Colin Charles Agenda

I don’t know if what the EpiCentre folk told me is true (about sustained sales of RM5 million/month for 3 months), but Apple has created the Apple Store (Malaysia).

I consider this a positive first step. For me now, I will not have to order engraved iPod’s through the Singapore Apple Store - I’ll do it right here in Malaysia (after all shipping in 1-2 days, is OK). In fact, I can’t imagine why I would order too much from physical Apple stores like EpiCentre or Machines anymore - unless I wanted to take advantage of their 12 months 0% interest-free credit card plans (Maybank, HSBC, American Express, Citibank, and probably a few more participate in this).

I said it before, and I’ll say it again - its a positive first step. Why? There’s a good chance, that they’re setting this up for the magical iPhone to come into the market. And in no time, we might see an iTunes Music Store. We might have crippled access, with no music/TV/movies, but its always a progression.

Not needing any Apple products yet (latest purchase: pink iPod Nano; latest gift arrival: new iPod Touch - thanks Sun), I am however still tempted to buy something from their online store. Why?

1. There’s a limited edition t-shirt up for grabs before November 24
2. Supporting their online initiative, to show that there’s a market for this sort of thing, and they should bring in more (like the iTunes Music Store, et al)

It seems there’s only one remaining iPod Classic, with a nice big disk (120GB). The last Classic I had, had a 30GB disk (and couldn’t store my complete music collection). Maybe this is what I need? Its sub-RM1,000, so an easy purchase to make ;)

They even have an education store, which is supposed to normally provide discounts, but from my cursory inspection, seems to suggest otherwise.

What are you waiting for? Go buy your Apple gear already.

I once wrote a plea to Apple about giving Malaysians access to the iTunes music store as well as selling the iPhone’s in Malaysia.

I stepped into one of the Apple Premium Authorised Resellers the other day, and spoke to someone who seemed knowledgeable about these things. I mean, I purchased my MacBook Air in Machines. I purchased an external DVD drive for it from the EpiCentre store, more recently.

The shocker? RM5 million in sales, sustained, for at least three months, before Apple would consider even opening an official Apple store in Malaysia.

Is this hard to reach? I find it hard to believe that this isn’t already reached. I take buying Mac hardware for granted. My latest iPod purchase however wasn’t in the market - I ordered it from the Singapore online store (I wanted it engraved).

If I want it engraved, I can only imagine that a lot more Malaysians want it too. Of course, I also imagined Malaysians spending more than RM5 million on Apple hardware per month.

Anyone know if this is an Apple requirement?

For a long time, I managed to use a feature in GAIM Pidgin that was known as the Buddy Pounce. Its described as:

When you set a pounce on someone, you can choose from a number of events, such as sign on or status change, and then you choose from a number of actions. These actions include everything from playing a sound (like an alert would do) to sending a message to the person, to executing a command. This action will occur the next time pidgin detects the event, i.e. the next time the person in your buddy list who you have pounced signs on.

I hardly use Pidgin any longer. I use its cousin, AdiumX, on the Mac (work IM? There’s skype and IRC). To do it in Adium, you have to right click on the contact, select Get Info, then set up a pounce in the Events tab.

Great, now you can hear when someone you care about signs in… With reference to ticket#921. Not very intuitive, but maybe I was seasoned to look for “Buddy Pounce”.

I’ve been starting to use Google Documents more and more, lately. Its great for collaborating with people, that are not within your Intranet - i.e. gone are the days of using the internal wiki.

But the Wiki has a good feature - the history of a page. Tools -> Revision History seems to solve that for me, in Google Docs (apparently, File -> Revision History works too).

It would be nice if there were more fonts available… some truly libre fonts, like Liberation.

On the Mac, another tool that’s worth installing is precipitate. It allows indexing of your Google Documents in Spotlight, so you can use “unified search” to find your documents on your desktop, and “in the cloud”. Haven’t found the equivalent for Linux.

This is funny. I was trying to type an MSN message, and was thinking of saying “i heart melbourne”. I wanted to find out how to replace “heart” with a logo. I Google’ed and since it took me a few minutes (slow night?), I came up with this:

I  melbourne

Without realising that I was searching for the Apple logo, and not the MSN heart symbol. Oops.

Anyway:

• Shift+Option+K =  (apple logo)
• (L) = MSN Heart sign

Got the dreaded “Backup failed with error: 11″ with Time Machine. Actually, I only got the dreaded message from the Console - the application itself, just kept failing silently with no suggestions (Apple, this is your cue to make Time Machine a little more useful). Nothing in Apple’s knowledgebase. Nothing seemingly useful come up in a Google search (i.e. something conclusive)

Solution? Delete:

/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/nameOfComputer/date.inProgress


It’ll ask for your password, and be gone with the file. Now the backups should start working again.

An example of what the Console showed:


13/08/2008 12:51:57 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4946] Error: (-43) copying /Users/byte/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs/AIM.bytebotdotnet to /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/lovegood/2008-08-13-125154.inProgress/424A6617-37A5-4C20-8845-764D9167E317/Macintosh HD/Users/byte/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs
13/08/2008 12:51:57 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4946] Copied 702 files (169 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
13/08/2008 12:51:57 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4946] Copy stage failed with error:11
13/08/2008 12:52:03 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4946] Backup failed with error: 11
13/08/2008 12:55:31 com.apple.launchd[73] (0×10dbd0.Locum[4961]) Exited: Terminated


In Singapore the last few days, I found some time to visit Orchard Road on Sunday. I thought about the best place to get an iPhone 3G and headed to Lucky Plaza. To my surprise, zip, zilch, nada.

Disappointed, as a long-time Apple user and developer, who has bought a lot of Apple gear, and been to several WWDC’s, and still continue to buy Apple gear (latest acquisition: MacBook Air), that Apple constantly assumes that there is no world outside of the USA.

So I asked myself over a very late lunch, why am I roaming the streets of Singapore, just to get myself an iPhone 3G, and have to go thru the hassle of “cracking” it? I am a legitimate user, who’s willing to pay the actual fees, yet I’m shoved for being in the wrong country.

Sub-Rant
I’ve recently changed my location from Melbourne, Australia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This is a problem for the iTunes Music Store, because while the iTunes Music Store is commonplace in America, it wasn’t long ago that it came to Australia. It still doesn’t exist yet in Malaysia. In fact, my Malaysian-issued credit card is discriminated against by Apple’s online store.

This I consider to be a large failure - I guess this will change at some stage, as the iPod Touch is sold legally in Malaysia, and applications for it must be available now (I haven’t checked this week, I’ve been pre-occupied).
</Sub-Rant>

I was extremely overjoyed that I got invited to a Facebook group (this doesn’t happen often, believe me), called iPhone 4 Malaysia. Louis Pang compares Malaysia against Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Madagascar, showing the number of mobile phone users, GDP per capita, and population of each country. Impressed I was, seeing the Malaysian statistic:
Population: 25.3 million
GDP per capita: USD$13,000
Mobile phone users (2006): 19.4 million

77% of Malaysians have a mobile phone! This statistic is surely a fib (I think; then again, some people have more than one mobile phone), as the adult population in Malaysia is nowhere near 77% (I’m unsure what the statistic is, I’m wondering where the census data is…)

Then again, if true, how is it possible that Apple is selling iPhones in these other countries, and not in Malaysia?

Naturally, I looked at the article at The Edge Daily, and Sharmila states that Maxis gets right to distribute the iPhone 3G. There is no reason to speculate, but the cost is expected to be under RM1,000. Will this happen by year end? Who’s to say…

So, if you’ve read this far down, and you’re Steve Jobs (or someone close to him, and will pass the message on), here’s my advice:

• Give Malaysians access to the iTunes Music store - Seriously, you’re missing out on a good opportunity. With disposable incomes amongst the large majority of the iPod toting crowd, buying music via the iTunes Music Store will definitely be easier than firing up a BitTorrent client, and waiting for the download, thanks to the throttling of traffic
• Malaysian credit cards are not fraudulent - Amazon, Paypal, and the list goes on, they all have no issue accepting a Malaysian issued credit card. Why should you be any different, Jobs? With the proliferation of Visa Debit cards, surely you can’t be worried about fraud?
• Don’t cripple access to the iTunes Music Store - by this, I mean, it should not only be for applications for the iPod Touch, but also music, TV shows (I imagine people buying BBC’s Top Gear rather than downloading it), and movies

After all, proliferation of broadband is great. There is already a large amount of users who are on the Internet. There are more and more Mac users, after all, there are a tonne of new shops selling Macs (Apple Authorised Resellers/Partners). Everyone in urban areas is using the latest, greatest, mobile phone (I dare say, the average Malaysian in urban areas are more mobile phone crazy than the average Australian in urban areas),

Make a bang with your presence, Apple.

– Current multiple-time Apple customer, dormant Apple developer, iPhone 3G owner-to-be

Update: There’s also an online petition to sign. And the Facebook group is standing at 1,019 members now…

Never having had a problem downloading Skype before, I’m faced with an unusual problem, and have no solution. With getting my MacBook Air, I’ve been trying for weeks to download Skype (usually via mobile broadband, or via Wifi hotspots) and I’ve been failing. I get the usual “mounting failed” error. Annoying.

I filed a bug with Skype, and I have no idea if they’ll look into fixing it. My other option is to search thru my backups from my other Macs and look for a .dmg. All in all, pain

Mounting failed

OS X can’t recognise it at all. For reference, the md5sum is: MD5 (Skype_2.7.0.330.dmg) = dfe1cb2286eccc906d642fca1325fef2.