Forum: From Nurin to Chief Justice

Attended a political forum on yesterday afternoon, my first time ever. Howsy has a detailed write up available here.

I made a short comment from the floor,

"I'm an IT guy, not a political guy. Am here to express a worry and an encouragement. We are all here today because of how information flows into our hands -- I am here because I received a Facebook invitation sent by Anwar office, I read about the scandal from Jeff Ooi's and Anwar's blog, I watched the video from YouTube, I also found that the BAR council has a blog to share their thoughts with the public.


Like some of the people have mentioned just now -- free media (my worry). Our government has lately been trying to control how information is shared, esp. online. However, that should not stop us from expressing ourselves. We talked about the rot of our judiciary, media and system, and we are in need of revamping them. But one of the very first things is that, we, ourselves have to start doing things, like expressing yourself, sharing your thoughts with the people.

Start blogging if you could.. (encouragement)"

If you have not been following the news, our country (Malaysia) has been in a sad state lately (in fact, all this while). Li Tsin's blog (Polytikus) sums them all up:

• Murder.
• Judiciary scandal.
• Cops screwing the rakyat.
• The forgotten East Malaysians.
• Consumer goods price hike.
• Potential petrol price hike.
• Haze is back.
• Public universities harassing students.
• Wasting police resources over a burnt flag.
• Maid abuse.
• Missing children.
• Mistreatment of foreign workers.

Or you can refer back to my past entries: Black and White March to Save Judiciary, RE: Reason Behind The Recent Condemnation Against Bloggers.

I am attending a forum on Digital Democracy on this coming Wednesday, by ALL-BLOGS. Hopefully, there are more things that I can learn and do, for the people.

- yc, whines

High School was Fun

I spent 7 years in Chong-hwa KL Independent High School at the age of 13 to 19. Found and joined its Facebook group just now. There is this discussion going on in the group: "Best & worst memories?", and I wrote these:

Causing electrical blow-off at the KH building, at form one that time. The school blacked out for an hour or so. Priceless.

Falling in love for the first time in high school at form 2. Being stupid but that's mesmerizing.

Throwing a chalk right on the arse of science teacher at form 3. Ridiculous.

Damned to retake form 3 but managed to secure form 4 after negotiating with the headmaster. Owned.

Can't remember how my time was spent and what I have really done for my SPM and UEC. Typical.

Went upper 6. It was World Cup 2002. Had a Davala[1] hairstyle for just a day. Busted.

[1]: http://images.google.com.my/images?q=davala

Everyone has been bad, I'm sure. ;-)

- yc, loves high school

Black and White March to Save Judiciary

It's the second time in 60 years the Malaysian Bar Council did something like that – "Walk for Justice". A recently revealed video of a senior lawyer on the phone with a Tun has led to the public disclosure of a judiciary scandal involving our Chief Justice, all thanks to Anwar Ibrahim (this link has the video).

Some of my colleagues might have noticed (and some were told by me) that I was with a black and white attire today because of this. I wasn't managed to pull off for a day-off, there wasn't enough time for it when I was informed.

To read more blog responses, click this link.

Our country has been in a pretty bad state these days with all the issues and scandals. The country needs a change. A month ago, the government and the rakyat-rakyat were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the independence day – slogan: "Jalur Gemilang" (glorious range of values).

50 years, so.. What have we achieved?

Updated: Jeff has taken/uploaded heaps of photos of the event.

- yc, sad

Definition of Web 2.0

I have this idea about Web 2.0 in my mind all these while, that I view it from three different perspectives:

• Users'
  
• Developers'
  
• Technology-wise

Yes, perspectives. It's not just about the keywords that you can see from the Web 2.0 cloud at Wikipedia. It's about how the pieces giving an impact to each of the aspects above.

I have tried to put it into words today, and I did, in one of my colleagues' blog comment I wrote this:

"Web 2.0 is the revolution of user experience, which a developer should always put in mind and into practice by using today's technology."

- yc

Best of Open Source in..

Bunch of open source products being selected by InfoWorld for the 2007 InfoWorld Bossie Awards.

• Mule is the top choice of ESB
• Hyperic is one of the selected monitoring tool
• Compiere is one of the CRM/ERP (well, I wasn't impressed by Compiere at all, 2 months ago I attended a talk about it)
• Apache OFBiz as another
• Asterisk beats everyone in VOIP solution
• Azureus Vuze as best streaming media
• Wireshark as best networking analysis tool
• OpenVPN as best SSL/VPN

There're more products, go read them up by youself. ;-)

- yc, 911?

A Micro-Softening Arvo - "Sembang"

Before I ran off for the "Sembang Tech.Ed" -- A sneak peak of the Microsoft Tech.Ed SEA 2007 organized by Microsoft in collaboration with Lensa Malaysia & Nuffnang Malaysia, I was having a chat with David:

(01:09:02 PM) yc - and skies..: I'm attending something M$
(01:09:09 PM) dchui: You're the dark side
(01:09:11 PM) dchui: Omg

Whether if I have turned to the dark side, that's not really important. If I'm to put a summary of this afternoon in one sentence, it would be:

"Microsoft builds software for the human beings."

The three-hour (which eventually went four) session demonstrated how nicely applications are packaged, how Web 2.0 is being implemented, and most importantly (at least, that I care of), the concern of usability/developablity for end-users, designers and application developers. An example regarding developability is, Silverlight applications can be developed using the Expression Studio and any development kits (which you should not expect designers to use) such as Visual Studio. It wasn't a concern of Macromedia (now Adobe) that the application developers struggled with Flash program until around these years that they come out with Flex. Of course, there're a lot of reasons behind such scenario, e.g. financial capability.

A brief run-down on what that had presented:

• Silverlight - Multimedia runtime for browser-based rich internet application. Microsoft seems very confident to compete with the dominating Flash. Also worth mentioning is the cool but very slow Sun's JavaFX.
  
  
• Popfly - Rich internet content (called the "mashup") creator. It has impressive visualization and can be easily integrated with your services such as Flickr, Facebook, etc. It comes with some cool geotagging feature too.
  
  I like this one.
  
  
• Home Server - A solution for homes to centralize computers and files. Great simplicity so that your parents know how to use it.
  
  
• Robotics Studio - Robot control and simulation tool so that your kids know how to make the legos move remotely. I'm definitely not a fan of robotics though, maybe you are, so digg or bury this -- Bill Gates' "A Robot in a Home".
  
  

I am one of the contributors to why the event ran out of time as I have been asking questions. Anyway, it was, of course, a great occasion to talk to people like Oliver, Chewy, Steven from Fortune Fountain, and some short chats with bloggers like June, Timothy, Jason, ES, Jeff, Nat, ..

P/S: Maybe you did not notice, there're some alphabets hanging on top of the ceiling of the stage, reads "Sinfully Yours". I'm sure Microsoft haters love this.

- yc, micro-softened