Zit Seng's Superwall

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?

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Cisco recently made available an interesting simulation game called myPlanNet. If you’ve played SimCity, as I’m sure most people are familiar with, you’d find some of the concepts similar. In myPlanNet, you are the CEO of a service provider, and what you do is to manage your business as it evolves through the different eras from primitive dial-up, through broadband and mobile connectivity, into the futuristic (although certainly not farfetched) medianet age.

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Let me hao lian about my personal port number. I was just reading about CARP, the Common Address Resolution Protocol, this afternoon and learnt about how they failed to secure a protocol number from IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), so they had to hijack someone else’s protocol number. Then I remembered how I secured for myself a port number from IANA. I know, a port number is not quite the same thing as a protocol number, but still, it is something interesting and notable to look back on.

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The current hot game on the Internet is Monopoly City Streets. So hot that it crashed on day one. So hot that it had to be reset. So hot that on the day it as reincarnated, it ran into trouble again. If you’ve not yet heard, Hashbro, the company behind the popular Monopoly board game, has teamed up with Google to bring Monopoly City Streets online using the entire world through Google Maps as your virtual board.

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One of my favourite products of IETF, the internet protocol standards body, is their publication of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) in RFC 2324. As a coffee drinker, I was quite intrigued about the idea of using the Internet to manage coffee brewing. HTCPCP is a protocol for managing devices capable of brewing the all-time popular caffeinated hot beverage. HTCPCP is important, because computer geeks, and indeed Internet addicts, are heavily dependent on this rejuvenating beverage.

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This should be an embarrassment to SMRT. It looks like they forgot to pay their bills. Their corporate website www.smrtbuses.com.sg is now inaccessible, because apparently the license for their Blue Coat proxy appliance has expired. Maybe it’s time to raise bus fares again, so that they have enough revenue to pay for their IT operating expenses. Not only is there inflation, rising fuel prices, wage increases, but there is also IT costs to grapple with.

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