Colin Charles Agenda

The Internet is a great tool, but the problem with the Internet is outdated information. I was looking to find the famous Foh San Restaurant in SS2, and while the Internet suggested it did exist, Foh San closed down in SS2 sometime in 2007. The only Foh San Restaurant that exists now is in Ipoh (not SS2), and from what I hear, they plan to open another one in SS2 or the surrounding areas sometime in 2009.

Now, back to the outdated information on The Internet. Look at dineMalaysia. It looks like it was last updated in 2004. A lot can change with regards to restaurants and bars in a period of four years. Their database is also shared with some Expat eatery site. Another catalogue site lists it, but I wonder how many restaurants on that list don’t exist anymore.

The importance of catalogue websites is that they need to be constantly updated. It has to be spurred by someone (maybe the tourism ministry?), and have the capability to be cool enough to have a community built around it. The way I see it, is it should be That’s Melbourne! with a community.

The only clue I got that Foh San in SS2 had closed was from this blog entry – “… the new Korean BBQ shop (formerly Foh San Restaurant branch)”.

This however, didn’t help me, as I had already spent time looking for it. Searching by relevancy, which can also suggest dated content, doesn’t help when there is a lack of information, does it? I see a book about Google’s search algorithms in the bookstore, but I’ve yet to pick it up. I’m just curious, how catalogue information can:

1. stay updated, constantly
2. be relevant

(1) is easy to solve… It has to involve a community. I guess that will fix (2) too… so how do you get a community involved in catalogue information? Shouldn’t be too hard considering its food and beverage related. Bottom-line is, there needs to be traction built around it…

So, the MCMC decided to come to their senses and scrap blocking websites. Internet censorship only lasted a few weeks (read previously Malaysia starts censoring bloggers). Of course, to control the victim of the latest censorship act, they used the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA), but that’s a whole other matter.

Its interesting to see how many people came around, and the amount of press/attention this whole censorship thing brought. Here’s a quick summary:

• SKMM not ordered to block access to website in where we find out that there are 127 websites and blogs that have been blocked for contravening various sections of the Act.
• MCMC – how to make a complaint – this is a useful website. Why? Because you can write complaints, or fax them, and get the MCMC to respond. They have to, I’m told, so if you feel strongly about an issue, this is the right place to hit up the next time such craziness hits.
• Dr M slams ‘blocking’ of Malaysia Today in where he expresses his disgust (on his blog, nonetheless!) about the censorship of the Internet. Quote: “… action exposed “a degree of oppressive arrogance worthy of a totalitarian state”, and that the Government would soon lose credibility and respect among the people.” Well, under his rule, I’d not be surprised if the ISA was used sooner… but whole other matter, right?
• Reporters without borders picked up on it.
• The Edge reported on it, and this takes the cake, because they were accusing “comments” – “MCMC chief operating officer Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi was quoted as saying the regulator ordered the block because it found that “some of the comments on the website were insensitive, bordering on incitement”.”
• Google, Go Away! – Rocky, tells Google to not build their multi-billion dollar data centre in Malaysia. Its been a long standing rumour that they planned to do this for a while
• SKMM: M’sia Today block order stands, probe underway in where they are deciding which Section of the Act to pick on, and where The Star decides to be relevant and links to the mirror site!

Well, the dark days of Internet censorship are averted. Bloggers beware though, the use of claims of libel, sedition, or just the ISA, might be around the corner. I love how ABC news mentions “a journalist, a blogger and a Member of Parliament” when they cover the recent ISA arrests. A blogger.

Seriously kids, what’s with the lack of scalability? I’ve never seen CNN or the NYTimes go down on “trimmed” versions.

Is it a question of bandwidth? Is it lack of hardware?

Take for example, Malaysiakini (the first alternative news source in Malaysia, with a subscription model built around it). It runs FreeBSD, uses PostgreSQL, and has a CMS on top of it (so almost a LAMP stack right there). There’s even use of Squid for caching. Yet there’s lacking load balancing? This is where the cloud can come into play, when there’s high traffic.

Next up, The Malaysian Insider. They’re the new kid on the block. Its probably Linux, Joomla, and MySQL is confirmed. No caching (hello, memcached at some stage?). Looks like a one server operation. Again, if you want to start lean, scale to the cloud…

Of course, what takes the cake, is one of the most famous dailies, The Star. The .asp tells me they’re on some kind of Microsoft platform, and I don’t know how scalable that is (maybe with their live.com/livemesh goo). But for a major newspaper (ala the NYTimes equivalent in Malaysia), I’m surprised they’re too busy to serve us content.

Is it the fault of the applications
Is the next wave, getting open source applications to act in a scalable fashion? A CMS like Drupal or Joomla, how ready is it for instant scaling? After all, EC2 has persistent storage (I don’t know if Sun’s network.com offers this or not?).

It seems like there’s a lot of OpenSolaris images for EC2 and web stuff, at OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. I see a Joomla AMI, for example. How easy is this to plug-in for something like The Malaysian Insider? How easy will it be for them to scale up their services (i.e. start more instances, but will Joomla load balance? What considerations must they make if they went this route?). Similar question for the Drupal AMI.

I’m thinking I need to spend some time playing with “the cloud” in due time… Any thoughts or pointers on this, are also graciously appreciated.

Truly fitting image about the ISA, in the wake of recent happenings. Feel free to use the image, its CC-BY-NC-SA.

(for those international readers, Kamunting is where the ISA detainees are held [sat view]. This photo however, was taken in the middle of Kuala Lumpur)

Last Monday, I attended the Maybank2u 2.0 Launch Preview at Delicious @ MARC Residences, in KL. Since then, I’ve been playing with their beta site, doing my day-to-day banking, using it.

The executive summary? I’m impressed. Not that the new site is leaps and bounds better, but I’m impressed over the improvement that was the previous site.

In Malaysia, 15 banks offer Internet Banking services, and Maybank2u has about 60% of the market. Apparently, statistics show that in 2007 alone, there were about 4.5 million Internet Banking users registered in Malaysia, with m2u – really? The queues at the post office for bill payments seem to tell another story.

Maybank’s Ahmad Shareza even went on to boldly say that the m2u website is the number 1 site (sometimes number 2 site, depending on AirAsia’s cheap flights promotions) in Malaysia. It sounded like a fib, but we’ll leave it at that.

The website launched in 2000 (so its been about 8 years due for a redesign?). With 4.5 million registered users, there are only 1 million active users (explains the post office queues!). However, registration is growing at 90,000/month. Impressive. There are over 30 million monthly transactions handled in the system, with over RM3.3 billion ringgit monthly value. The page view stats stand at 157 million page views per month!

Its important to note that they’ve taken a scientific approach to redesigning the site. They went through interaction design stages, usability studies, design first then only rebuild, and so on. It took them about 6 months, and the abilities of David Wang and the rest of the team at AGENDA.

Interestingly enough, they benchmarked the site against 25 other banks – they picked on UK, US and Australian banks. Smart move. For a bank to want to offer personalisation services, I say its a real win.

OK, a bit about their previous architecture… They had 3,000 pages all coded manually. There were 4 master templates, and 6 sub-templates, but overall, there was nothing being pulled out of a database, or anything. Nothing has changed with the current architecture – they’re still using JSP, and the backends are still the same. However, just look at it as a progressive UI redesign (templating, if you must).

Site Loading
Its slow. The previous site gets an F(56) from YSlow, and is 148KB in size (taking me about 5.47s to load), with 41 HTTP requests. The new redesigned site gets an F(50), weighing in at a whooping 195.8K, with 61 HTTP requests (now, load times are at 10.68s). Lets hope they fix it, at some stage.

The UI
Its cleaner. There are tabs, they make use of rounded corners (easier on the eyes), there is a messaging system. In fact, it reminds me of what Commonwealth Bank offers, minus the silly Java applets.

The cue has been taken that a lot of laptops are now 1280×800, in terms of display resolution. While the wide-screen aspect part of it doesn’t come into play, with my browser running in full height mode, I did manage to see the entire website. This of course meant turning my dock into auto-hiding mode (on Linux, the way I run my desktop, 800 pixels in height wasn’t enough).

The colours are streamlined.

A little peeking shows that they have mobile CSS capabilities now. Asked if there will be a mobile site (not with some silly applet that sits on the phone), I’m told they’re looking into it. Of course today, there are no rules – hopefully by the mid-October 2008 launch, there will be.

Functionality
The website still doesn’t work past midnight till 6am. Oh wait, there’s a grace period till about 1am. Its useless when you’re overseas, because sometimes that’s the best time to bank. I mean, who keeps track of what time it is in Malaysia? Its interesting to note that about 10% or so of the m2u users are not from Malaysia!

A lot of people complain about not receiving the TAC in time. Most find it useless. The TAC is of course is a mechanism for two factor authentication. The 6 digit code comes via SMS, and works a charm even when you’re overseas (and roaming, of course). But apparently, it only works well with Maxis – other providers have delays. So, Maybank is looking into using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). This uses the voice stream, and is most reliable (more so than SMS anyway). Why limit TAC sending to local phone numbers only? Allow it for international numbers!

M – annoys me. Its not LiveChat (there was no due diligence on anything besides the solution from Microsoft). You need MSN Messenger to get it going. I find this silly. Its an AI bot, so there’s no one on the other end, but why the lock-in to Microsoft? Oh, naturally, because of a partnership with Microsoft. Take a look at a chat with M. Reminds me of the Emacs Psychiatrist.

Pull-down menus, having things you need on hand, most useful. You can even choose services based on some criteria the bank set out for you.

Post-choosing, you can even compare and contrast between cards (and other services). The UI there needs work (horizontal scroll when its not needed), but the previous site would’ve sent you hunting and pecking and left you frustrated.

What else?
The more I use it, and the more I get annoyed with it, I’ll be sure to update you. Now I have Shareza’s email address, I’ll be sure to drop him regular comments :)

Interestingly at the event, I met a bunch of tech folk whom are in the usual tech circles, but most of the others were bloggers. Very cliquey, but maybe I exude an aura of aloofness. They also blogged: kclau, jason, liewcf (whom I finally got to meet after all the chatting previously), suanie, davidlian, pin?, josh lim (interesting chatting to the Adverlets guy – maybe next I’ll find a Nuffnang guy – my thoughts on the local advertising industry coming right up). There are probably more, I found these links through Google BlogSearch :)

Today, you can discover their all you portal. A bank is blogging! This might be a first? From there, you too can try out the new maybank2u!

Happy banking!

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub – has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control” – can control. Control is a loaded word, no? Especially in the land of open source.

The architecture is such that they’re on Sun servers (SPARC based), using GlassFish, Apache, Memcache and a single MySQL 5.0.45 database server (I’m guessing there’s a maximum storage of 146GB because they’re using SAS disks – they will implement replication soon). It seems they’re currently on 32-bit MySQL – they’re getting less than 10% CPU usage, and the query cache is working well for them (98% hit ratio). If graphs, et al turn you on, look at the slides from Fernando Castano, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails.

Its interesting to see the mix of software offered – Mercurial and Subversion (for project hosting – there be choice, unlike the other services out there), Sympa (as opposed to common Mailman), and Bugzilla as the bug tracker. Oh, its built on Rails, so it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless, to see how Rails scales.

Why does Kenai interest me? Because for every project, you have a forum, a separate wiki, access to source code, mailing lists, and a bug tracker. Why should Kenai interest the MySQL community? Because maybe down the line, there will be integration with the Forge. Today, the Forge does not offer hosting (we have got the bits built-in, technically, but Launchpad seemed like a better bet for us, in the long run – the Forge is not in the storage business, its more a catalogue of information), mailing lists, forums, or a bug tracker.

After all, the tagline is “We’re More Than Just a Forge”. There look like there are some social networking aspects to Kenai as well – maybe some ohloh like features will make its way in due time? Maybe a Facebook application, created using Zembly will mash things up even. Who’s to say what the future of Kenai can bring.