This by-election is for residents of Hougang to vote for their member of parliament. On the surface, it seems like it doesn’t concern anyone else in Singapore. But quite the contrary, this by-election continues to be ever important for everyone in Singapore. The scale of the election is certainly smaller, but it is not any less important. National issues continue to be relevant in this by-election. Residents of Hougang may be feeling a heavy burden. On the one hand, it…
It even sets the bar for Apple’s next iPhone launch. Over the first weekend, the last iPhone reportedly received 4 million pre-orders. The Samsung Galaxy S III (SGS3), on the other hand, now has some 9 million handsets on pre-order. I don’t know when all the pre-ordering began (and some sites like the German Amazon started taking pre-orders even before the SGS3 was announced). But regardless, 9 million is an awful big number. The SGS3 looks all set to go…
Today’s Straits Times reports about LTA reviewing the penalty framework for MRT breaches. Everyone’s very mad about all the recent MRT breakdowns, particularly the two major incidents in December 2011. We’re all thinking that the MRT operator should be fined heavily. But do you wonder, at the end of the day, who really pays for the fines? If the operators’ bottom lines are affected by these penalties, or side-effects of such penalties (e.g. increased maintenance costs), they’ll ultimately petition the…
SCADA, or Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, security breaches are not often heard about. At least, not at the same level of other sorts of computer crimes. But SCADA has the potential to impact the physical environment, physical security, and personal safety of all of us, so such incidents should not be taken lightly. For those who are unfamiliar with SCADA, it’s basically about computer systems and networks that monitor and control industrial, infrastructure, or facility-based processes. For example, SCADA…
We were back again at The Line, the buffet restaurant at Shangri-La hotel. It was yet another $29 lunch buffet promotion. The Line serves an international cuisine buffet. Their 16 culinary stations serves a very wide spread of food to suit every taste bud. It was a sort of buffet extravaganza, featuring Japanese food, Chinese dim-sum, Italian cuisine, Indian dishes, and even local favourites like chicken rice, roast pork, laksa, etc. Many years back when I first visited The Line,…
As much as I sympathize with football fans who were upset by SingTel’s mioTV epic failure during the epic EPL season finale, I’m glad I don’t watch football. I would otherwise have been completely infuriated and spent the following week organizing a campaign against SingTel. This is a colossal engineering failure. Surely SingTel knew the number of subscribers they had on mioTV. I think most subscribers are on mioTV only because of the football programmes. Otherwise they would probably find…
I’ve traded in my Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) for the HTC One X, HTC’s latest flagship smartphone. It was, surprisingly, not a very difficult choice. The Samsung Galaxy S III (SGS3) was just announced earlier this month, and it does look like a a great phone. The choice between the SGS3 and HTC One X, however, was quite clear to me. I’ll tell you more about that later. Let’s talk about the HTC One X first. When the HTC…
That’s right. Nokia’s latest Pureview 808 handset has soared to such great heights never before reached by other mobile phones. Literally. The Pureview 808 was carried by a ballon up 34 km high. From there, it took really cool pictures of our planet Earth. Not the whole lot of it, like you would see from the moon, but certainly impressive enough and something you’d never get on any other smartphone. The Pureview 808′s camera boasts a pixel count of… 41…
The last couple of days we’ve been entertained by the public inquiry into the spate of SMRT disruptions. We’ve just come to the juicy part where SMRT ex-CEO Saw Phaik Hwa gets grilled. Not unexpectedly, we’re going to learn about many more things wrong about SMRT. One of the key issues is about the maintenance budget set by SMRT had not kept pace with the growing ridership. To cut a long story short, Ms Saw claimed a mid-life refresh had averted…
I feel a little strange reviewing a product without really knowing precisely what that product is. It is an Android tablet, that’s for sure. But I’ve yet to figure out exactly what sort of tablet it is. You know, as in its make and model. This Android tablet is a gift I received as compensation for tolerating a 90 min (or as it in fact almost 2 hrs?) timeshare presentation. I had been considering getting an Android tablet. I’m already…
