innovation by IBM.

FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.

The other major approach is to create or identify a problem, and then offer to solve it. Until a consumer goods company created the fear of halitosis, otherwise known as bad breath, most people didn't know they needed to buy mouthwash.

Of course IT is more sophisticated, so our problems need to have fancier words and more expensive solutions. If one looks at the evolution of computing from mainframes to minis, to PC’s, to client/server, to web, and now to Service-Oriented Architecture, one gets a clear view of something that has cleverly been called Marchitecture.

This is a term given to any form of architecture perceived to have been produced purely for marketing reasons. It may be used by a vendor to place itself in such a way as to promote all their strongest abilities whilst simultaneously masking their weaknesses.

I sometimes get the mental image of a corral, with all the CIO's inside like cattle, and the vendors outside figuring out how to rope and brand us.

This is not meant to be an attack on IT vendors, but I do get tired of having to pretend that we have a choice when it comes to the tools we have available for running our shops.

So the question becomes, is it really innovation when you buy a product and install it in your shop? Or is that implementation?

In fact, can you be innovative in the back office, or is it execution? The company that sold you the new tool may be innovative, but is your use of the tool meeting the benchmark of innovation?

Innovation is a high hurdle to set oneself for day to day operations, when what the customer wants is predictability and stability. There is a basic contradiction here. We are being told by our vendors to be innovative, while our employers want reliability and low cost.

Change is the enemy of good execution, and so innovation is not something that we can sustain on a daily basis. We risk intellectual bulimia from trying to keep up with vendor driven change.

True innovation is something that is likely to happen once in a career. Unless you are working in a vendor environment or product development organization, the chances to be part of a real innovation are slim. You will however, have a daily opportunity to execute better than your competitor.

It is difficult to be managed by people who only know how to count costs instead of benefits. It is discouraging to be in an industry with such a concentration of suppliers that one has to follow the vendor’s roadmap instead of your own. It is disheartening to watch the guy in the front office making millions in bonus from trading on the systems that you build and run, usually without recognition.

But perhaps I am being too harsh. We are all bright people, and we choose to work with, and for organizations.

I would argue that the real challenge lies not in innovation, but in execution. When everyone has the same tools, it is execution that separates the good from the merely average.

It is the day to day work that is necessary to make a complex and fragile set of systems function. It is the imagination and discipline that allows one manager to be successful while another fails. We rarely create new products and services, but we do gain competitive advantage from how well we operate.

To avoid bruising our vendors again, let’s look at another industry that has few suppliers, and many customers. I suggest we consider the airline industry.

If you want to run a long-haul airline, you basically have two suppliers to choose from, either Boeing or Airbus. Interestingly, they also supply trade publications, conferences, and white papers. And if you place an order, they have really nice people who talk to you, and they even give you rides in their product.

Each of these companies is driven by the need to innovate. They periodically take huge gambles, investing amounts that will destroy the company if they are not successful.

Their customers are all in the same business. They transport people from one place to another, using exactly the same equipment as their competitor. The innovation for the supplier is clear; they need to continually improve their product to beat the competition.

But where is the innovation for the customer organization? Why are some long haul carriers profitable and solid, while most of the industry lurches in and out of bankruptcy?

And why are we will to pay more to fly on one airline than another? I can travel from Singapore to Amsterdam in business class on either KLM or Singapore Airlines. The price difference between the two is almost 75%. They both fly the same physical aircraft, a Boeing 747, and the flights leave within minutes of each other. How is SQ able to command a premium over its competitor?

Execution.

It was innovative to create the Singapore Girl marketing campaign, but it is the daily need to deliver the promise that requires execution from SQ. In more ways than I can count, a large team of people, equipment, and systems have to function at a level that earns the premium being charged. Like most organizations, they have good days and bad days, but they do understand the promise they have made, and they execute to keep that promise. Some of that is IT, but it is the entire Company working together that produces the outcome.

Our role, the role of the CIO, is to understand the business, and apply information technology to solve problems and create competitive advantage. Innovation is one source of advantage, but I would argue that an even more important source is execution.

So how should you allocate your time as an innovative CIO that knows how to execute?

The founder of Visa, Dee Hock, is one of the great innovators of the past 50 years. He conceived and drove the creation of what we all take for granted today – a universally accepted credit card.

Hock describes the 4 things that one needs to manage to be successful. The first is yourself, then your boss, your peers, and then hopefully with less than 5% of your time left, your subordinates.

Hock is making the point that we are subjected to many conflicting demands, and that we often fall back on giving orders to others rather than managing the relationships that actually determine our success.

We let the pressures and deadlines of our jobs prevent us from the continual learning we need in order to stay current and useful. It is tempting to put off reading another white paper, or attending a seminar, because of work.

When I look back on the knowledge I have about technology, I realize that it has a very short shelf life. I have been working with computers since punch cards were the main form of data entry. I know how to sort a data set by setting up a card sorter. I know how to change a ribbon on a Decwriter terminal. I know how to write programs in dBase, and to write documents in WordStar. I have used so many different operating systems that I have lost track, from Xerox Sigma 9 to Honeywell CP6, to CP/M to DOS, to Windows, to Unix and Linux and, in a moment of pure madness, Apple OSX.

The same thing would have happened to a programmer trying to stay current - COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, APL, PASCAL, Basic, C, dBase, C++, SQL, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and so on.

The point is that unlike someone who works in a more traditional discipline, we work in an industry that rewards newness, not experience. The only certainty we have is that our technical knowledge is being made obsolete at this very minute by someone, somewhere, working on the next great thing.

This is not a complaint.

It is a celebration of why most of us chose this field of endeavor. We are change junkies. We love the newest software, the next breakthrough, the cool gadget. And by putting ourselves on this treadmill of change, we have to keep running just to stand still.

In the scramble and compromise of day to day pressures, we risk becoming people with a shallow familiarity with many things, but no in-depth knowledge of anything.

Except that one thing has never changed in all the years that I have been working.

Business is about providing customers with what they want. It doesn’t matter if you are in the private or public sector. We get paid because somebody wants to buy what we are providing.

All the technology in the world does not change the reality that in business, you are setting out your stall and hoping somebody will buy. We can pretend we actually control the process and use tools like ERP and CRM and BI to generate reams of data that prove we understand the customer, but at the end of the day, individuals make buying decisions. Our job is to make them buy from us, and to deliver the promise that we have made.

As innovative CIO’s, we need to embrace the constant change with which we are surrounded, while managing ourselves, and our key relationships to ensure that we stay connected to our organization.

Ultimately, we are judged on how well we execute.

Linksys CIT300 Skype Phone

2007-02-27T23:06:00.000+08:00

I wrote before about the Linksys cordless phone that connects to Skype. This purchase was a hit with my wife, who was freed from the technidiocy of computers and headsets.

Linksys, through its parent company Cisco, has famously been embroiled with a lawsuit against Apple over the laters use of the product name iPhone. I have to admit, I never thought of the Linksys as an "iPhone", but rather by its model number like all other Linksys products.

In any case, Linksys are continuing to roll out new variations of the cordless phones. My latest acquisition is the CIT300. This phone looks very similar to the original model, but with a new twist. The base station also supports a connection to a normal PSTN line, so that one phone now supports normal dialing as well as Skype connections.

Another benefit seems to be a more stable software driver. The CIT200 would randomly just go away, even though the status icon appeared normal. The cordless phone would be unable to connect, and I would have to reset the software.

With the CIT300, those problems are gone. I have been running it for months now without any problems at all.

Highly recommended.

Singapore - En bloc backlash

2007-02-14T10:22:00.000+08:00

A rather amazing thing has started to happen. After writing to the Straits Times about the insanity that is the Singapore en bloc property market, I was annoyed that they had censored my letter, so I posted it on the blog.

I received a comment from a fellow calling himself Dr. Minority who has a blog dedicated to the topic of en bloc issues at Enblocking Singapore.

Getting a comment was unusual enough, but today I received a phone call from someone who wanted to say that they agreed with the letter in the ST Forum. She had gone to the trouble of finding my home phone number by noting that I had mentioned Ardmore Park in the letter.

I realize a sample of two is not significant statistically, but folks, nobody in Singapore ever speaks up about government policy.

At a time when the Integrated Resort projects are leading to an influx of new people, and when the Singapore government has indicated a desire to raise the population level of the country, they have unleashed a process in which the housing stock is being destroyed.

The Singapore government needs to wake up and understand that the en bloc rules have led to the forced eviction of the very people who vote for them. When you are forced to sell your home at a price that cannot even buy an equivalent replacement, something has gone badly wrong.

Singapore - En bloc sales show tyranny of minority over the majority

2007-02-07T10:40:00.000+08:00

The Straits Times ran an excerpt from a speech by Ngiam Tong Dow, a former senior civil servant, on February 5. The article was entitled "Maximising the lie of the land", and it was a pretty smug affair.

Ngiam makes the claim that Singapore's rules governing en bloc sales of private property are innovative and that the "happy outcome is that both the individual and public interest are served"

Most governments reserve the right to "eminent domain", or the inherent power of the state to expropriate private property, or rights in private property, without the owner's consent. This is done supposedly in the interests of the larger society, permitting the clearing of slums, or the large-scale development of new towns for example.

Abrogating private property rights is a very slippery slope. As cases around the world have demonstrated, once governments get a taste for the power of eminent domain, it becomes increasingly addictive. Want to increase tax revenues? Force private home owners off their land so that a shopping mall or casino can be built. Want to attract a new factory to your area? Again, force the existing land owners to vacate. Mr. Ngiam doesn't even think it is necessary to pay a commercial price for the expropriation.

Singapore's en bloc rules have led to people being forced from their homes and neighbourhoods, and to rampant speculation in the property market. Rather than maintain their buildings, owners are incentivized to suspend maintenance in order to maximize profit, at the expense of those who truly want a home instead of just an investment. Why use the sinking fund to repair the building when you can just wait until things deteriorate and you can persuade your neighbour to give up and sell out?

Mr. Ngiam says he is "glad to see that the invisible hand of pricing has often worked its wonders." In fact, it is the distorting hand of government that has permitted the abrogation of property rights and the distortion of pricing. If the market was truly efficient, the price of flats would fully reflect the value of the building and the land they stand on.

With construction costs running at approximately S$200 per square feet, how does one explain the sudden jump in value of a property from $1000/sq foot to $2400/sq foot simply by destroying the existing building? It is because the prospect of an en bloc sale encourages short term thinking and treats buildings as tradable assets instead of homes.

If one takes the example of Ardmore Park, it is hard to understand any reason for the destruction of pretty much every building on the street and the surrounding neighbourhood. These were sound, desirable residences. What exists now looks like a war zone. In most other economies, these buildings would increase in value, given their location and quality. If an owner wanted to profit from the increase in valuation, he would sell to a new buyer, not vote for the destruction of the property.

When a building does go en bloc, it is not a triumph of the majority over the individual as Mr. Ngiam asserts, but rather the triumph of the developer, the estate agent, and a few speculators. The environmental cost of destroying perfectly sound buildings because of this price distortion is inexcusable.

The real cost is borne by those forced to live through the destruction of the existing building and eventual construction of a replacement. With Singapore's lack of meaningful noise and hours of work rules, the impact on those living nearby is 7 days a week, around the clock. As any medical practitioner will tell you, noise is one of the largest causes of stress and heart problems.

The reality on the ground is quite different than the idyllic picture painted by Mr. Ngiam. Rather than an efficient market in which willing buyer and willing seller set prices, the en bloc rules have had the unintended consequence of distorting the market, disincentivizing building maintenance and upkeep, raising housing costs, and destroying the quality of life for tens of thousands of residents of Singapore.

=============
Updated 070219
Managed to find a copy of the original speech by Ngiam Tong Dow.

In my 40 years of service, I conclude that what works is what counts. The embedded rhetorical question is — works for whom and counts for whom?

Looking back, one of the most satisfying pieces of work that I did for Dr Goh Keng Swee, my first Minister for Finance, was helping to draft the Cabinet paper setting out the economic and social rationale for the introduction of the Land Acquisition Act.

A news item titled, "In China, land seizures fuel unrest in rural areas", in The Wall Street Journal (Asia) of Nov 10-12, 2006, reported that hundreds of enraged farmers in Guangdong province's Sanzhou village surrounded a granary during its inauguration ceremony, and for almost 24 hours refused to allow the departure of dozens of officials and investors inside the encircled building. The farmers complained that the money paid by the investors for the seized land was significantly higher than the compensation paid to them, and alleged that corrupt local officials pocketed at least part of the difference.

I would now dissect this Chinese episode from the viewpoint of a Singapore administrator. At the outset, I would state that, in principle, the larger interest of the community must take precedence over the rights of the individual. If property rights are absolute, then HDB towns could not have been built to house 85 per cent of our population. The modern city we now call home would have remained a town of slums and swamps.

The core principle of the Land Acquisition Act is that private land can only be acquired for a clear public purpose. In Singapore, private land is compulsorily acquired for infrastructure, such as roads and expressways, low-cost HDB housing, the Jurong industrial estate, schools, hospitals, and public parks.

The process is open and transparent. No Singapore Cabinet would have approved the acquisition of the granary in the report cited above as a granary built by private investors is clearly for commercial gain and not for a public purpose. A Land Acquisition Act is a very powerful tool, and in the wrong hands, it can be easily abused. Acquisition can easily degenerate into expropriation, where corrupt officials in the name of the State turf out peasants and resell the land for a huge premium.

When the Singapore Government acquires private land for public purposes, it pays — from public revenue — compensation to the landlord. Land is priced at its market value in its original undeveloped state. The Chief Valuer does not take into account the potential commercial value of the land. It is the State that builds the infrastructure. The community pays for public infrastructure out of tax revenue. Hence, any increase in value of the land from public investment should rightly accrue to the State. The individual landlord is entitled to the value of the raw land, not the incremental value created by public investments.

The large landlords in Singapore appreciate that it is in their larger long-term interest for the Government to invest in public housing and infrastructure. As Singapore grows economically, all land in Singapore appreciates in value, sustaining the value of homes and offices, including their own.

A more difficult problem in land administration is the resettlement of tenants and squatters who do not own the land. The Singapore Government pays what is called ex-gratia compensation. Unlike the landlord, the squatter is not entitled to any legal compensation. The State, out of the goodness of its heart, compensates on the basis of fixed assets, such as his hut and pig-pens. He is offered priority in the allocation flats by the Housing Board, sometimes offered taxi licences or market stalls, so that he can find alternative means of livelihood.

By being fair to resettled families, public infrastructure has been built for the good of the larger community without public discontent.

Purist economists are for an individual's absolute freedom to choose and against any form of state intervention in the economy's functioning. As a former practising administrator, I would think that the second part of the equation is just as important. The state can and should intervene in the working of the marketplace when it is manifest that public interest will be better served.

The Land Acquisition Act enables the Government to acquire huge tracts of private land for the construction of low-cost housing. Individual rights were violated, but not trampled upon. Compensation was paid, but not at its full commercial potential.

Were any mistakes made? Yes, but they paled into insignificance compared to the larger national achievement of building a modern metropolis.

When the MRT system was being built, the Government adopted a policy of acquiring all private land and properties within a certain radius so that small lots can be consolidated and tendered publicly for comprehensive redevelopment. The intention was benign, but did such acquisition pass the test of manifestly being in the public interest? Could the free markets be used instead to achieve comprehensive redevelopment without state intervention?

Private capital and expertise could have been used to develop such strategic sites to reap better economic value for the community, instead of the Singapore Land Authority playing the unfamiliar role of developer. The happening Boat Quay redeveloped by the private sector contrasts sharply with the sterile atmosphere of renovated Chinatown shophouses. Of course, private enterprise is no guarantee of commercial success. The old Lau Pa Sat redevelopment is an example of private sector failure.

Take en bloc redevelopment sales of private property. There may be one or two individual owners who, for good reasons, are not willing to sell their properties. Should a minority of one be allowed to stop all the neighbours from unlocking the value of their aging condominiums in a buoyant market?

Should the economy miss out on the economic value-add of public infrastructural investment such as the MRT?

When en bloc redevelopment succeeds, the public revenue benefits from development charges paid for higher development intensity. The happy outcome is that both individual and public interest are served.

In the economic domain, there is no need for conflict of interest between the majority and the minority. Fair and transparent pricing serves the interest of both parties.

What is in the best public interest will ultimately have to prevail, provided the State does not allow the majority to oppress the minority. In a multi-racial country such as Singapore, the burden of leadership must fall on the majority.

This was adapted from former Permanent Secretary Mr Ngiam Tong Dow's speech at the Singapore Academy of Law's Professional Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

en bloc
Singapore
property rights
eminent domain

Singapore - Wi-Fi Prosecutions Misguided

2007-01-18T19:49:00.000+08:00

I have been watching with growing concern the prosecution of individuals in Singapore for Wi-Fi theft. The whole premise for such a prosecution is misguided, and shows a lack of understanding of the underlying technology and the regulatory framework under which it was launched.

Wi-Fi is a standard for data transmission over unlicensed radio spectrum. The rules governing this usage were set in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As the protocol and equipment gained popularity, demand forced other governments to allow the same usage.

The key here is that the radio spectrum being used is unlicensed. Like CB radios in the 70' and 80's, anyone is allowed to transmit and receive on this spectrum. There are no offers of privacy or private property, this is public spectrum.

Once Wi-Fi became widely available, people quickly realised that their data was at risk if they transmitted without some sort of encryption. Equipment manufacturers, not governments, responded by offering first WEP (Wireless Equivalency Privacy), then stronger forms of encryption when WEP was shown to be hackable.

Wi-Fi transmitters are designed to broadcast their availability, and for Wi-Fi receivers to search for all available networks. Any modern laptop will automatically list all available networks that can be "seen". In my own flat, I can see at least 12 networks, at least half of which are not encrypted.

There has been an analogy proposed that tries to equate Wi-Fi mooching with physical entry to someone's house. "Just because I leave my door unlocked, does not mean you are free to enter". This analogy is completely wrong.

Wi-Fi is designed to send a welcome message to anyone operating with Wi-Fi compliant hardware. The proper analogy is "You are welcome to come into my house unless the door is locked" In this case, silence, or inaction, on the part of the network owner is consent.

The real culprit in this sad state of affairs is the person who attaches a Wi-Fi transmitter to his home wired network, and knowingly fails to turn on basic encryption. Such individuals are breaking the terms of their ISP agreements which prevent further distribution or access by individuals other than the subscriber.

Stop ruining the lives of children by giving them inappropriate criminal records, and start going after the real problem, those who are too lazy to use equipment properly.

UOB Singapore Dumps on Internet Customers

2006-12-10T21:02:00.000+08:00

I was making a routine login in to my Internet banking account this evening when I was presented with a new screen demanding that I accept new terms and conditions. The choice was clear - accept or logoff. Since I needed to pay some bills, I clicked on the "accept" box, but not willingly or happily.

This habit of coercing customers into accepting new terms is one of the uglier behaviours to emerge from the move to the online world. Instead of being presented with legible contracts, we are now ambushed with demands for agreement or service is withdrawn. Software companies are fond of this sort of thing as well.

Being the trusting sort of person I am, I tried to copy the terms for later perusal. Cleverly, UOB has prevented copying the text. However, there is a link in micro-font at the bottom of the screen that leads to the terms in the form of a PDF file.

It is a 26 page document! However, the document is locked, not permitting the copying of text.

And predictably, it contains a number of completely one-sided denials of responsibility, and impossible demands.

UOB may send your Username and Password to the customer by any means available. However, UOB has no liability if it is not received or intercepted. Good start.

The customer is responsible for, and MAY NOT DISPUTE, any transaction carried out on Internet Banking.

The Customer may not record ANYWHERE his Username and Password. Hope you have a good memory...

UOB may refuse to carry out any or all instructions for any reason whatsoever.

And my favourite so far (we are only on page 8 of 26)

The Customer must compensate UOB for any direct, indirect or consequential loss and/or damage, without limitiation including loss of profit or interest (whether forseeable by you or not) suffered by UOB.

When is the Monetary Authority of Singapore going to stand up to the local banks and end this manifestly one-sided abuse of customers?

DBS Bank Singapore - We Can Take What We Want

2006-08-07T18:58:00.000+08:00

I've been working flat out, and just realized that it has been over a month since my last post. Tonight is the start of my summer leave, so I was kicking back, thinking about travel to come, and dealing with the incoming snail mail.

A good mood is always at risk when dealing with correspondence from banks, and sure enough, DBS managed to provoke both my ire and a blog post.

Try this for a new low in contractual onesidedness:

Payments Charges Fees Costs and Taxes

You will pay such charges and fees for the provision of Electronic Services as we may prescribe from time to time, whether or not you in fact make use of such Electronic Services. We are authorized to debit your Account(s) for all charges, fees, withdrawals and payments for the provision and/or use (authorised or unauthorised) of Electronic Services and any other liabilities to, and loss suffered by, us as a result of the provision and/or use of Electronic Services.

So let's parse this gem. "You will pay". Yeah, got that. The customer always pays. But wait, here is a new concept - "whether or not you in fact make use of such Electronic Services".

Wow.

What a business model. The customer pays even when he doesn't use the service. And there's more - even if the usage is unauthorized or if the Bank suffers a loss, the customer pays.

All I can say to customers of DBS bank is run. Run now.

Banks
Singapore

Other People's Children

2006-06-15T00:34:00.000+08:00

Unlike OPM, (Other People's Money), which is a good thing, OPC, (Other People's Children) can be a pain, particularly when dining at a restaurant.

I can't count all the times when we have had a meal disrupted by unsupervised kids let loose by their parents. Inevitably, the parents continue their meal in serene ignorance of the ensuing chaos. Or at least they pretend not to notice.

I dedicate this picture, taken at a North Vancouver restaurant, to all those who understand why it is funny.

Starhub - It Just Gets Worse

2006-06-10T18:51:00.000+08:00

My least favourite service provider has managed to hit a new low.

It is 18:50 on a Saturday night, and I just tried to call Starhub's customer dis-service number at 1633 to try and resolve a billing problem (another long and painful story). I was greeted with a recorded message saying that they were too busy to take calls, and then the line was disconnected.

Wow.

This is a company that carefully hides all contact information from the public, refuses to publish the names of their corporate managers, has a website that forces customers to use their call centre, and now refuses calls completely.

Having done away with 800 numbers so that the customer foots the bill for attempting to contact the company, we have now reached the stage that contact is simply refused.

Congratulations Starhub, you have retained your title as the company I most hate to interact with. Actually to be more precise, the company I most hate trying to interact with...

StarHub

Bug in Airline Reservation System Resolved by KLM

2006-05-31T18:11:00.000+08:00

I wrote before about finding an annoying bug in airline reservation systems that prevented booking multi-city itineraries. I reported the bug to Singapore Airlines and KLM through their web site feedback links.

The result was interesting. SQ wrote back saying "We regret the problem, will look into it", while the KLM bot answered "We are very busy and unlikely to reply in less than 4 weeks". 4 weeks!! Guess their SLA was written by retired union negotiator...

The results have been even more interesting.

SQ has done nothing to fix the problem.

After I got frustrated and just phoned KLM Singapore directly, they, in the person of Nura Akbar, engaged me in a series of emails to understand and fix the problem.

Well done Nura, and well done KLM.

The actual problem turns out to be in a configuration setting. The default value for Minimum Connection Time (MCT) is 12 hours. It seems none of the airlines bothered to set this properly, so it was impossible to book a flight that departed less than 12 hours after the arrival of the previous flight.

Now if KLM would just allow seat assignments during online bookings...

Airlines

Major Bug in Airline Booking Sites

2006-05-24T15:08:00.000+08:00

I have been travelling a great deal recently, and have had to use the online booking sites of various airlines to pick up tickets. I kept running into a strange problem with errors when trying to book multi-sector tickets, the sort of trip where you go from one city to another, then another, rather than just point to point.

On both KLM and Sinagpore Airlines, there is a button on the booking form labeled "Multi-city". This takes you to a dialogue that lets you add flights one by one. All pretty straight forward until you try adding the third flight. The error that comes up indicates that the flight you have chosen is not available because of the departure time.

The actual bug is quite simple. A programmer has added a check to ensure that the departure time is after the arrival time of the preceding flight. EXCEPT there is an error in the calculation of the time. Where flights start on one day, and arrive the next morning (most flights from Asia to Europe), the booking system is incorrectly calculating AM flights as PM flights (12 hours are being added to the time).

Although simple to recognize, this bug has been there for months. I have sent email to the airlines involved, but without any fix to the problem. Clearly, the booking engine is shared by a number of airlines, and so they are all suffering from the same bug.

It is amazing to me that an industry that lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis can manage to have a major bug in a revenue generating system. It is simply not possible to book a multi-sector ticket online because of the problem.

Airlines

Car Sharing Done Right

2006-05-13T17:32:00.000+08:00

I have been hesitant to talk about the Honda Diracc car sharing service for the simple reason that it is so good. Like a favourite beach or restaurant, letting everybody else know reduces your own chances of getting in.

About a year ago, I was wandering along Orchard Road when I came across one of those ubiquitous booths selling something. Normally I give these a wide berth, but in this case, it was an exhibition on green technologies, and Honda had a booth displaying their Civic Hybrid. The car caught my attention, and while looking at the specifications, I realized it was part of a fleet of cars offered on a sharing basis.

The sales guy was friendly and knowledgeable, and the next thing I knew, I had signed up for a year long membership. A couple of weeks later, I received a letter inviting me to attend a familiarization session. This took place in the car park of Raffles City and took about 5 minutes to run through the activation system and use of the in-car terminal. With that, a smart card was handed over and I was ready to go.

Honda Diracc works by positioning a fleet of Honda Civic cars at 13 different car parks scattered around the central business district. These locations are called ports. I am lucky to have one port near my apartment, and another near where I work, so it is pretty convenient. A member is able to pick up a car at any port, and drop it at any other port they choose.

I should say that owning a car in Singapore is not something one undertakes lightly. There is a complex and shifting set of rules that result in high costs of ownership and usage. With the amount of travel I do, and a non-driving spouse, there is not much rational excuse to own a vehicle. Taxis are relatively cheap and plentiful, and no amount of limo rides can equal the cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

Unfortunately, while taxis in Singapore are cheap, they are operated by rather perverse individuals who do not see themselves as being in the service industry. Rather, passengers are treated as a necessary irritation to be tolerated in order to earn money.

This results in taxis being almost impossible to obtain when required. The downtown area is barren of available taxis at quitting time. The only vehicles to be seen are cruising around with "On Call" or "Shift Change" signs. To get a taxi, one has to call a booking number, wait on hold for an operator, then wait on hold again while she dispatches the job and waits for a driver to respond. The fee for booking, CDB surcharge, and peak hour surcharge turn my trip home into a lengthy and expensive affair.

Enter Honda Diracc. By clicking on the web site, I can instantly check to see if a car is available at the port beside my office. 90% of the time (holiday eve an exception) a car is available. I stroll over to the car park, wave my smart card at the window, and the doors unlock. Once inside, I enter my PIN on the LCD screen mounted on the dashboard, select the port where I will drop the car, hit enter, and the ignition key pops out of the ignition lock.

And that's it. No paper work, no need to re-fuel before dropping off, no hassle. I have to say this is one of the best engineered, best functioning systems I have had the pleasure to use. After a year of event-free usage, I remain a happy customer. I even managed to recover a cash card that I had inadvertently left in the ERP (Electronic Road Pricing) terminal by calling the office which arranged to fetch it for me.

Economically, a car from my office to home is actually cheaper than a taxi, even without all the booking charges. The Diracc charges are calculated on time and distance (the chart of charges is here), with gas, insurance, and parking at ports all included.

The other car sharing schemes in Singapore all require either advance booking and/or paper work and re-fuelling. They also tend to be positioned to serve those in the HDB heartland rather than those living in the downtown areas. BusinessWeek recently carried an article about a similar service in North America, called ZipCar, which has locations in 8 cities including Toronto in Canada.

Singapore
Car sharing

Singapore Election - Post Mortem

2006-05-11T18:55:00.000+08:00

I was surprised to see a letter to the editor in the May 11, 2006 Straits Times which does an excellent job of summarizing the behaviour of the PAP that led to 33% of voters choosing the opposition.

Entitled "why 'people's hero' lost the hearts of 33% of voters", Jacob Tan Teck Lee zeroes in on the more questionable tactics of the PAP.

Here is the letter in its entirety:

Why 'people's hero' lost the hearts of 33% of voters

SINGAPORE'S history of nation-building is nothing short of spectacular. The PAP should be the people's hero, yet it lost the hearts of 33 per cent of voters, even in the Prime Minister's own GRC. Why?

The PM inadvertently revealed the dark side of the PAP when he said his focus would be to 'fix' the opposition and figure out how to 'buy' his support if the opposition won 10 or more seats, though he did subsequently say that his choice of the word 'fix' might have been too strong, and offered his apology if it had offended anyone.

However, it affirmed for many their uneasiness over the political tactics of the PAP over the years:

The morphing of the original GRCs from three  MPs intended to guarantee minority representation to super-GRCs of up to six MPs (perceived as  creating a barrier to entry for the opposition with their cartographical contortions and as a means of  bringing in new, untested PAP candidates under the air cover of ministerial  heavyweights).  

 The lawsuit (intended to safeguard the integrity of debate) seemed to have  become extended into an ever-ready weapon of political dare-and-do. The PAP-Workers' Party  dare-you-to exchange was especially grating to voters hungry for higher political discourse.

 The conversion of HDB upgrading (one of our secrets for social stability) into the  spectacle of which PAP MP can offer more money to their voters ($80 million here, $300 million  there but to the almost-total exclusion of the candidate's own positions on national issues).    It  is not that the voters take the good work of the PAP for granted. Travel the world and you will  know how much the PAP has done and is still doing for Singapore. The PAP deserves better. But  only if it tears itself away from its dark electoral insecurities and rises to its historical role of  nation-building.
 The PAP, as a political party, is not obliged to hand over its seats to the  opposition. However, the PAP, as the Government, is a steward of our political process and it owes  itself and Singapore, as the founding party and only governing party, to shepherd the political  development to greater and more open political participation and not to political atrophy. 
  Some suggestions for the PAP Government: 

 Eliminate super-GRCs and return to the  original three-MP GRCs, not all of which need to be minority-represented if the 'minimal quota' is  already reached. Smaller GRCs reduce the charge that GRCs are a means of letting in 'backdoor'  MPs.

Maintain greater stability in electoral boundaries. While population shifts may  necessitate changes, the PAP should stop the practice of moving wards around as jigsaw pieces to  reconfigure weak GRCs/ SMCs and carve out new SMCs. With greater electoral stability, the  opposition has a better chance to nurture their chosen constituencies with their more limited  resources.  

 Stop focusing on individual-constituency HDB upgrading as the primary  election platform of MPs. Today it seems we conduct town-council elections and get a national  parliament as a by-product.   It is the national policies of the PAP that have raised  resource-scarce Singapore to First World standards. Let them be the PAP electoral showcase  instead. 

Lawsuits should be served when slander or libel is committed. They should not be part of the political lexicon of campaigning thrust-and-parry.

The PAP has done so much for Singapore. It should be more confident of itself that it will continue to win the support of voters on its track record even when it loosens its grip on the political process. Indeed it will be more heartily supported.

Jacob Tan Teck Lee

Singapore
Elections

Apple's Device Model vs. Component Freedom

2006-05-11T09:45:00.000+08:00

Walt Mossberg, the personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal has an article up today suggesting that Apple's "device model" is superior to the "component" model championed by Microsoft.

Ignoring the giggles that ensue from suggesting that Microsoft is a big supporter of standards-based open computing, Mossberg is essentially arguing that life is easier when one company makes end-to-end systems.

"Apple's Device Model" is the same as saying appliance. One could argue that there is no need to hack the OS on a microwave oven in order to have choice in the market, but in fact the choice is limited to microwave ovens that basically do the same thing. There hasn't been much change since the original appliances were created 30 years ago, discounting annoying voice chips.

The danger with mono-culture in nature or technology is that innovation stops and one becomes vulnerable to change, whether a real world virus or shifts in the business landscape. Microsoft has effectively killed off innovation in a number of software markets with the Windows mono-culture.

Personal Information Mangers used to be a thriving category with companies supplying multiple ways to support the organizational needs of people with many different ways of thinking. Now we just have the rather ponderous and opaque Outlook. Ditto personal databases, spreadsheets, and presentation programs.

Apple is using the components created by the PC revolution (video cards, power supplies, hard disks, interfaces, displays, memory). If they had been successful with their closed strategy from the beginning, we would all be staring at very expensive 10 inch monochrome monitors.

I vote for the component model every time.

Singapore Election - No Opposition Needed

2006-05-10T01:55:00.000+08:00

Politics in Singapore can be breathtaking. But it is usually the short, sharp, intake of disbelief.

On Thursday, May 4, 2006, The Straits Times reported the Prime Minister as saying that "Singapore had succeeded because it had a dominant People's Action Party government which could think long term and run the country without being distracted by the opposition."

Interesting statement that, because it is offered without any proof. One could just as easily state that Singapore has succeeded in spite of the dominant People's Action Party. Without there having been any other party in power, it is all just speculation.

He went on to say "the real job of the opposition was not to improve the government, but to trip it up."

Another short, sharp, intake of breath required here.

This is a complete perversion of the principle of parliamentary democracy, in which the opposition is the loyal opposition..

Lee is recasting electoral politics as a "winner take all, loser gets nothing" event. It is that kind of thinking that has destroyed African democracies, where the tribe that gets power does everything in its power to benefit its supporters and to hold on at any cost lest they become the minority.

I have a great deal of respect for what Singapore has accomplished, but there are definite signs of an insular mentality within the PAP - one that leads them to believe that they hold a monopoly on the ability to govern.

When you start to believe that no other opinion than your own is worth listening to, it is time for a hard look in the mirror.

Singapore
Elections

Singapore Elections - We Really Know Who You Are

2006-05-02T10:11:00.000+08:00

A report on Channelnewsasia.com describes residents unease when they received election pamphlets by mail that displayed their NRIC (National Registration Identity Code) on the mailing label.

The article quotes the Elections Department:

"In response to Channel NewsAsia, the Elections Department says the NRIC numbers are given out to political parties as an assurance that the electors are genuine persons.

The Registers of Electors may be purchased by political parties and aspiring candidates to facilitate their communication with registered electors."

Which is nonsense of course. The Elections Department has to know that a voter is genuine, but having done so, there is no reason to further distribute sensitive information such as the NRIC to third parties. This lack of awareness of basic security is breath-taking, particularly given the very public and ongoing problem of identity theft.

Anyone who believes that national ID cards are a benign move permitting good government needs to realize that once a number is established, the genie is out of the bottle.

It is routine for security guards at buildings in Singapore to demand physical possession of your NRIC card before permitting entry to a building. Which makes it somewhat difficult to prove one's identity while inside the building, and leaves a nagging sense of peril that the guard is using your NRIC card for some other nefarious purpose, but hey, that's security.

Identity Theft
Singapore
Elections

Singapore Elections - We Know Who You Are

2006-05-01T14:38:00.000+08:00

The Today newspaper carried an article on April 22, 2006 entitled "Be ready for checks at rallies" which describes new rules apparently permitting the police to conduct physical checks on people attending political rallies.

I attempted to find the rules, or the press statement that Today is quoting from, on the Singapore Police web site, under Media Releases, but it does not appear to be there. Further digging turned up something called the Police Elections Liaison Office, with a web site here. The actual document is in .pdf format here.

One wonders how the average citizen is supposed to know about all these rules, or who is making them.

The rationale for allowing police to completely control political rallies and those who attend them was given by Mr. Seng Han Thong of the People's Action Party.

"Election rallies are opportunities for terrorists who want to "sabotage". "These places are more vulnerable and the measures are to ensure that no one can take advantage of such a situation."

Singapore
Elections

Counting Skype Users

2006-04-30T13:49:00.000+08:00

Jeremy Wagstaff has a blog entry entitled "Skype's 100 Million: Where The Hell Are They?" in which he questions Skype's claim of 100 million users. As users of Skype will note, the number of online users at any given moment is somewhere around 6 million.

Not sure what all the angst is about Skype subscriber numbers. Any telecom service is going to have more registered users than online users at any given moment. If not, the networks would collapse, since they are all engineered with a level of over subscription implicit in the design.

Skype is different from a conventional switched network because it is using peer to peer technology, so theoretically, it should be able to scale better.

I am just happy it exists. Having access to cheap, easy to use voice and video communications with chat and presence has completely changed the way I do business and interact with family.

Skype

StarHub - Smart TV Firmware 1.10 update

2006-04-30T11:35:00.000+08:00

I was in the middle of trying to send my StarHub DVR back because of the poor performance, when they finally released a new firmware update, 1.10.

Because of family protests about the poor quality, I had already removed the new DVR from our main setup and reverted to the digital cable STB. The DVR now sits with the second TV, and is only occasionally used.

I cannot say at this point whether the new firmware makes any difference. When I went back to using my Pioneer DVR-520H, it was just so clean and simple that any desire to continue fooling around with the StarHub box just evaporated.

Apart from the fact that the Smart TV supposedly allows programmed recording from the on-screen directory, nothing else about it matches up to the quality of the Pioneer. I say supposedly because the previous firmware routinely failed to record selected programs.

I will eventually get around to testing the unit, but for now, it has achieved the status of an enthusiasm that didn't pan out.

StarHub

Singapore Election - No Comments Please

2006-04-30T11:20:00.000+08:00

There is an old saying that people get the government they deserve.

It has been a frustrating week watching the PAP machine grind toward the official calling of the Singapore General Election. Frustrating because of the peril one faces if observations or opinions are objected to. I can't truthfully say that the risk is worth it, and so have decided to write privately, rather than post any comments to my blog.

Suffice to say that events here stretch the definition of democracy to an extent that would be unrecognizable to a citizen of ancient Athens, the birth place of rule by the people.

Singapore
Elections

Singapore Elections - Let the lawsuits begin

2006-04-22T10:25:00.000+08:00

The Straits Times is reporting this morning that the Lees, father and son, have issued letters of demand against the Singapore Democratic Party's entire 12 man executive, and the printer of their newsletter.

This is a legal move to accuse the SDP of libel. The leaders of Singapore have used libel law frequently, resulting in the bankruptcy of opposition candidates. Once declared bankrupt, a person cannot run for Parliament.

The specifics of the libel suit relate to statements made in the SDP newsletter which claim the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) leaders have known about, and tolerated, corruption in the NKF charity and other government agencies.

There is a certain repetitious quality to the whole "election, libel suit, huge judgment for the plaintiff, bankruptcy of the candidate" cycle. One wonders why opposition candidates bother to run and/or why they are so careless about opening themselves to libel charges.

Granted, anywhere else commonly thought of as a democracy, most of the statements would be protected free speech.

Elections
Singapore

Stealth E-commerce

2006-04-18T15:59:00.000+08:00

I have recently had an unpleasant awakening to just how far the concepts of "fair use" and "intellectual property" can be pushed in the wrong direction.

I am an avid reader and collector of books. As the number of volumes has grown, it made sense to use computers and software to organize my collection. I have written before here, and here, about two great ways to accomplish the task.

What bothers me greatly however is that the organizations responsible for the software and service have both chosen to surreptitiously insert their own Amazon affiliate tag into listings and displays.

Let me explain the implications of this. Amazon has a program in which you can sign up to be an affiliate. They provide tools that let you embed links to books on Amazon within your web site, or as the case may be, listings of books on LibraryThing. If a person clicks through the link and buys the book, you are paid a small percentage as an affiliate.

That is all pretty straight forward. The whole web is driven by advertising, and whether it is Google ads or Amazon affiliate tags, it is a logical and above board way of driving sales and paying for the traffic. You would have to have a pretty popular site to generate earnings of a significant amount in any case, so it is not just the money that bothers me.

Where this all breaks down is when software companies and service providers start inserting their affiliate code into my listings and without prior notice. What is even worse is when those organizations refuse to modify their behaviour having been caught.

My current hall of shame includes:

Book Collector, which inserts their affiliate code in HTML extract reports,
LibraryThing, which inserts their affiliate code in displays of user book collections on the web

The morality is pretty hard to defend. Both Book Collector and LibraryThing rely on open API's to get the information and images they need for their services for free from Amazon and libraries.

This is all reminiscent of the ugly happenings at CDDB, in which tens of thousands of people uploaded CD listings to what they thought was a public domain database, only to have it become a commercial enterprise.

e-commerce

Redemption

2006-04-15T16:59:00.000+08:00

In the spirit of Easter, a few thoughts about rebirth.

The Wife watches Oprah, something I only admit to because apparently she has millions of fellow viewers. Inevitably, I end up sitting through the occasional show as circumstances dictate.

The formula seems pretty well developed. Somebody who has totally screwed up their life comes on, then everybody tut tuts about how well they have screwed up their life. This is followed by an uplifting denouement in which all is forgiven, acne is cleared up, and everybody emerges as happy and productive members of society. All accompanied by much demented cheering from white chicks in the audience who are secretly hoping for some freebie to be handed out.

But enough about Oprah. What really intrigues me is the easy way in which the traditional confessional and penance of mainstream religion has been transformed into the stuff of TV shows and pop literature.

Every society needs rules in order to ensure that things keep running and that the weak have a fighting chance against the strong. Morality, unless you really believe in the stone tablets, is the embodiment of the evolution of those rules.

The problem with systems that hold out damnation for sinners is that they fall apart unless the sinner is offered redemption. After all, if I commit a sin and then am eternally damned, I might as well forget about the rules for the rest of my life and just enjoy myself. Confession and penance are a neat way to keep the flock in line by offering the chance to wipe the slate clean. Now, this used to be something that happened privately, and supposedly confidentially, between you and your religious representative/priest/minister/shaman whatever.

Today in America things have become a lot more open and streamlined. Now you can completely screw up, get caught, do time (or not, depending on how much money you have), then go around telling everybody how much you screwed up and bask in their forgiveness and the 15 minutes of fame that go along with it. All pretty painless.

Since lots of money is spent screwing up, and more on the cure, and then even more on the publicity created by the recovery, one has to believe that this has a significant impact on the economy. Instead of worrying about all the American consumers in debt over their heads, just think of all the pending redemption stories out there. The books. The TV shows. The movies. The new charitable foundations.

I wonder if Greenspan took all this into account.

Oprah
Easter

Book Recommendation - Syrup

2006-04-14T16:26:00.000+08:00

It has been a rare treat to have had time to do some reading recently. Even more enjoyable has been the serendipitous introduction to two new authors. I reviewed Barry Eisler's work earlier, and now I have had the chance to finish my first read of a book by Max Barry.

He is simply a great writer. I don't know why I had never heard of his work before, but I couldn't put down Syrup from the moment I started reading. I don't want to go through all the plot and ruin the experience of reading it yourself. Rather, I just want to comment on the authentic voice that Max brings to his observations and dialogue. I constantly found myself nodding and agreeing with behaviour, remembering similar experiences and people.

If I was going to use reviewing cliches, then Syrup is a satirical romp through the world of advertising and corporate politics. Actually, it is funny. Very funny. My immediate reaction on finishing was to go and buy everything else he has written.

Get this book.

There have been a couple of other books that have delivered similar feelings of familiarity and mirth. I can recommend Thomas Scoville's Silicon Follies, and Douglas Coupland's Microserfs for excellent takes on life in Silicon Valley.

StarHub - Smart TV Digital Set Top Box Update

2006-04-14T14:40:00.000+08:00

It has been a month since I took delivery of StarHub's new Smart TV digital set top box (STB). My original review is here. The experience over that time has not been satisfactory.

Where to start? Perceptible synchronization problems between audio and video. Heavy pixelization and digital artifacts, random picture breakups, complete crashes of the STB on an almost daily basis, failed recordings, inability to fast forward without losing synchronization, perceptible lag when changing channels.

I was astonished to read the positive review that appeared in the Straits Times Digital Life supplement. OK, not astonished, StarHub is a major advertiser of theirs, and the chances of a negative review were exactly zero. But come on.

Seeing other reviews that don't mention problems, I decided to call StarHub and ask to have my box replaced. The tech immediately agreed and scheduled an appointment. When the installer showed up at my flat, he was reluctant to do the swap. His point was that it would make no difference because the problems were not in the hardware. I insisted that the swap take place anyway, and fired up the new box.

Same problems.

Looking at the firmware revision number, 1.6, it is clear that no new release of software has been made in the last 30 days. I don't mind being a beta tester, but there is something wrong with this picture.

I am paying for hardware that doesn't deliver the service for which it is designed. There is no feedback mechanism to communicate with the beta program engineers other than going through normal 1633 customer disservice. Anyone using the box for more than an hour and exercising its functions would see that it was not ready for release.

My question to StarHub is "Why was this product released to customers?"

Singapore
StarHub

Book Recommendation - John Rain Thrillers by Barry Eisler

2006-04-13T14:02:00.000+08:00

One of the pleasures of reading a newspaper such as The Economist (never to be called a magazine we are informed) is the breadth of its coverage. Rather than a narrow focus on things financial, readers are treated to reviews of cultural matters as well. And it is from one of The Economist's recent book reviews that I discovered the work of Barry Eisler.

Mr. Eisler writes good old fashioned thrillers. He has created a character named John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American killer for hire. With a combination of detailed tradecraft, martial arts, and exhaustive description of locale, one feels completely immersed in the action.

John Rain is not a simple minded psychopathic killer mind you, but the complex result of much that has gone before, as Eisler reveals throughout the books. The psychological debate Rain has with himself lifts the character out of the cartoon category and allows him to stand with his predecessors, most famously James Bond.

Quibbles? Although there is great detail about surveillance and counter-measures, there is far less detail about how all this is funded. Rain just always seems to have cash on hand, regardless of location or time. I would prefer to see the same level of detail Eisler supplies to surveillance applied to exploring the mechanics of moving and accessing funds.

The first two books have Rain involved against foes in Japan and America, and there is considerable ambiguity as to who the bad guys actually are. It is all quite believable. In the third book, Rain Storm, the foe becomes rather cartoonish Arabs, who are of course stupid, evil, and incompetent. The addition of a blue-eyed, blonde(?) Israeli femme-fatale to the mix makes the whole thing very black and white, losing the more interesting exploration of the shades of grey Eisler achieved in his first two outings. One can see this as astute marketing to an American public looking for Arab bashing books after 9/11, but it doesn't do the character any good.

I am looking forward to see if Eisler gets back on track with his fourth book, Killing Rain. It is not available off the shelf in Singapore, so I have put in an order with Acma to get a copy.

Resurrection

2006-04-13T08:24:00.000+08:00

I have trouble throwing away gizmos and gadgets that have ceased to function. On one level, there is a sense of waste, a feeling that if I could just figure out what was wrong, or obtain a missing part, all would be well again. On another level, there is the rememberance of the joy that I felt researching, buying, and learning to use the latest "miust have", and the feeling that somehow that could be recaptured if I had the time or knowledge to fix the thing.

My long time favourite PDA, the Psion 5MX, was notoriously fragile. I put up with the expense and the periodic need to service or replace the thring because it was just so brilliant, and I had built my working habits around its capabilities.

It was the final death of my last Psion, and the fact that the company no longer manufactured the model or provided service in Asia that finally persuaded me to transition to the Nokia 9500. Now I really like the 9500, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles the 5MX did, and I am still reminded of that fact occasionally when I try and do something that is no longer possible on the Nokia.

Which brings me to an odd occurrence yesterday.

It is Spring, and I was doing some cleaning in the Haunt when I came across my drawer of Psion carcasses. Everything from the original Series 3 to a couple of dead LCD screens from various 5MX's. Sitting with pride of place was the last 5MX, which had died suddenly, without warning, and resisted all attempts at revival. I had backups, and managed to retrieve most of what had been on it, all except my agenda which had been a complete diary of appointments going back more than 10 years.

For old time's sake, I popped in a couple of double A batteries and pushed the reset button. Nothing happened, and a phone call came in, so I just left it sitting on my desk. About five minutes later, I picked up the 5MX and prepared to take out the batteries. I popped the screen one last time to check and there was the setup screen in all its glory.

I went through the familiar motions of completing the script, and was dropped to the main screen of a fully functional Psion Series 5MX. No data files because of the hard reset, but otherwise a ready to go PDA.

I won't go back to using it of course, the same problems with fragility and service would remain. But as a reminder of the basic value of optimisim, it sure felt good.

Psion
Nokia 9500

Getting Linked To

2006-04-12T13:54:00.000+08:00

Was checking my Technorati listing last night and saw that my blog entry on Social Networking had been referenced over on InfoTangle. I guess this stuff actually works, but is it self-referential or self-reverential?

StarHub gets dissed in Straits Times

2006-04-08T02:09:00.000+08:00

An article appeared in the Friday, April 7, 2006 Straits Times headlined "Gamers upset about StarHub's sluggish broadband speeds".

As a long time subscriber, I can attest to the problem. I can also attest to the lack of any meaningful discussion of the problem. Networks are not mysterious beasts that defy management or description. They are collections of equipment, wires, and configuration instructions. When managed properly, they deliver excellent service in a reliable way.

There seems to be a confusion about the terms speed (capacity), reliability (packet loss), and latency (lag). The discussion with Starhub has degenerated to the "It's slow, no it isn't" level instead of focusing on the very real and measurable problem.

Let's look at the facts. Starhub offers various plans, supposedly with higher speeds for higher prices. However, they do not guarantee any additional bandwidth for traffic after it leaves the local loop connection at a subscriber's home. You may have a high speed circuit, but it is only high speed to the first router within Starhub's network. What happens after that is very much a matter of how badly they oversubscribe their equipment. There is no way that the aggregate bandwidth sold to subscribers is matched one for one in the backbone network of Starhub.

The situation gets even worse when considering overseas sites. Starhub purchases a certain amount of international bandwidth to connect subscribers in Singapore to overseas networks. Again, this bandwidth is oversubscribed at a certain rate, which results in the performance seen by subscribers. There are simple and free tools available on the net such as PingPlotter to graphically show how all these factors come into play to deliver the Internet experience.

What is particularly frustrating is that Starhub refuses to acknowledge subscriber complaints, even when backed up with evidence, and continues to insist that the problem must be at the subscriber end. When that excuse is proven false, they fall back on the minimum service standards published by the IDA.

The bad news for gamers is that the standard is so low for local connections, real time gaming will be barely be acceptable even if StarHub is meeting the standard. The international latency standard of 300msec makes gaming pointless.

One can assess StarHub's approach to the market by looking at how they sell their service. It is not by focusing on the quality, or latency, or reliability. It is by packaging "freebies" with 2 year contracts to lock subscribers in, regardless of the level of service provided. Once you sign the contract or accept the "freebies", you can complain all you want, but you no longer have a choice.

To tell a customer like Mr. Tan, who is already a MaxOnline 6500 subscriber, that he needs a faster service is just ignorant. What he needs is a better network service provider. As do we all.

StarHub
Singapore

CIO Asia Conference and Awards 2006

2006-04-07T18:07:00.000+08:00

Attended the CIO Asia Conference and Awards 2006 today. The folks at CIO magazine always put on a good show and this year was no exception. The event was well attended, and the speakers were, for the most part, interesting.

I say for the most part, because there is something that overtakes marketing managers for IT vendors and turns them into blatant shills for their companies. They just don't seem to get the difference between reading Powerpoint presentations to an audience and actually giving some thoughtful insight into the industry or their product sector. Suffice to say, new lows were established.

On a more positive note, any time an end user is prepared to be candid about their operation, I will be in the audience. There was a terrific presentation by Noble Coker, the CIO of Hong Kong Disneyland, and his enthusiasm and insight into his job were a joy to behold.

I was a bit taken aback by a comment from an IT manager at a local health group who explained that it was important for hospital systems to be available 24x7 because otherwise it would get into the papers and the Minister of Health would scold them. I always thought it was because patients would die...

Singapore

China Agrees to Microsoft Tax

2006-04-06T15:53:00.000+08:00

It is being widely reported today that China's main PC manufacturers have agreed to stop shipping machines without a pre-loaded Microsoft operating system.

Supposedly this is to reduce piracy, but in fact it is the U.S. government putting pressure on behalf of Microsoft, which has long licensed its operating system to PC manufacturers based on the number of machines they manufacture. Some of the largest PC manufacturers in China were shipping PC's without any bundled OS.

Under the agreement, regardless of whether a customer wants a PC without an OS, or with an alternative OS such as Linux, the manufacturers end up paying a "tax" to Microsoft for the OS.

This is particularly invidious for large corporate customers who are also forced into bulk contracts with Microsoft. Under programs like Select, a corporate ends up paying twice - once under the Select agreement, and again when it purchases PC's.

Given China's rather visible attempts to avoid paying royalties for foreign IPR (intellectual property rights) for things like DVD's and cell phones, it is surprising that they capitulated on this issue.

Another article indicates that Microsoft is making the same demands on PC manufacturers in the UK.

China
Microsoft

Singapore Elections - No Talking

2006-04-04T16:25:00.000+08:00

To understand Singapore, it is necessary to understand the statement

"That which is not permitted is forbidden".

Once you take that on board, it is a lot easier to anticipate what might seem like unusual statements by government spokesmen.

One might have thought that a lively debate among an informed electorate was one of the key elements of a healthy democracy, but it turns out that this doesn't apply in Singapore.

The local tabloid Today is carrying an article outlining the government's clarification that podcasting is not allowed during elections, nor is the streaming of video, nor "persistently promoting political views".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PODCASTING will not be allowed during elections as it does not fall under the "positive list" which states what is allowed under election advertising.

Dr Balaji Sadasivan, the Senior Minister of State for Information, Communications and the Arts, added that streaming of videos during campaigning would also be prohibited. He was addressing a question in Parliament by Opposition leader Low Thia Khiang yesterday about the use of new technologies on the Internet during hustings.

Pictures of candidates, party histories and manifestos are on the "positive list" and they are allowed to be used as election advertising on the Internet. Newer Internet tools such as podcasting do not fall within this "positive list".

Dr Balaji said: "There are also some well-known local blogs run by private individuals who have ventured into podcasting. "The content of some of these podcasts can be quite entertaining. However, the streaming of explicit political content by individuals during the election period is prohibited under the Election Advertising Regulations. A similar prohibition would apply to the videocasting or video streaming of explicitly political content."

The Parliamentary Election Act was amended in 2001 to allow political parties to advertise on the Internet. This was to ensure responsible use of the Internet during campaigning as the free-for-all environment of the Internet is open to abuse.

Dr Balaji added that individual bloggers can discuss politics, but have to register with the Media Development Authority if they persistently promote political views. Once registered, they are not allowed to advertise during elections, something only political parties, candidates and election agents are allowed to do.

Despite the new Internet technology, there are no plans to change the law on online campaigning during an election, said Dr Balaji.

"We recognise that in our society, people will have their diverse opinion and some will want to share their opinion. But people should not take refuge behind the anonymity of the Internet to manipulate public opinion. "It is better and more responsible to engage in political debates in a factual and objective manner," he said.

Channel NewsAsia
----------------------------------------------
I sort of get the point about anonymous manipulation, but if a person is willing to stand behind their statements and identify themselves, what is the harm in expressing an opinion?

Of course, the chance of that happening anyway is limited given the novel and effective use that has been made of libel laws in Singapore.

Singapore
Elections

Microsoft attempts to mug English language

2006-04-03T21:07:00.000+08:00

The growing realization that Microsoft's next version of the Window's operating system is not only going to be delayed, but also likely to be a complete bloatware resource hog, is leading to some interesting tap dancing on the part of the marketing department.

In an article in Computerworld, a JupiterResearch analyst tries to explain the difference between Microsoft's certification of PC's that are "Vista capable" and those that are actually able to run the new operating system.

My Oxford English dictionary defines capable as: having the ability or quality necessary to do something.

That is pretty straightforward, and does not anticipate a usage in which capable means "sort of able" or "we are just kidding, it won't really work".

Joe Wilcox, an analyst at JupiterResearch, stressed the importance of customers understanding the distinction between PCs "capable" of running Vista and those that are actually ready to do so.

"A system that will run Windows Vista may not be capable of using all of its features," he said. For example, Wilcox said, a machine branded Windows Vista Capable that is a high-end Media Center PC with superior graphics capabilities will be ready for even the most feature-intensive versions of Vista. But if it's a low-cost PC and it has a "Capable" sticker on it, "it will probably run the features of Home Basic but not anything else," he said.

Microsoft

Identity Theft - A real growth industry

2006-04-03T20:22:00.000+08:00

While working as an R&D Manager at Visa in the mid-nineties, I had the chance to do a lot of thinking about payment systems, identity, trust, security - all the things that have to be present for value to be exchanged between parties.

Visa was heavily involved with the then newly emerging field of public key cryptography as a way of enabling payments on the Internet. The problem was that the systems being proposed, such as SET (Secure Electronic Transactions), were hopelessly complex to use and to implement.

Thinking about the societal implications of using certificates and computer stored identity, I was concerned about the confusion of value transfer with identity. Why do you have to know who I am in order to accept payment for goods? I also became increasingly concerned about the potential for identity theft and false accusations.

If everyone agrees that an identity method is secure, then there is a natural tendency to assume guilt if the method says a person is involved. As we have seen with fingerprints (not unique after all), DNA (not unique, but statistically significant), and biometrics (easily fooled by Jello), it is dangerous to rely on technology to ascertain identity to the exclusion of all other factors.

My major concern about storing one's identity in a computer, or chip, or cellphone is what happens when it is stolen. Indeed, the fact that identity is available to be stolen guarantees that it will be. No amount of encryption mathematics is going to prevent misuse by the average customer who fails to safeguard what has now become the key to his entire identity and by implication, wealth.

The kind of nightmare that can ensue was covered by the Hollywood flick "The Net", in which the protagonist is targeted and has her identity stolen. While the technology depicted in the film is somewhat Hollywood over-the-top, it does give the flavour of what it would be like to try and function in society when your identity has been removed and you essentially lose access to your own life.

Which all leads to the recent release of a report by the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics in the US, entitled "Identity Theft, 2004".

It appears that the identity theft industry has grown, and continues to grow, quite nicely. The press release for the BJS report says it best -

3.6 MILLION U.S. HOUSEHOLDS LEARNED THEY WERE IDENTITY THEFT VICTIMS DURING A SIX-MONTH PERIOD IN 2004

Identity Theft

UOB Singapore does it again

2006-04-03T16:46:00.000+08:00

The two activities any payment system has to do perfectly are clearing and settlement. The order in which they take place is as important as the outcome. That's the theory anyway.

I use Internet banking a lot because of travel and an aversion to queuing and counter staff. Having an upcoming income tax payment to make, I scheduled the payment and a corresponding funds transfer to cover the amount.

Imagine my surprise on returning from a recent business trip to find that the payment had not been made due to insufficient funds. A quick check confirmed that both the funds transfer and the payment instruction had been executed on the scheduled date.

With considerable weariness, I called the call centre to find out what was going on. No joy there, just a promise to get someone to look into it. To their credit, UOB did call back on the next business day, but the answer was not what one would call helpful.

It seems that the "IT Department" had informed the caller that there was no guarantee that transfers (clearing) would take place before payments (settlement). I expressed considerable surprise at this, and suggested that any IT department running operations for a major bank that could not figure out in which order to run scheduled jobs was probably incompetent. The caller agreed that the situation was unsatisfactory, and promised to raise it with higher ups.

He also suggested that funds should be in an account 24 hours before they were required. A sensible suggestion from one point of view, but not one shared by other parts of the bank when it comes to crediting interest or inter-bank transfers, those mysterious transactions that result in money disappearing for days.

The customer is expected to surrender funds before they are required, but the Bank is not.

Banks
Singapore

Using Firefox instead of IE

2006-03-30T09:19:00.000+08:00

I switched over to Firefox during its beta releases, completely captivated by the "tabs instead of windows" method of browsing. As has been documented elsewhere, it is just a faster, more secure, more feature rich browser than the 7 year old IE.

One of the unintended consequences of that change however has been that I don't often look at my own web site or this blog using IE. A few days ago, I did happen to load the blog in IE and was surprised to find that the sidebar had disappeared.

Actually it turns out that it was still there, just dropped to the bottom of the last entry. Since the sidebar contains all the profile, navigation, and link information for the blog, this was pretty serious. After contacting Blogger technical support and persisting through the auto responder "go away" messages, I finally got someone to help.

It seems that if a piece of text like a URL exceeds the width of the column, IE can't handle the wrap-around gracefully, and just pushes the whole sidebar down. A very helpful person named Sarah managed to pinpoint the offending entry, and everything is now back to normal for people using IE.

My only question to someone still using IE would be, "Why haven't you switched to Firefox yet?

Blogger
Firefox

UOB Singapore - When is a line of credit a "Fund Transfer"?

2006-03-29T00:08:00.000+08:00

One has become somewhat inured to the mangling of the language in pursuit of profit, but I was taken aback by the latest promotion by UOB bank in Singapore - " Fund Transfer - The smarter way to get cash in your hand!"

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has been trying to rein in the banks operating in Singapore which have been aggressively selling credit cards and lines of credit. There is a long standing rule that banks may not extend more than twice the monthly salary of the borrower in credit.

The banks have tried a number of semantic twists to get around the rules, including debit cards that allow overdrafts. Um, isn't that a credit card?

Now comes "Fund Transfer". Looking at the application form, it is just another way of advancing funds against a credit card. I would have thought that one would have to HAVE funds in order to do a fund transfer, but apparently this is no longer necessary.

In a perverse way, one has to admire the creativity:

debit=credit
derivative contract=structured deposit
debt=fund transfer
time deposit=perpetual deposit.

And while we are on the topic of mangling language, how come everything gets a superflous "s" (staffs, softwares, hardwares) except when it is needed as in Funds Transfer?

Singapore
Banks

StarHub - Bad website, bad service

2006-03-23T23:53:00.000+08:00

I recently activated SMSemail on my mobile phone account with StarHub. This is a free value-added service that allows a subscriber to receive an email sent by Internet to his phone. Most mobile operators provide this, and the addressing is usually something like mobilenumber@operator.com. In the case of StarHub, I received an SMS telling me the service was activated, and to use the format mobilenumber@starhub.com.sg.

Only one problem. It doesn't work. The same SMS told me to look at a web page for further instructions. It doesn't exist.

By using search, I found a web page where there are instructions on how to use SMSemail. It says to use the format mobilenumber@starhub.net.sg.

This does not work.

I called the 1633 helpline, a fancifuly named facility which specializes in music on hold, and eventually spoke to the call agent. It took a couple of tries, but she finally got the point and said she would check. She came back on line after a few minutes and said the service was down for maintenance.

Since it had been 5 hours between my first and most recent attempts, this sounded bogus. I suggested that this was not a correct answer. She then said she would log the fault and have an engineer call me back. That was the last I heard from 1633.

Since intellectual curiousity had been stirred, I gave it another shot during the following business day, and managed to reach a live tech support guy. He immediately said the correct format for SMSemail was mobilenumber@shsms.com.sg, and explained how to send an outbound email by SMS. I told him the introductory SMS was wrong, and the web page link was wrong, but he didn't seem particularly interested. I have no idea if any action will be taken.

In a fit of civic duty, I attempted to report all this using StarHub's cleverly constructed self-defense system, also known by the confusing name of "Customer Care". This diabolical system is designed to prevent any contact with the company. It requires many fields to be filled out, has drop down menus that don't drop down, and if you get past all that and actually press the submit button, you get an SQL/OLE error and are dumped.

Nowhere on the entire StarHub web site are there any contact details for departments, management, phone numbers, fax numbers or any other evidence of human life. The sole way of contacting them is through the voice call centre at 1633, or the non-functioning "Customer Care" form.

I really wonder if this form of commercial enterprise could exist anywhere else in the world other than Singapore or some sort of communist dictatorship.

Oh, and in the hope that no one else has to go through all this nonsense, you can send an email by SMS using the phone number 7801, and the format -

S#emailaddress#subject#emailbodytext

However, and this is just great, the return address on the email is mobilenumber@starhub.net.sg
which, inevitably, does not work.

StarHub
Singapore

LibraryThing - Books meet social networking

2006-03-23T17:51:00.000+08:00

Having purchased Book Collector to manage my book collection, I was intrigued by a relatively new web site that is combining some existing ideas into a new twist on social networking. The site is called LibraryThing.

In their own words, "LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. Because everyone catalogs together, you can also use LibraryThing to find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth. "

I really like the approach. One of the nice things about browsing in a physical bookstore is that the books are normally arranged by subject, then by Author. Which means you tend to meet people with the same interests if you hang around that section. In the days of the independent small bookstore, you could also count on the owner and staff to be a source of suggestions.

Amazon uses a similar concept to suggest books by looking at the patterns thrown up by the books people buy, then making suggestions - "People who bought X also bought Y, so we think you will like it".

While mega-stores like Borders and Kinokunyia are welcome additions to the Singapore scene due to their huge and varied inventory, the staff appear to be functionally illiterate, negating one of prime value propositions for a bricks and mortar bookstore..

LibraryThing goes further by incorporating all the latest Web 2.0 technologies. Using open API's from Amazon, and the Z39.50 protocol, you can look up book information and retrieve cover images, just like Book Collector. You can also use Tags to categorize books according to how you think of them, giving you a convenient way of remembering things the way your own mind works, rather than being forced into the Library of Congress classification for instance.

All that would be worthwhile, but there is more. Becasue all data is kept centrally instead of on the user's PC, LibraryThing can do a lot of pattern recognition. This can be seen on the Zeitgeist page, where there are list of things like "most owned book", "most reviewed", and my favourite, "most contentious" which list the books with the highest deviation in ratings between reviewers. I personally find that I ofter love books that others hate, so this is a good place to start.

The business model, according to the "About" page, is straight subscription. You can maintain a library of 200 books for free, then it costs US$10/year or US$25 perpetual for an unlimited number of books.

The final seal of approval comes from the ability to import and export data. I have written before about the need to be able to move data between devices and formats, and LibraryThing says it supports import and export. No kidding. With an absolutely fuss free interface, LibraryThing basically sucks in any data source and intelligently looks for ISBN data, then goes and looks it up.

Wow.

Highly recommended.

Social Networking - Back to the future

2006-03-23T17:39:00.000+08:00

Social networking is one of the big "next things" that is attracting VC money and user interest. Sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster have had huge growth, and there are more than 200 social networking sites now operating according to Wikipedia's article on the subject.

What strikes me though is that these web-based sites have not drawn on lessons from the past. Early social networks were created when Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were put up by individuals and clubs, allowing forums and file sharing. These systems were either single subject, or organized into topical forums.

In the commercial world Compuserve was very successful with its targeted forums moderated by people with knowledge and passion to keep things lively and interesting.

Now we have Web 2.0, which seems to start from the presumption that nothing existed in the past. I say that, because all the old lessons learned seem to be ignored while the same mistakes are made all over again. Put it down to the arrogance of youth, or more likely, the lack of any history to consult. Unless you lived it, you don't know about it.

Any BBS operator could tell you that moderation (editing and dispute resolution) were necessary to maintain a healthy community. The current sites tendency to disclaim responsibility for content allow unhealthy things to take place - stalking, grooming, and luring of kids by predators for instance.

It seems the site operators want the profits of content provision with the overheads of bare telecom provision. A nice game if you can pull it off, but the resulting harm is generating calls for increasingly strict regulation.

Canada's cost advantage second only to Singapore

2006-03-22T16:36:00.000+08:00

Now here's a headline I never expected to see:

Canada's cost advantage second only to Singapore
KPMG's global competitiveness study ranks country top among G-7 industrialized nations despite rising dollar
STEVEN THEOBALD, BUSINESS REPORTER, TheStar.com

Despite reports to the contrary, a strong dollar and perceived high corporate taxes are not hurting Canada's global competitiveness, says a new study from an international consultancy firm.

Canada remains the most cost-competitive economy among the G-7 group of industrialized nations, and second overall to Singapore, according to the latest KPMG Competitive Alternatives survey of nine countries released yesterday.

It's a "misconception" that the strong loonie is marring Canada's ability to offer cost-effective opportunities to potential investors, said Mark MacDonald, who led the study."We can't say the value of the Canadian dollar is not important, but it is not as important as some people make it out to be," he said in an interview following a news conference in Toronto.

KPMG's current report is based on an 85-cent (U.S.) exchange rate. The loonie would have to approach par with the U.S. dollar, "or certainly somewhere in the high 90s," to erase Canada's cost advantage, said Glenn Mair, a director of MMK Consulting Inc., which contributed to the study.

The report shows the currency rose 13.6 per cent since the 2004 survey, yet, Canada still enjoys average operating costs 5.5 per cent below the United States. That's down from a 9 per cent advantage two years ago when the loonie averaged 74 cents.Canada held the top spot in both 2004 and 2002, when the 65-cent exchange rate gave the country a 14.9 per cent cost advantage over the U.S.

This is the first year Singapore was included in the survey. Low labour costs gave it a clear victory. As for Canadian taxes, it's simply not true that corporate tax rates are scaring businesses away, MacDonald said, adding that researchers claiming the contrary may have "vested interests" in the matter. In reality, the combined federal and provincial effective corporate tax rates in Canada are on par with U.S. federal rates, and that doesn't include state-level taxes, MacDonald said."The evidence is very clear."Canada's policy of offering tax breaks to promote investment in research and development has been especially successful, Mair said. "Personal taxes are another story, and not part of this study."

The study's conclusions:

Canada's key advantages include lower labour costs, especially for highly skilled workers.

Canada has the sixth highest average wages and salaries. But lower benefits costs, specifically public health care, vault it to second place in overall labour costs, behind Singapore. The U.S. is in sixth place, with labour costs 13 per cent higher than Canada.

Canada leads the pack in tax rates for research and development, with a negative 2.8 per cent. The United Kingdom is second at 0.2 per cent. The U.S. is fifth with 20.7 per cent effective income tax on R&D.

For larger cities, Singapore has the greatest cost advantages, followed by Montreal, Atlanta and Toronto.

Canada has the lowest average electricity costs, at 7 cents (U.S.) per kilowatt-hour, just below France and the U.K. The U.S. is fourth, at 8.9 cents.While the threat from a strong loonie and tax rates is exaggerated, rising electricity costs, particularly in Ontario and Alberta, pose "potential problems" for the future, Mair said.

Singapore
Canada

Jingoism is alive and well in America

2006-03-21T11:50:00.000+08:00

The recent furor over the DP World buyout of P&O has taken many forms, but the underlying reality is that Americans find it acceptable for a British company to own their ports, but not one based in Dubai.

A recent column by Winn Schwartau in Network World poses the question "Would you hire Dubai to run your network?"

If I understand Winn Schwartau's thesis, he is arguing that it is unsafe to use people, equipment, networks and technology supplied by non-Americans.

OK, let's look at the same question from the point of view of every customer of American companies. As a Canadian, should I fear Cisco, Microsoft, HP, Dell, AT&T, and all the other technology vendors? Should I ensure that our RFP's state that only national vendors are permitted to bid? Am I at risk because the technology is American origin and may contain back doors or other mechanisms to prevent proper functioning if America gets pissed at my country?

Such behaviour will hurt America more than anyone else, as a global trade war ensues.

Let's get back to reality. The ports in question were owned by foreigners. The ships calling at the ports are all sailing under flags of convenience owned by shell companies that hide their true owners. The ships were built anywhere but the US. The crews are not likely to have a single US national.

So sure, go ahead and scream security. Just get ready for a really low standard of living.

And if you don't like/trust foreigners, just hide in your bunker while the rest of us get on with life.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 300Gb hard disk

2006-03-20T18:15:00.000+08:00

This is going to be one of those entries where I wax nostalgic about the good old days. Except for the fact that these are the best of days when it comes to storage.

Putting aside the Osborne 1 for a moment, the first PC that I ever tried to add hard disk storage to was a home-built Hanafi 86 - an IBM PC clone with a dubious BIOS running an Intel 8086 chip at the princely speed of 8mhz.

The native storage on this beast consisted of half-height 5.25" floppy disk drives with a capacity of 360K. I was able to load DOS, dBase II, and WordStar all on one floppy, and keep data on the second. Now that was computing.

As software got more complicated and larger, the floppy became a major bottleneck. They were slow, noisy (you could hear the head move from track to track), and low capacity. The dream was to get a hard disk, but the problem was cost. A 10Mb (yes, megabyte, not gigabyte) hard disk was US$1,000, roughly half the price of the entire computer.

Fast forward to today, and I just picked up a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA II 300Gb hard disk for the astonishing sum of S$195 from the folks at Fuwell. (and no, don't try to say the name really fast, you might hurt yourself)

This unit has a 16mb cache, and is rated as one of the quietest drives available. Performance is rated highly due to the cache, interface, and Native Command queuing (NCQ). The spec sheet is here.

Suffice to say that things have come a long way. The cache memory is larger than the entire drive of days past. The drive cable is now a stylish thin red part that looks more like a phone cable than anything else. Gone are the interface cards and ribbon cables of yore. More importantly, the cost per megabyte of storage has gone from $161/Mb to .065/Mb.

The disk drive industry has remained cut throat, with thin margins, rapid innovation, and frequent mergers and acquisitions.

Contrast that amazing price/performance trend with what has been going on with the operating system. Convicted monopolist Microsoft sold DOS for $50, Windows 1.0 for $65, and XP Pro will set you back US$250 minimum.

Seems like there may be something to this anti-trust stuff after all...

V-Gear Landisk Firmware Upgrade - 024

2006-03-16T15:15:00.000+08:00

The folks at V-Gear have released another firmware update for the LanDisk. It is now up to version 024 and is supposed to fix some more bugs. I installed it without problem and everything seems to work well.

Firmware Update 024

V-gear
LanDisk