It’s finally raining now in the afternoon of the second day of this Lunar New Year. I think this must be about one of the hottest ever Lunar New Year. It’s been so hot I already feel uncomfortable the moment I step out of the house to go anywhere. So thank goodness it is raining now. Oops. It seems it has stopped. But well, hopefully that brief shower cools down the ground a little, otherwise it feels as if the whole of Singapore was a giant frying pan.

All the house visiting, exchange of pleasantries and ang pows, the usual Lunar New Year things-to-do are getting too routine. I think the most outstanding thing of this Lunar New Year is the weather.

This month has been so busy that I actually hadn’t caught up with the usual list of shopping items I go through for the past seasons of Lunar New Year preparations. In fact, you might even have noticed that this blog hasn’t been regularly updated this month either.

An “incident” happened at work on the eve of this Lunar New Year that had my colleague spending about the entire day at the office. We take turns, actually, to tend to after-office hours “incidents”, but no one has yet had this misfortune of having a Lunar New Year holiday disrupted, so I think we all feel bad. Coincidentally, this incident was related to heat too. So I think this Lunar New Year is going to be remembered for the heat.

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Google just launched yet another new service this week. It’s basically a Twitter-like service called Buzz. Not everything Googles jumps into actually takes off really successfully, so it is still to early to say how Buzz will work out. However, at some point, it starts to get horrifying how Google is everywhere. Steve Jobs, at a recent Apple company town hall meeting, made Google out to be evil. Is Google going to be the Skynet of Terminator fame?

Google has thus far been positioning itself as the good guy. Search is their core business, but they give you plenty of things for free, with few services that actually require payment. They shook up the free email service by offering gigantic email storage with their Gmail service. Since then, they’ve expanded to do all sorts of things: browser, operating system (both phone and PC), etc.

Few of these services actually add to their profit bottom line, at least not directly. Do you wonder what Google is up to?

What if, one day, Google says, uh oh, Gmail now costs $1 per month per GB. What now? Many services depend on a Gmail account now. Their Chrome OS beta, for example, requires a Gmail account to login. Yes, a Gmail account to login to your “own computer”. What if Gmail becomes not free?

Don’t you think that with Google setting up a public DNS and getting everyone to use their DNS, they will start to learn too many things about you? What about Google Latitude tracking your movements? Hmm. You realize, Google probably knows more information about you than any other Internet organization.

Then, what about Google kicking up a fuss with the Chinese government, and then getting the US National Security Agency to beef up their company defenses?

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This is a UOB ATM encountering a “system problem”, spotted recently at a crowded shopping centre in Singapore. The machine is basically a PC running a flavour of Windows. I’m just trying to figure out what Windows it is, and I’m guessing it’s probably Windows 2000. I’m slightly familiar with these things, so it is not surprising to me that they run Windows, even a fairly outdated version of Windows. In fact, I still wouldn’t be all too surprised if they ran OS/2.

But still, I wouldn’t be too comfortable about an ATM machine crashing. Yeah, this machine hadn’t quite crashed yet, but it still isn’t a nice error message to be seeing. Remember how virus attacks could bring down ATM networks in the US?

Why not a Linux machine, I wonder. Has anyone seen a Linux ATM?

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It looks like SingTel Mobile has mucked up again. In the late afternoon, I found that my mobile phone had no signal. After rebooting, it seemed to be okay. So perhaps it was my phone. Then my colleague noted that he had no 3G data connection on his SingTel Mobile line. Later in the evening, for much of my trip home, my phone again had no signal at all. When it did, it had no data. Eventually, I got to find out that people have been calling me and were not able to get through. The callers were not on SingTel Mobile network and they got a network busy message calling my phone.

Back home, a quick check in twitter-world confirmed that others are twittering about their problems on SingTel Mobile too. So it is not that the few odd cases that I am personally aware of. So it seems that SingTel Mobile network was mucked up for a couple of hours from this late afternoon to some time in the evening. It isn’t even the first time. I blogged about it previously (which interestingly shows up as the number one search result for “singtel network down” on Google right now).

Let’s say those few hours of downtime today amounted to approximately 2 hours. That’s 0.023% down time, or 99.977% uptime. That’s bad. Phones are supposed to achieve 5 9’s… 99.999% uptime.

There’s nothing much more to say than I’ve already posted about previously. I just want to rant a little about the inconvenience of having a working mobile phone when you need it.

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I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for newbies. Although I only had a few simple struggles with my latest Fedora 12 installation, I cannot imagine how a computer newbie is going to handle such challenges. Granted, Linux is probably more suited for the “power user”, many people in Linux-land try to evangelize the idea that Linux can be used by just about anybody. To this end, I think Linux might be going in that general direction, but it’s still a long way getting there.

My Fedora 12 installation was generally quite smooth. In fact, I’d say it was pretty quick, much faster than I had been used to. My computer isn’t terribly powerful (about 5 years old it think), but it has a brand new hard disk which I’d like to think is reasonably fast. That’s really nice. When the installation from DVD was done, the system rebooted to continue the post -installation setup. Ah ha. The system rebooted, but it failed to boot up Fedora 12. I can see the Fedora 12 boot up screen, then eventually the screen blanked, and nothing could evoke any response from the system. Not even Ctrl-Alt-Del. Hmm, problem. After some struggling around, I managed to see an error message about the system not finding the root device. Hmm, no good.

Well, let’s just say after some mucking around, I finally got Fedora 12 up and running. But my troubles had not ended. One of the first few things to try was to check for software updates. Guess how many updates were there?

Now, remember Fedora 12 was released only in November 2009, just barely 2 months ago. There are now 520 packages to update, totalling over 600MB in size. Fine, if there are so many updates to catch up on, it could simply mean that Fedora or the software it includes are pretty on-the-ball to keep themselves updated. If my broadband speed is fast, 600MB isn’t really all that long anyway. Sure, let’s update.

Yes, next problem. If only the update would actually work. The Software Update program crashed. A quick Google search found several results on this topic. None of the several solutions I randomly picked worked. Eventually, I sorted that out myself by using the command-line tool that I was already familiar with.

I’ve used Linux for a long time. My first installation was Yggdrasil, which I’m sure most people have not heard of until they do a Google search. I consider myself an experienced Linux user, but sometimes I like to be a simple end-user newbie and want everything to just work. I love how in Mac OS X everything (well, almost) just works. At some point, you want to use your computer to get useful work done, not figure out how to fix broken things so that you can get your work done.

Maybe I should have abandoned Fedora and considered something else for my latest installation. Perhaps my familiarity and preference for Fedora has clouded by view of how great Linux distributions have become.

Well, alright I should admit that I just wanted to rant a little. This is 2010, I am expecting Linux to work more beautifully. When I bought an Acer PC preinstalled with Windows Vista last year, it just worked. That’s how I want my Linux distro to be.

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If you think students hogging tables to study at fast food places is bad, this is worse: Students hogging tables to play cards. I suppose you don’t call it gambling if money doesn’t change hands, but many places just outright ban playing cards too simply because they consider it equivalent to gambling. Of all places, this is happening at MacDonalds.

I was annoyed because we needed a big table to seat like 8 people. The only two big tables were occupied by these bunch of people playing cards. There were no other tables big enough, and not enough small tables close enough that we could combine into a big enough table. These card players were seated right in front of the counter. So clearly they did not go unnoticed, and I imagine the supervisor or manager will definitely see it himself or herself. Yet… they remained.

There were signs posted to ban studying. Perhaps gambling is unofficially sanctioned.

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Today I woke up to be greeted by a rather contradictory headline in our Straits Times paper. Civil servants will not get a bonus this year, but they will get a one-time payment. Hmm. Aren’t bonuses like one-time payments too? It is not like you get it every month, and it is not guaranteed or the same quantum every year. So what is the real difference between a “bonus” and a “one-off payment”?

This one-time payment is being paid out in support of wage restraint. It is based on a quarter month’s salary, but capped at $750. I suppose this is a nice gesture of the Public Service Division to help out lower-income civil servants to make ends meet.

For the record, civil servants will still receive their full 13th month bonus.

There’s a new meaning to “no bonus”.

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Obviously this is the kind of joke only for IT people, particularly the Linux people. It’s a case of a post sent to the wrong mailing list which quickly developed into a series of hilarious follow-ups. I myself had a good laugh when I sifted through the email I received from the list this morning. Someone posted to the Fedora mailing list about the worsening mileage he was getting on his Toyota Prius. He realized quite immediately his mistake. But other funny people on the list followed-up with serious-sounding Linux advice.

Upgrade the kernel of the Prius.

Use one of the kernel performance measurement tools.

Upgrade the prius_mileage package (yum update prius_mileage).

Someday, the Toyota Prius might really run Linux. Cars, after all, have got onboard computers at least in the form of Engine Control Units which are getting pretty common these days. Particularly on high-end luxury cars, these onboard computers are also getting rather complex, controlling and monitoring a lot more things than just engine operation.

It wouldn’t be too long before cars start malfunctioning due to buggy software.

Oops. Actually some cars are already malfunctioning due to buggy software.

Not the least of which is, coincidentally on the same day, news of the massive recall of various models of Toyota vehicles in the US, including the Prius. It doesn’t sound like a software bug though, even though software could perhaps fix the problem.

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I’ve just noticed that Shingz has become the top searched phrase that led to my blog, some 14 times more so than the next phrase. As a word on its own, it’s in number two place. In fact, if you just search for shingz right now on Google, the number one entry in the search result leads to this site. Oh my, I am riding on the popularity of Boomz and Shingz, and the success of Ris Low’s brand of English.

Since so many netizens have faithfully come here in search of shingz, I shall do a public service by offering the definition of the word, according to Ris Low’s brand of English of course.

What is Shingz?

“Shucks”, or “whatever”. Like “oh my god, this is so shingz. I can’t stand you anymore. Please talk to my hand.”

When I’m walking down the street, and a car stops in front of me, beep beep, I’ll look at him and say “shingz”. … It’s like another word for f**k.

So there you have it. The definition of shingz, according to the inventor of the word. If you’ve not been living on this planet recently, the above was learnt/heard from an interview with Ris Low by Shan  and Rozz on clicknetwork.tv at the Three Monkeys Cafe.

I think the Three Monkeys Cafe probably became a lot more well known after this episode, in case people haven’t heard of them yet. I haven’t eaten there, although now it is now moved up in priority in the list of places to try next. (I’ve heard of them, but haven’t particularly wanted to go there before.)

Incidentally, I did briefly think about how to capitalize on these new words. Pity, but both boomz.com and shingz.com domain names are already squatted on. In fact, even boomz.com.sg and boomz.sg are taken. Interesting, boomz.sg is an online t-shirt seller marketing a line of, well, boomz t-shirts. I think they also caught on to Apple’s i-everything, because they have iBoomz too.

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You’d have expected that an upmarket retail shop like that of Tag Heuer would be a picture of perfection. Neat, pristine and clean. Especially in a display cabinet which is not exposed to dust, fingers, and other sorts of intrusions. Yet, as I walked past, something just caught my eye: a smudgy fingerprint on a mobile phone in the display! Somehow, it stood out so clearly under the intense halogen lights. It almost seems like the fingerprint was planted on purpose, as if it were in fact part of the display.

Except that it probably wan’t meant to be part of the display. I guess the cleaning crew need to be more careful in future. Particularly since, ahem, the fingerprint would clearly identify the culprit of this misdemeanor.

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