Archive for April 2009

I’m going to Barcamp Bangkok 3!

I’m going to Barcamp Bangkok 3. Its happening May 23-24, 2009, and I’ll be in Bangkok, Thailand from May 22 right till May 25.

I know @cerventus, and @nazroll will be there. @preetamrai from Singapore will be there too (blog) Will you be?

Wanted: nice, clean, cheap hotel, nearby to Sripatum University. Failing which, it should be a cheap tuk tuk ride away. WiFi in-room, is a requirement too. Thanks :)
[I’ve seen a list of hotels but I’m curious to know where most of the campers are staying?]

Filing taxes online in Malaysia

Executive summary: If you make a mistake in your e-filing for taxes, you have to print out the tax form, submit supporting documents, write a cover letter, and send it over to the tax office, anytime after the tax madness of pre-April 30, is over. Read on, for the tale.

So, if you’ve been following my tweets, you know I’ve been a little under the weather lately. Plus I just flew back from San Francisco. No, I do not have swine flu, its just sinuses acting up. Nonetheless, the government of Malaysia’s, Inland Revenue Board (LHDN/Hasil/tax office) doesn’t believe in excuses, and had set an April 30 deadline (showing them my passport, I doubt would have been any help).

Much like Suanie, this is my first year of filing taxes. I thought I’ll try the e-Hasil method, which is basically e-filing, right in your web browser.

First up, the system is available in English. OK, the content is mostly available in English (its filled with Bahasa Malaysia at the top, with the English text, in small print), and the buttons are all in Bahasa Malaysia, but you can guess what needs to be done.

Getting my e-filing PIN was easy. I just went to a very crowded LHDN office, and asked the nice lady over the counter. I’m surprised she engaged with me, entirely in English, without any complaint. I got my Tax ID, my e-filing PIN number, and some instructions.

Upon going home, I attempted to get it all working. Its pretty easy, if you can get connected to the site (I ended up tunnelling my traffic – and Gareth warns that the servers do crash). It really did take less than 15 minutes. I just input my salary, how much I could deduct (charity, books, and medication for parents — who knew sporting equipment counted too? Time to buy some this year.)

And then, the next day, I realise I had made a boo boo. I had not input the maximum deduction for EPF. Why? Because the software didn’t translate it properly, and it did only say “KWSP”, not “EPF”. So there’s a RM6,000 deduction, making my taxes not seem in order (in a way that benefits me, might I add — this should add to my refund).

The site, is all written in ASP. There definitely are some checks, via JavaScript in some fields. It works fine using Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (I got to test it all — my parents too, decided to go the e-filing route this year).

Now, noting that there is already some JavaScript, why not, at the field which asks you about EPF (or KWSP as they put it), there be an alert? After all, if you’re paying taxes, you’re definitely paying for contributions to your retirement, to the EPF/KWSP.

To make matters worse, once you’ve submitted the form online, and “signed” it, you can’t amend it. I called up the Shah Alam office (because all other numbers went to hell), at 03-55103202, to ask for help. I must shout out to Twitter user, @derekw who had already emailed the tax office before with regards to a similar question. His email to me, was really useful.

I got transferred three times before I got to someone that spoke English to me. His instructions were simple: write a cover letter, state your case, attach the print out of the tax return, plus attach the document(s) required to support your claim. In my case, the nice bloke told me to just write the cover letter, and attach my EA form, which comes from my employer. And he said, don’t bother doing it now, just do it anytime next week (or later, even), since the offices are all too crowded now.

So, that’s been my tax tale. How can all this be improved? What’s good, what’s bad?

  • Good: it works with Firefox. It also seems to be cross-platform. It could be worse — like some Windows based software, that will make you vomit
  • Bad: its written in ASP, and uses Microsoft technology (Windows 2000, IIS 5). Spending money of the rakyat should be wiser, and using proprietary software, is bad.
  • Bad: servers need to scale. Failing, or being slow, under traffic, is just unacceptable. You don’t need “extra” machines, so maybe some form of scale-to-cloud, during peak season.
  • Bad: there are some checks now, with JavaScript, but there should be more checks on mandatory things (case in point, my EPF problem)
  • Good: Its bi-lingual.
  • Bad: the English interface needs improvement. Buttons need to be translated properly
  • Bad: editing your tax returns, should be available, till the deadline, in the respective year
  • Good: PDF’s are generated of your receipt, as well as your tax form

Again, thanks to the Twitterverse being helpful: @ShaolinTiger, @derekw, @kamal, and @mikefoong. In other news, I can heartily recommend you read: Why should we pay income tax to the BN? and the running commentary there, as well as on Suanie’s post.

Review: The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

I’ve had the pleasure of using as my second phone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, for the last month or so. Let’s take this mostly step-by-step, and this should generally be pretty darn lengthy. If you’re interested, check out the tech specs, and this is broken up into: The phone, the screen, the camera, connectivity, music, video and other multimedia bits (I can highly recommend reading this part), software, conclusion and other thoughts. And I’m told that I shouldn’t compare this with the iPhone, but its hard not to.

The phone

The phone is plastic-based, so if you’re used to the E-series devices (like the E71, E61i, etc), its not quite metal on the back. The back of the phone, is actually similar in feeling to the N73. So it does seem a little flimsy — but you won’t be opening the back cover unless you want to change batteries or remove the SIM card. No one changes batteries any longer (I remember a time when we used to have at least two batteries :)), and SIM card changes tend to be very rare, so I guess this isn’t really a large problem. The battery life seems to be pretty useful – a good day is not a problem, even with music playback.

Nokia 5800 XPM (side view, left)The first snag I found with this phone was related to the SIM card. Typically one inserts the SIM card, and then inserts the battery. Once you open it, you’ll realise that the SIM card fits in by the side, and you’ve got to make use of the stylus to push it out, if need be. This design seemed unintuitive, and took a bit of time to get used to. If I were a first time user, it would have been OK — I’d have followed the instructions at the back of the cover. However, I’ve been using Nokia phones for over twelve years, so, I found it unintuitive.

The introduction of a “Keyguard switch” is pretty cool. Locking and unlocking the phone, is now dead easy – there’s a button, just swipe it down, on the right hand side of the phone, and its either locked or unlocked. One button phone locks/unlocks are way better! This is a marked improvement.Nokia 5800 XPM (side view, right)

It comes standard with an 8GB microSD card! That’s a ridiculous amount of data, for a tiny phone. They should have clearly built a USB dongle (there is a micro-USB port, but you still need a cable), which pops out, and allows you to use it as a thumb drive. One device less, for data-on-the-go, makes so much sense, no? Video cameras are doing it (Flipcam, Kodak’s Zi6, Creative Vado’s), why not mobile phones?

Top of Nokia 5800 XPM Oh, while the power button has always been at the top of the phone, why is the charger also located at the top?!? In fact, the micro-USB port, as well as the AV connector, is located at the top — I’d have preferred this to be at the bottom of the phone, which seems to be a lot more standard.

The software is that of the Series 60, 5th Edition. Lots of changes, have come, but keep this in mind, when you’re downloading third-party software applications. Not everything is compatible…

The screen

This is pretty cool. Its a 3.2″ widescreen display, and when its held horizontally, you’re seeing 640×360 pixels. This is a 16:9 ratio, and the colours are just amazing. Don’t forget that it comes with an orientation sensor, so the display changes as and when you turn it around (very similar to the iPhone).

Nokia 5800 XPM (front)Its a touch screen, and you’re expected to be able to use it with one hand, and you can use your fingers. However, its not so fancy — once you’ve used the iPod Touch or the iPhone, you’ll slowly realise that the touch screen isn’t all that.

Why? The touch screen is resistive, not capacitive, which means that a “click” is only registered when two thin layers of the screen get pushed together under the pressure from my finger (or stylus). AFAIK, the iPhone uses something called “projected capacitive” screens, and you don’t need actual contact (and it works well for multi-touch).

The phone comes with a stylus (reminds me of the days when I was still using Palm handhelds), and I’ve never actually used a phone with one. You’ll be using the stylus a lot — I found that my fingers didn’t really work well with the screen. It turns out there’s a reason for the stylus — Chinese input. I never thought about this, because all I seem to care about is the input of the English language, but it does make a lot of sense.

Because its a touch screen based interface, the interface differs from other Nokia’s. But its not that much different, and its easy to get worked around. Note that you’ll be dialling on the screen, you’ll be “typing” on the screen (the stylus comes in real handy here), and if you’ve used a phone with a keyboard, you’ll miss that. But if you’re a first time user, or in the target market, you’ll be fine.

The camera

A 3.2 megapixel camera, churning out images at 2048×1536 pixels, which also comes with an LED flash light. How are the pictures? Comparable to the E71, but not as good as the Nokia N96. Simply put, its tolerable — I’d use it, but it won’t be replacing my camera, anytime soon. Its got good pocket camera qualities, if you decide to carry one device less.

You can also record video – 640×480 pixels, 30fps, so its good enough for TV playback (take that you iPhone users!). The more memory you have, the better, clearly, but with a whopping 8GB, you should be fine. It also comes with a camera in front for video calls, so will really benefit from being on a 3G network (currently, that’s just Maxis and Celcom that support it). I only mention this, because modern phones like the iPhone, also don’t come with video calling features just yet — so you don’t even need the 3G network in theory, EDGE is fine.

I tried streaming with it, to Qik. It looks OK (I couldn’t notice any difference with my E71). I was hoping to see this in the “Download!” folder itself, but I never saw that. In fact, seeing some applications selling for “MYR 5”, sounds like it costs RM5/application.

Connectivity

The phone comes with Bluetooth and WiFi. It works out of the box, as expected. It wasn’t obvious that it had WiFi though — had to go poking through Settings (OK, it would come up, if you searched for it, via anything that required Internet access).

*#2820# doesn’t work, to tell me the Bluetooth MAC address. Weird? With regards to WiFi, the standard *#62209526# works, and this will give you the MAC address of the WiFi adapter, so that you can filter it at your router, if required.

There is an A-GPS, so you’ll need some form of network connectivity. It comes with Nokia Maps, something I’d rather not pay for or use — go get Google Maps, its free *grin*.

Music, video, and other multimedia bits

I think this is where the phone shines. Its multimedia abilities. My interest with this phone was piqued when I read about comes with music. I had wondered about this, earlier this year, and found out that you still didn’t quite get “comes with music” here in Malaysia, despite the fact that you get 1,000 DRM-free, free of cost songs with this phone.

bimbit However, its provided via a service called bimbit. bimbit is kind of interesting — its like the iTunes Music Store for Malaysia. Its not well publicised, but it does come with either MP3 access or WMA access. They work on a points based system, and to get a song from a popular artiste (say, Jason Mraz), you’ll be paying about “38 points”, per song. 12 points work out to be RM1, so every song really costs a little over RM3.

They have subscription plans, in where you pay RM360 to get 12 months worth of music (4,600 points, not unlimited), and you an also buy reloads, at various different values, but the bottom line is that Nokia Malaysia, is paying bimbit over RM2,900+ of value, everytime they sell one Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. No one is in the charity business, so I wonder what kind of deal Nokia and bimbit have struck.

<aside>If you’re using bimbit, might I caution you that you better back your multimedia up. They don’t endeavour to give you your download back again, so if you change device, keep copies around. In fact, keep copies around elsewhere, so if you’re on a Mac, back it up with Time Machine. Put it in the cloud. Whatever. </aside>

The built-in speaker is nifty – stereo speakers with surround sound, and the quality of the music coming out of it, is simply amazing. I don’t need my headset to listen to music, so I can literally broadcast music from the speakers (and be really annoying, if I were waiting where there were lots of other people around me). What however did annoy me, is the fact that if you wanted to use the radio application, you needed the headset — music player doesn’t require it, but the radio does? Looks like a software error.

Nokia 5800 XPM (Why so serious?)Video playback is gorgeous. While the screen isn’t as big as what you’d see on an iPod Touch/iPhone, it certainly does provide enough clarity. The video that I recorded off the camera, isn’t as clear as you’d expect (but that’s a question of quality of the source), but if you load up something from bimbit or elsewhere (wherever you get your music videos from :-)), you’ll notice that its crisp, and clear. Millions of colours are being displayed, and the clarity, and contrast, is just amazing.

Software

SIP (for VoIP calls) isn’t built-in. I found this to be lacking, since most of the E-series devices come with this functionality. You can get it via installing third-party software, but, a built-in client would have rocked.

Bounce is a game that makes use of the touchscreen. Kind of useful. Its been a while since I’ve played with games on a mobile device — the last time I was excited by a game on a phone, it was the infamous Snake, and it was made more fun, when you could play with another player, via IR :)

There’s also some cool software, like Touch Guitar, Touch Piano, Touch Card Match, and the Talking Dictionary, which you can install for this phone. The S60blog has relevant links to all this software.

Conclusion and other thoughts

I should probably cover what else is in the box. It comes with a nice mini-CD (not full sized, which is cool, but doesn’t work on slot-loading drives, which is what you mostly get today), the headset, with an additional bit to get the music controls, a USB cable, a case, a spare stylus, AV cables, manuals, and the bimbit card to give you 1,000 free songs. There’s also a charger (which I didn’t use) — its one of the modern, smaller ones for Nokia phones (gone are the days where the charger used to be larger ;)).

Would I buy this phone? It doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard, which I’ve got used to, for the last few generations of mobile phones that I’ve owned. It does break some design boundaries that Nokia phones traditionally had. It does come with 1,000 free songs, that I can download and carry on any device, I like. It does come with a huge amount of memory. It makes me wonder how cheap the phone actually is, to make!

So back to the question. Would I buy it? Not as a main phone, because of the lack of a keyboard (my use case suggests lots of email on the go, lots of typing up notes, and lots of surfing the Internet and heavy input into things like Twitter, and so on). Would I buy it for my seventeen year old cousin? Yes. Would I recommend it to my twenty one year old cousin? Definitely. Would I recommend it to my mom? Definitely, she could use a new device, to replace her ageing Series 40-based Nokia. I think, I could safely recommend this phone to anyone who’s not been infected with Blackberry-itis.

Gets a good 8/10, in my book.
(and boy, can’t I wait to see what else Nokia is bringing out — lots of cool stuff, look at the Nokie E75, N97, and more, all coming soon, all looking rocking.)

Disclosure: All this thanks to David Lian, from Text100 (they get it – nobody should be reviewing a device, just by looking at it — a good review happens after using it, on a daily basis, for some period of time — only then do you get the quirks, et al). I write this, as its almost time to give back the review unit (I just kept it in a draft folder, adding in more text, over time, so I do hope its not too haphazard). I’ve had quite the experience using the phone.

Asus EeePC 1000HE, and The Windows Journey

I recently became the proud owner of an Asus EeePC 1000HE. It claims to boast a 9.5 hour battery life, comes with a 160GB hard disk, a 10″ screen, a modern keyboard that is about 92% full sized, as well as more sensible Shift key locations. Compared to the first generation EeePC 701 that I have, this is by far, a much better machine.

Incidentally, it also comes preloaded with Microsoft Windows XP Home. Part of me writing this, is to log the fact that I am going to try and use Microsoft Windows, and report back if its even usable. It turns out, that the battery life is supposed to be better when you’re using Windows, as opposed to switching to Linux. So let’s see how long this flirtation lasts, before I decide its time to install Linux.

The build quality seems to be quite high. Its black in colour, but the issue there is that it loves getting fingerprint smudges — so after a while, cosmetically, it looks rather dirty. It comes with an SD/MMC slot, which can be useful with consumer cameras and video cameras, though all the little video cameras I’ve been experimenting with come with a USB slot. It has 3 USB ports. Holding conversations with the built-in speaker and microphone, seem to work well too, so no complaints there. At some stage, maybe I should try recording a podcast “on the go”. The 1024×600 resolution is great — its hard to read and do anything with just 800×480.

Windows First Impressions

I’ve not used Windows on a desktop, since Windows 3.1. Nowadays, at most, I use it in a VM, because I need it for testing. But in these last few days, I’ve been occassionally using Windows, and its been an experience.

First up, I ran Windows Update. Then I installed the following:

  • Avast! – this is for anti-virus protection. I used to normally install AVG-Free on Windows machines that I came into contact with, but it seems that Avast! is all that and more. So far, it seems to be getting virus definition files updated almost daily.
  • Firefox, and the Flash Plugin – just because
  • Evernote
  • Google Chroome – not essential, but I’ve always wanted to give it a try, ever since it was announced.
  • PuTTY – its crucial for SSH access, which seems to at least give me a semblance of what I’m familiar with
  • Dropbox – now my files are synced across my Linux and Mac boxes
  • Notepad++ – On Linux, I use vim(1). On the Mac, I use TextMate. And on Windows, it seems like NotePad++ might be what I’m after. Is it? I’m unsure, but so far, I don’t mind it — it has text completion, it can be configured with plugins, I installed aspell so I can run a spell-check (how I wish it would show me an error while I type, as it does in TextMate).
  • 7-zip – In the old days, you might think of WinZip. Today, there’s 7-zip, and now I can access my .bz2 or .tar files. Its also opensource software, and I like this, naturally.

You know what I do miss? Keyboard shortcuts. I’m so used to hitting Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E, and Ctrl+K, in the command line, that I can’t seem to get the same responses in Windows. Ick.

What about remapping the Caps Lock key that I never use, to being another Control key? For that, I had to edit the registry! Seriously, what world do we live in?


REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

The PowerToys set of tools seem interesting. I installed the Virtual Desktop Manager, which makes Windows more usable – I can now have several workspaces, and move around by pressing the Windows key+1,2,3,4. This is like Spaces.app, and like virtual desktops that you see in GNOME.

I miss Quicksilver. Just hitting Ctrl+Space, and entering the name of an application makes so much sense — does this exist in Windows land?

I have no idea how to perform backups in Windows. What’s the Time Machine or rdiff-backup equivalent?

I find it funny that this little laptop has more disk space than my MacBook Air (which I paid a lot more for). It has a 1.6GHz Atom processor, and its mostly incapable of playing back HD video (stuff that comes out of my Kodak Zi6 for example). But for most purposes (browser, SSH, NotePad++, Evernote) it seems to be fine.

What about the battery life? So far I’ve noticed:

  • 5 hours 40 minutes with Skype video running
  • 7 hours 50 minutes with just a browser, NotePad++, SSH, Evernote, running

I think I can considerably improve the battery life if I disable Avast!. But should I? I mean, this is Windows, and I am deadly scared of catching a cold.

So there, I’ve been using Windows XP for about two weeks now. It worked wonderfully well while I was at the conference. The laptop is light. I can type on it easily. It seems to do everything I need it to do. I wish there was a real shell (PowerShell, people tell me to try — I will soon), but PuTTY puts me in control of other machines so I just get stuff done.

Would I recommend the Asus 1000HE? Yes, I would. Go forth and buy it!

Video: Interview with Marc Delisle, of the phpMyAdmin project

I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.



Video: Interview with Microsoft’s PHP Evangelist

I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.



I learned some new things:

  • Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
  • They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
  • They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
  • There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in dependencies that you need, to use popular open source software packages.
  • Drupal for example, is a featured application, for the PHP on IIS stack. If the software allows, it brings in SQL Server Express Edition; otherwise, it even brings in MySQL!

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