When the web evolved to become web 2.0, I started to love the idea that websites can be so dynamic and become more like a desktop application. AJAX based websites and templates came out like mushrooms and more and more websites are developed with API access to interact with other websites or web apps. Phones were able to keep getting updates from the internet and social websites are becoming more then just a circle of friends sharing files.

But what happened now? Instead of many websites with very unique style and functionality, almost everything around the net nowadays are somehow related to Facebook, Twitter and Google.

I love it because it has grown into such as powerful medium of information and communication. I hate it because choice is so lacking lately.

Since Maybank2u is having a contest to give away a HTC Desire for every 1000th transaction user on m2u Mobile, Celcom, Digi and Maxis has offered free internet access to Maybank2u Mobile for 3 months. Each of the telco will have different dates for the free rate.

Just be sure no one’s peeking when you do online banking and always remember to log out.

For more information, browse to:
http://www.maybank2u.com.my/mbb_info/m2u/public/promoDetail.do?channelId=PRO-Promotions&cntTypeId=1&cntKey=PRO01.14&programId=PRO01-Accounts&chCatId=/mbb/Personal/PRO-Promotions

There’s a big problem with my blog which makes it unable to grow into a bigger, better blog. It’s a personal blog, and personally, I’m not a very exiting person. I don’t have nice stories to tell, nor do I travel or eat a lot. I basically do the same things daily, eat the same things daily, get into the same argument daily and blog about the same things daily.

I’ve always wanted to create another blog either related to technology, food or traveling, but I can’t. I do not have the resources nor the budget to even do it.

I did try to get into a local project before which failed miserably. The “last man standing” on that project has taken over the entire project and turned the website into a photography blog. It was kind of good and I was happy for him since I thought him how to use WordPress. But it seems that he has become inactive as well… That blog’s domain is going to expire soon. Will my old partners update it? I wonder.

Petalingstreet.org, officially called Project Petaling Street (PPS) was a blog aggregator where bloggers can “ping” their latest blog posts to petalingstreet.org and get their post listed in the site. It worked very well for both bloggers and readers. Readers will always find new things to read almost every few minutes and bloggers get lots of traffic from PPS. I won’t deny it, I used to get up to a few hundred hits from PPS even when I post something lame.

However, the good times didn’t last. The website was bought over by MenJ and he turned petalingstreet.org into an advertisement paradise. Since then, most bloggers’ posts were monitored and censored and almost every bloggers were upset by his extremist attitude. There were movement to ban the usage of PPS and that was about the time I stopped visiting PPS as well. I didn’t really care if they banned my posts there or not as I had an automated ping plugin which helped me to post all my latest posts to PPS at that time.

Today, as I was running out of things to read, I paid a visit to PPS just to see how it has become lately. I was surprised to see this:

I guess it was to happen sooner or later since no one will support any party who suppress freedom of speech.

Well, I guess that idiot kinda figured out that just buying a high traffic site and posting ads all over the site doesn’t really help you to make money.

Anyway, I guess Ah Mike beat me to it posting about this.

Looking at how web applications are developing (thanks for HTML 5 and Google), it seems that web API are getting more and more common and even some newer web applications (or even desktop applications such as widgets) can be completely built on those APIs alone.

How’s this development going to impact the total performance and efficiency of the entire IT industry?

One thing that comes to my mind is dependency. If the main service were to have any downtime at all, all the services and websites using the API will experience downtime as well. Although Google seems to have shown extremely great uptime performance so far, we may never know.

By the way, just imagine this like a science fiction movie. An alien explorer has landed on a planet which was just recently destroyed by some war or disaster. All the computers in that planet uses cloud computing. So there’s no way to extract data from any computers which the explorer comes across even though there’s computers everywhere!

How’s cloud service going to overcome this problem?

Many of my relatives and friends has been asking me about the iPhone’s price and features since it’s availability in Malaysia. Many has bought the iPhone the instant it hit our shores.

To be fair, it isn’t a bad phone at all. There’s lots of cool innovations involved in the phone and very planned out way for the user to have a good experience with the phone.

However, ever wondered why Apple has been standing on top of the sales charts for the 2 years and why no company has come out with phones as good as iPhone yet? It sure isn’t because there isn’t any better programmers or engineers out there compared to Apple. But it’s because of patents. (You can check out the list here). Just look at Patent No. 7,657,849, “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image”. Yes, they can sue you if your design use any part of your touch screen to unlock your phone, forcing you to use other method, usually a switch.

Almost anything good or creative has been patented by Apple or can be argued as an Apple’s patent. Which seriously handicapped the wold of technology and give our mobile development a big speed bump. Just look at how little the smartphone has improved over these years since iPhone came out. Almost all phones are the same.

If you want to do something creative using multi-touch, do it on the iPhone and not any other phones! Any good new battery savings ideas are patented by Apple!

So no, Apple isn’t on top of the list because they are just too good. They are on top because they monopolized the market with patents.

It just doesn’t make any moral sense in what Steve Jobs Said about Adobe since they are doing just the same thing in a different form.

Now, if you’re one of the users who keeps on drooling over Apple products, you’re contributing to the slowdown of technological development. It’s a crime in my books since you’re giving Apple the money to tell us things we can not do in future.

Google has challenged the market with its Android OS which keeps on adding cool features with every update. It’s also open source and free for the phone manufacturer to use. Now that’ll help contribute to the technological world. Just take a look at the web now since Google started developing tools such as Chrome, Gmail, Calendar and Google Apps. All free, all ideas which are not patented, and all ready for more upgrades. It has strongly brought out the development of HTML 5 today.

Man in high-heel attack a top property agent

That’s what the headlines says in The Star online today. I would have though that a man wearing high heels was attacking a property agent, until I re-read the article.

Funny that just below that article, they reported about Miss Singapore’s bad command of English.

It doesn’t mean that you’re safe.

Being online is just like driving a car. It doesn’t mean that being inside the car won’t get you into a serious injury if you drive racklessly. When you’re surfing a website, you leave detailed information about your computer and your history. Computer viruses also plays a role in stealing your information and sending them to strangers.

Also, just because you think you’re using emails and don’t install anything you got from your email, it doens’t mean that you’re safe. sometimes, if you have stupid friends who would simply forward any emails with your email address in them, be prepared for SPAM… Lots of spams.

I don’t get it why some people are so careless when it comes to downloading files from the internet. Just because Torrents are easy to download nowadays doesn’t mean you can just simply pick a file and download. Ever heard of people being sued and sent to jail?

Sigh…

I still think nerds rule sometimes…

If you have used a public computer to surf the net and check your emails before, you might probably have forgotten to sign out of your email account before you left the computer for another stranger to use. That stranger can access your emails, change your settings, send emails from your account and even obtain sensitive information of you or your contacts. Just as easy as how I accessed someone’s email.

So, how can you make sure your Gmail accounts are secure and not accessed by others while you’re at home?

Checkout the screenshot above. Gmail has a section at the bottom to show your account activity. Let’s say if you have not touched your Gmail for more then 8 hours but the information shows that it has been accessed just 3 hours ago, then you know that someone has just accessed your emails! Either that, or you need some vitamins to boosts your memory.

What can you do about it? You certainly do not want to drive all the way back to the Internet cafe to whack the person using your account and just to sign off from there. You certainly also wouldn’t want to wait until that computer’s log-in session is over (Waiting for it to log out itself). You are most certainly unable to do it in time before that stranger is able to compose a new email titled “all your email are belong to us”.

All you have to do is to click on the details link and be presented with this screen.

Then, click on the “Sign out all other sessions” button to make the computer you’re currently using the only one signed in. Which means, you’ll be sure you’re the only one with access to your own emails!

Google will remind you that anyone with your password can still sign into your account and will ask if you want to change your password. It’s a good practice to have a complex but easy to remember password. That makes it harder for some software to decrypt your password or for others to guess your password just by viewing at your keyboard while you’re typing.

Try a combination of alphabets and numbers including at least a symbol and make use of the shift or caps lock.

The safer way to surf using a public computer is still to always clean all the browser’s cache and cookies after using it. Or the safest way is not to use a public computer at all as you might not know if there’s a keylogger (which can record all your computer actions) infecting that computer.

Are you an iGoogle user? Do you use the weather gadget in your iGoogle? Do you find it hard or strange that the town/state which you selected isn’t really correct?

I’m staying in one of the area affected by this bug and this bug hadn’t been fixed for months. Perhaps no one have actually reported it or Google just didn’t seem to care.

However, there’s an alternative way to add your own state’s weather report  into your iGoogle.

Go to your normal google.com search page and type “weather: [your town]” without quotes and replace [your town] with the place you’re staying.

Then, you’ll be presented with the weather forecast and an option to add it into your iGoogle.

Tada! Now you can plan your picnic ahead of time!