amudi.org

6 Jul 2010

The Internet

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

via newsweek.com

From 1995.

17 May 2010

diaspora

diaspora /dī-ˈas-p(ə-)rə, dē-/
origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”
1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

via joindiaspora.com

Interesting, in case you haven't heard of it.

17 Feb 2010

On The Value of Personal Information

Also worth considering: We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal with Google. The rest of us would rather spent $99 and keep the contents of our email to ourselves.

via fakesteve.net

All my credit card statements, software licenses information, electronic receipt, password reminder, everything, goes into Gmail.

Maybe it's a good idea to ditch gmail altogether, for a system with better privacy. But not MobileMe, I've read some bad experiences with that. And of course not the rumored facebook mail. Maybe I could roll my own email server somewhere?

2 Feb 2010

Internet Restriction in Singapore

via tweetie

26 Aug 2009

Reading Trends

What I've read according to Google Reader trends. Yes, I still read RSS feeds. Sometimes I find statistic like this amusing.

18 Aug 2009

The Time Machine

Browser has become one of the most important piece of software in human life. Take one example, me. I use web based application to track a project. One day, I can't access the website. I was literally pulling my hair trying to figure out what's wrong. The ISP? The web? The whole internet broken?

After a dozen of refreshes and restarts, I am somehow able to access the site now. After I log in, I see something wrong. The CSS and JavaScript files were not loaded. The site is a AJAX-heavy site (which is cool), but has no alternative when the browser can't load JavaScript. See, the J in AJAX is JavaScript, and it's not AJAX if you can't do the J. In conclusion, I can't see or update my task list, I can't do anything for two days.

I tried re-installing Safari, tried with Firefox (two different versions of it), nothing worked. 3 am in the morning, in desperation I pull one last trick. Time machine. I restore Safari and some of its configuration files from a few days back (before the latest update), and shutdown the computer (without trying opening that damn site again, too tired). Later that day I tried again, and to my surprise it worked. Life is good again. Now I can continue my life.