ZDNet's Top 10 IT disasters of all time

This is my Friday morning laughing dose of the week.

1. Faulty Soviet early warning system nearly causes WWIII (1983)
2. The AT&T network collapse (1990)
3. The explosion of the Ariane 5 (1996)
4. Airbus A380 suffers from incompatible software issues (2006)
5. Mars Climate Observer metric problem (1998)
6. EDS and the Child Support Agency (2004)
7. The two-digit year-2000 problem (1999/2000)
8. When the laptops exploded (2006)
9. Siemens and the passport system (1999)
10. LA Airport flights grounded (2007)
    

For more details check it out on ZDNet's Top 10 IT disasters of all time

Android Developer Challenge

Google's Open Handset Alliance Project just released the Android software development kit (SDK) on Monday (Android Site). On top of that, the alliance offering $10 million reward to any developers with promising mobile apps built on Android platform (no string attached). If you are wondering what Android is all about, Android is another ambitious project initiated by Google to come out with an open source software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The mobile suite is expected to power phones in the second half of 2008.

For further information, Android Documentation is the best source of reference. Among some of the technical details and features about Android:

• Android is a platform based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, a set of libraries, multimedia interface and phone applications;
• The platform includes the Dalvik virtual machine;
• Android is based on the Apache v2 open source license.
• Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
• Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library.
• SQLite for structured data storage
• Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
• GSM Telephony
• Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi
• Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer
• Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

For any Malaysian developer out there this is your chance to materialized your idea and get recognition on global scale. Any takers?

Web Services - Why and How to Build

Have you ever interface a web service before. A web service consists of a server to serve requests to the web service and a client to invoke methods on the web service. Web Services is a modern and very popular technology. Some popular public sites that offer their web service are Flickr, Facebook and so many social site like MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5 and others though Google's OpenSocial web service.

With Web services readily available, and as the pool of XML Web services grows, you will be able to find software modules that can be integrated into your own application, by finding it and integrating it through XML Web services. Integrate with existing Web services instead of reinventing them. The bottom line is that you will be able to develop much faster than before.

Here are some reasons why Web Services should work where prior approaches have failed

1. Universal Support. Previous de facto, or de jure interoperability standards usually lacked participation by one or more key vendors.
2. Protocol not Platform. It doesn’t require the adoption of a common platform, just adherence to the standard protocols.
3. Low Product Costs. Sure vendors will want to sell products that optimize the Web Service experience in some way, but the basic needs are going to be supported essentially for free as part of the platform or as an adjunct to some existing product. Nor are they expensive to adopt in term of development effort. Everyone can play this game without major investment.
4. Evolutionary. Long term, Web Services will likely usher in some revolutionary new ideas that force the replacement of existing systems. In the meantime consider Web Services as evolutionary and use them to leverage your existing applications and infrastructure rather than requiring rip and replace - another low cost benefit.
5. Business Oriented. Web Services don’t just appeal to the technician, but directly address real business needs of today. The business didn’t care about OO or CBD, but should care about Web Services, particularly where they directly reflect some meaningful business concept, and especially where they are being exposed external – and hence are a reflection on the business.

The list of protocols and technologies related to Web Services grows every day, but SOAP is probably the most important. It is rapidly becoming the standard protocol for accessing Web Services. So you might want to consider to add web service on you current development plan.

So now probably you are wondering how to build your own web service based on your current application. Since web service is a protocol, platform doesn't really matter. You probably could build a web service from ColdFusion, PHP, ASP or JSP but for a start let just pick PHP. There two methods of creating web services in PHP, SOAP Web Service & XML-RPC Web Service.

Deepak Vohra wrote an excellent tutorial on how to create web service with SOAP & XML-RPC in PHP 5 for a beginner. I've tested the code and I'm quite sure you'll get the idea pretty quick.

What do I hope from all this? I would like to see more and more web service coming from our soil, specifically Malaysia. Perhaps the web service could create some degree of access in some of our government agencies database. Maybe directly pay the Hulu Selangor's land tax through Maybank2u or other payment method so that they won't receive another "Penyapu" award next year from Khir Toyo. Still, anyone could contact me if you need further consultation.

To Scale up or Scale out

I can't sleep so I read lot of boring stuff tonight and hopefully I'll be sleepy by the time I finish up this blog entry. I've been thinking and wandering what are the easiest or the cheapest way to scale any enterprise level web application. I've seen how it done in Windows Clustering but now I'm looking how open source solutions handle this.

One of the article that explain this well was written 3 years ago by John Lim in his blog (caution some links are broken), Enterprise PHP. You can read some guide on scalability, load balancing & high availability. At least you will get some general ideas to start with.

Another good reading material for a load balancing beginner is written by Vivek Viswanathan,
Load Balancing Web Applications. This article are complete with illustration but only cover the load balancing part. I used to had a round robin software solution before and the advantages are clearly pointed out. However I never had a chance to try out the hardware load balancer option.

To sum up, scaling any web application is an expensive venture because it involves hardware and data centre cost, hence you need rack space to relocate your servers. So make very sure you need multiple servers. Try other methods to cater your user traffics like use the Quad-core processor, boost up the ram to the max, use high speed SCSI drives or move out the database into a bigger server with 100 mbps connection between the application server.

One of the term than I learned through all this reading includes, scale up or scale out, derived from the database product literature. Scale up means scaling by moving to a bigger, more powerful server, while scale out means scaling by adding more CPU boxes to a cluster of database servers.

And this is my favorite, the KISS Principle. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid is self-descriptive and recognizes two things:

1. People (including product and service users) generally want things that are simple, meaning easy to learn and use.
2. A company that makes products or furnishes services may find simplicity an advantage for the company as well, since it tends to shorten time and reduce cost. (Where the company is trying to use the principle on behalf of users, however, design time may take longer and cost more, but the net effect will be beneficial since easy-to-learn-and-use products and services tend to be cheaper to produce and service in the long run.)

Thats should cover it. Now I feel a little sleepy.

Maxis Broadband

I tagged along with Azwa to Maxis building to get her phone number back. Her phone were stolen on Deepavali eve at Mid Valley shopping complex. Poor thing.

Anyway I manage to get a clear pricing on Maxis Broadband

Starter
- 384 kbps
- RM 68/month

Advance
- 640 kbps
- RM 78/month

Power
- Up to 3.6 mbps
- RM 98

Their one-time charges include:
- Activation - RM 100
- Installation - RM 88 (not applicable for self-installation)
- Deposit - RM 100 (waived)
- Registration - RM 50 (waived)

Maxis Power package look attractive, just RM98 compared to RM120 from Celcom package. And no cost on modem itself. But bare in mind you have to sign in 18-month contract period. But this is the best price you can get compared to other wireless broadband services out there. You decide.

Review Web Design on Multiple Platform and Browser

Did you ever wish to find a better way to view how well your web design on other OS of browser without having or buy the system? Your wish is granted. Browsershots tool will check your web design compatibility with various internet browsers at a single click. Once clicked, you have to give them sometime to load the preview. It will simulate how your website will look like on other OS like Linux, Mac OS and of course Windows. It will list out something like this:

So designer out there, you don't have any excuse for not having other OS or browser anymore.

How to Recover Your Deleted Files

Have you ever face this kind of situation? You have deleted a few files to free up some space in your hard disk, empty the recycle bin but suddenly you realized that you accidentally deleted a wrong file. Now how do you get it back? Don't panic, clear up your mind and start looking for options.

There are many data recovery software out there, how do you know which one is the best. Well, if you don't try it all you wouldn't know. And each software has different features to apply on different kind of situations. Anyway, I have found a good freeware solution for recovering deleted files:

http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

I always look for a free stuff first before looking for the commercial or pro software. Freeundelete does the job pretty well. You can choose which drive you want to scan. It will show you a list of all deleted file on that particular drive. Select any file from the list and choose where you want to save the recovered file. It will advice you to save it on different drive to avoid further damage on the data. That's it.

Free software always has limited functionality. If you want to perform harder task such as recovering data after hard drive has being formatted, you might need software such as EasyRecovery Pro which will cost you about $500 (price depend on several variants). It is a good practice to download a trial version before deciding to buy any software tagged with that price.

Despite all this, there is no guarantee that you will get back all your data intact. Based on my experience, the success rate of data recovery depends how severe the damage done on your hard disk. So, best of luck.

SEO Tools Unlimited

I haven't touch about SEO for quite sometime. Maybe because I'm not on website development at this moment. So, to refresh my memory I looked around and I found this useful tools. I used to subscribe newsletter from this website but I didn't received any newsletter from them anymore. Anyway check out their SEO tools at

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/

And here is the list of the tools (I don't even know half of it):

1. Adsense Calculator
2. AdSense Preview
3. Advanced Meta Tag Generator
4. Alexa Rank Comparison Tool
5. Check Server Headers
6. Class C Checker
7. Code to Text Ratio
8. CPM Calculator
9. Domain Age Check
10. Domain Typo Generator
11. Future PageRank
12. Google Dance
13. Google Keyword Suggestions
14. Google Search for Multiple Datacenter
15. Google Suggest Scraper
16. Google vs Yahoo
17. Indexed Pages
18. Keyword Cloud
19. Keyword Density
20. Keyword Difficulty Check
21. Keyword Optimizer
22. Keyword Position Check for Multiple Datacenter
23. Keyword Typo Generator
24. Link Popularity
25. Link Price Calculator
26. Meta Analyzer
27. Meta Tag Generator
28. Multiple Datacenter Link Popularity Check
29. Overture Keyword Suggestions
30. Page Comparison
31. Page Size
32. PageRank Lookup
33. PageRank Search
34. Robots.txt Generator
35. ROI Calculator
36. Search Engine Comparison
37. Search Engine Keyword Position
38. Site Link Analyzer
39. Spider Simulator
40. URL Redirect Check
41. URL Rewriting

Now I wonder why my PR is undefined, null, void or blank???

Tourism Malaysia Launches Siti - The Digital Ambassador

Siti is a Window Live Agent representing Malaysia (or perhaps Tourism Malaysia) to engage the Windows Messenger user. You can chat with her only in constructive word manner. Meaning it won't talk rubbish and keep on reminding you with a few destination name in Malaysia when your conversation stray off topic. This is so much remind me of Virtualmalaysia.com's Maya in 2001.

I'm quite surprised that Tourism Malaysia decided to use this as a method to draw tourists as I'm quite sure that the response from the user won't be positive. Because at the end of the session, does the user convince enough to visit Malaysia? When I asked about Major/National Landmarks in Kuala Lumpur, Siti response was a summarized destination of KLCC,KL Towers, Merdeka Square, Sultan Abdul Samad & the Selangor Club building. Is it worth it to visit Kuala Lumpur by only knowing the destination name without feeding their actual facts and values?

Tourist often want to know more when deciding to visit any destination but I believe on current state, Siti alone won't be enough. At least give us a chance to chat to a real people. But who knows, maybe in future Siti's content will evolve towards Wiki-based. Now that what I called a fat ass information.

Anyway if you want to add Siti as your Windows Messenger buddy, simply add sitimalaysia@hotmail.com. Have a stiff awkward conversation.

3G Speed Test

To get some idea how the 3G connectivity speed, I use the Global Broadband Speed Test. Check this out.

Connected to Celcom 3G PCMCIA data card



Connected to Time.net Broadband



If you ask me, sadly I will say, like the rest of 3G user said (from what I read), it almost feel like slightly faster than dial-up service. :(

Configuring D-Link 3G Mobile Wireless Routers

The startup configuration is properly documented in CD and the user manual. You can change the administrator password or the user name, monitor the status and much more. The only problem that I encountered is the information for my Celcom 3G broadband ISP setting. Without this information, I can't get into the internet. So here is the solution:

Before I start, D-Link 3G router has specific ISP card driver option to choose from:

• UMTS - Far Eastern Telecom - Option GT 3G Quad
• UMTS - O2 - Option GT 3G Quad
• UMTS - Vibo Telecom - ZTE MF320
• UMTS - Orangenet - Option Wireless GT Quad
• UMTS - Vodafone - Option Wireless GT Quad
• UMTS - Taiwan Mobile - Novatel Mireless (Wireless) Merlin U530
• UMTS - Chunghwa Telecom - Huawei E612
• UMTS - Telkomsel - Option GT 3G Quad
• UMTS - Exelcom - Option GT 3G Quad
• UMTS - Celcom - Option GT 3G Quad
• UMTS - Maxis - Option GT 3G
• HSDPA - Cingular - Sierra Wireless AirCard 860
• HSDPA - Cingular - Novatel Wireless Merlin U730
• HSDPA - Cingular - Sierra Wireless AirCard 875
• HSDPA - Italy - Sierra Wireless AirCard 865
• HSDPA - Optimus - Novatel Wireless Merlin U740
• HSDPA - T-Mobile - Option GT 3G+ / Fusion+
• HSDPA - Exelcom - Huawei E600 / E620
• HSDPA - Exelcom - Huawei E220 (USB)
• HSDPA - Exelcom - Option GT Max
• HSDPA - Maxis - Huawei E620
• HSDPA - Maxis - Motorola Phone RAZRV3xx (USB)
• HSDPA - Singtel - Huawei E620
• HSDPA - Singtel - Sierra Wireless AirCard 850
• HSDPA - Singtel - Option GT Fusion+ EMEA
• HSDPA - M1 - Vodafone GT MAX GX0201
• HSDPA - M1 - Vodafone Huawei E620
• HSDPA - M1 - Vodafone Huawei E220 (USB)
• HSDPA - Celcom - Huawei E600 / E620
• HSDPA - Celcom - Huawei E220 (USB)
• HSDPA - Globe - Vodafone Huawei E620
• HSDPA - Globe - Vodafone Huawei E220 (USB)
• HSDPA - PowerGrid - Huawei E620
• HSDPA - Vodacom - Huawei E220
• HSDPA - Vodacom - Huawei E620
• HSDPA - MTN - Huawei E220
• HSDPA - MTN - Huawei E620
• HSDPA - Taiwan - Option GT 7.2 Ready
• HSDPA - Taiwan - BandLuxe C100
• HSDPA - Hong Kong - Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870
• HSDPA - Hong Kong - Huawei E220(USB)
• HSDPA - Hong Kong - Option GT 3G+
• HSDPA - Hong Kong - Option GT MAX
• HSDPA - Egypt - E220 etisalat USB

So before you buy the router, make sure your 3G modem or data card driver is available.

Go to manual internet connection options and click "Manual Configure". You will see the following form.

At first I thought I just need to select my 3G ISP name (Celcom). So I tried both UMTS - Celcom - Option GT 3G Quad and HSDPA - Celcom - Huawei E600 / E620 but no connection detected. So I look back at the box and I noticed that the actual name is Novotell Wireless Merlin U530. So I choose UMTS - Taiwan Mobile - Novatel Mireless Merlin U530 on ISP - Card option. You can leave the rest of the form blank except:

- Dial Number : *99***1#
- APN : internet
- Keep-alive Interval : (your choice mine is 60 seconds)

Save the configuration and click to Status menu. You will find that your WAN is now connected. The internet is now ready, try it.

3G Network Connected to D-Link Mobile Broadband Router

Yesterday I went to Low Yatt and decided to subscribe Celcom 3G service. I've visited a few wireless broadband like Maxis 3G broadband and Izzi 4G broadband but none of the service suits my need. I need a 3G service that can reach as far as Semenyih with no restriction on yearly contract. The Maxis marketing representative mumbling something at their booth which I can't understand a word so I just walk to Izzi booth and waited there. Like Apek in EJen 016 said... I wait forever. So moving on to the last broadband booth, Celcom.

Currently Celcom Broadband offering 3 type of subscription;

• Daily Unlimited
  - RM8/24hours
  - Up to 384 kbps
  
  
• Monthly Unlimited Basic
  - RM68/month
  - Up to 384 kbps
  
  
• Monthy Unlimited Advance
  - RM 120/month
  - Up to 3.6 Mbps
  

Here is the catch, for a start you need to buy the 3G modem. There are 3 type of modem; USB, XpressCard and PCMCIA card. The USB modem, the one that showed in TV commercial, priced at RM1200. As for the XpressCard, there are 3 types to choose with prices RM899 to RM999. And for the PCMCIA type there are 2 prices RM399 & RM499. The prices differ merely because of the brand. The one carrying Vodafone brand are much higher.

Now I'm in delima. My home notebook uses XpressCard, my office notebook uses PCMCIA. To eliminate this differences, I can simply pick the USB modem. But the price is too much for me. So I choose the cheapest option of all - the RM 399 PCMCIA modem card.

Now I need to find either a PCMCIA adapater to USB or a 3G router to stay connected between this 2 notebooks. I looked for the adapter first but no luck. Even Sri Computer don't have it. So the only option left is the 3G router. Currently the only 3G router available in Low Yatt is the D-Link 3G Mobile Broadband Router and priced about RM599 (your bargain skill might come handy here).

So the total cost of having a 3G broadband at all my home is around RM970. Huhuhu that too much for me already. So I'm thinking on how to get back my investment? Since I have the wireless router, maybe I could open-up the internet access to my neighbor. Is it legal?

JAWI Unlimited

If you want to learn JAWI, an adapted Arabic alphabet for writing the Malay language, now there is an online converter tool. All you have to do is just type the normal Malay text and click convert, the Jawi alphabet will appear. You can copy & paste it into your blog or other medium. It is that easy. This reminds me during those old days when my English tutor (she is not even Muslim/Malay) thought me how to spell Ayam in Jawi.

Check out this ejawi.net website to use the converter. سلامت منچوبا