Selamat Hari Raya Idul Adha to all my Muslim friends, Selamat Hari Ibu for all Indonesian mothers (including my mother and my wife), Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends, and Happy New Year to everyone! :)
Picture courtesy of 123greetings.com.
The political situation in Malaysia is getting hotter recently. It was started with a demolition of an ancient Hindu temple by the Malaysian government late October, causing rage among Indian Malaysian community in Malaysia. Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), whom activists were being detained by the police when protesting against the demolition of the temple, staged mass rallies throughout last month and early this month, shocking the government and the nation. The rallies were highlighting the minority Indian Malaysians' complaints of discrimination by the ruling government, and almost all of the rallies ended with hundreds being arrested.
The claims of mistreatment against the Indian community were being denounced by Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who said that those claims were stirred up to create racial conflicts. It seems that the Malaysian government was trying all-out to curb the situation by performing mass crackdown on those who supported the rallies. They even charged 26 ethnic Indians with attempted murder of a policeman during one of the protests, with their bail being rejected. What's more, some of them were even accused of having links with terrorist groups.
And recently, seems that the crackdown has widen and is affecting not only the Indian Malaysians group, but also other groups such as lawyers and human rights leaders who were also staging street protests against the government on some other issues. Even Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition figure and former deputy premier who was being sacked during Mahathir's era, was also detained at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after returning from a trip to Turkey. This leads to the United States government to call on Malaysia to allow freedom of expression and assembly. They have repeatedly raised with Malaysian authorities their belief that citizens in any country should be allowed to peacefully asemble and express their views. But of course, Abdullah's stand is that public safety and security should take precedence above public freedom.
Seems that the issue is now getting more serious. Let's just hope that this issue does not cause the Malaysian government to forget that they still have some other important issues to take care, including the flood issue which has caused the death toll to rise and thousands to be evacuated.
The above picture is courtesy of ChannelNewsAsia.
Walk Around The Singapore Formula 1 Track - Part 1 and Part 2. Created by an avid F1 fan who came to Singapore and took pictures of almost every corner of the track. Link is provided by Tomorrow.SG.
One of the biggest IT and digital exhibitions in Singapore, SITEX 2007, is now happening at the Hall 5 and Hall 6 of Singapore Expo, now until 2 December 2007. The event is organised by the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) and managed by Singex Exhibitions. It is an annual exhibition event which has been held since 1988.
The organiser promised that this year's SITEX will not only be bigger, but it will also feature new themed segments such as New Technology, Smart Home, IT & New Media Education, Automobile Electronics, and IT for Kids. They also have partnered with Cash Converters and Clean Solutions for a recycling initiative where consumers can can trade in unwanted electronic gadgets or items at the Cash Converters booth for cash, or dispose of them using recycling bins situated near the entrances. This is a good time for you to dispose all your spoiled or unwanted electronic items.
Currently I don't have any IT or electronic items to buy, so I'm not too sure whether I'm going to pay a visit to the event. Well, actually my wife has been asking for a new laptop but I'm not too sure whether it's now a good time to buy... we'll see. :) :)
I have just watched the premiere of The Amazing Race Asia 2 on AXN Asia just now. It is the second season of The Amazing Race Asia series, one of my favourite shows, after its first season last year. This season, the race started in Singapore, specifically near the Raffles Landing Site where I and my kids just visited last week, and their first destination was the Merlion statue at Mount Faber. Believe me, I didn't know that there's another Merlion statue in Mount Faber, until I watched the show. I thought Merlion statues in Singapore can only be found in Merlion Park and Sentosa. :)
Similar to last season, there are ten teams competing for one hunder thousand dollar. There is one contestant from Singapore, Adrian, who is hearing-impaired, making him the first hearing-impaired contestant in the Amazing Race history. There's one team representing Indonesia, actress Kinaryosih and her partner Brett, and they can reach the pit stop at the fourth place in the first leg of the race. Not bad. :)
So, from next week onwards, I will have to mark this important time of the week: Thursday at 9pm (Singapore time), for me to watch The Amazing Race Asia 2. Oh, and don't forget also that every Wednesday at 11pm (Singapore time), Channel 5 is also showing the latest season of the Amazing Race.
Pictures courtesy of AXN Asia website.
The above picture is taken by our dear Pangeran Panda, using his camera (with the so-called special lens), during our Indo-Sing Moderators dinner event last night.
Believe me, he didn't need to climb to the ceiling to take the picture. The camera was just positioned less than one meter away above the table.
Amazing, eh? :)
Similar to last year, both Singapore and Indonesia governments have decided the same date for this year's Hari Raya Idul Fitri, which is on Saturday, 13 October 2007.
In Singapore, the Mufti of Singapore has announced that based on astronomical calculation, the moon was not visible on the horizon yesterday evening as it set almost at the same time with the sun. Thus, today (Friday, 12 October 2007) marks the 30th day of the Muslim's holy month of Ramadhan and the 1st day of Syawal (Hari Raya Aidil Fitri) falls on Saturday, 13 October 2007.
In Indonesia, the Ministry of Religion Affairs also have decided that this year's Hari Raya Idul Fitri falls on Saturday, 13 October 2007. According to Cecep Nurwendayat, an Indonesian astronomy expert, the moon (hilal) was not possible to be seen yesterday because the sunshine was still strong when the moon set.
Similar to last year, Muhammadiyah, one of the largest Islamic organisations in Indonesia, have decided that Hari Raya Idul Fitri falls one day earlier than the government's decision, which is today (Friday, 12 October 2007). This is due to the different methods used in determining the end of the month of Ramadan. Therefore, it's quite common to see some of Indonesian muslims who celebrate Hari Raya Idul Fitri today instead of tomorrow, and alhamdulillah, these differences are widely accepted by the Indonesian people and never cause any problems, let alone frictions, among Muslims in Indonesia.
I would like to wish all Muslims all over the world, a Happy Eid ul-Fitr celebration. Eid Mubarak, Selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri, mohon maaf lahir dan batin.
Picture taken from Traffic Camera section of One Motoring website.
Those who drive or often take taxis in Singapore will notice that nowadays, there are more cars on Singapore roads compared to two or three years ago. Last year, I would only take less than 15 minutes to reach my home in around Upper Bukit Timah area, from my office in around Science Park area, during evening peak hours. Now, every evening I would need at least 30 minutes, due to congestion along the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE). Last time, the expressway was usually congested only if there's an accident, but nowadays, built-up traffic during evening peak time period is now an every day matter.
And now, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) will install more Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries all over Singapore, to control the traffic flow. I don't understand why they chose to do this instead of limiting the number of cars on the roads. They can actually do so by reducing the number of quota available for Certification of Entitlement (COE) bidding. Past two years were actually a good time for LTA to review and reduce the quota since there were many cars being scrapped/de-registered. But instead, they chose to use that reason as an excuse to increase the quota, and as a result, COE plunged to a very low rate in the past couple of years. At the end, more people are buying cars, resulting in more crowded Singapore roads.
They should actually reduce the quota much earlier, say one or two years ago, to control the number of cars, instead of installing more ERP gantries now to control the traffic flow. It's not fair to the road users, especially to those who purchased their cars when the COE was on a much higher level (2004 and earlier). They paid higher COE premium at that time, expecting that they will enjoy smooth flow of traffic due to the limited number of cars on the roads. However, they ended up having to share more crowded roads with newer car owners who paid lesser COE premiums, and now they will also have to share the burden to pay for additional ERP charges.
OK, I admit that my opinion might be subjective since I bought my car in 2003, while the COE rate was above $30k. But don't you agree with me that the government should limit the number of cars in the first place, rather than letting people to buy more cars and perform "damage control" by charging them to use the roads?
Aaaargh. I missed this year's round of Merdeka's open submission. I intended to register this blog as well as my Minda Indra blog for the open submission, but then I was very busy on that particular day both in the office and at home so I forgot to make the submission. More over, I forgot to mark this date on my scheduler. Guess I will have to wait for the next round of open submission, don't know when...
Why this round of submission is only opened for one day? :(
On one of the mailing lists I subscribe, Rani quoted an article from Reuters saying that the leading Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera said that it has been in talks with the Singapore government since early this year, hoping to get the go-ahead to broadcast in Singapore by year-end.
According to Nigel Parsons, the managing director of the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera English channel, Singapore was cautious about allowing it to broadcast in Singapore because of criticism of the channel in the United States. Al-Jazeera, which attracted millions of viewers after it aired exclusive footage from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the wake of the September 11 attacks, has been accused by the US (who else?) of biased reporting on Iraq and "supporting" terrorism.
Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA) said that it was still assessing Al-Jazeera, saying that "as with all foreign channels, the authorities will need to make assessments based on criteria such as public expectations and interest, as well as the ability to meet local programme standards."
I also read on the Straits Times newspaper yesterday, that if Al-Jazeera gets the go-ahead, most likely it will be aired under SingTel's MiO Pay-TV package.
Will be very interesting to see how the Singapore government will follow-up on this matter, as we have known, Singapore is quite strict in enforcing their controls over the media. And considering that Singapore is a close ally of the United States, I foresee that Al-Jazeera will be having difficulties in getting the broadcast rights.
As what Mr. Parsons has pointed out, "We understand that we have to be patient".
(Picture courtesy of Wikipedia)
At last, the date for the inaugural F1 race in Singapore has been set. It will be held on 28 September 2008 and will be after the race in Belgium, and before the race in Shanghai, China. Subject to final safety clearances, the Singapore race will be the first F1 race to be held at night. The race will be held on a 5.2-km street circuit around the Marina Bay/Esplanade area.
Tickets will start to go on sale in December 2007. Although the ticket prices have not been fixed yet, Singapore Grand Prix, the organiser of the Singapore race, has released the estimated ticket price to start from S$50 for the trial races, and S$100 for the actual races.
Well, I believe Formula One fans can start marking the date in the calendar, although now it might still be too early to book the hotels. I'm not too sure whether you can just book a hotel within the Marina Bay area and watch the race without having to buy tickets. :)
Complete race list for 2008 F1 season:
Yesterday (22/7) evening, while waiting for my wife to shop at IKEA on Alexandra Road (it's annual clearance sale in IKEA now until 12 August 2007, by the way), I took Inka and Irza to a children playground, located in front of Block 2 Jalan Bukit Merah, between the former SAFRA Bukit Merah clubhouse and the ABC market and food centre.
The playground is quite nice, and I remember that this playground was just built recently after the whole block and some other blocks nearby were undergoing major renovation. Inka and Irza were having a great time playing there.
The only one disturbing sight there is stagnant water, most probably as a result of drops of rain, smacked in the middle of the playground. With many cases of dengue reported all over Singapore, such sight is a bit worrying since if I'm not mistaken, the stagnant water can be a nice breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Wondering what would the NEA say about this?
I have seen many vending machines throughout Singapore dispensing drinks and snacks. But this is the first time I saw a vending machine dispensing umbrellas. The vending machine is located at the first floor of IMM Building at Jurong East, just in front of Burger King fast food restaurant.
I believe this is a great business idea, especially in Singapore where the weather can be so unpredictable. One time it can be so hot, and one or two hours later, it can just suddenly rain heavily. Sometimes it can be difficult for some people (including myself) to get an umbrella when we need one. Either we forget to bring one, or too lazy to bring one.
The price of the umbrella itself is, surprisingly, quite cheap, for Singapore standard. Only S$6 per umbrella. I haven't managed to buy one so I don't know how's the quality of the umbrella, but the vendor's website claimed that it's a mini 3-fold high quality umbrella, framed by lightweight aluminum alloy, which also has ultra-violet ray protection as well.
Not too sure whether we also have this kind of vending machines in Jakarta or any other parts of Indonesia. Has anyone seen one? :)
Before I had my Multiply site, I used to use Yahoo! Photos to store my photo albums. There were more than twenty albums I stored there before I started to use Multiply, which I think is much better in terms of features and community. Time goes on, and since Flickr was being acquired by them, Yahoo! had two redundant photo sharing services. And now, they have decided to close Yahoo! Photos since they will focus their efforts for the development of Flickr.
Yahoo! will officially close the service on 20 September 2007, and they give the option of moving the photos to another photo sharing service, download the original resolution photos back to our computers, or buy an archive CD containing all the photos. I chose the first option, and considering Flickr is currently also being managed by Yahoo!, I decided to move the photos to my Flickr account, which I have merged with my Yahoo! account quite some time ago.
It's quite easy to migrate, I just needed to login to my Yahoo! Photos site and chose Flickr to transfer my photo albums, and they will do the rest. They estimated that it will take up to a week for them to do so, however I found out that all my albums were being migrated in less my two days. All my Yahoo! Photos albums were conveniently being transformed into sets in Flickr, and being set as private so I can easily mark which albums I want to set public and which ones I want to keep private. Very convenient.
The only problem is that the number of sets for normal (free) Flickr account is limited to three. Because I moved my Yahoo! Photo albums to Flickr, they have generously gave me free 3 months of Pro account, which will expire on 28 September 2007, but I was wondering what will happen to my albums (read: sets) after the Pro account expires. I might need to extend the Pro account, which will cost me US$24.95 a year. Holy smokes! That's cheap! Or, is it? :) Considering that Multiply can give unlimited albums and photos for free? :)
Well, what I am doing now is to create a same tag for all the photos on the same albums, so I can still access my albums using tags. Hopefully this will help me to track the albums even after the Pro account is expired. Or, perhaps later someone might be kindly enough to give me a Flick Pro gift account, for free? Who knows... :) :)
The Coffee Club itself is a chain of coffee shops located throughout Singapore, similar to Starbucks and The Coffee Bean. However, usually we don't go to Coffee Club for the coffee. Our (especially my wife's) favourite is the fresh fruit fondue, some fresh fruits such as strawberries, mangoes, kiwis and bananas served with hot thick chocolate.
I also ordered the muddy mud pie, which is actually ice cream cake served on top of oreo-based cake layer. The only drink we ordered was the ice rambutan, which is much similar to Al-Azhar's rambutan spin.
(Pictures taken from the article)
Even though the workshop and tutorial of APRICOT 2007 in Bali has been starting since mid of last week, the conference was only officially opened yesterday (Tuesday, 27 February 2007). The conference was officially opened by Mr. Sofyan Djalil, the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, after the opening speeches given by Ms. Sylvia Sumarlin, the chairman of APJII, the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association, and Mr. Gaurab Uphadaya, the chairman of APIA. APJII and APIA are two out of several organisations which support the APRICOT 2007 event.
Yesterday morning, I attended the BGP Deployment and Best Practices tutorial, conducted by Philip Smith. During lunch time yesterday, I had the chance to meet Mr. Sanjaya, one of APJII's activists who is now working for APNIC, and Mr. Roy Rahajasa Yamin, my ex-boss in RADNET. During the plenary session, I also met Mr. Yulianus, the network administrator of Indosat, one of the leading ISPs in Indonesia.
Yesterday night, I attended the APRICOT Opening Social Event, which is held at the Westin Poolside. I met some friends from Starhub and Equinix, Singapore. I also met Mr. Toto Santoso, the administrator of Ipteknet/BPPT and also previously the administrator for the go.id second level domain. We discussed almost anything reminiscing and Bill Fridini also joined the discussion. It was fun.
Today (Wednesday, 28 February 2007) morning, I attended the second phase of the APRICOT plenary sessions at the auditorium, with some interesting presentations, such as the new 4-byte (32-bit) AS number testing by Geoff Huston, and bogon filters discussion by Randy Bush. During lunch time, I met Judhi Prasetyo, one of my friends in Singapore. His company, FortiNet, is having a booth here in APRICOT 2007 and is one of the sponsors for the event. He also introduced me to Valens Riyadi, one of APRICOT's organising committee members.
I'm now writing this article from the Nusantara 2 Room, attending the IX SIG, chaired by Philip Smith. There are some interesting presentations, one of them is regarding the new 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, by Greg Hankins from IEEE. Currently, there's also a presentation regarding Euro-IX, which is actually a European IXP association, and *not* a European IX point by itself. Very interesting. This might be due to the fact that there are many (and not only one) IX points in Europe.
Although today (Monday, 26 February 2007) is my first day at this APRICOT 2007 conference, it's actually already the sixth day of the conference, since I skipped the workshop and some of the meetings which are not related to my organisation. This conference is being held at the Bali International Convention Centre, which is quite a good, world class convention centre, similar to the Suntec City Convention Centre in Singapore. It's located within the complex of Westin Resort hotel, about 5-10 minutes from Melia Bali Hotel where I'm staying. There's a shuttle bus ferrying all the delegates from hotel to the conference venue.
Earlier, during lunch session, I met Mauldi Wirastomo and Bill Fridini, both are my old friends from APJII. They are now very busy since they are in-charge of the network providing Internet access to all the delegates. I also had the chance to meet Ahmad Alkazimy, one of APJII's key technical staff whom I previously only knew from his e-mails in some mailing lists. I also met Deny Kurniawan and I Nyoman Tusta, two of my old friends from RADNET Surabaya.
There are some tutorials which we can choose to attend, based on their streams. For today, I attended the Introduction to IPv6 tutorial by Jordi Palet Martinez, and IPv6 Deployment tutorial by Salaman Asadullah. There's free Internet access provided through wi-fi (wireless) networks, and power plugs are also available in the tables, so we can use our laptop and access the Internet while attending the tutorials. Unfortunately, the Internet access is a bit slow, although, according to Mauldi, there's more than 28 Mbps of bandwidth available. I guess it might be due to more people are using the network this week compared to last week.
The APRICOT conference, which stands for "Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies", is the place where all network geeks from Asia Pacific, if not the whole world, gather to discuss about new technology in the Internet and IT fields, especially on the network area. The event consists of workshops, tutorials, conference sessions and some other forums as well. We can say that APRICOT is the Asia Pacific version of North America's NANOG. For this year, the APRICOT 2007 will be held at Bali International Convention Centre, Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. It will be hosted by APJII, the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association.
My blogger friend Tata, who is currently in Switzerland but is having a plan to migrate to Singapore soon with his family, informed me that his computer always hung after viewing the main page of The Journey of Inka and Irza. I tried to replicate the problem, and yes, I also encountered the same problem. My Mozilla Firefox hung after trying to load the page for some time, not too sure why. Many thanks Tata for the feedback. :)Amazing! As I have predicted earlier, my favourite team, the Malaysians Zabrina and Joe Jer, have won the first session of the Amazing Race Asia, with a narrow lead from the second team to arrive at the pit stop, Sandy and Fransesca. The race ended at Bako National Park (misspelled as "Baku National Park" by the show's producer), which is about 37 km north of the city of Kuching, in Sarawak, Malaysia.
For some reason, my syndication sites such as Planet Singapura or Planet Indra are now only showing the titles of all my posts on my Blogger-based weblogs, such as Rumah Indra and Info, instead of the full articles. Not too sure why. The problem started immediately after I upgraded my Blogger-based to new Blogger.
At last, I finally saw the long awaited option on my Blogger dashboard for me to switch to the new Blogger, which is already out of Beta (see left picture). The option appears on top of my usual Blogger dashboard when I logged in to the dashboard today. This is a great surprise to me, since I have actually tried to switch just several days ago, and it was not successful. I believe this was because my Blogger account is also a contributor of the Bemo Live and Suka Suka Gue blogs, preventing me from switching to the new Blogger account. It seems that now, Blogger has managed to give me the option to upgrade all my blogs separately from the two blogs which are still on the old version of Blogger.
Having said that, I immediately chose to switch to the new Blogger. First, I needed to confirm my sign-in by signing in using my old Blogger account (see right picture). After signing in, I am given the list of all my blogs, which are going to be upgraded (see below picture). It was mentioned that the two blogs I have mentioned above are owned by someone else, and although I will still be able to post to those blogs after upgrade, but the blogs won't have the new feature until the owners upgrade them.
After pressing "Continue", the screen would prompt me to choose a Google account (see right picture). I could either use my own Google account if I have one, or create a new one. Since I already had a Google account, I just needed to key in my Google account and password. After signing in, the upgrade process will start, and depends on the number of blogs and how big they are, it may take several minutes. Once done, an email will be sent to our Gmail e-mail account.
So, here this is, my first post on the new Blogger version. Haven't really explore the new features yet, though. One of the obvious features I can see, which I think would be very useful, is the labels tagging, which can be used for me to categorise all my next articles. Well, let's see how it goes after I post this article. :)
