Colin Charles Agenda

I just stumbled upon nushackers (formerly linuxNUS). Here are a group of people from the National University of Singapore, who organise weekly talks (Friday Hacks), as well as workshops (hackerschool).

I’m totally inspired by what’s happening, it kind of reminds me of the CSSE Student Club I was a part of back at my alma mater. The extension to that was GAUNIX, in where we controlled a machine supported by the university and gave folk shell access.

Great things happen when hackers meet up with each other. And here I’m referring to the hackers, not just the idea folk/business people. Just people playing around with new things, tinkering, sharing about new technology, building stuff. 

There used to be MyOSS meetups in Malaysia. Now there is WebCampKL, but this is a meld of people who are not exactly hackers.

I reckon this is what’s missing in the Malaysian space – it needs to be fixed. 

Today instead of stepping into the Apple Store on Stockton St, I decided to walk past it and head to look for the Microsoft Store. It is inside the Westfield San Francisco mall. There are plenty of signs to tell you its next to Bloomingdales on the 2nd floor. 

I finally reach the store and its bright. There’s lots of light to ensure that the place is bright. It reminds me very much of an Apple Store – the clothing worn by staff look like I stepped into an Apple Store. The layout is very similar as well.

Staff are aplenty. They are very eager to help you. People are also aplenty. Yes — many people are interested in getting their hands on devices.

I played with a Surface RT with Windows. My pod had a Touch Cover. I tried typing coherently but it seems that every substantial sentence had about one or two errors. Considering the Type Cover isn’t far off in terms of price, I don’t know who will buy the Touch Cover. It takes a little while to get used to the Metro interface, but for some reason, you get a stock Windows look & feel when its time to launch applications like Word. Hmm. This isn’t a tablet. This isn’t a laptop. It’s some kind of hybrid. I’m not so sure, considering I’ve been using “modern” tablets since the iPad first came out.

Then I moved over to a laptop. This was one made by Asus. I saw a stylus next to it, so I tried touching the screen. A kind store employee told me that this particular laptop/tablet hybrid was weird, and closed the lid, only to reveal the tablet at the back of the regular screen. That was touch screen and you could use the stylus or your finger. What an odd hybrid!

I went back to the Surface RT with Windows to see the store employee demoing it to two people. When asked what they used at home, they said they had a MacBook Pro. Oops. The employee could have done a better job at understanding what the Finder, etc. was all about, but he had no clue about the Mac. Which makes it really hard to sell to switchers, especially if you’re selling the Surface RT with Windows as a laptop replacement! During the demo, he tried to show how cool the augmented reality maps were to work, but when he started moving it around and turning, the display didn’t turn, so the demo failed. Poor chap.

There were many devices and so many devices that are iMac lookalikes. I am impressed by all the makers of devices. There are other things for sale, like accessories. A small corner for Nokia exists too – to showcase their phones.

I saw many people checking their emails, doing things that they would do at a cybercafe. I wonder if they were treating it like a cybercafe?

A few takeaways:

1. Real estate matters. Location, location, location. Apple is at street level. The Microsoft Store needs to tell you how to find it (inside Westfield, next to Bloomingdales on the 2nd floor).
2. Teach the staff what the Mac is all about. It will help sell to switchers.
3. Make sure canned demos exist. There’s nothing like a failing demo when you try to sell something.
4. I didn’t check to see if there’s free WiFi in the store, but if there isn’t, make sure its like the Apple Store – this is one reliable thing you can find in any Apple store.

The year 1995 was when I got my first laptop. It was made by Acer, came with a whopping 8MB of RAM (yes, megabyte, not gigabyte), and a 400MB hard disk (read more at an interview conducted in 2004). It shipped with Windows 3.1, but I shortly moved over to Linux when Windows 95 was announced – the laptop just didn’t cut it for the requirements of Windows 95.

The laptop cost an arm and a leg for those features. With PCMCIA cards, external CDROM drive, SCSI scanner, etc. I’m sure the total cost of ownership exceeded RM10,000. I was eleven years old then, but had been computing for over six years already (386 SX2, 286, 8086 – all desktops). I had really supportive parents, so I will always be thankful to them.

Fast-forward almost two decades later and a laptop for a student is used as an election promise for victory! Many view this offer suspiciously. Some wonder if it will cost the government RM40,000 per laptop (has happened before). Some wonder what learning software will be used? Which suppliers & contractors are getting it going?

What about the idea of a smart school, mooted sometime in 1998? I remember going to a school called Victoria Institution sometime in 2004 and installing Linux in a lab and ensuring that OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Base) could be taught in schools. Later on it was understood that the syllabus (under the Official Secrets Act) was way too Microsoft-centric, which meant that generics of using a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation suite or even front-end database meant that you couldn’t use equivalents but had to mostly use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access). What a shame.

I’m all for children getting laptops or tablets to improve their education. Children of today are very, very lucky. I’m just not sure that the government is right in doling out a laptop.

This wouldn’t be the first time… they’ve already doled out many 1Malaysia laptops (some to the tune of 800,000) to students. Is our education system improving and making use of the new technology?

Many failed items in the past: EPF Computer Purchase Withdrawal Scheme (2000-2002 discontinued) and PC Gemilang / PC Mesti Beli (yes, I was part of the PC Gemilang project getting Linux on them) (2004-~2005). 

From a commercial standpoint, have we forgotten about the 1Malaysia laptops (link)? Or the 1Malaysia Tablet/Pad?

Remember a laptop isn’t the be all and the end all. The laptop goes outdated before the term of the government. Warranties at most expire at 3 years. Software tends to be obsoleted a lot quicker.

Ideas are all fine & dandy, but is there any long term thinking to this? 

I love analysts. The buzz a report can create can drive amazing amounts of traffic to your product and give it a lot of street credibility. My only beef with the whole industry is that the reports cost an arm and a leg.

There are however “open analysts” – the folk at RedMonk, a bit of the 451 CAOS Theory (of the 451Group).

What interests me most is how analyst services are getting cheaper, coming from the media outlets themselves. Look at GigaOM Pro ($299) and BI Intelligence (normally $499, now $299 for an introductory offer).

Those are prices one can muster. $299 for a year. They also get/repackage the news. I’m big on the above services and I think more of this will arrive.

I happened to be awake last night so I caught the announcement via livestream for Facebook Home. I’m glad its just a system launcher. There are many (I myself on my phone use Nova Launcher), but from the demo, this is beautifully designed with a new take on the interface. The demo showed it being smoother than butter ;)

Chat heads look interesting. Some may claim it being bothersome or unintuitive, but most iOS users have this already turned on via accessibility settings assistive touch since the home button breaks far too easily. Why a little white dot when you can now make it do things for you?

I was impressed with the amount of partners on launch day. Buy-in from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Alcatel. Chipmaker like Qualcomm. Telcos like AT&T, Orange, EE. I can only expect this to grow of course. Gives great competition in the mobile landscape for 2013.

You see, FirefoxOS has a huge amount of partners & buy-in. I continue to be surprised that Ubuntu doesn’t have a similar page.

Am I switching from iOS as my main phone? Unlikely. I’m almost certain that many at Facebook, including Zuckerberg runs on IOS. But I will be playing with this on my secondary device (the Galaxy S3). I’m a little surprised that the April 12 launch isn’t available for the Nexus set of phones… and in Asia, the Galaxy Note form factor is popular, where did that go?

HTC First will be the first device to come with the Facebook Home system launcher as a default. I’m not sure how this is different to them applying skins and admitting that Facebook does it better. This isn’t the first time they’re playing around with a Facebook phone though.

Interesting times as Facebook has confirmed that their strategy is clearly mobile first. The fact that they built this on top of Android can’t really impress Google very much ;)

Others have also covered this well, i.e a strategy for Facebook, how this isn’t good for privacy.

I started using OmniOutliner sometime since 2003. I upgraded to the Pro version in 2006. The software came bundled with a PowerBook I had (so thanks Apple!). This marks my tenth year with the software.

It is an indispensable part of my workflow. I use it daily. The total I’ve had to pay was for upgrades (some $24.95 and $30 – so still much less than the $69.99 fee). I can use it when I’m online or offline as it’s a desktop app! The one thing that always kept me coming back to OSX even when I used Linux daily was this integral piece of software – there were just no good opensource outliners.

I’ve always thought that the one thing I’d like to do in my spare time is write an outliner that lived in the browser. So I could use it on my laptop (online/offline), or on my tablets or my phones.

So it wouldn’t be hard to say that I’m excited by Little Outliner by Small Picture. This is Dave Winer writing an outliner for the web browser! 

However, lately, I’ve been thinking more about depending on tools that I have some control over. I’m getting back to my opensource roots even though I write this on a Mac. Big companies shut services down (look at google reader going away), and small companies have it a lot harder. 

I want to depend on Little Outliner. I would even pay for it. But I’m not sure I’d pay for it in such that I’d stop using OmniOutliner, as there’s a huge TCO gap (even $2/month makes you think desktop software is cheaper than the cloud). And without payment, I’m not sure this is a service that will be around in 2023 (i.e. ten years from today). And thats where I need things to be opensource.