Alas, a blog! Live life, like you give a damn!

Kudos to Tridge in working to remove another of the MS alleged patents that they claim is infriged upon by Linux. The rubbish that M$ claimed against Tom Tom was settled out of court so we will not really know the truth. Regardless of that, I applaud all moves to remove any possible "software patent" that can still be FUDed by MS.

It is ever so nice to have a good belly laugh and all thanks to @osrin who tweeted that he thought that "Chrome OS and Android have different missions didn't http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/10/android-will-live-on-get-%E2%80%9Csweeter%E2%80%9D-and-more-social/?mod=rss_WSJBlog we try this with NT and 98?". I could not help but laugh out really loud! It has been a while since I had such an ROTFLMAO from a MS-person's comment (the last time was when Ballmer said that there are patent infringements in Linux!) Thanks, @osrin!

I am really happy to note that my good buddy will become a Nominated Member of Parliament. The only link I can point to at 1100 hrs UTC July 6th is the Kum Hong. The government press and media don't have anything on their sites. I really wonder why.

So, with Viswa, I now have a total of three classmates in the Singapore parliament. The other two are full ministers. Well done, Raffles Institution class of 1975 (secondary four).

For the record, I did apply to be considered as an NMP, but I was never called up for an interview. A tinge of regret, but then, so be it.

Simply a great story reaffirming how the failure of technical leadership and fundamental understanding about the need to have a robust underlying technical architecture for something as fundamental stock trading. Compare that fiasco with how the New York Stock Exchange sustains it's leadership so much so, that the CIO himself is willing and able to go on camera to attest to the robustness of Linux and related technologies. Years ago, it used to be said that "no one get's fired for buying IBM" and then some tried to replace IBM with Microsoft. Big FAIL.

I am hoping that the decision makers who awarded the Standard Operating Environment of the Singapore government are reading this blog and following those links. I suspect that they are not for they are so blinded and entrenched in a MS worldview. I continue to hear of major defects in the project, massive cost overruns ("oh, that part is not budgetted for.") and general annoyance at the end user level. Try talking to anyone about the progress of SOE and all you get are snarls and a string of explitives. Wonderful. Almost a billion dollars plunked down for questionable and low quality proprietary software. No empowering of the local economy to help with the system. Wasted tax dollars. #fb

It is heartening to read that the NZ government's negotiations with MS for NZgovt to fork out more money to MS for a licencing deal has failed spectacularly. I was hoping that something like that would also be a outcome of the, now faltering, SOE (Standard Operating Environment) project in Singapore. Well, who am I kidding? Portions of my tax dollars will go to Microsoft anyway because of how MS has cleverly structured the deal (or so I am told by sources). Even if MS is thrown out of the Singapore SOE, they will still get monies. Hmm. We need a FOIA/RTIA system here to find out exactly what sweetheart deal was cut. Obviously the sweetheart deal model did not work in NZ! Someone's KPI is not going to be met! #fb

For every attempt at doing the right thing, there will be the MS Mafia who will go in to reverse any attempts at implementing open standards and open source. Let's see how long they will take to turn the cart over. Today is May 25, 2009. #fb

Am intrigued about the proposals that are to be put forward by the establishment about some changes in how politics and government functions in Singapore. I think Chok Tong is clever in putting the "hints" out, but I think there are bigger issues behind the idea. I think it is crucial that there be consultation and review and if needed, a referendum, to ascertain if whatever proposal makes sense.

We have to do a few things off the bat.

a) Remove the whole idea of walkovers. It is an abomination of democracy. Even if there is only one person or a team (for the Group Representative Constituency or, more accurately, GeRrymandered Constitutuencies) or for the presendential elections, that person/team must garner at a minimu 30% of valid votes in favour. No vote, no seat. Plain and simple.

b) An independent Elections Commission. No more "Elections Department reporting to the Prime Minister's Office".

These two, or at least a) above, will go a long way in bringing this country to the heights of greatness it is capable of. #fb

What a great post by Jeremy !Of all people, he knows how to do interoperability right. He had to reverse engineer the SMB protocols so that Samba can work. If interoperability against a black box is to be measured, Samba would get the top prize. No specs, badly written documents etc etc is what the Samba team had to content with. And yet, when the ODF 1.1 is released, MS goes out saying that "oh, there is no way to save spreadsheet formulas because ODF 1.1 does not say how" so we just did it our way. That is going by the letter of the law (standard) and not the spirit. I like Jeremy's analogy about working to rule - that is exactly MS is doing with their honest-to-the-letter ODF implementation. #fb

Looks like Wolfram Alpha might be an interesting "new" idea. It does challenge one's tried and familiar way of how to ask a question. I think there is value, but I am sure there will be nay sayers. Looking forward to see how school kids use this to answer their homework questions! #fb

While I would be kinder to the MDA, I think this article is quite telling. The two agencies (EDB and the MDA), have in their ranks people who are smart, but not street smart. It is a pity. There are good things these two agencies can do (and have done) but as the organizations mature, there is a significant amount of complacency that creeps in. #fb

Looking at the charts, it sorta confirms what I have always felt - that traditional TV and traditional newspapers are quite passe. In 2006, I posed a question to a group of university students (about 70 of them) as how they get information. When asked about if they watch TV news, no one raised their hands. Reading the traditional morning papers - one hand. So, how do you get information/news? Websites, blogs, friends. The new media - however you define it - is what is driving the students' information acquisition. Perhaps I should ask the same questions to a bunch of students this year and get a sense of how accurate the charts are. #fb

I've always thought that Sony Corporation was a business that was both innovative and cool. But to hear their CEO thinks that he "doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet" is amazing. It is 2009, even for Sony. This is no different from the way Microsoft continues to ignore the value of open source and competing on fair terms rather than to continue with their (MS') convicted monopoly business model. It is failed leadership on the part of both Sony's Howard Stringer and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. #fb

Rather bleak report about the thinning of coders globally. This will have a huge impact on how software gets written and shared.

It is therefore, timely that the ITSC has been running a programming contest since 2007. The 2009 code::XtremeApps:: contest hopefully to stem this decline marginally. If you don't cut code, how would you understand what goes on inside a piece of software to help make it better? Yes, there is a class of people who are good testers - without writing code - but ultimately, it is the coders who make the whole thing tick. It is like saying "oh, the blub in the lamp has fused. I have to call in an electrician to fix it."

I am excited that we are running the 24-hr contest using Andriod and Python as the platforms for the open category and for the under-12-years-of-age, Squeak. Quick. Sign up. Closing date is May 25th - in 12 days. #fb

By the looks of it, I cannot but feel that MS has found a way to fork the ODF 1.1 to suite their world view of having their product as the only one out there. I have to agree with IBM's Rob Weir in this post.

I was really tickled to read a tweet from someone in the Seattle area who wanted to run some new fangled (but time-bombed though) MS operating system on his new machine. Apparently he "could not find an anti-virus product" for that new fangled operating system. My question really is, why is it that in the year 2009, Microsoft cannot make operating systems that do not ever need anti-virus software? It cannot build any operating system that is safe and virus-proof?

I know of many individual engineers in Microsoft and I know that they are competent and intelligent. Their respective intelligence and diligence I think does not hold out to the collective intellectual failure of management and product marketing in that organization which leads them to constantly put out operating systems that are so far below par, that it continues to be a running industry joke - even after almost 19 years after win3.0 was released. #fb

I applaud Distesh for his post. It is a well known tactic of Microsoft to go about saying that they are supporting Standard X or Prototol Y, when in reality, it is support in a cursory form only. When they said some years ago that they are using Keberos, they did support some and then added proprietary extensions. A few years before, Microsoft tried to fork Java while it was licensed from Sun only to be sued and to pay up $20million to Sun.

They never learn. Or rather, they cannot learn. They are bound to repeat the same behaviour, over and over again.

We all know that the Open Document Format version 1.1 definition is deficient in how formulae are stored in spreadsheets. And yet, there is already an implementation, all open sourced, in OpenOffice.org to exactly that. So, when MS releases an update to their office suite, they totally mess up how spreadsheets with formula are stored. It cannot be that they did not HOW some else would have worked around that deficiency in the standard, but they, in their arrogance, choose not to.

Why you ask? What will happen now is that there will be many people who use the MS office products and choose to save the documents in ODF format who are going to have documents that FAIL. These same documents (spreadsheets) will not work correctly when read into OpenOffice.org.

And guess what Microsoft will then say: "ODF is no good. Save in OOXML. See we told you." And there will be people who thought they were finally able to have true transferability of ODF across products, now having to think twice.

It reminds me of how years ago when MS released their Office 95 tool and then subsequently their Office 97 tool. A document that was created and saved in Office 97 as a .doc, CANNOT be read by Office 95. Why? Simple.

Boss: Why can't I read this .doc file?
Secretary: I think we are running Office 95 that's why. We have to upgrade to 97. I am raising the PO.

Product Marketing decided to make the format different enough to force the unknowing to upgrade. They milked their customers, yet again.

They are doing it again in 2009. Do not trust Microsoft. I know they want to win customers and win the confidence of customers, but so long as they cannot play ball, stop buying any Microsoft products.

This is not the first time that Redmond company has seen it fit to take a well-worn and engineered solution running on Linux (or even FreeBSD) and put their OS on it. I recall a company here in Singapore called earth9 which was a Linux business from the beginning and when they had a call from MS Singapore to do some work, MS Singapore wanted them to switch out of Linux to their OS and be a case study. That was I believe in 2002 or so. 7 year on, that still continues.

Today we have OpenOffice.org 3.1 gets released. In the meantime, the proprietary product from Redmond claims to be able to wirte ODF format, but fails. Pity. Money corrupts, but MS Tax Dollars corrupts absolutely.

Here are some fun memes from the EGM of AWARE that happened on Saturday, May 2, 2009.

a) "Shut Up and Sit Down" - a statement made by one of the executive committee members when a member was speaking from the floor. Nothing to do with Sit Down, Shut Up though :-).
b) "I'm on Page 73" - a statement made by a self-declared-appointed Feminist Mentor, Dr Thio, who said that a reference was made about her in a 2007 AWARE publication. It appears that she is trying to draw some credibility because she was mentioned in a AWARE publication.
c) 1,441 the number of votes in favour of ousting the executive committe. 761 was against the ouster.

Two terms that I did not need to know about: Steeplejacking, and http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/21/171257/854>Joel's Army. I guess it is important to know about these and to keep a watch out.

It was really endearing to watch the tweets that were being generated under the #awaresg tag regarding the extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the Singapore-based women's NGO, AWARE.

The issues behind the calling for the EGM were very simple: the executive committee that was elected in at AWARE's April 2009 Annual General Meeting (AGM), was seen to be pushing a religiously tainted agenda. Whatever the truth, enough people were upset in the way the AGM was done and how long term members were ousted.

After a long (multi-hour) EGM on May 2nd at Suntec City, the tainted executive committee was voted out after a motion of no-confidence was passed with over 65% in favour to rid of that exco.

I am not a member, but a supporter from the sidelines. I was really pleased to see that enough people (members) attended the EGM and were tweeting. At one time, the tag, #awaresg, was trending as #1 hashtag! For all the global participation of Twitter is, a small nation of determined people can have an issue that they are passionate about to trend to #1. Wow.