Having another late night meetings, and reminiscing back 9 years ago. Back then, I had a palm pilot with a foldable keyboard, and tried to get work done by connecting to my handphone (i believe it was a Sony Ericsson T68i) via infrared, sending and checking emails/sms using the built in email app in Palm
Fast forward 9 years. Now, I’m having an IBM Thinkpad X200 running Ubuntu 9.04, with a Singtel Mobile Broadband, connecting to the internet through the 3.5G network, accessing my emails thro Zimbra web interface, IM’ing on Pidgin.
Late Night Meetings: 2
May 12th, 2009 by yuitJaunty on my X200
May 9th, 2009 by yuitUbuntu recently released their latest operating system, Ubuntu 9.04, also known as Jaunty Jackalope. I have been running it for the past 2 weeks on my Thinkpad X200, and I must say that I have been thoroughly impressed - more so than any other releases I have experienced so far. Top few things that impressed me:
- Amazing suspend and resume stability: I have been using it for the last 1 week with no reboots, only suspending, and resuming. And because I run around quite often, I typically suspend and resume about 4-8 times a day. And for 5 full days, the laptop didn’t freeze up on me. Wireless kept on working, applications, bluetooth, sound… you name it. I had to terminate Firefox twice in this 5 days cos it was taking up too much memory - i typically have about 60 opened tabs.
- Mobile Broadband: I was stuck in a meeting one evening, and xiaobai was using Singtel Broadband. Out of impulse, I decided to just plug it into my USB slot. To my absolute astonishment, a dialog popped up asking me Country, which I selected Singapore, and then it went on to ask me to choose M1, Starhub or Singtel, which I selected Singtel. And.. viola!
That was 3 days ago. I have just gone and bought my own Singtel Laptop Broadband package, and below are the screens:
-
- New Applications: There are quite a lot of new applications available on Jaunty Jackalope. Amongst which are
- UNetBootin : Allows you to easily create bootable thumbdrives.
- BlueProximity: A very cool application that pairs with your handfone and locks/unlocks your laptop based on the distance of your phone from the laptop
Well, I am curious how the next version of Opensolaris will be like, especially now that Oracle has bought over Sun - if its on schedule, it should be this month.
Late night meetings
May 6th, 2009 by yuitIts been quite a while since I’ve had long late night meetings with clients. Just finished one. Sure brings back memories back to 2001 days. And this one is pretty memorable in the sense that we had 4 projectors projecting different screens all at the same time, of which one was a mindmap so that we can decide and change the IA on the fly and make a decision there and then. 
Learning and Curiousity
May 3rd, 2009 by yuitI always believe that curiosity is one of the core characteristics that one needs to cultivate if he/she wants to thrive in the digital medium, and thought I’d just point out a small case in point that I personally experienced 15minutes ago.
I was just clearing my emails, and this being a Sunday evening, I just happened to have a *little* more time on my hand and decided to do some simple analysis of one of the usual email marketing newsletter I receive rather than sending it straight to the thrash. Selecting the “Show Original” option on the right-click menu, i noticed a few email headers that I didn’t recognise
- List-Unsubscribe
- X-List-Unsubscribe
- X-Unsubscribe-Web
None of these email headers were those which I’m personally familiar with. A quick check with Google shows up the following interesting articles:
- http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/list-best-practices.htm
- http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/list-email-headers.htm
Apparently these headers are specified in RFC 2369
Going through the intro of this RFC, tells you that these headers are optional, but meant to extend the functionality of list managers and their respective functions.
Quite a bit of things that you learn in 10minutes of quick research, all because of the curiosity of examining the email message body. So now, I can learn more about what the latest technical implementations are, what other people think about email best practices, from their point of view, both technically, and from a messaging angle.
Always be curious. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn this way.
Visualisation with Processing
April 29th, 2009 by yuitTuckwai’s blog post on visualisation made me remember this technology that I have been looking at for a long time, but never had the time to delve deeper into it other than downloading the Java libraries.
Processing. An amazing piece of software used by companies such as Yahoo and others. Capable of a variety visualisation stuff.
Nice screensaver type effect
MTV-type effect
Its recently (about 6 months ago) been ported to Javascript. See more here.
Applying web technologies to “traditional” markets
April 29th, 2009 by yuitCame across this article some time back that talks about the US Army taking a page out of Google Maps and Wikipedia. Essentially, its a “MapPedia” kinda application, where soldiers are able to annotate on a map events and things relating to those different areas, allowing easier taking over by their incoming replacement when they end their tour and leave. It allows for the new soldiers to learn things that otherwise would have been lost when the old-timers left - things such as where is the most dangerous road junctions and so on.
It is essentially “Documentation” for soldiers, presented in a highly graphical (I love visualsation stuff), and easy to use manner.
Not very radical from our standpoint, but considering that this is the army, it is still pretty interesting because there are many other “traditional” industries out there today that can use applications like this in their work.
Can you think of another “traditional” industry that can benefit from Web 2.0 technology?
Of course, to get a “traditional” industry to adopt a new way of doing things would require a business process change, AKA B.P.R (Business Process Reengineering), but that is another challenge altogether.
Better automated sliding doors
March 23rd, 2009 by yuitI’m sure everyone is familiar with automated sliding doors. Those glass doors that slide open when a sensor mounted on top of the door detects movement.
Recently, i was stumped when i went to the basement food court at Sim Lim Square, walked up to the glass door and nothing happened. After a few seconds of blinking at the door to no avail, i noticed a plastic tab with the word “Press”. Ah…its no longer automated, but instead, manually triggered - which makes a lot of sense when you have a door located in a high pedestrian traffic area. This afternoon I was sitting outside TCC at Bugis Junction this afternoon, and saw for myself how often the automated glass doors slide open and closed because of human traffic.
Anyway, ever since that day at Sim Lim, i have noticed the plastic tab “Press” gadget in a few other places - Wisma Atria taxi stand entrance, and today at Bugis Junction TCC. Frankly, i don’t think its the most intuitive designed interface, so i thought about how to improve the user interface - why not, instead of a plastic tab, have a palm sized metal plate that has the imprint of a palm on the glass door. In that way, a person who sees it, will intuitively push (or so I think). After some thought, i realised that some people may end up thinking that these doors were push-open doors rather than sliding doors and break them trying to push it open.
So, I came up with some alternative ideas:
- Use a vision system that can detect shapes, and point it at an angle downwards so that if it detects an object against a pre-defined background that does not move, it activates the doors. This represents a person standing in front of the door, expecting it to open.
There are already systems like that, that can do this. Axis Communications (http://www.axis.com) sells camera systems that have software that detects motion against a predefined background. - Have a pressure mat/sensor embedded in the carpet in front of the sliding doors. Set it so that if there is sustained pressure on it for, say, 0.5 seconds, it activates the doors.
Each of the solutions above has some inherent challenge of its own. Can you think of an alternative solution?
What’s wrong with Straits Times Interactive?
March 16th, 2009 by yuitI was having a conversation with someone in the industry the other day and the conversation wandered over to the question of whether young people read the newspaper nowadays. I personally belong to the group that also do not regularly read newspapers (Straits Times, basically, since they have the monopoly), instead getting my news online. And as the conversation went on, I realised that I didn’t find Straits Time Interactive that user friendly. After quite a bit of thought and analysis, I have come to the conclusion that Straits Times Interactive is
- Crippled by its rigid day by day approach towards news - the way the content management system works, seems to be unable to pull up more than just the current day news
- Bad layout, information hierarchy, and typography.
What issues to I have with Straits Times Interactive?
- Its rotating banner is clunky to use - it will keep rotating unless I click on the “Pause” button. Instead, it should stop rotating the moment i start to use the “Left” “Right” scroll buttons. If you intend to put text for people to read, then the banner should *not* auto-rotate. It is very very irritating.
- I can’t figure what the difference is between “Top Stories” (the banner stories) and “Latest Stories” (the stories on the right of the banner). They should just merge the 2 and not confuse people.
- Next, there is this huge junk that I have to skip through, because they are generally a waste of time because they are typically irrelevant, and takes too many steps to even get there. The blogs for instance, uses a javascript popup command, which messes up my “open in new tab” function that I’m very fond of
- Razor TV
- Blogs
- ST Forum
- Stomp Most Popular
- Finally, the rest of the news is right at the bottom.
Layout for Straits Times Interactive
Now, the problem with Straits Times Interactive goes a bit deeper than that.
- Its “Rest of the news” sections do not encourage browsing. If you looked closely at the “Rest of the news” section, the “Show More” is hidden in the frame of the box, rather than right after the last news item. And, clicking on them (at least currently, when I’m doing it) leads to an “Error” page.
Zoomed in picture of "Rest of News"
- Clicking on any news item in this section, brings you to a full page article. Notice the navigation on the right side that is supposed to bring up other articles? It does not give me any indication how current these articles are, and does not allow me to drill deeper if I wanted to read through more articles on Tech and Science. As mentioned in the beginning, it appears that Straits Times is not able to pull up articles that are not of current day, hence not allowing me to browse through 7 days of “Tech & Science”.
- If you decide to then click on any of the section headers such as “Singapore” or “SE Asia” or “Tech & Science” on the top navigation, you will end up with a page like this the one below.
What happened to the news items on the right side? It has disappeared. And if you looked at the typography and information hierarchy design of the news items on the main content section, you’ll find that it is really quite junk. Why is there no “More” links at the end of each article summary? Why is the article “Facebook fun goes mobile” (the only item on the right column) without any summary text? Again, why is there no ability for me to pull out older articles?
Compare all the complexity against a site that I visit almost daily - Digg.
- Digg allows me to read through pages and pages of news with title and summary. Those news items that catch my eye, I’ll open it up in a new tab and read it later.
- The chronological paging structure of digg (most recent on top) allows me to catch up on news if i have been away for a few days, by scrolling through pages starting from page 1, until I hit the page that contains articles that I remember reading
An overview of the digg homepage
Now, the fact that I find Digg much more sticky and user friendly to use, in terms of getting the latest news compared to Straits Times Interactive is a rather alarming sign that our local publications are not able or not interested to serve the needs of the web generation. There is so much that Straits Times Interactive can do to improve on its current site - but until then, it will keep losing visitors and visitor goodwill.
I hate cockroaches
March 16th, 2009 by yuitI was trying to fix my rubbish chute about 2 hours ago because the chute frame was loose. Having bought some epoxy material, I thought I was equipped to deal with the task ahead.
After some careful analysis and probing around the chute with a screwdriver, I realised that the silicon sealing around the whole frame needed to be peeled off so that I could seal the chute frame properly against the concrete wall. As I started to peel the silicon seal off, I saw that had taken on more than I originally intended.
Evidence of cockroach infestation...
The lower part of the rubbish chute where I peeled off the silicon seal seemed to have some black mould growing out of it. Kicking the rubbish chute door resulted in a rain of small little pellets that I now am quite sure, is cockroach eggs. So basically the chute frame has been harbouring a huge cockroach nest!!!!
I have since called some sanitary guy who will be here at 3pm tomorrow to change the whole chute door. I think i’ll keep an all night vigil fumigating the chute area every hour so that any mother cockroach that crawls out of the nest dies.
Bodycount so far (1:52am)
Adult cockroach: 2
Baby cockroach: 2
Cockroach eggs: approx 30
How much data are we going to lose?
March 14th, 2009 by yuitI am quite convinced that in the next few years, the general population on this planet on the whole is going to be losing a lot of data. Why?
Everything is going digital.
All communications, media, personal records - they are all going digital. When was the last time you used a traditional silver halide film camera? And as of now, there is no ideal storage technology that comes close to paper or cloth in terms of reliability and robustness.
Under the most ideal storage conditions, Kodak CD-ROM can last 217 years. In most cases, they don’t go beyond 20 years. http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Kodak.html
Most families have no idea what is the best method of storing data - backup hardisk fail pretty frequently. And when they do, it is extreme grief for the victims.
About 2 years ago I built my little VIA-based 600GB RAID 5 file storage server. A few months ago, one of the hardisk went down (RAID 5 still runs fine with 1 failed hardisk, albeit in degraded mode) , and as a stop gap measure, I bought 2 1T hardisk, copied the data to the 1T hardisk and did manual mirroring.
Now, to keep my 2 portable disk in sync, I’m using RSync. http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/#Rsync
I’ll need to find a more optimal solution soon.