I have been following TED Talk for many years now and this is by far the most inspirational talk that makes me realize that the most trivial matter we seem to have overlook; and that is FOOD. Kudos to Jamie Oliver, one of the chef I really admire not only as a celebrity but by the work he has contributed, especially to the children diets and health.

Next time when you want to bring your kids to a fast food joint, think again! FRESH is always the BEST!

Many Malaysians especially those subscribe to twitter has a field day catching up on the latest court drama that is happening today. We are all tuned in to tweets that is streaming by and also reading live news update from StarOnline and MalaysiaKini alike.

However, how many of you paid attention to the headline above “Sodomy II:…..”. Look carefully at the meaning and tell me what you think?

Microsoft’s iPhone reaction: A retrospect

Remember the introduction of iPhone not so long ago in 2007, and a question was posed to Microsoft’s CEO and the famous response he gave? Below is a clip to help you jog your memory back.

Here are some key things he said back in 2007 and what happen today as of 2010.
In 2007, Steve Ballmer laughed off at the iPhone by saying :-

“It doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine”

In 2010, almost all smartphone manufacturers from Nokia’s Symbian, Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile are trying to mimic iPhone’s success by having their devices without a keyboard and using Touch Screen technology (only not as smooth as the ones in iPhones) and even up to the point of mimicking the iPhone’s UI .

In 2007, Steve Ballmer put it as if Windows Mobile is the platform of choice for customers by saying :-

“Right now we are selling millions, and millions of phones every year and they are selling zero”

And three years later this is what happen to the Worldwide market of smartphones according to Gartner :-

Source: Gartner, August 2009 and chart courtesy of Admob

And the iPhone market share keeps growing and growing at a very fast rate, while Windows mobile slowly dwindle into oblivion. And as the saying goes, the rest is history.

Another sour grape moment, and they just don’t learn from history

This time the shot came not from Steve Ballmer (perhap not at the moment of this writing) but from Brandon Watson, Director of Product Management for Microsoft’s developer platform. He was quoted as saying,

“It is a humorous world in how Microsoft is much more open than Apple.” and he added, “With Microsoft’s platforms, developers can build whatever they want, and target a broad array of devices using the same skill set”

What he is trying to imply here is that somehow Apple with its App Store is a closed system and that developer are being “locked up” into its platform for iPhone, iPod Touch and the new iPad and somehow in the Window’s platform is a more open platform where developers are free to develop anything and can runs in all kinds of devices. How can there be any difference, you tell me? Or perhaps he is referring to Apple’s draconian control over what applications are allow into its platform. While Apple seems to have tight control over this issue and while I may not agree to some of them (ie Google Voice being rejected), I still strongly believe it has more pros than cons by having a centralize repository where we can search for applications.

Windows developers can use the same skill set and develops across all the different Window’s platform (computers and mobile devices) and as if it is not the same when applies to developers who built for the Apple’s platform? Bare in mind, that both applications running for the Mac OS X and iPhone OS (which applied to iPhones, iPod Touch and iPad) are based on Cocoa and Objective-C. So are there any differences? Of course there will be minor differences in API calls due to different sets of Interface and underlying operating system functionality but basically they are still applying the same skill sets. Existing Mac OS X developer will have no difficult time in porting or developing applications for iPhone OS.

Watson also said and I quote,

“Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive because iPhone OS uses the Objective C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform”

My Dear Mr. Watson, maybe you have been living in a cage for the past many years but development tools on an Apple platform is FREE and it comes bundle in with every Mac OS X, while development tools for Windows platform, the developers got to pay for it and comes with all sorts of fine print in its EULA. Unless by the word “expensive” you meant something else. And here is an interesting piece of snippets I pulled out from RoughlyDrafted that compares between .NET and Cocoa coming from the mouth of a .NET developer.

Despite being an expert in .Net but brand new to the Cocoa platform, Hoffman said the time to complete his project was much faster on Cocoa. The same project took only one third the time, despite his having far more experience with Vista’s .Net frameworks than Apple’s Cocoa. He also noted:

The user experience developed was better by default on Mac OS X. As a programmer and “not a designer,” Hoffman says he approached user interface development with some trepidation, needing to seek out help from professional designers on the Vista end.

Under Cocoa however, Hoffman says he found Apple’s visual development tools very accessible, while Microsoft’s visual interface builder tool in Visual Studio was “so poor I turned it off.”

Two conflicting views of what a Tablet should be, and who will win long term?

When it comes to a Tablet’s form factor, Microsoft and Apple has two different views of the world. Microsoft’s views is that a Tablet must be and must act likes a PC with all the full features of an Operating System cramped in to a Tablet PC which due to its form factor definitely going to have a slower processors, memory and storage capacities. This is where they fail after so many years because a Tablet simply do not have the power to run as good as a full fledged PC and not to mention with all the CPU crunching it will certainly makes the battery life shorter which defeat the purpose of mobility.

As for Apple, they have an entirely different philosophy of being less is more. By making the iPad tablet having reduced functionalities and just focusing on just doing what it can do best that is internet experience, and media experience. David Worthington of Technologizer sums it best in his article by describing the two camp :-

When Microsoft released its Tablet PC back in 2001, it grafted handwriting recognition onto Windows. That capability extended Windows into new (such as engineering and medical services), but the Tablet PC was still essentially a PC running Windows. Windows 7’s multitouch enhancements create a more natural user interface for PCs, but a PC is still a PC.

The iPad isn’t a PC. I’ve gone on trips to Boston and Washington DC over the past several weekends, and spend hours riding Amtrak and on Wi-Fi-enabled busses. I didn’t bring a laptop with me, because I didn’t want to lug one around, and didn’t really need to have a full fledged computer with me. My iPhone provided me with entertainment along the way. Truth be told, I would rather have had an iPad with me to surf the Web, listen to music, watch movies and read.

Time will tell if iPad will be as successful as the iPhone or iPod, but I strongly believe Apple is moving in the right direction with the iPad as a Tablet. For one thing, in my humble opinion is that Apple makes the right choice of not treating the Tablet as a computer but rather a consumer device that delivery rich contents and user experiences to its customers. And with the starting price point of $499, I am beginning to think that it might eventually give netbook a run for its money and many would be buyers of a netbook will opt for an iPad instead. Why? For the simple reasons that a netbook user or would be users is most likely to have a more powerful Desktop or a Laptop system with them to do their daily works and netbook is just a secondary device for them to do simple task like web browsing , email and some minor document editing, which iPad can also do plus much more. Think about it!

This is part 2 of the series on my take of the initial reaction to the announcement of Apple’s new creation the iPad. I have talked about the general responses and criticisms from the general view I gathered over the Internet and I will spend some time here to talk about what I think the future iPad will hold.

Some initial unanswered question

Prior to writing this part of the article, I had some unanswered questions as to some of the technical points of the iPad. Firstly is about the applications. How is it that the developer going to maintain two sets of a single application for two screen size of the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad not to mention the different UI interfaces such as menus, panes, and windows. I just went through the Apple SDK documentation and it did mentioned a feature call the Universal App where by a developer can maintain one binary for two different set of interfaces. So there you go; problem solved but am sure binary will be bigger from now on having two set of UI instructions.

At the event, Apple review to us the new iWorks for iPad. It looks great and not to mention cheap and at $9.99 it would definitely set a standard of how a software would cost in the future especially for those which are running on a Mac OS X platform. Now the question is since the iPad, like its counterparts (iPhone/iPod Touch) does not has a file folder hierarchy like the Max OS X does, how are the document files going to be stored and shared between a Mac? Would it work like how we sync our songs and videos? After much digging, the answer lies in what they call a Shared Folder.

Courtesy from weblogtip and Apple Inc

Honestly, I would prefer the iPad (even to the extend of iPhone and iPod Touch) to have a common folder system that can be access by all applications. Imagine if applications such as DropBox , iDisk or any other applications can have access to the same folder system, it would be perfect to integrate everything nicely and have files sync across the clouds transparently.

iPad and what the future holds

Content is King

As I have mentioned earlier, there are many strong reactions (positives and negatives) over the announcement of iPad. I am not going to say more about what people’s reactions are as I am sure you can google it. Now, let’s talk about what the future holds for iPad. Remember the reaction when iPhone was launched back in 2007? No multitasking, no apps, no 3G, too expensive , no copy-cut-paste, no MMS, no stylus and blah blah blah, and it will never sell; move back the clock to 2010 (3 years later) and we have over 40 million iPhones sold, over 140,000 applications and over 3 billion of applications downloaded. I am suspecting the same will be apply to iPad and 3 years from now you will see an iPad everywhere you go.

One interesting thing I noted over the Steve’s presentation; He emphasized, “We’re a mobile device company” but I think the subtle hint was “We are a media content delivery company”. Many wanted an iPad as a computer device that can perform like a netbook or a laptop. I think is safe to say Apple strategy since the day of the iPods has always been the contents rather than the hardware.  They want to be the King of contents, delivering a full spectrum of media experiences to its customers via its hardware. They started of with Music, then Movies (both rental and non-rental), Applications, Games, and now the “Print” media which are books, newspapers, magazines and comics. There is a reason after all when they changed their name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc; that’s to say we are now no longer just a Computer company, we are a content delivery company. One more thing I wanted to add into this is since now we have iTunes Store, AppStore and the latest iBooks Store, why not merge all this services into one single coherent store for instance an AppleStore? I hope Apple would take note on this.

Apple’s mobile devices roadmap

Let’s move beyond what the iPad can or cannot do for a while here. I think generally many people (unless you are a geek like me) missed something very important over this iPad announcement, and that is the new Apple A4 chip. For those of you who do not yet know, Apple had recently acquired a chip manufacturing company call P.A Semi and iPad is the first product in Apple’s range that uses its own CPU. SOC (Systems-on-a-chip).

Courtesy from  myuibe and Gizmodo

If you have watched the demo, you would have noticed how blazingly fast it was. The demo on the Maps application is super fast. And this A4 Chip, I believe will be the key towards the future road map of all Apple mobile devices maybe including the next generations of MacBooks. There is a good article written on this here by Daring Fireball.

The future of mobile applications

I am sure by now many existing iPhone apps developer will be cranking their thought processes into making use of the screen resolution to come out with some nifty innovations. I am very excited about this. Imagine having the ability to run an iPad version of Photoshop and do a quick editing while having a coffee at Starbuck laying down comfortably on a couch and immediately post the photo online. Ain’t this more true to a sense that a Tablet is more like a “Laptop” than a laptop? I am sure with such a big screen size, couple up with multi-touch and accelerometer, we are going to witness many applications yet to come that will blows your mind away, just like what happen to iPhone with Augmented Reality Apps and many other innovative apps such as those that enable us to search for news, foods or movies based on where we are.

Courtesy from mattbuchanan

My Final Note

The question now is would I buy one? Hell yeah! and I admit I am a sucker for all things Apple. Now, the next question is how and when am I going to use it since I already have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone? The answer is simple really. Doing all my work related stuffs while I am at my desk ie Word Processing, Photo Editing and whatever you can think off, I will stick to my MacBook Pro hooked up to my beautiful 30″ Apple Cinema Display. If I am on the road, walking around, or having a quick lunch I will use my iPhone. How is it I am going to use the iPad then? Say when I decide to laze on the couch or at Starbucks enjoying my coffee and killing time, it will be a good idea to catch up with blogs, perhaps editing one, catching up with my emails, doing some photo editing, reading an e-book, or even perhaps watching a movie with an iPad solely because of its screen size. Not that this cannot be done by a laptop or a netbook, but how many of us can truly lie down on a couch with those hot beast on our laps, right?

For those who were psyched about iPad and got disappointed after that is because they are having a mindset that a tablet is a can-do-all computer, very much what Microsoft is pushing but failed. Sorry folks, I don’t see it that way. If you want a computer go get a computer. iPad will never going to replace a Macbook or a Netbook. It is design for different set of purposes, hence if you have seen Steve Job’s presentation you will noticed he emphasize on one very important issue about iPad being in the third category of device in between a laptop and an iPhone:-

“If there is going to be a third category device, it has to be better at these kind of tasks (refering to Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games and E-books) than a laptop or an iPhone”

So there you have it; my long winded analysis of what I gathered so far and what I think this mobile device will be in the future. And if you are like me, prepare to break your piggy and get swept away by the possibilities of what it can do.

27th January 2010, was a day that many have been waiting anxiously over a period of time and the reactions even before Steve Jobs walked out of that stage was tremendous and surreal. Everyone that was on the Internet was busy scouring for last minute rumors and one particularly came from Jason Calacanis (Founder of Weblogs, Inc., TechCrunch50, Silicon Alley Reporter, Engadget & Mahalo.com) where I received many retweets stating that he somehow had his hand on the Apple tablet and was testing it for days and he is spilling the beans as his NDA expired that day. I admit I did go through his tweets but I was thinking to myself this must be a prank as I do not think for a person of his standing would reveal the details and jeopardizing his name.

Courtesy from myuibe and Apple Inc

So the time came, and Steve Jobs announced Apple’s latest creation, the iPad and reactions immediately poured in all over the twittersphere.  My reaction as do so many others was the name iPad. Boy, does it sounds like a Sanitary Pad. The best reaction came from Cult of Mac.

“Like a Tampon, only more expensive”

Well, like it or hate it, Apple does has the capability of turning a trivial name into a BRAND. Remember the days when Steve mentioned the death of the name PowerBook and is rebranded as MacBook Pro? We all hated it at first especially those hardcore Powerbook users like me. The strongest reaction was from Richard Tibbetts editor of Hyperextended Metaphor:-

I believed that PowerBook was one of the strongest brands in the high tech industry, and thought it was remarkably stupid to change it.

However many years later the name became the BRAND that just ingrained into many peoples mind and the word becomes something trivial to all. So it seems the reaction to the brand iPad would be a short term thing because many people in their mind (after reading all the rumor mills) were expecting something more fancy like iSlate (that even make Steve Ballmer quickly named his upcoming tablet as SlatePC) or something as trivial as the name iTablet. Enough said about that; let’s move on to my reaction over the iPad and what I think it would become and would not become.

iPad initial reactions

Firstly I would list down the many general complains I read over the twitter feed and try to put a response to it.

“What? no camera like an iPhone? This can’t be happening!”

OK! Why in the world would you want a camera on a Tablet? Wouldn’t it look odd taking picture with it? I think Steve Jobs is smart enough to know what make sense and what do not. Being said that, a webcam in front of the screen would make much more sense than having a camera at the back like an iPhone. For this reason I don’t know why it didn’t have one; could it be due to some technical reasons? I don’t know but I suspect future version of iPad will definitely have one. A hint to that is the built-in microphone which I suspect is for future use in video conferencing plus an interesting article posted here on an interesting SDK which allows you to take screenshot of yourself.

“Oh! It has no multitasking!”

This was something I wasn’t expecting too. I was thinking along the line that the new iPad would have a new kind of operating system that will revolutionize the tablet. But sadly to me is just another iPhone/iPod Touch OS that make its way into a larger screen format. Nothing as revolutionary as when iPhone was introduce with their Multi Touch technology.

“Why, Why..no Flash?”

Dude, FLASH for however great it is, is going to be a thing of the past with the introduction of HTML5 and AJAX. Just look at YouTube with the introduction of HTML5 videos recently. I see many potential for HTML5 especially for mobile devices over such thing as persistence storage for offline access and things like geo-location services such as the one which Google is using over iPhone and Android. In fact, I believe many developer are moving into this area as they can now develop a single set of application that will work across all kinds of devices that supports HTML5.

“Micro Sim what?”

Ok, I must admit I am not sure what is the decision behind using a Micro SIM as oppose to the usual SIM card that is common to all mobile phones like iPhone but I am sure we will have to judge it some other future times. One thing I know is Apple has the tendency to introduce something which are not common in the industry. (remember Firewire ?) I am not sure where this Micro SIM will be heading to but you can read more about it here.

“iPad is going to kill Kindle for sure”

Courtesy from myuibe and Apple Inc

I wouldn’t bet on it. Kindle is a totally different category all together. It was designed solely to read books and magazine whereas iPad was designed to be more of a jack of all trades media device like browsing, gaming, some editing (via its new iWork), photo viewing (perhaps some minor editing with upcoming apps?), movie watching, reading and perhaps more. Kindle uses Electronic Ink display whereas iPad uses a LED-backlit glossy widescreen display. I bet you can’t read a book under the bright sun light on a beach as you can with a Kindle. So there is no comparison at all when book reading is concern and not to mention the battery consumption of both 10 hours (according to Apple) vs. Kindle’s one week usage on a single charge. One thing I know for sure, thanks to Apple we can now possibly get a much cheaper Kindle.

Part 2 of this series I will touch on some unanswered question at least on my part on the iPad and my opinion on the future of what this platform holds.

I downloaded Firefox 3.6 the moment it was released and I must say the speed does improve tremendously. First thing I did as usual after updating its major release was to update all the extensions I had and to my very surprise, all the extension was compatible except Mozilla’s very own Ubiquity extension. I was taken aback as to why most of the third party extensions were already made to be compatible but not the Mozilla’s very own extension. For those of you not familiar with Ubiquity, it is basically a command line interface that simplifies common web interface like doing translation, searching for maps on the fly while you are browsing or writing up an email. You can head up to Mozilla’s Lab to learn more about it.

As I can’t live without it for the moment and do not know when will Ubiquity be updated to be compatible with the latest Firefox version, I digged around for some answers as to how to make it work and I will explain here step by step as to how to hack it.

Method 1 (if you have already installed Ubiquity earlier prior to 3.6)
When you are at the extension add-ons windows, you will notice that it will say that Ubiquity is not compatible with Firefox 3.6

What you need to do now is to go to Finder (If you are a Mac user) and edit ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxx.default/extensions/ubiquity@labs.mozilla.com/install.rdf file. If you are a Windows user, refer here.

What you need to do is to change the word “3.6″ to “3.7″. Save the file and restart Firefox. Viola, that’s it. Everything will work as before.

Method 2 (if you have NOT already installed Ubiquity before)
This will be a little trickier as when you go ahead and install Ubiquity, Firefox simply won’t let you do so and complain that you are trying to install an extension that is not compatible. What you need to do now is to type in “about:config” (without the quotes) in the address bar and you will see a dialog screen as shown below.

Go ahead and click the button, but be forewarned that you are now venturing into the heart of Firefox and any mistakes you make while editing the configuration might render it useless. Now do a right click and you will have a menu option pops out. Choose New->Boolean and enter “extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6” (without the quotes) and toggle the option to FALSE. You will see something like this:-

Once you are absolutely sure, go ahead and restart Firefox and go to Ubiquity page to download the extension and you can now safely use it without any warning on compatibility issues. You now have two options; either leave it as it is and happily use the Ubiquity extension with compatibility check turn off but taking a risk that you might install other extensions in the future that might not be compatible, or have the compatibility option turn on again by setting “extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6” to TRUE. If you do that, you need to follow Method 1 to edit the install.rdf file and restart Firefox. The choice is all yours.

Happy Ubiquitying! (If there is such a word) and I do not take responsibility for this hack. User discretion is advise.

Postscript: Please note that if you install directly from https://addons.mozilla.org you might be getting Ubiquity ver 0.1 which is not the latest that they have. Maybe that’s because it might temporary be used in 3.6 but with limited functionality. For the latest you have to heads up to https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity

I am a heavy iPhone user and as good as the phone is, the battery is not something to be proud off and I have to resort to charge it whenever I find the opportunity to do so but I’ll be out of luck if I’m outside and is about time I go get myself an external battery source. So after reviewing the many options out there, I finally got myself a Mophie Juice Pack Air. Although it is still early for me to review about the battery pack, so far it has been great. One thing I need to comment is the packaging. It does has the feel of a typical Apple product’s packaging (simple yet engaging) and when I took out the Battery cum iPhone case, I was surprised by the simple greeting “Mophie loves you“. Is a simple thing like that, that makes a customer feels great. Truly innovative marketing on their part.

You can head to Mophie if your iPhone is like mine, always hungry for power.

I have been an avid MobileMe user for two years now and it has been a wonderful product that seamlessly sync all my keychains, bookmarks, contacts and calendars to all my Macs and iPhone without any issue. And to top it all off the “Find My Iphone” is really something cool especially when and if I do lose my precious iPhone, not only I can have a chance to locate it but I can totally disable it and render it useless. But I guess the Achilles’ Heel of the MobileMe platform is the iDisk.

I maintain a large amount of documents in iDisk in order for me to work at the office, at home, and on the road and it is critical for me that the files are sync properly and is always up to date without any problems. The downside of iDisk are too many to mention until I gave up and immediately get myself a paid account for Dropbox. Below are some of the issues I’m facing with iDisk (almost to the point of me cursing it) and my observation of Dropbox as a comparison:-

1) If you do the initial sync especially with many files involve, it will take a day or even longer to complete it depending on the total file size. Initial sync for Dropbox takes almost as long for uploading but I do observe downloading from another Mac takes a shorter time frame

2) Say a Word document is being open for editing and when it sync it always pops up an annoying box saying that it fails to sync. I don’t see this an issue in Dropbox. Infact every time I hit the save button, I can see Dropbox immediate sync up the file and the great thing about it, it keeps multiple version of the document I worked on and I can revert back anytime I want to. Dropbox just makes it so seamless and behind the scene as if it is part of the operating system. I might be wrong in this but iDisk seems to put a lock when the file is open for editing and it wouldn’t sync until the file is close, and during a sync process of that file and if happen to open it up to edit again, it will be only “read-only” which is very frustrating.

3) Whenever a Folder with large amount of files are being move to another location or rename, iDisk somehow has to resync the files all over again and that takes a lot amount of time. I tried this in Dropbox by first renaming a Folder which contains lots of files and also try moving it to other location; and the sync process just takes less than a second but iDisk takes hours to complete as if it has to resync every single files that is in it. (This is stupid)

4) I read this article and i quote:-

A SERIOUS WARNING

Some users keep document and other files in the local copy only, so that they can be kept synced with another Mac. I strongly advise against this. If you accidentally delete or make an unwanted modification to a file at the office, by the time you get home that file will have been deleted or modified. Worse, there have been cases of the synchronizing process going wrong: people have found files missing, and if they don’t stop the syncing in time then of course the other computer will lose the files as well. Keep your files on your computer and copy them into the local copy as necessary (and back them up off-computer as well).

Need I even say more. Dropbox will have no issue as you can always check out previous revisions and your files are practically intact.

5) Both iDisk and Dropbox has great apps for the iPhone. Dropbox does seems to so much faster when accessing files and traversing thru folders, but iDisk somehow needs a longer refreshing time. As for caching local copies for faster viewing iDisk allows up to a maximum of 500MB caching while Dropbox works in a little different way where you can favorite a file and it will be available for offline viewing.

6) Another issue has to do with Time Machine. The greatest and most seamless backup application that makes backup and restore as easy as reading ABC. (Take note Microsoft – Nothing Fancy and complicated and it just works). Before I talk about Time Machine, let’s ponder on the architectural differences between the two. iDisk chooses to maintain a filesystem as a sparsebundle. Basically it is one big chunk of file like the Mac Disk Image (*.dmg files) and mounted on as an iDisk. As for Dropbox, the files within it are store basically like what you would store a file in the local filesystem using the HFS+ filesystem. Now back to Time Machine, what does this mean? It means that files in your iDisk are practically not able to be backup in Time Machine, although technically you can do it by having it backup the actual bundle itself which a one large big file BUT if you choose to do so, every small incremental changes to a file will cause Time Machine to backup the whole large chunk of the bundle files and this will eats up heavy resources, whereas Dropbox treats every file like a normal files you would have in the harddisk, Time Machine will have no issue backing up those files. Now what we have here is extra redundancy and it virtually guarantee that all your files are safe in an external storage and also in the cloud (not to mention all the different versions that Dropbox maintains). If a file in your iDisk is corrupted it is as good as gone once it is sync because your other machine will be sync with the corrupted copies and you have no way to revert it back.

I did gave iDisk few chances thinking why should I be using Dropbox even though having such rave reviews because I still firmly believe iDisk will be more firmly tied to the MacOSX and it is part and parcel of the MobileMe subscription that I am maintaining. It did fail on me a few times and I have to restart the iDisk sync and have it sync the entire files all over again and I am patient enough to give it one more chance until I had enough when few days ago it decided not to sync anymore for no obvious reason with vague error logs, and no other ways to make it sync again, and YES i am not gonna restart iDisk again as it will be permanently TURN OFF.

I have yet to fully utilize the potential of Dropbox and there are many tips and tricks out there like maintaining a centralize copy of Firefox profile, 1password keychain, itunes and iphotos and not to mention many third party application to further add value to it. So far I have been loving it and also it seems to share files conveniently with my colleagues at work irregardless of the platform of OS they are using. Do try out Dropbox, afterall they give you a free 2GB of space to start with.

update [27th January 2009] – The beauty of using DropBox; Every time someone accept your referral, you get an additional 500MB and this will keep growing as long as you keep inviting. Something iDisk / MobileMe should learn.

A few days ago our Information Minister touches on the subject of Social Media ie. Twitter and Facebook and advise the general public not to be too immersed into it as it is not part of our culture and guess what was the general reaction? Even fellow party members have sarcastic reactions to his view here and here. And unknowingly to him a simple statement makes him the biggest celebrity on twitter and perhaps this is the first time that a Malaysian subject trended on twitter and reaching to number three spot as you can see below:-

Here are some of the snippets I gather while searching for #yorais – (I must say for the first time tweets makes me literally ROFL and makes my tears spill out and my tummy cramped)

@taniasafuan: #yorais is so old, he EATS blackberries.

@vpyp: #yorais is so kuno he will print this thread out and read with his bifocal glasses yo!

@5xmom: Rais is so ancient, if you tell him his komputer got bugs, he sprays Ridsect

@simonseow: Rais is so ancient that he thinks @staronline is a new solar system #yorais

@altimet: He so ancient he think Tumblr is how his kids bring water to school. #yorais

If you are interesting you can head up here at the Twapper just in case twitter search no longer cache all those tweets.

MALAYSIA BOLEH!!!!! Keep it up

update:- According to Perpetual Tockism the viral started from @bongersz

For many months now I have been maintaining two blogs at Posterous and this one. While posterous is good for acting as a central dispatch where post that is written there usually by means of emails are automatically posted to various site like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter; over time I find it pointless of having two same blogs reflecting each other.

So starting today, I have deleted tonnes of entries here and maintain this site solely as a journal of my thoughts and rants. And posterous blog will be solely a photoblog mainly showcasing my photos especially iphone photography. If you happen to get 404 from external links, that means the entry has been deleted and most likely you will be able to find it here.