Our peace of mind

Boutique Store, Hypermarket and Farmer’s Market

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When Microsoft first launched their Application Marketplace, the number of applications are so limited that you feel like entering a boutique shop selling or showcasing limited edition products.

After 3 years (or is it 4?), Apple (and their loyal fans) always like to boast about the high volume of applications available in their Appstore. The last I read they claimed to have 200,000 applications available for download. But in reality, how many of them are really useful, and how many of them would really catch your attention for a download? Apple Appstore therefore is like a big superstore or hypermarket, not just  because there’s a wide variety of products you can choose from, but more importantly you are either clueless what exactly you need, or you are just bored that you want to shop around.

Now Google had recently claimed that they have reached the milestone of 75000 apps in their Android market. With just 1/3 of what Apple Appstore has,  Android market is just like a farmer’s market (or in local context, a wet market), provides all the essential and necessity goods without the bells and whistles.  Android Market is just that for the current moment. But like a typical wet market, it’ll transform overtime, and I will not be surprised that Android Market becomes a “superstore” in near future.

So the point being? Application store in terms of application counts is no longer relevant anymore. What  matters more will be the quality of the applications available, and that is not just about the user interface, but also the functionalities the application provides. Strip away the useless apps in Apple Appstore for example, you probably only have 1/3 (I am being conservative here) of them that’s worthy for download and use. So keep an open mind (myself included), ask yourself what applications you need, and shop around to see which platform offers the best application that best meets your need, not how many you can download.

a nice poem about Liverpool

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my unusually shy nephew wrote this, in response to the latest verdict by the court on the recent legal dispute by two clowns on the sale of Liverpool club to New England Sports Venture.

Built by Billy Shanks,
Destroyed by Silly Yanks.
They’re gone, a new era is born.
Oh dear, here’s our saviour!
John Henry,
it’s not the fricking money lenny (G&H)
Get the Hell out,
Cos’ the fans of Liverpool shout,
YOU WILL ALWAYS WALK ALONE.
YNWA.

Week 39: My rant snippets

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It has been a very bizarre and tiring week, to say the least.

It has been 3.5 years since I took my current job position. And it has been that long since I work under odd hours, having to engage my colleagues in all 3 regions across the globe. At times, I works round the clock, 4 hours in the morning at the office, rest for 2 hours before 3 hours of conference call with the Europeans  in the afternoon. The day unfortunately doesn’t end there. A couple of hours break in the evening before a series of long night calls till 2-3am. I do find that it has been more physically very demanding these days for me to attend the night calls. Few days ago, I attended 2 nights of meetings (from 11pm to 8am, for what’s worth), and I took two days to recuperate. I wonder how long can such insane routine last.

Over the weekend, my car refused to start. Initially suspected of a flat battery, it turned out that the likely cause is a fuel pump failure. It was a Sunday morning, so I had to have it towed to the workshop and by Monday, we shall know what and how much will be the damage.

The week ended with my favorite club, Liverpool, lost to a minor club, Blackpool at home. Seriously, this is really f**ked up, and I hope Roy gets the booting soon. There’s a good reason why he spent his 30 over years of managerial positions with lesser clubs and winning nothing. Resume does not lie, there is so much you can sweet coat it.

End of…

Samsung Galaxy S – Can it ever be a brick?

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In the techie world, the ‘brick’ is usually associated to the state of your phone, where no matter what magic you try to apply, your phone  cannot be powered on at all. It is therefore no better than a high tech paper weight, or a brick if your phone happens to be one heavy phone.

Well, I thought my recently acquired Galaxy S was bricked yesterday.  It’s almost unthinkable that a surreal phone sitting in front of me was staring at me like a brick. I had previously flash a corrupted kernel or interrupted the flash process, in all cases, the phone will just show a broken flash icon when I tried to power up the phone. The phone was recoverable in every incident, since I could bring the phone back to the “download mode” (i.e. bootloader mode),  which allows me to re-initiate a firmware flash.

But not yesterday. I updated one part of the firmware, the flash process was successfully executed as indicated by the Odin flash application, and the phone was expectedly rebooted. But lo and behold,  the phone did not wake up at all after the reboot. It stayed powered down, no display, no sound, no sign of phone trying to “breath”. Not even an icon on the screen that says corrupted firmware. The phone did not even react when I attempted to put it back to the “download mode”.

Thinking that the phone has just coincidentally run out of battery, I decided to put the phone on charge but but it was still no go after few minutes. As I tried to recap what I have done, I realised that I had done something a noob would not have done. I had ticked on “re-partition” option prior to the flash process in Odin. Coupled with the fact that I was flashing the CSC image (one part of firmware that provides operator specific configuration and/or software).  Consequently, the phone had its entire system storage re-partitioned and end up with just that CSC code, without the remaining code, not even the kernel.

It was 1.30am at that particular moment, I reckon my sleepy head must be the reason behind this stupid action of mine.  What I couldn’t comprehend, is how can this screw up impact the bootloader, which is responsible for controlling the phone action during the boot up. One thing certain though is that I had completely woken up as a result.

For a good 15 minutes, I have been thinking all possible remedies, including removing the battery (albeit doing it very quicky) and putting it back to restart the phone.

I was almost resigned to the fact that my phone has become a $950 paper weight. But being a stubborn person (or one who perseveres, depending on how you look at it), I did not like the idea of throwing in the towel. I remembered how my father would spend the entire night till morning, just to fix some simple computer glitches when I was a young boy. I think I might be like him for that night.

Then I was enlightened. I observed that in those attempts when I was trying to put the phone into the “download-mode”, the phone might already be in panic-boot mode. While I had removed the battery and put it back to restart the phone, it was done so quickly that the state of the memory may not have totally erased.

So there I went, took out the battery, left the phone for a minute, put back the battery, and powered on the phone into “download mode” right away. Lo and behold again, phone is alive again! I almost yelled with joy .

And the moral of the story?

Never do any “not for weak heart” tasks, and firmware flashing for that matter, in the wee hours of the day. You would end up staying wide awake for the whole night, regardless of whether the end result is positive or not.

On a lighter note, it appears that it’s impossible for Galaxy S to end up as brick. Not unless you literally make it to be so.

Internet Scam

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Internet Scam is really prevalent everywhere, and just these few days I came across two when doing some research in the internet.

First, I was trying to find out more about the breed of my Cody, and came across this site trainpetdog.com,  which appears to have wealth of information on how to specially train Corgi dogs.  As I read further, I see the type of sales tactic very similiar to those  TV commercial advertisements that try to sell products or services at a exceptional special discount. You know those that says something like, “Normally it cost $100, but for limited time, we are offering it at $50 instead, and if you call within the next hour, it’ll be yours for $29.90, and you get extra free gift…”

The same thing for TrainPetdog.com …  They said, and I quote,

Now, given that the best professional trainers will charge you nothing less than $1200 to train your Dog, given how much frustration and stress our membership site is going to save you from, given how much peace of mind our membership site is going to provide you, and given how much time and money our membership site is going to save you, we could have easily charged you at least $197 for access to our membership site. But we are not going to!

Why?

Because the ebooks will be presented to you as online content, we will not have to incur any printing and fulfillment costs. And we want to pass on those benefits to you.

So, we slashed down the price to $97. But, even at $97, we know that not many Dog owners are going to be able to afford to get access to our membership site…

We absolutely adore Dogs and we want as many Dog owners as possible to benefit from the secret tips and techniques described in our new membership site…

So, we have decided.. on a much more affordable discounted price…

If you order anytime by midnight, tonight Friday, May 28, 2010 11:59:59 pm
you will get the Membership at only $37

However, please note that the price of $37 is a discounted price. We fully intend to increase the price to $97 very soon as there is no way we can afford to keep the price at $37 for too long…So, if you order now, you can save $60!

But, if you decide not to order now, and in case we withdraw our discounted price of $37, you will have to pay the much higher price of $97

 

As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably so. So I google searched and found this site that talks about how this site is being a scam site. Somebody even bothered to setup a domain and a site just to expose the scam. So apparently, one get nothings at all after paying that $37, despite a few pages worth of promises described by the Nancy Richards @  TrainPetdog.com. I decided to do a test and subscribed to the same mailing list using another name and email address, and I get the exact same email respond, except the deadline of the special offer is now a day later! Whatever the case, its clear this is a scam site that tries to take advantage of human’s greed, in this case, hoping to pay just that $37 for something that’s worth $197 (or $1200 depending on what you believe in)

On separate note, I was looking at ways to watch the coming South Africa World Cup football online, in a legitimate way. No way I am going to pay $70 just to watch that 64 matches live, and its not as if I have the time and energy to watch every single match. Then I came across Free-Football.tv, which promises to watch unlimited number of football matches (World Cup, Barclay Premier League, etc,) just for $19.90. Alittle skeptic with the (good) deal, I decided to google again on the legitimacy of this service. Turns out this is yet another scam site, as the google result reveals that the site is basically selling something that’s free on the internet. I have emailed the owner of the site, and we shall see what came out from those correspondences.


what’s Liverpool chance?

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Being a Liverpool fan, I say we shot ourselves in the foot for not bagging the 4 points in the recent matches against the hamsters ( Birmingham and Fulham) having drew in both matches. Otherwise, we would in driving seat by now, having 2 points clear above Spurs, albeit with a game in hand. As a matter of fact, we have lost too many points throughout the whole season, that honestly speaking, to clinch a 4th spot,  not only is an impossible task, it’s also not what we deserved.

Nevertheless, putting on the analytical hat, here’s my analysis of what could happen, ideal and yet realistic.

Spurs has 3 games remaining, against Bolton (Home) ,  City (Away) and finally Burnley (Away)

Manchester City has 3 games remaining too, against Aston Villa (Home), Spurs (Home), and finally West Ham (Away)

Aston Villa has 2 games remaining, just like us, and they will be playing against City (Away) and Blackburn (Home)

We have to play Chelsea at home, and wrapping the season by playing against Hull away.

With soccer, anything is possible, but if we consider just a pragmatic idea situation as follow

  • Spurs draw with Bolton and  Man City, beat Burnley. Gains5 points as a result, aggregating a final total of 69 points.
  • City draw with Villa and Spurs, beat West Ham. Gains 5 points in total, aggregating a final total of 68 points.
  • Villa draw with City, and draw Blackburn. Gain 4 points in total, aggregating a final total of 68 points.
  • We win the rest of our 2 matches, against Chelsea and Hull, and we have a final aggregated points of 68.

So you see, Spurs is the likely winner of the last Champions league spot.  It’s hard to imagine Spurs dropping points against Burnley, but hopefully they do against Bolton. If they win this coming weekend match against Bolton, then its a lost cause for us.

For us to win against Chelsea, it’s also an unimaginable task, although considering that we have won the double against them in previous season.

So cross our fingers and toes, and may the best team gets the coveted spot.

HP InstantWeb on mini netbook

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My sister-in-law bought HP mini netbook recently, and I helped her to setup over the weekend.

I was pleasantly surprised to see HP InstantWeb application pre-installed in the netbook. Firstly, I have read about the application from the internet but this is the first time I have seen it in person. Next, I thought it’s cool for HP to custom build this small application that enables user to quickly access email or web surfing without having to wait for a long boot time. Although Windows 7 has improved the boot up time significantly (works out to be around 40s on my laptop running on 64bit Windows 7 Ultimate) , it’s still considerably slow for a mini netbook.

the effect of low cost policy

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Had a late notice 2 weeks ago that I need to travel to US for a workshop meeting. Naturally, I am expecting the travel fare to be either expensive at this late hour of reservation, or with a cheap but undesirable itinerary. And no prize for guess what’s the outcome. In all fairness, there was no available flight to fly directly to San Fransisco, even I was willing to take the worst possible airline you can find in the earth. There were two alternative flights proposed to me by the travel agency. Both were travel-round-the-world-just-to-get-to-SFO type of flights. But the SQ flight is twice the cost of the Emirate flight, and therefore I ended up flying to San Fransisco via Dubai from Singapore. 27 hours to SFO, and 31 hours when I came home. Torturous experience, enough said!

Then today I was curious about a problem on google analytics service which I encountered 3 months ago. Google analytics is one of the free services offered by Google (duh!), which enables one to analyse the web traffic to one’s web site.  It started off well when I first subscribed to the service, but a month later, all of sudden the service registered zero web traffic (or at most 5 visits per week type of traffic), and I made a report to Google’s “self service help desk” only to find out that I’m not the only one encountering this problem. After few correspondences, it didn’t look like I’m getting any attention of Google staff to make any good progress, so I gave up, thinking that the problem might resolved by itself somehow if given some time. Fast forward to now, at least 3-4 months after the problem occured, I logged into my analytics account, and found out that the problem remains unresolved. Well, what do you expect from a free service?  And the ironical thing is that the tracking web site is actually a Google-hosted site, subscribed via their free google site service.

There’s no free lunch in this world.

Turbo charged iPhone?

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It always amazed me whenever Apple releases its new products, the technologies it delivered is deemed refreshing, nevermind the industry is already on it for months, if not years.

I recalled reading Steve Job’s argument on why 3G is not bundled in its 2G iPhone product; He said that 3G consumes more battery juice than its predecessor. Yes it does and so does WIFI which can be found in its first generation of iPhone.

Fast forwarding to now, the new iPhone 3G S is touted as a turbo charged iphone 3G with its HSDPA technology. Again it’s a technology found in my Dopod c730 two years ago. Anybody who wants to argue that Apple always does thing better than its competitors should really question how better is it for this context? That we are able to have 3.5G broadband at fraction of power consumption? I don’t think so.

Then BGR has reported undesirable high pitch noise when iPhone 3G S plays some sound files. One site blamed it on the bluetooth headset, and claimed that he had no problem with another. Surely we can infer a more objective conclusion from all these can we?

Posted from my Touch-HD

iPhone versus Windows Mobile

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No, I am not going to go into the over-debated argument of which is better, iPhone or Windows Mobile.

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I always think each has its own forte, and shortcomings. There is no perfect phone in this world, you have to look at your own requirements in terms of what do you really use the phone for. Hey, even a $50 phone would be a perfect phone for some, that should say something, isn’t it?

What I would like to blog about, is the software model of iPhone versus Windows Mobile, specifically on the development and distribution of the software, that would enrich the features of the phone.

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