Chong Tan Fook-Lee Wan Wah advanced into the final today with beating compatriot Mohd Fairuzizuan Mohd Tazari-Lin Woon Fui 15-8, 15-7. While in other court, the agressive attacking pair Mohd Zakry Abdul Latif-Gan Teik Chai was down 14-17, 9-15. They’ve been leading with 14-5 in the 1st game with Zakry’s lots of tricky shots. However, it could be anxious to end the game, or their brain just went blank — lost focus, the inexperienced pair allowed their opponent to come back from 9-points gap. And they didn’t ever request to take a break in this period! Anyway, it then replicated the 2004 final of Tan Fook-Wan Wah versus Jens Eriksen-Martin Lundgaard Hansen. Tan Fook-Wan Wah would have the chance to revenge on their lost on 2004.

The amazing Eriksen, he is already 36 and can still play such an intense game in the competetive All England. That probably would never occurred in Men Single as MS surely required tougher stamina. Peter Gade is an good example, he was surely out of stream in his 2nd/3rd game with Lee Hyun Il, which Lee has an easy win with 3-15, 15-8 15-1. I was really hoping to see Peter’s challanging the title again. But what could you expect? When a player was so exhausted and the normal rhythm was gone, age count!

Lee Chong Wei, yet again can’t beat Lin Dan outside of Malaysia courts. But it was so close this round! In the first game, Chong Wei was playing like his game with Lin Dan at World Championship last year — no confidence, slow foot work, weak smash. I was then feeling like argh…gonna lost again. And then the real Chong Wei was back. Starting from 2-8 in the 2nd game, he morphed into a different person — patient set up, speed running, smooth cross-court net play and smash. The fast and furious play getting him the 2nd game (15-10), then all the way leading to 13-6 in the third game. There’s no happy-ending for M’sian fans, Lin Dan’s switching gear and boost up to come back from 6-13 to 13-13, 14-14; and eventually took the match, to storm into final.

What a pity! Lee CW was called as Kampung Champion (could only win title in Malaysia) by some of badminton fans. But I bet to differ, to really look at his result at various open tournament. He used to live up to his world ranking. That he mostly only lost to top ranking players (e.g. Lin Dan, Taufik). Without his stable performance, his world ranking won’t climb up to the top three.

While IBF (International Badminton Federation) is going to change to 21-points (credit without serving) format around March this year. God seem wanted to shows why 15-points (credit only with serve) game was fun to watch: the ability of coming back from big points-gap and creating drama of the game. There seem to have happened a lots in All England 2006: Eriksen-Lundgaard’s game from 5-14 to 17-15, Lin Dan’s 6-13 to 17-14, Chong Wei’s back from 10-14 to 17-14 in 2nd game with Chen Hong in QF….etc. Those were the holding-breath moments, you wouldn’t forget when you’re following it — and then you’d love the game!

But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and notice the similar interface. Take a looks at the screenshot of SpyMy, Pligg and Digg, do you think this is something we should do?

        

Web 2.0 service like Digg or reddit is US-centric and articles posted mostly only interested to geeks. So there’s big potential to expand to other more specific areas. To segment the market for Digg-alike web service, I could think of following potential fields:

• Region-interest: it has been lots of web portal focusing on region’s interesting news/events/activities. And these portals are all lacking of the interaction to allow users to vote for their favor posts or commenting. Good target to apply digg-alike service.
• Different language: it could surely see that users stick with the web with the language they’re most familiar. A Malay-only or Mandarin-only users posted/voted service should have potential.
• The other “niche” fields like shopping, books, movies, musics, even technology specific to Linux, Windows, Gadget…etc for the particular interested group of people

So and so, there are plenty of areas to explore and deploy the idea. Nevertheless, the key point is, you could copy the idea and develop your own version — but not copying the exactly same web behavior (the flow of the web service) and user interface! Let’s do porting and expanding, not copycat.

Even in days of Internet being adapted widely as the alternative channel for news or information, you wouldn’t get to know opinion of politician in person. That partly because what we read on web is mostly written, heard, drafted by some one else instead of the particular person. With blog, nope, with more politician (or more persons in authority) joined the blogosphere, we can percept their messages in first hand. People could directly feedback (comments) and more importantly, through the constant reading of a people’s blog, you would most likely understand where this person stands. It’s good we could have that kind of understanding and communication with our own country’s polictian, isn’t it?

So far I knew there’s blog of Lim Kit Siang and Teresa Kok. Any other M’sian politician’s blog you know of?

The news is at its peak and Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid will go to China to clear any mis-perception that our police is targeting China citizen. It’s a hurt to our tourism. However, the event trigger me of some thing else. The abuse of police power isn’t quite an unfamiliar stuff in our daily life. Although without any proof, we are used to think of the following cases:

• some polices are taking bribe
  
• to make complaint effectively reported to authority, we got to seek some one who is powerful enough to help
  

As a normal people living in a big city like KL, I didn’t feel secure. Comparing to Taipei and Singapore, the 2 places I’ve visited lately, I dare not said it’s usually safe if you walk alone in the city in late night —- though my friends in that 2 cities are proud of that. Besides the safety, one particular thing being harmful to our tourism is the attitude of taxi driver. When I was in Singapore, I never felt worry to take on any taxi at any places, knowing that they’d honestly run the metering. And I could logde the report if they didn’t do so, you knew they are effective in handling that. But on the bus coming back to KL in late night, I was worried about where we are going to take off the bus. Why would I worry? Isn’t this the familiest place I am living? I knew there’d have drivers asking for double of the fair charges, or even more. Well, with the cases friends ever experienced or heard over, you knew that taxi drivers at certain places (especially places trourists used to be) going to charge much higher — and they don’t meter the journey.

To be fair, there could always some mis-behaviour by minority in any cities. I just hope this would be changed in the future and let whoever come to our city and country feeling secure and comfortable.

She has been there for one week and I missed her a lot. So on last Friday night I took bus to go to Singapore too, with the hope we might be lucky in Race 3 — well, the race 3 started on last Saturday (19/Nov).

We arrived at the starting point of the race early Saturday morning, register and have the first riddle: (you got to re-register even if you have joined the previous races)

Sitting along the quiet path,
This is hardly nature’s wrath.
If you strain your sights hard enough,
You might glimpse a fruit that’s just so tough.

Well, we got a car this round (from my sister-in-law), and this riddle seem extremely easy! Initially her sister suggested it could be the orchard at Bukit Timah, but come to really think of it — this is a game promoting to know Singapore, then obviously the answer is the Esplanade !

So and so, with smile on our face and confidence, we started the searching along all possible quiet path we could find around the Esplanade. Guess what? A few hours later, we are exhausted, on our feet we have been though a big big round surrounding the Esplanade — because we thought it’s obviously some quiet place where you could glimpse the roof of Esplanade. That’s the look of a durian obviously isn’t it?! All Singaporean knew that. Further more, lots of the participants have the same thought and been the same place, we met and said hello, and having the same misery face. It’s such a easy guess and yet we are out of stream…

We finally gave up around 3:30pm at the afternoon, decided to go back to my sister-in-law’s house and do our homework on Internet. That end up with a good sleep and through to the night.

Frusted, feeling hopeless to the game, we wake up the second day (20/Nov) and had some good news! With friends’ help and we’ve been thinking it could be the long under-pass linking among a few shopping mall in that area — CityLink, which allows you to walk to Marine Square, Suntec City, MRT without a shine of sun. That could be a place be the first checkpoint! We went with excitement. Again, few hours later we are down, having a delicious Ramen and, hopeless again. The last hope, well, it could actually be the orchard at Bukit Timah. My sister-in-law had the never-say-never attitude, she went all by herself to Bukit Timah to have a search.

Errhem.…today, Nov/21, I am at my home at KL, typing for this blog post. End of the story, end of my 2-days journey at Singapore for the Race 3 of the treasure hunt. Of course, we didn’t find it. My wife was so close at the Race 2 and yet Race 3 game seem so far… May be I was the one bringing the bad luck to her. Well, the organizer might be happy, I am one of the trourist well spending in that 2 days for over 500 ringgit —- think about if they could attract a couple hundred of Malaysian for the race.

The A380 arrived at KLIA on Wednesday, heard that there is a test flight this morning. It flight through on air around 10:30am this morning. I didn’t follow colleagues to watch it outside of our office. Nevermind, let’s have some view of A380 at Flickr.

May be more Malaysian has been aware of it now since TheStar has its media coverage of the winner of race 1. The Malaccan got the RM50,000 into his pocket happily.

My wife and her friend have gone to Singapore on the past Monday. It’s already on Race 2 (with award RM75,000). On Tuesday, they wasted no time to register and going through 4 stations, solving all the given riddles. It’s percepted as pretty fast as they caught up with the 1st team just within a singular day! However, the luck isn’t with them. The last station is at a place that didn’t operate on Tuesday (the rule is, you can’t get in for the hint of next check point if the participate office isn’t operate).

Waiting cautiously till Wednesday morning, they arrived the check point and found there is already one team staying in front of the gate — all wanted to step into the Bollywood Veggie at the first second it opened! Too bad, without prior experience, that one race would only consist 3 to 5 check points, they didn’t know to search for the letterbox as it’s the last check point! And it’s even worse when they finally found the letterbox, the paper inside the letterbox is LOST?! My wife called the organizer 15 minutes later and only then found nobody should take the paper away.

They got back to the letterbox later on and found the paper, probably organizer did call the other team and ask to return. However, it seem too late to them, even though following the instruction to make call and register their achievement of the final check point. Only winner go away with the RM75,000. :(

Looks like they are serious to get ringgit flow into Singapore in this period of time, to boost Singapore tourism. There are totally 5 races, from race 1st to 5th it provides sole rewards of RM50K, 75K, 100K, 125K and 150K. That’s very attractive isn’t it? If you are Malaysian who pay attention to media, you probably have noticed the event at The Star, Sin Chew Daily, 8TV and TV3.

How did it start? It would put up a riddle on the selected media — which its answer point to the starting point of the race. Then you could get to the location to make registration and start to look for the treasure cheat —- after going to a few points , each with the clue poster to give riddle to be solved. There would be only one winner for each race. The important document you got to get to eligible to claim the prize (well, if you are the winner): Malaysian Passport, Immigration card and the endorsed registration card.

Do check out its FAQ if you are interested.

Lawyers also argue that by forcing copyright owners to lower prices, the government could be in breach of a World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement on intellectual property rights.

The agreement makes it clear that no signatory should do anything that would ‘unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder’.

The Straits Times understands that the United States is looking into whether Malaysia is breaching its commitments under WTO or any other agreement by making CDs and VCDs price-controlled items.

And software vendor like Microsoft and BSA are worried about the price control would open a back door to Singapore and Thailand users. As

it is perfectly legal for consumers to buy licensed software from abroad for use in their home countries.

MDC compiled the feedback of local companies which related to digital product and voice out a “No”. The local legal experts have the same worry :

Meanwhile, legal experts said that the imposition of price controls in certain cases could contravene Malaysia’s obligations under international trade agreements to which the country has acceded.

These include the Asean Free Trade Agreement (Afta), and those related to Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“Price control is normally used to control prices of essential items such as meat and vegetables,” said Benjamin J. Thompson, an intellectual property (IP) lawyer with law firm Sharizat, Rashid and Lee.

“This is the first time it’s being applied to digital products.”

May be our government would like to do it our own way, but please do more analysis before making decision.

CIA

Jeff got an idea to set up a CIA, where CIA stands for Citizens’ Intelligence Agency — similar to MIT Media Lab’s GIA. The mission is to provide an information repositary of individuals/organization/corporations related to government, and setup a secured channel for citizens to submit government related issues/information.

This is an good idea, though controversial. In one hand, it’s a channel for citizens to have a clear understanding of how the people we vote for run the government. There are so much policy/procedure/execution of government where we don’t really how it is being decided or executed. Increasing transparency is definitely a good point and nobody would against. But that brings up a few questions:

• Where do we get those government related information?
• If we could get it, how do we verify it?
• ISA — Internal Security Act, how should we cope with the fear and uncertainty? Where’s the boundary?

Considering the organizations outside of government: Keadilan, DAP, PAS, NGO, Malaysiakini…etc, the source of intelligence input might not be a problem. It might even play a better role to monitor government than the major media. Verification? I have no idea on a reliable verification mechanism.

ISA and OSA are law our govenment applying. There’s just no way you’re going to take easy on it. But there’s always boundary. It would be critical on the accuracy of information submitted. That’s why the important of verification.

Go take a look on the discussion, it’s well worth being posted on the issue.

Water Off My Back

Najah is making a note to herself: “NEVER GIVE INTERVIEWS TO JOURNALISTS”. She blog on her experience of how the paper media screwed what she said, which, either misquoted, out of context or viewpoint being bended. Her rant getting intense responses, where other people commented on different angles of view from journalist, the editing process, or personal experience. An interesting read. :-)

[update] Here’s a personal press of Najah again :).

As a subscriber of the basic 384/128 package, I am pretty OK with the bandwidth. But I can’t tolerate with the low quality of network connection, there’re network problems once per few months. The 24/7 Streamyx has been running for almost one year, and yes, they’re improving. Did it come to a reliable stage already? Its network seem quite OK recently, except the DNS. However, I just can’t have the faith on TMNet, for its bad record.

The government has no choice but to fix the prices of computer software, compact discs (CDs), video compact discs (VCDs) and digital video compact discs (DVDs) if the industry does not cooperate in determining the price control scheme for these products.

The Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry is going to meet with industries this Thursday to discuss price control for these products. Government decided last week to categorise these products as controlled items under Price Control Act 1946.

But what do they mean by “no choice”? I personally don’t understand how they could apply a price control scheme on softwares. It sounds like they’ve never studied the industry before voice out the decision. Just because it plays hard on pirates, then it’s “no choice” to fix the prices?!

Let’s looks at these items that going to put under price control scheme. We’re here talking about products regarding music, movies and computer softwares. They are more or less sort of intellectual products, not just some manufacturing items. And it’s sure the industries would oppose the decision, it cut their profit margin smaller or worse, making lost. On my personal opinion, here’s my though on the feasibility of implementing price control on these items:

• Compact Discs(CDs): This is refer to audio CD (music industry). How much is the cost to produce an album? I have no idea. But price of a CD could go from RM30 to RM50. If that has to be a positive proposal, one might could work out some price rate based on it. The current price range in the market isn’t that big and price control is possible.
• VCD: I always have a doubt on copyrighted VCD, especially on those western movies. Did the big corporates in Hollywood giving out the right to produce VCD? They have the channels to sell and distribute DVD. But VCD? There isn’t many VCD players sold in U.S.. Anyhow, I don’t know how the industry players should define the price of an original copyrighted VCD. But not doubt an affordable price could be worked out. Some of the original VCD is sold at about RM16 on the market. If applying some re-structure on the sale channels, it should be able to drop to a more affordable price.
• DVD: I never knew how much is a copyrighted DVD cost in Malaysia. Check around my friends, none of them ever bought an original DVD. So I could only refer to Amazon. On Amazon, most of the DVDs are sold at US25.00, which is around RM95. On copyrighted DVD, there is a region code embedded into DVD to ensure that DVD could play in certain region. Therefore, could government do put some power on this, taking it to a lower price? RM25.00 looks pretty reasonable to me :-).
• At last, computer software. Unlike previous 3 items, they already have publicly recognized price range and you could base on that to propose a better price scheme, software price is varied. It’s just too general to call it computer software, in that way, the price could go from RM15.00 up to millions ringgit. So, so how are they going to do with software? Categorise it, you said. But there are so many categories. Even if you’ve successfully categorize softwares on the market. You would face the most important question: how to measure it? Complication is the nature of softwares. Every pieces of the software development process is a decision of design (even when you’re coding, you got make a design decision in a few lines of code). And the complication increased when it involved human interaction. There’s just no effective scientific way to measure the effort of a software creation. It doesn’t sound right if you’re going to put a price control scheme on computer software.

I am not saying that software development is creative art but movies/music creation isn’t. For movies, there’s a mature market and VCD/DVD is the side-products. And either CD or VCD/DVD has a recognized stable market price to follow, and you could work on that if some kind of control has to apply on it. To talk of softwares, it is a big category — inside there price is varied, effort can’t be measured in a single way; even though most softwares could be develivered in a CD. It could be workable if government’s intention is to put price control on certain softwares (e.g. Microsoft Windows/Office).

Dinesh has his thought on Software like chicken rice and We just don’t get it !

PPS is using TrackBack feature provided by Movable Type. Thus, for fellow testers, there’re basically two ways for you to ping PPS (which means, send a brief info for PPS to list your blog entry’s URL/extract):

1. If you didn’t use MT, nor your blogging system has the ping/trackback feature, you have to use a public pinger: Registered as a member, and then go to PPS’s public ping form. Just fill in the form and submit, you’re done. The detailed instruction has been given in Aiz’s email.
2. For MT user, a simple guide is illustrated below.

A simple guide for MT users to ping PPS.

1. First at all, you have to know what URL to ping. Aiz has published the trackback URL in PPS Beta mailing list. Noted down the URL. It’s important.
2. Logon to Movable Type
3. You could either manually ping PPS or configure your MT to automatically ping PPS once you post a new entry.
4. For manually ping, click “New Entry”, after you’ve done your writing, paste the trackback URL at the box labeled “URLs to Ping”. Click “Save”, then MT would send a trackback ping to the URL.

   

5. To automate the ping process, click “Categories”.
6. For the category you would like to automate the ping, edit the category attributes.

   

7. Paste the trackback URL to box labeled “TrackBack URLs to ping”, which fall under Trackback Setting->Outgoing Pings. If you would like all your post auto-send a ping to PPS, you have to configure this setting on all your categories. (Note: In other word, if you don’t have categories at all, you can’t automate this ping process)

   

8. Once you configure the categories attributes, that’s it, leave it there and MT would do the ping for you. If you would like to be in control which post to ping, choose the manual way and be remember to paste the trackback URL when you’re going to save a new entry.

That’s it. Enjoy.

My wife is fan of Harry Potter. We went to One Utama, with the intention to shop at IKEA, and of course, checking the availability of the Book 5. But end up she was disappointed. The book is in hardcover! It is thick and heavy. I wonder how possibly you could read it on the bed. Holding the book and reading is just simply a torture to your wrist, but then it isn’t comforable to read it on a desk because of the thickness.

So, is this still a book designed to be read by children? Parents must be training their weak wrist to give bed time reading to their children.

We are looking for a cross-section of Malaysian bloggers (or non-Malaysians living in Malaysia are also invited to apply) to make up this team. When you email us your application to be a BETA tester, please include the following information:

• Full name (real name please, no pseudonyms)
• Email address
• Your blog name
• Your blog URL
• Age
• Gender
• Location (you can be a Malaysian living overseas, no problems)
• What type of blogging tool you use? e.g. Movabletype, Blogger, LiveJournal
• In a word or two, how would you describe the majority of the content of your blog e.g. current/affairs news, personal journal, technology
• Approximately how long have you been blogging i.e. we want a cross section of new and long-time bloggers - the new version has some technical aspects that we want to make sure everyone of all levels of blogging experience and technical capability will be able to use

All appllications should be written to beta@aizuddindanian.com. The application closing date is 26 June 2003. Successful applicants will be informed 28 June 2003. BETA testing will commence 30 June 2003 and last for 7-14 days, depending on how long it takes to iron out all the bugs.

PPS aimed to aggregate Malaysia blogs into a single space, come and join, make your voice heard and make PPS a better place.