Colin Charles Agenda

Twitter has a wonderful Location: field, and a lot of clients, like TwitterFon (for the iPhone), or twibble (for Symbian devices), tend to update the field automatically. They tend to update it with the phone’s built-in AGPS, so at worst, your accuracy in location, is about 100m or so.

I find this to be a tiny problem. You can copy the location string (GPS coordinates), paste it into Google Maps and find out that the person at the Location above, is at MidValley Megamall.

Who cares when you’re in a public location? That can be a good thing for bumping into friends. But what about stalkers who now know where you live? Or an angry wife, that knows you weren’t working late, but chilling out with the guys at a nearby pub?

This is where Google Latitude kind of makes sense. Its opt-in. You only share the location with your friends. Twitter is just open (very rarely, do people’s profiles remain private).

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to write a quick Greasemonkey script to send me to Google Maps automagically. After all, Dive Into Greasemonkey still applies… Quick search on userscripts.org, and I found Twitter Google Maps Link. It does exactly what I want, so I didn’t need to hack up some JavaScript. Win :)

Piracy is a big deal in Malaysia. Apparently, piracy is causing greater losses for the software industry, and is a billion ringgit problem. The piracy rate is 59%, which is below the regional average of 61%. Wow!

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) hates piracy. They’ve even setup an informative site, titled B4USurf. Its great to see that they run Apache, on CentOS, and are powered by PHP and CMS Made Simple. They however, don’t at any point in time mention opensource in all their information. Of course I understand why – the BSA themselves shouldn’t like opensource.

However, the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry plans to increase public awareness to buying only original software. They’ll also touch on the downside of pirated products. Will they then not talk about opensource software?

Its all fine and dandy to create an open source conference for advocacy purposes, but if we’re still doing advocacy after so many years, something must be amiss. Maybe enlisting help from other ministries, tacking on information campaigns organised by the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry might make sense, no?

Seeing ads that tell you to buy original software, just falls on deaf ears. Show them alternatives. Show them that there is no need to buy original software, after all, open source software is free (as in bebas, not necessarily percuma).

When I was in Bangkok, Thailand recently, I received really good information from John Berns, one of the organisers of BarCampBangkok3. He told all out-of-town guests, that you have options for data, with regards to phone SIMs (which you can procure for less than 100 Baht, and topups range from 50, 100 and 300 Baht – cheap!):

If you want to get EDGE/GPRS data service, buy a One-2-Call SIM, it’s easy to set up and you can get 20 hours of EDGE/GPRS for B100. To subscribe, just dial *138 and follow the voice menu.

In Malaysia, prepaid broadband is not simple. Until now, it seems. I quote, from the article Driving mobile broadband to tourists:

Celcom Broadband Prepaid plans are available for RM20 for a week’s worth of unlimited Internet connections while RM6 will buy you 24 hours of unlimited connectivity. The connection speed is up to a maximum of 384 kilobits per second.

RM20 for a week’s worth of unlimited Internet access, that gives you 384kbps. That’s cheap! For a month, that is a meagre RM80, much cheaper than Maxis’s Broadband offering (albeit at a higher speed, but the service quality is horrendous) at RM138.

How is Celcom Broadband? Does it work well? It seems like they’re about the only provider that I have not subscribed to, and this prepaid deal is making me want to check it out. (Their website on the other hand is a complete useless hunk of Flash, that even MacOSX dislikes.)

Point to note: in Thailand, getting a SIM card is easy, you just buy it off the shelf. In Malaysia, they require ID checks, and an address (I’m sure a hotel’s would suffice, and a passport would do), as they need to add it to a centralised database, to track your naughty behaviour ;-)

The last time I was in Singapore, I also noticed something similar from M1: M1 Prepaid Broadband. 3 days of usage, up to 7.2mbps, and topup’s are SGD$18 for 3 days, and SGD$30 for 5 days. The card itself costs SGD$18. Very nifty (there was a promo for a little over a hundred bucks, you could even pick up an unlocked HSDPA modem!). Where else can I get prepaid broadband, on the cheap?

You own a modern phone? You own an iPhone? You definitely want something like this, considering you’ll find the location based services useful, as well as making use of the assisted GPS unit to find your way around. Looks like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have their bases covered for the mobile data warrior.

I’ve never been much of a Japanophile, but the couple minutes or so that I saw Preetam demonstrate the use of the Furoshiki, I was hooked.

Preetam did a lightning talk demo at BarcampBKK3, where he demoed how you could hold books in it. Later, Satoko (@31o5) mentioned that you could also hold bottles of wine, and more. Naturally, I was intrigued, so I hopped on and found a bunch of cool things you can do with it.

For one, the Ministry of Environment in Japan has published a guide on how to make use of it. All the various different knots, and methods, for you to carry items of varying sizes, and volumes. Very useful. I also found it most interesting to note that there are stores that specialise in this – take a look at this post from Kyoto.

Want to buy one? All hail Furoshiki.com. They seem to be about USD$12-$70, not including shipping and handling, depending on the styles available.

Further links: a bit of history, how to gift wrap (video), usage etiquette, history, folding guides and more (very useful resource), a video of a store in Kyoto, and how to use it to carry your bento boxes.

I have to admit, that Japanese culture and custom is starting to interest me these days. Seems like there’s a lot to learn, as there are things I’d consider innovative, that is part of daily Japanese life. I wonder if a book like Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan will help?

(photo by Preetam Rai)

Taman Klang Jaya, formerly known as Taman Goodwood, currently gives me great woes, when it comes to getting an Internet connection. In short, there is no choice, but the monopoly that is Telekom Malaysia, and their substandard DSL service, better known as Streamyx.

Streamyx, as we all know, pretty much sucks. Heck, even Members of Parliament know this.

Hence, I have a Maxis Broadband modem. And guess what? Their 3G services not only suck in Taman Klang Jaya, they suck pretty much everywhere. On Twitter, people are suggesting to go back to just use the 2G network, and things work out fine. If the telco had any maruah, they’d do what DiGi did for their prepaid users: service outage = half price calls.

So I thought I’d try P1’s W1MAX. They seem to be selling in Klang, and I have a little Wiggy device. Still, no coverage in the area.

I’ve recently become a DiGi Broadband subscriber, and while it works fine (1mbps in my PJ home), it drops back to EDGE in Taman Klang Jaya. And as we all know, EDGE isn’t that fast.

So, what is a resident of Taman Klang Jaya to do? (Certainly, its not to subscribe to Streamyx, P1, Maxis and DiGi!) Rather than complain here on my blog, is it possible that I contact my local Member of Parliament? How do I even find out who my MP is? (Wow, that kid at BarCampKL that @tekong and I encountered, would be jumping all over this statement, right about now).

The state of broadband is such that even if I were to launch any high-bandwidth requirement businesses, I would fail. And I’m sure somewhere, in the MSC Bill of Guarantees, there is a provision that says the infrastructure itself must be world class. Streamyx today, is probably even worse than many third world countries I’ve visited.

This weekend, I was introduced to a neat device, called a Poken, by my friend Preetam Rai.

What is a Poken you ask? A cute little device (that comes with several different characters, one of which is a geisha even), that is the business card of the 21st century! Its a USB device, that contains a “key”, which pairs to your profile online that you create on their website. It then uses Near Field Communications (NFC) to “beam” business cards over (you do this via touch – the term beam seems so 1998, ala what Palm used to call it). When you get back to your computer, you can now see all the contacts you’ve met, and connect with them on the social networks that they’re on. Limited profiles exist as well, so maybe all you want to do is share an email address.

Nifty, yes? The problem with traditional business cards is that when you get back after an event, you have to parse them. The Poken takes away this trouble, as its all point and click. The device sells for about USD$27 at Bic Camera in Japan, though if you get it in bulk online, its about USD$16 with postage.

Can this work in Malaysia? At a little over RM50 (RM100 retail), I might be a tad bit sceptical. However, its all the rage in Japan. Its not for sale in South East Asia (yet), and its much cheaper than a Palm device than can beam over business cards… What do you think?

The Poken itself, is not a social network. It just carries contact information. I found it interesting (in a limiting sense), that you could only carry 64 contacts at one time, before syncing. So if you happen to meet a 65th person, your first contact gets lost!

Elsewhere on the Web, Crunchgear has a review, poken.jp which is the Japanese site (they were smart – they sold Poken’s in night clubs! They even have Poken meetups, and more), and last but not least, check out a video, from a Google Tech Talk, titled Poken: Extending Online Social Networking Into the Real World.

And in case you can’t see the embedded video above (coming in via an RSS reader or something), check out the Poken playlist.