ThinkingNectar

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

This is written by Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Simple yet insightful words that shows how dependent we are of each other.

I spend a good hour reading a Martin Gardner book over the last weekend. I will say it kept the mind occupied and it is always good to revisit some books that you had read when you were younger. If my memory does not fail me, the first time that I touched Gardner’s book was when I am 17. Pretty late I will say.

The current book have 2 rather interesting parts which I like to share. Those who knows me well enough will uunderstand that I do have a keen interest in understanding how and why human make mistake, or mis-judgement.

The ten travellers

Ten weary footsore travelers,
All in a woeful plight,
Sought shelter at a wayside inn,
One dark and stormy night.

“Nine rooms, no more,” the landlord said,
“Have I to offer you.
To each of eight a single bed,
But the ninth must serve for two.”

A din aroise, The troubled host
Could only scratch his head,
For those tired men no two
Would occupy one bed.

The puzzled host was soon at ease–
He was a clever man–
And so to please his guestes devised
This most ingenious plan.

In room marked A two men were placed,
The third was lodged in B,
The fourth to C was then assigned,
The fifth retired to D.

In E he sixth he tucked away,
In F the seventh man,
The eighth and ninth in G and H,
And then to A he ran,

Where in the host, as I have said,
Had laid two travelers by;
Then taking one– the tenth and last–
He lodged him safe in I.

Nine single rooms– a room for each–
Were made to serve for ten;
And this is that puzzles me
And many wiser men.

It got me the first time. Seems on the first count that some how the inn keeper threw the pigeonhole principle out of the window.

For part 2, we have a simple maths equation.

a = b +c

Multiply both sides by a-b to obtain:

a² - ab = ab + ac - b² - bc

Move ac to the left side:

a² - ab - ac = ab - b² - bc

Factor:

a ( a - b - c ) = b ( a - b - c)

Divide each side by a-b-c to get:

a = b

Again, find how where is it that your mind got lead astray.

This is a follow up on my post on Barcamp Singapore: Maps and Mobile Unconference.

I was playing around with Google Maps and looking at what other have done. Zefrank have a rather interesting and amusing, if not useful, application that shows anyone who is interested to know what is on the other side of the Earth on where they are standing now.

So for Singapore, we have the following:

On the other side we have:

So imagine if anyone starts digging vertically downwards now, he/she will end up in some rather mountainous area in Ecuador. At least we know we have a strong backing!

Pardon to any poster who had tried and failed to comment on this blog for the past few days. I had tried to be smart and change a little of the Maths comment Spam filter only to have it backfiring on me. How nice.

Thanks Lesile Huang of E27 of informing me of the malfunction. I do not have a contact form on this blog and he was kind and resourceful enough to drop me a message via facebook.

My bad.

May the comment god have mercy on my blog

I was at BarCamp Singapore last week. Yes, this post is overdue but still it should give a good insight to what (some of) the speakers had offered.

The topic to discuss is on Maps and Mobile. Mainly Google Maps and generally anything mobile. 2 tracks and I attended the Maps track. But before going on, the event was the first public event sponsored by Google Singapore and supported by NUS Enterprise, e27/Garag3 and Singapore PHP User Group.

Derek Callow (Corrected after by Lesile of e27 update me on the actual speaker) Andrew McGlinchey (Geo Product Manager for SE Asia, Google Singapore) was first to present on the overview of Google Maps API. Nothing much technical but generally what Google Maps aims to be and what are the possiblity. In summary of what he said:

• 80% of data have location related meta information
• Geospatial long tail: most geo location information collected by government are limited to landmarks and places of general interest. What about parking lots and places to walk dogs? Hence the long tail of geospatial data.
• Google Earth have managed to map a pixel to a meter square accuracy.
• Enterprise Level user agreement: A paid service level agreement for power users, whom which none of Singapore Google Maps based website have yet to require.

He always suggested that we check out the following:

• KML
• Sketchup
• Mapplets Gallery

A useful introduction to Google Maps. Too bad he spoke without a microphone and it was pretty hard to hear him from the back of the room.

Second up was Gerard Lim, CTO from bak2u to talk about Secured Mobility. For this I was not paying too much attention as my area was way to noisey with dis-interetested participants.

Nokia managed to get the first presentation slot and was presentated by Gary Chan. His presentation was (sadly) a close duplicate of what Derek covers earlier. Thunder stolen maybe. But Nokia Maps are like Yahoo and MSN maps, competitors in the Maps API arena with Google. Just maybe the geek culture just prefer the Google’s touch better?

Singeo was next with Jon Petersen. Singeo have maps on many kind about Singapore. He have maps on wifi location in Singapore and general stuff that the public will be intereted in but may not be captured by the governement.

He mention Fire Eagle which is a location broker which allows a user to allow certain controlled access to his/her location so that certain services can be provided to him/her with such information on her current location.

Then he touch upon some concept of locating a person’s location via wifi based trigulation and/or GPS or event mobile phone location. Such the ability to location on person will allow an intelligent system to show nearby bus stop to anyone, to cite an example of his.

Shopelette was next and it is a presentation on their site and services. Pretty site, and rather appealing for the shopahoplics. Generally is a site for people to state their purchases. Mainly for the less mainstream from what I saw. Of course, he mention 3 key points which strikes me:

• Shopping is a social activity
• 95% of purchases happen in-store
• Location, location, location

Overall, a insightful view to something which I have little interest in. Which is shopping. If ever I was to use Shoplette, I guess Sim Lim Square is all I see. Right? Throw in Funan Center too. The presenter’s blog here.

On a side note, Shoplette is done in Ruby on Rails.

Lilihood was next. They have a highly interactive map (location) based social network. Pretty fun as users can claim a turf and see who shared the turf with you and then you get to make friends and such. What caught my attention was the ability to switch the underlying map from Google to Yahoo and if I am not wrong, MS Maps too. A site with great technical effort placed into.

Last on the Maps track was on homespace.sg. This in my opinion worth my effort that day. As they covered the problems which they faced. Highly user-centeric based problems but should serve as a guide for anyone starting out on Google Maps API.

Problem: Display information - Information overload

Solution:

• Proper Planning of relevancy.
• Reduce loading of irrelevany information
• Grouping of information
• Reduce visual distraction
• Uses clusterer plugins to reduce information shown on map and group markers together

Problem: Design and Aesthetics - textless markers

Solution:

• Design markers to symbolise information
• Consistent theme for different class of markers
• Custom markers for School and MRT lines, 2D markers vs 3D markers to differential importance
• Making use of info windows, uses Danmarvelous

Problem: User behaviour - dragging and zooming requests

Solution:

• Limit request by understand user behaviour
• Separate type if request.

In short, I think it as a great presentation on their experience with Google Maps. 2 thumbs up.

Of course, Preetam Rai sneaked in a short presentation on tagging a real life object and generate a shared communication/sharing of thoughts between users of that object/place/item. It is better explained with his blog post named tagging real world objects.

And last but not least, Widgeo.us did that beta launch and do support them and register for their service.

SimplyJean have a article (on a newspaper article) on this local company VueStar going around sending letters to local companies to enforce a patent which they (VueStar) have.

At the time of writing, Jwong had commented on SimplyJean the following:

Back to the point. The patent(s) were awarded sometime from 2001-2003. We all know that the ‘invention’, in this case the HTML ‘HREF’ tag, has been public since the early 1990s. In fact, because the method is HTML code, it should probably belong to Tim Berners-Lee instead.

Seeing as to how they were neither the inventor, and the invention isn’t new, it’ll never hold any water in court. I’d love to have them come and try me.

VueStar looks to be another company preying on the public’s misinformation to make a quick buck. Just like how another local company, Odex, cheated people of thousands of dollars by claiming copyright ownership.

They relied on the (Singaporean) public’s fear of the law, to make a quick buck, and never ever really brought anyone to court. They were just after the gullible, and VueStar looks to be just like that.

I find Jwong to be correct. Webmaster follows the current HTML standards. If there is any infringment of IP of any sort, we should be hearing it first from the W3C. Not in some form of legal letters having a go at smaller players.

What VueStar did amused me greatly. How do they think that they can pull such a thing off?

I did some digging and IPOS returns the results at here for Patent Number is 95940 with application number 200301820-7.

I took lunch time to read the patent details and its seems that it is applicable to the search results return by search engines. Hence if you do run a search engine (many of us do not) you are pretty safe. But if the nitty gritty comes in, and if you do run a search feature on your site, the feature maybe be covered by the stated patent. And that if the search result returns image to faciliate/enhance the visualisation of the search.

That brings me to the next point which can be found in the Q and A on VueStar site:

I do not have a search capability, why do I have to pay?

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has entitled you to conduct your and others viewing. They will also have to take up a licence because they are causing or contributing to your use of the VUESTAR System (TM) and using our patented technology.

This is a strange rule I will say. I created my site and if someone present it in a different manner, I am liable for fees with regards to this new presentation which I did not explictly wanted. Sounds like taxes to me. I am not a laywer by training but if the search engines or any service provider wants to show my site with a image linking back to my site, I thank them for the recognition but that is all I can do. Most website are in a as-if format. Go after those who causes the patent infringment, namely the search engines?

I guess it will be a wait and see now. The local webmaster and site owners are pretty much wiser from the Odex case and will be more than happy to wait out for the first, if any court case on this matter.

On a parting note, what on earth was the officer at IPOS thinking when he/she issue the patent?

PHP meetup 08 brings to us a series of presentation on CMSes.

Starting off the talk will be Voiceroute. The presentation will be mainly on the SOAP API of Druid which is the open source unified communication project by Voiceroute. Vikram touchs upon SugarCRM which is another open souce CRM project. A demo of calling his mobile phone via a web interface met with a little bit of hiccups and was quickly remedied by a simple callback.

So Micheal picks up his phone. Sweet demo. And into the code. The demo simple made a click to call function, a SOAP request to the Druid API. I guess the code will be better highlighted when the presentation slides appears on php.com.sg.

Giving more possibilies to the Druid API, a few functions for Android is presented. While the second demo boots up, we were told to ignore the silly monkey wallpaper that was currently on the screen. The demo is a emulator running an Android machine and accessing the data on a Voiceroute Druid based server.

That sums up the end of presentation one. The Q&A was pretty short and the audience were informed that the Druid interface as created using JQuery and DoJo.

Moving on, we have Jamming with Joomla.

Zhenhao is the presenter and his experience with Joomla is around 6 months and the talk will be catered to beginners. Joomla is a fork of Mambo. And it is a content management system. CMS are more than a blogging platform as it have a work flow management system.

3 Building blocks for Joomla:

• Modules
• Plugins
• Components (MVC model)

The demostation by Zhenhao will be to install a simple Joomla 1.5.3 CMS from scratch (on a windows machine).

Hence you enter the basic MySQL details and only MySQL, and the CMS is installed. Of course as most CMS goes, delete the install directory or install script. Then Zhen Hao covers the different type of roles, namely,

• Registered
• Author
• Editor
• Publisher

A run and the 3 different type of users are created.

Moving on, we touched upon the different modules and there are a series of modules that are commonly used. Login module was installed in the demo. And the demostartion moves on to adding structure and some simple article submitting and show function to the naked interface that the installed Joomla have now.

The Author user logged in and created a simple article with the word “demostration” and that was followed by the Publisher user logging in and getting the article to published. Workflow illustrated.

Next, Template customisation was covered with the modules presentation tightly integrated and easily customised within the adminstration module itself. Component is up next and we will be looking at Joomfish. Before that, we have to enable legacy support in Joomla. Installing the component was was easily as pointing the componet file in the admin panel and the component is installed.

The presentation moves to a quick tour of the other components.

• Calendar: JEvent
• Forum: Fireboard
• Shopping Cart: Virtue Mart
• Document Manager: Doc man
• Community Builder: Online Community

Up next we will be looking at Drupal, presented by Daniel of Ideapreneur.

Daniel starts by saying that the moves from Joomla to Drupal simply because Joomla cannot do tagging then. While Drupal (then) can do tagging really easily. The title of the presentation is Drupal 101.

The demostration is also another one that install a Drupal CMS onto a windows machine. A Vista this time round. The installation was clean and quick and Daniel went on to talk about user roles where the admin can limite the access to the site by the different type of users.

And Daniel covers the theme avaliable for Drupal and he honestly mention that Drupal’s theme are rather sucky and Wordpress and Joomla have better themes out there to be downloaded.

Drupal’s blocks are next where a drag and drop feature was shown that the admin can directly play with to decide where each block will appear on. A much user-friendly feature as compared to the days of the “weights”.

Nothing much was covered for modules and Daniel was honest that beginners should steer away from Drupal and stick to Wordpress and Joomla.

Kien added that Drupal have a module that integrate with Facebook that enable a Drupal site to serve its content in a Facebook iframe. And he added that wordpress too have one plugin too.

The topic of sleep is something that intrigues me, if not most of the people I know. Sleep too much and you wasted good productive hours. Sleep too little and you are depriving yourself of one of life most simplest pleasure.

Sleeping has also spun off a profitable industry. Look at the many type of pillows and beds on the market. Surely that is huge money. And who can forget those late night infor-mercials (who on earth came up with such a word! Darn marketers!). Here is one for those who wants a good laugh.

Wikipedia has one entry on sleep that makes for interesting reading. It serve as a good introduction to the topic generally but I will not recommend to take whatever on it as the absolute truth. What interest me, and hence the topic of this post is Sleep Debt.

Sleep debt is the effect of not getting enough rest and sleep; a large debt causes mental and physical fatigue. Scientists do not agree on how much sleep debt it is possible to accumulate, nor on whether the prevalence of sleep debt among adults has changed appreciably in the industrialized world in recent decades. It is likely that children are sleeping less than they used to in western societies

There are not much researched articles one the web that talks about sleep debt and how we can go around to handle them. And the most recently read article on the topic from Scientific America states the following:

The good news is that, like all debt, with some work, sleep debt can be repaid—though it won’t happen in one extended snooze marathon. Tacking on an extra hour or two of sleep a night is the way to catch up. For the chronically sleep deprived, take it easy for a few months to get back into a natural sleep pattern…

A few months. That is a scary thought to entertain. Given that the exams season had just gone by, many students should be under some form of sleep debt. I do encountered some of these sleep debt issues during my undergraduate and army days. It seems a good and lengthy night rest followed by a series of days of napping takes care of most sleep debt issues.

I may have to lean towards the side that sleep debt varies from people to people and hence the way to handle and repay sleep debt varies too. Napping works for me and hope it works for others too. At least napping kept my productivity level bearable after rushing datelines and such.

Moving on, repaying sleep debt is not the root of the issue. The issue should be at least tackled to allow any sleep debt repayment tactics to be effective. If it is worked or studies related, like rushing projects and reports, then take a look at your working patterns, your co-workers and even your work-life balance as a whole.

Else if it is leisure induced, like levelling up your characters in some MMORPG, or making more friends in some trendy social network or even getting a dose of free videos in other video sharing sites, you should be sleeping my friend. And yes, blogging late into the night as in this post is been made counts for too.

And for the last scenario, if you are sacrificing sleep for the next generation. Good for you if you are procreating. And you get what you sow if you are not sleeping while you change diapers in the middle of the night.

To round off this post, good sleeping habits count for good productivity. Get a regular sleeping pattern and have a conducive sleeping environment. If all yes fail, get that support pillow. You may just need -1 hours of sleep after using it!

Spend a good part of the previous weekend updating from Gusty to Hardy. Most of the time was spend (silly-ly) download the packages from a source that was slow. Actually from the main repo. Silly me. Was thinking it was crazy that a update should take 10 hours to download. And the packages are only around 150MB in size!

Hence I found out that anyone can easily add mirrors to get the packages from, hence speeding up the updating process. And Taiwan have a 20Gbps fat piped mirror.

Hence the download became 40 mins from 10 hours. And the actual installation took another 30 minutes. Very much painless, less that the fact that I need to recheck every single Apache subdomain that I had created to make sure that there are still working. It was pretty scary when the updates wants to overwrite your configuration files. And configuration files breaks things!

FireFox 3 Beta 5 and Flash: Adobe default installer for Linux works!

Off the box (or installer), the first thing I checked was to get flash back into the FF3 beta 5. It seems pretty simple as the default Adobe installer for linux seems to work perfectly. Sweet. Pity my previous post on FireFox 2 and flash should become history. I yet to get Shockwave as yet.

Firefox 3 beta seems to solve a fair bit of memory problem from what I see. No slow down when I had igoogle and netvibes open in my tabs. But netvibes pages font seems to be slightly screwed with bad kerning. Other than that, Firefox 3 beta 5 seems to have better font display. I hate to say this but the looks of the font display is closer to Safari.

Speaker mute when headphones plugged in: Nice

What impresses me the most is support for plug in headphones or earphones for the mattter. Now in Hardy, when you plug in your headphones, the main speaker for the laptop will be muted. Sweet. It was one issue which I was looking into in Gusty but never gotten around to do as it is not critical.

Desktop Effects: I like

I also like the support for deskstop effects. As I am running on a Intel 965 GMA, previously on Gusty there were limited support for desktop effect for this graphic hardware. It was desktop effects or video. And video includes flash video. But now, it is best of both world. Nice.

Ubuntu Touch Pad Configuration: Missing

Lastly, a feature that is sorely missing. The lack of touch pad configuration. Yes there are plenty of forum posts and threads on resolving it. And I can easily get it done too. Given that I am fortunate enough to get my hands on a eeePC 701 recently, and it have touch pad configuration out of the box. Guess I have to get my hands dirty to resolve the touch pad sensitive on my laptop.

On a closing note, Hardy seems to do more for me and I do recommend users to update to the latest 8.04 LTS.

I was reading this interesting article from Slate.com and was pretty impressed by how many things in life can be explain by Game Theory. Of course, in a slightly more simplified manner.

The article explains why there seems to be a lack of appealing available man? First we establish the classic marriage proposal pattern:

A dating couple dates (DUH!). Women made known she is open for a proposal and man proposes. The interaction is not “I choose you” by the man, instead, the proposal is more like “Will you choose me”, playing the ball into the female’s court.

In a rather twisted look at the above pattern, I compare it will an auction. An auction where the item on auction need not necessary sell within a certain time frame. The females being the items and the males being the bidders.

The male will bid to their true ability. Be it their character, their earning power or social status. While the female, knowing their own (female) true value, (and the hapless man does not) will hold out for the best deal, when the highest bid comes along.

First of all, we must understand that the information that both parties see here are different. The man perceived the woman to be the woman the woman wants him to see. Not to sound confusing, the woman will impress onto the man the image of the “lady” the woman is. It may not be the true person, but a image of the “perfect woman” the man thinks he is getting married to. While the man is judged by his character, his social status, his looks and his earning power.

Hence the issue arise here. A better qualified woman, will hold out for the best deal, the best man that she feels is the “one for her”. While lesser qualified woman, upon impressing a man whom is better than her league, will accept the proposal.

If such behaviour continues and after some time, good man will be removed from the game, having gotten married. While better qualified woman question why there is a lack of quality appealing man to date.

There you go, game theory at work where both parties get the best deal for themselves. Poor man.