Colin Charles Agenda

When I’m in the USA, if I get the time, I do like to consume some television. I’m an odd person – I’m usually watching the advertisements more than the television shows themselves. And the promotions that surround shows.

Its very common for advertising for products to have several logos at the end: usually one from facebook with the page name, and another from twitter with the page name. Nowadays it seems to be getting common to offer a hashtag and this I presume is just useful for Twitter. (though it seems trending data now on google+ also has hashtags.)

Today, for the first time I saw an ad for Google Plus. Used by a television show called sullivan & son. They advertised a facebook page and told fans to “search google plus for sullivan & son”. For a google hangout! 

I searched Google for sullivan & son and ironically the Google+ page (which has a horrible URL) wasn’t even on the front-page. Google is clearly missing an opportunity here.

Two opportunities: 

1. short-form URLs (like what gplus.to provides – in fact you have the option to do profiles.google.com/username if it is not a page, but your own profile)
2. promoting Google+ profile pages in search results

I last spoke to Simon Phipps about the OSI (Open Source Initiative – opensource.org) and how they’re opening up for membership sometime on a cold february day, in brussels where we were for fosdem 2012. it seems like that time has come and yesterday I became an individual member of the OSI. I presume that if you’re asking what your $40 fee gets, realise that they’re transforming the OSI, so it is an exciting time of change. 

It is likely that all this will be announced on wednesday at oscon. Doing this yesterday I managed to grab a t-shirt. They also have OSI singlets/tank tops this time around. What are you waiting for, join the OSI.

I generally “opt-out” and head for a manual pat down by the TSA at airports in the USA. Today, I decided to try the bodyscanner at san francisco airport (SFO). I was tired from an active night of wine drinking & mingling. I cleared all my pockets and proceeded to get scanned.

Today I was wearing my Dockers Mobile Pants. This is the older model with two zippered pockets. After spending some three seconds in that machine with my hands up, I walked out to see that the image suggested I had something on me. It turns out that it picked up my zips on the mobile pants and required me to get a manual pat down. To make matters even more fun, they swabbed my hands for residue.

I told the TSA agent that the machine is broken and he said that its very sensitive and is working. It picks up zips. I asked what about the regular zip for my pants. He had no answer.

I guess there’s absolutely no point in doing this bodyscanner thing at all. I’ll continue getting my manual pat downs and pretend to enjoy it. I don’t care if they claim its safe either.

I’ve been looking to get some text going and have been paying attention to fonts lately. I was curious to see if I could find Malaysian made/designed fonts & typefaces. Here are a few resources:

• Type design in Malaysia by Luc Devroye. Brilliant list, very complete. This is the best resource out there from what I gather.
• Ong Chong Wah is a pretty famous designer. His Bookman Old Style typeface was even included in Office.
• MyFonts has a list of Malaysian Typographic People.

Found some interesting work. Conceptual work with things like “bra-fonts”. Its looking like I’ll end up with some work of Ong Chong Wah soon.

I’ve wanted the iTunes store for over four years. Today Apple finally brings the iTunes store to Asia. All hail all of us sitting in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and more. Indonesia which is big in mobile however, is missing from the list.

For music, I’m not particularly excited. I’m using Spotify (first experience) and Rdio and don’t plan to buy music again. This means that iTunes Match doesn’t particularly excite me either (don’t forget that many Malaysian telcos are now charging you for your data — free 3GB with a plan, and the rest is either slow or you pay).

What looks interesting for me though? Movies. This is something I still have not solved yet, and using torrents always makes me feel dead guilty (which is why I always end up buying DVDs later, and never watching them – see my tv/movie consumption in 2011). The ability to buy or rent shows seems really interesting to me.

This probably means that I’ll end up getting an Apple TV in the near future. They don’t seem to be available in the Malaysia or Singapore stores yet… Metered bandwidth for DSL soon? I sincerely hope not…

Prices in the Malaysian store still suggest things in US dollars. Then again, everything including apps are in USD.

I have two iTunes accounts (one Malaysian, one US). With this announcement, I can finally think about merging everything into one account. Totally stoked at the upcoming simplicity :)

Excerpt from a post by Fred Wilson titled Tolerance and Prosperity (highlights are mine):

William Penn was a Quaker and when King Charles II gave him a large piece of his land holdings in America, Penn created the colony of Pennsylvania and grounded it in the notions of tolerance and religious freedom. Instead of limiting Pennsylvania to Quakers, they welcomed all comers. And the result was that Philadelphia became the fastest growing city in America with a vibrant economy and lifestyle.

The neighboring colonies, which were initially centered around a single religion, reacted to Pennsylvania’s and Philadelphia’s economic success by opening up their cultural norms and becoming more tolerant as well.

Paul told us this story as a lesson in why cultural norms, even more than laws, are a determinant of prosperity and economic development. And tolerance is one of the more important cultural norms in this regard.

When I read this, I immediately drew a parallel to the situation that Malaysia and Malaysians face in general. Malaysians as a whole lack freedom of expression (try talking about religion, the royal family, etc.), freedom of religion (Muslim-at-birth-Muslim-for-life), and tolerance to diverse communities (no deviant cultures like LGBT and that has great effects on computing & opensource for example). I can look for more flaws but that isn’t the idea of this post.

People go where they feel welcome. People go where they are tolerated. People shy away from places that say “you can’t cook curry next door because it makes my apartment smell” (ok, that’s Singapore, not Malaysia). Of course you outweigh the pros and cons of a location.

But for Malaysia to become prosperous we need to become tolerant. We always claim we’re truly Asia with our “different cultures”, but that relationship is built on thin ice. We need to be united as Malaysians before we start welcoming outsiders/Malaysians-living-overseas and together become prosperous.