Residents of Hougang may be feeling a heavy burden. On the one hand, it is their constituency, and they have every right to want to take care of their own interests first. But the reality is that things aren’t so straight-forward. Residents of Hougang are also citizens of Singapore, and many issues they face are the same as any other citizen in Singapore.

I do not stay in Hougang, and I cannot attest to the ability of the Worker’s Party to run its town council. But, I believe, they have not failed. WP would not have continued to win Hougang if they had disappointed their residents. At the same time, should the People’s Action Party take over Hougang, I do not believe they can’t deliver as well as the WP can. To me, whichever party takes Hougang makes little difference on how the constituency is run.

Which candidate, WP’s Png Eng Huat, or PAP’s Desmond Choo, can serve Hougang residents better? Both have never been voted in before, and thus have little track record to talk about. However, it can be argued that Mr Choo has been “in” Hougang far longer than Mr Png has.

Perhaps that’s the reason why Mr Choo wants us to know that “I am my own man”. Mr Choo is telling residents to vote for the best man, on the account of that person himself. Don’t get distracted by the backdrop of political parties. After all, having been served by WP for so many years, Mr Choo realizes that Hougang residents will have no qualms to vote WP’s man. It’s status quo to them. Perhaps he figured he stood a better chance if he was compared with WP’s Png Eng Huat man-to-man. His attachment with the PAP could be more of a burden in his contest to win Hougang. Mr Choo, however, did quite badly in the last General Election. Is it the man, or the party, that Hougang residents were dissatisfied with?

On the matter of national issues, do you think either man will do better or worse than the other in Parliament? Mr Choo will probably toe the party line. Mr Png can offer alternative views, but will his voice matter at all?

This by-election is totally different from the last General Election. Most Singaporeans agree the opposition is not ready to run the government. However, many Singaporeans are dissatisfied with the ruling party. At the last General Election, many Singaporeans could have felt themselves in a quandary. You want to support the opposition, but at the same time, you cannot afford to let the ruling party lose too much to become unable to run the government effectively.

This time around, things are much more straight-forward. It is just one seat in Parliament. There is no risk in upsetting the composition of Parliament. There are no cabinet positions are at risk. Thankfully the PAP did not send in a heavyweight to upset the balance in the by-election.

So, to me, this by-election is going to serve as a mid-term performance report, albeit a very early one, on the progress made by the ruling party in this term. Vote WP, you’re signaling your continuing dissatisfaction with the ruling party. Vote PAP, and you’re signaling approval of the progress made by the ruling party.

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The SGS3 looks all set to go down as one of the most successful phone launches. Samsung has certainly learnt a lot from Apple, from the way hype was generated before announcement, the way the announcement itself was planned, and now the volume of pre-orders. Launch day is 9 days away. That’s for the European launch, which is on 29th May.

No one has said how early the SGS3 will be available in other countries, but considering that even Singapore’s 3 telcos has already started taking pre-orders, with one of them stating that customers will be contacted from 25th May onwards, it sounds very much earlier than later. But, presumably, not earlier than 29th May. Then, on launch day, and the subsequent weeks, it’ll be very interesting to watch how the sales of the SGS3 pans out.

The SGS3 could well be the first competitor to be in the same league as the iPhones.

In terms of all its specifications, the SGS3 seems to be a great phone. All, except, in my opinion, how it looks. I’m not sure if the design might grow on me over time.

If anyone’s out to get a new phone this season, and you’re not one of those decidedly onto the iPhone, then the SGS3 seems like a pretty good choice. Yeah, I just jumped ship back to HTC with the HTC One X, but I think if the SGS3′s price is right, it will overall make a good choice. Just, except, as I said earlier, because of its looks.

But possibly things might not be so straight forward. Google has announced that they’re going into get out some 5 different Android 5.0 phones before the end of this year. So now the question is if you should wait for the Android 5.0 phones or settle with the SGS3.

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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 Public Transport Council for fare increases. So what do you know, eventually commuters will find themselves having to pay more.

Do you think the MRT operators will sacrifice profits, payouts to directors, dividends to shareholders, etc, and absorb costs associated with these breaches?

The LTA needs to find a way for the MRT operators to be truly penalized. This isn’t going to be easy. But it needs to be done, otherwise, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to penalize them. The costs gets transferred to commuters, and commuters have no real alternatives. Yeah, if you don’t take the train, you’ll take the bus. Even assuming the busses are reasonably good alternatives, guess who operates the busses?

Singapore’s eagerness to “privatise” various infrastructure service providers don’t quite seem to be such a bright idea now. A national rail company may not be so efficient, but perhaps they will be more focused on their real purpose rather than being driven entirely by profits and side-businesses that generate more revenue.

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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 systems are used to manage and operate power generation plants or water treatment plants. In buildings, SCADA can be behind the operation of electrical systems, elevator controls, air-conditioning systems, etc.

SCADA was not built with very much security at the beginning. This is not unlike how our various Internet protocols weren’t very secure either in the early ages of the Internet. Much of SCADA security used to depend on its physical interconnections being “physically secure”. The scary thing is that SCADA systems are now often linked, or are converged, with computer data networks, and you know how that makes it so much more convenient for the bad guys to penetrate and disrupt SCADA systems.

While in the past, the logic controls of various processes were often hard-wired into the devices and control systems themselves, nowadays much of the monitoring and control are centralized and remotely managed through SCADA.

Let me illustrate with an example. An old failover air-con system might be designed with hard-wired electrical or mechanical controls. If the main air-con fails to maintain room temperature, a thermostat will start up a standby air-con once the temperature breaches a certain threshold. This is old school. With intelligent building controls, sensors deliver data to a central computer system which decides, and then, sends out a command signal to start the standby air-con. This sounds quite uninteresting, and perhaps you don’t see how it can lead to serious safety problems. But, imagine, if this hard-wired mechanism were, instead, a safety system that opens a release valve of a chamber when its internal pressure breaches a certain threshold. Let’s say it’s now replaced by a SCADA network, managed by a remote computer system. A malicious hacker gets in and alters the control program or sabotages the computer so that it never sends the command to open the safety valve. If pressure builds up and there’s no way to relief it, then eventually the chamber will break and explode.

I’m surprised that the blackout at Marina Bay Sands had to do with misuse of SCADA systems. An insider had, while accessing the system remotely, caused the blackout. More interesting is how the people on-site could not rectify the problem, and that the police had to be called to compel that person to cooperate, before the blackout was rectified. Although this incident was a big embarrassment to Marina Bay Sands, it didn’t really have any real threat to people’s safety.

But considering what SCADA system can be used for, it is worrying how, when, and what the next SCADA breach might result in. It’s high time for SCADA users to seriously rethink how their systems are used, and to ensure appropriate safeguards and fail-proof capabilities and built in.

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Many years back when I first visited The Line, it was priced at a premium. Lunch or dinner, it was one of the most expensive buffets in town. Things have changed somewhat, Their frequent promotions means, well, it’s not difficult to find yourself at a $29 lunch buffet like I did. (Besides that, buffets at other hotels have steadily increased in price too, so now The Line’s not considered terribly pricey.)

I used to look forward very much to visiting The Line. It’s premium dining. But my last visit has changed my mind somewhat. Their buffets are getting far too popular. Too many people. Too long queues to get food.

Like, for example, the queue at the oyster counter was just impossibly long and slow moving. I looked at the counter several times and gave up joining the line because, well, I didn’t want to spend my lunch time standing in a queue. Despite there being at least 2 chefs there shucking the oysters, they just weren’t fast enough to cope with the throngs of people waiting in line.

There was a similarly long queue at the Japanese counter. The queue was for the sashimi which is sliced on-the-spot.

I begun to wonder if they called the restaurant “The Line” because, well, there are meant to have long queues.

Anyhow, I did get around to have a small serving of fresh oysters. Sadly, I think the quality has declined. I don’t know how exactly to describe it, except that it simply didn’t taste good.

I wonder if this has become a case of over-popularity leading to decreasing value. It’s probably still pretty worthwhile for $29. But if I had to pay the full price, I would be very dissatisfied.

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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 better programming offered by StarHub.

But never mind that, surely they know how many are signed up on the sports package. These are diehard fans who probably switched over to mioTV because of football, and surely you know they are going to tune in to the season finale. So, isn’t it quite plain obvious what kind of viewing load the mioTV network will experience?

So, on Monday, SingTel apologized. The problem with the way apologies work in Singapore is that, well, they are not sincere, and in same breadth, so to speak, they attribute blame to someone else. In SingTel’s statement, they blamed the disruption on an “unprecedented number of viewers”. Yah. People who were forced to switch to mioTV, paid for a football contract, are not expected to tune in to the season finale?

Then, in a so-called goodwill gesture that, I’m sure, does nothing more than further insult affected subscribers, they plan to waive one-month of subscription fees? Do you seriously think one-month subscription fees will make up for the failure on Sunday night?

I think the least SingTel should do is to return all the monies paid by all affected subscribers, and continue to offer them free subscription for as long as they can deliver a problem-free season.

MDA, please stop imposing silly $50K fines. Do you know how much SingTel mioTV collects from its subscribers?

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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 One X was first unveiled in Singapore at the Marina Bay Sands, I was actually not particularly interested about it. In fact, I even passed up on an opportunity to go down to the event. I was not planning to change my phone yet. I could find the technical specifications and read plenty of reviews online. I didn’t really do any of that either. But several key points did catch my attention: quad-core Tegra 3 processor (plus one extra low-power CPU core), and the awesomely fast 8 megapixel camera.

My SGS2 was a pretty good phone. However, one aspect that did disappoint me was its camera. Compared with the iPhone 4S, the SGS2 was colossally slow. Image quality was not on par with the iPhone 4S either. But it’s not the image quality that annoyed me (it’s quite decent, actually, just not as good as the iPhone 4S). What was really bad is its slowness in focusing, capturing the shot, and then being ready for the next shot. Unless you’re going to be capturing only still life, the SGS2 was often too slow to get any good photos.

I like to take photos. I’ve often talked about how convenient a camera phone is because it is something you carry all the time, always ready to take a photo. But to be really useful, the camera phone has to be actually ready to take the shot when you need it too. It needs to be fast. Preferably with reasonable quality too.

So, anyway, how did I come to meet the HTC One X since I wasn’t very interested in it in the first place? Well, thanks to working demonstration sets available at some retailers. Manufacturers should take note to make demonstration sets as easily available as possible, especially if you feel you genuinely have a winning product.

I was at the Challenger outlet at IMM one morning, and found a HTC One X demonstration set available. The first thing that hit me when I picked up the HTC One X was that the phone felt very good in my hands. It’s a little large. But it feels good to touch, and feels comfortable to hold. The body feels very solid. I think it helped a lot that the unibody construction didn’t need to accommodate a battery cover that will weaken the body. The display was absolutely brillant. In that instant, even before actually playing with the phone itself, I had a very good positive impression of the phone.

The SGS3 has been hyped so much, and just about anyone who’s watching Android smartphone development will want to wait to see what Samsung will unveil. I, too, was waiting to see what the SGS3 would be. The announcement came, and as I mentioned right at the start, I decided to go with the HTC One X. I wouldn’t even wait for a demo SGS3 to land in Singapore to try out.

I ordered my HTC One X online. I didn’t have to go play around with it a second time. It’s the first time I’ve bought a phone online, and the first time I’ve committed to a purchase so quickly. It’s also the first time I’ve done so with so little “hands-on” time with the phone.

I was sold onto the HTC One X for a couple of reasons:

• It looked good.
• It felt good to hold.
• Awesome speedy 8 megapixel camera.
• And of course, it has all the features it needs to have to be a flagship.

Yes, I know there are many more things that the SGS3 probably does better than the HTC One X. But I really don’t like the look of the SGS3. No matter how Samsung says the SGS3 design is inspired by nature, there is nothing natural about it to me. It just looks so awkward to me. There are so many simple things that could have been tweaked to make the SGS3 look better, but it seems to me like Samsung purposely chose in every instance to make it look worse. (It was made ugly by lawyers to avoid law suits.)

I don’t know if, over time, I would get over or get used to the look of the SGS3. But I don’t want to risk the chance that I would continue to dislike its look for a long time (or forever). It’ll be quite a problem considering that I’ll be looking at the phone so much every day.

This is one of the few times I’m choosing a tech gadget not based primarily on its tech qualities, but because of its aesthetics. It’s the first time for a phone. It’s not that the HTC One X fails in its tech qualities. It is the SGS3 that has failed in aesthetics.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I liked the SGS2′s design. I wasn’t font of the Galaxy Nexus, but I could tolerate it. The SGS3 seems to have amplified the parts of the Galaxy Nexus that I didn’t like. As much as I dislike the look of the SGS3, obviously some others will absolutely love it.

I wasn’t planning to go back to the HTC camp. My first Android phone was the Google Nexus One, which is made by HTC. A nice thing about HTC is the free pickup and return service when you have to send in your phone for repairs. Samsung requires you to visit their service centre (although it is fairly conveniently located, and queue times are short). Of course, it’s best that phones are made so good that you never have to send them in for repairs. Nevertheless, this is one up for HTC over Samsung, and it’s something to consider too.

As you can see, I chose the Glamour Grey colour. One reason is that I was slightly concerned that the Polar White version might discolour over time, or be more difficult to maintain. The more important reason, however, is that the Polar White seems to be featured too much. Even the demo phones I saw were Polar White. I’d like to have something a little more unique.

So, that’s how I came to choose the HTC One X.

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The Pureview 808′s camera boasts a pixel count of… 41 megapixels. That’s right. It’s not a typo. Forty-One Megapixels. It’s a camera resolution that outdoes any other smartphone, all compact cameras, and most of the DSLR cameras too.

The 41 megapixel camera produces still shots that measures 38 megapixels. But the default photo size is 5 megapixels. What Nokia’s trying to do with their new camera is oversampling, so as to produce higher quality images. Each pixel in the 5 megapixel camera shot is made up of 7 pixels on the image senor. This allows the camera is average out the sensor input to effectively remove noise, thus providing image quality that is unprecedented on camera smartphones.

The 41 megapixel image sensor also lets you zoom… without digital extrapolation like other camera smartphones would do. To produce zoomed in photos, less of the image sensor is used, and there is less (or no) oversampling, but every pixel from the resulting image really comes from the image sensor. No moving optics involved, and no digital extrapolation. A key advantage of this solution is that there is no noise from any motorized zoom mechanism like often happens with compact digital cameras.

Is the 41 megapixels overkill? Well, if you care very much about good image quality that you can capture anywhere you go… well, there is no better way to achieve that with a camera smartphone that you can carry around with you all the time.

The Pureview 808, unfortunately, is otherwise a little dated in other aspects. It’s a Symbian phone (yeah, didn’t Nokia already want to abandon Symbian?), has a 4″ display with 640×360 resolution, a single-core 1.3 GHz ARM 11 CPU, and a rather clunky form factor. Oh well, the space is needed to house its amazing 1/1.2″ sensor (yes, beats about all the compact digital cameras out there).

Would you get the Pureview 808?

For me, I’m quite decidedly done with Symbian phones. Regardless of how they rename it. But the 41 megapixels camera with Carl Zeiss lens is quite awesome hardware.

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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 spending on maintenance. However, we learnt that those refresh were primarily about upgrading of air-conditioning and passenger cabins. These are good for passenger comfort, but don’t help to improve reliability and safety of the trains.

Ms Saw also claimed that productivity improvements helped keep maintenance cost low. I’m not sure I understand this. Ordinarily, I’d think about human productivity. Fewer people to do the work of more people. Yeah, of course, you reduce headcount, but there is the same amount of work to do, of course productivity increases, but do you get the same quality result?

Broadly speaking, productivity is simply about how much output you produce per unit of input. Whatever she means by productivity, it comes down to doing more with less. I don’t know if the same quality of work was produced, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get a simple answer about that. But quite clearly, SMRT has put in less input.

We also learnt about how some of the headcount lost due to natural attrition were not replaced. That means, basically, you reduced headcount. You don’t necessarily need to fire people or retrench people, you could also reduce headcount. That’s what many companies do to reduce manpower overheads.

The public inquiry has become like a drama. Each day unveils little snippets (or sometimes larger ones) of information about what goes on inside SMRT.

What SMRT has been doing is probably not different from most other private enterprises. Most businesses, if not all, ultimately wants to maximize profits. Maybe they could have lofty vision and mission statements about how they want to make the world a better place, or improve our lives, etc. But ultimately, isn’t it the case that they want to maximize profits?

The trouble is that our government has made train services a basic and critical transport infrastructure. You can’t run such infrastructure services like a typical private enterprise.

I was just about to compare with other basic infrastructure like water and electricity. Then I remembered, electricity providers are, technically, also privatised. But perhaps it’s different here because for consumers, the electricity tariff is fixed formula that depends on prevailing oil prices (and the irony is that our electricity is generated from natural gas, not oil). Big consumers of electricity have the flexibility to call for tender and benefit from healthy competition between the providers. So it’s different. Sure, electricity providers still want to maximize profits, but they do so by lowering their cost, and the quality of their output is easily measurable.

Having said that, I hope tomorrow we don’t wake up to a first blackout in many years, and the start to a new era where we’re told blackouts are “unavoidable” and we just need an incident management plan to deal with it.

I don’t think our “train disruption rate” has improved since December 2011. Despite everything that has been said and done, many of us are going to assume train service disruptions are very much a part of life. I seldom take the MRT, but a week or two ago, when I had an early meeting appointment in town, and had the option to take either a train/bus combo or just buses only, I actually factored in a variable delay component into the train segment of the journey, exactly like how I would do for buses.

Gone are the times when we could be quite confident that if we got to the train station at time X, we would be at our destination train station at time Y, give or take 5 minutes.

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I had been considering getting an Android tablet. I’m already on my second Android phone, and I’ve got two iPads at the moment. But I’ve not had any Android tablets. Previously, I had considered getting the Asus Transformer Prime (but ultimately decided on that 2nd iPad), and also a cheap $100+ basic Android table, something like Ainol/Anova.

So, anyway, this Android tablet came along. I’m quite satisfied with the Android experience. The iPad is okay too. But I interact with Android everyday through my phone, so it would be nice to also move up to a bigger form factor with the same operating environment.

This nameless Android tablet, is really very OEM-ish. There’s really no branding on the box. Except, well, for the word Android. Talk about the pure Android experience, this could not have been more pure.

The tablet inside the box is equally nameless. Not a single branding on it. Yes, I tried hard to figure out. Here’s how the tablet looks.

The tablet came loaded with Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Pretty modern. It has 4GB of internal flash memory, a front camera (no rear camera), capacitive menu, apps and back buttons, hardware power and volume rocker, 3.5mm audio jack, mini-USB, 5V DC-in jack, HDMI output, and a TF Card slot (which I found out is the same as MicroSD). The screen measures about 6.85″ diagonally. I don’t have a weighing scale to check the weight, but it’s reasonably light. Something like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″.

Decent specs for a freebie tablet. I suppose it will cost a little over S$100 if one had to pay for it.

Performance isn’t great. Swiping through homescreens was not smooth. But, I suppose it is good enough to be usable. Besides, Angry Birds, which was preloaded in the tablet, ran well enough.

I’m really curious to identify the device. I know my way around Android gadgets, or at least I think I do, so I tried to connect to the tablet via adb. Nothing detected. Yes, the tablet has USB Debugging mode turned on. Too bad, I could not use adb to find out anything about the device.

There was no terminal emulator installed. It’s just one step away to go to the Google Play store to get it installed, and in no time, I had a shell to poke around the internals. It’s ARMv7 architecture CPU, single-core. I could see dmesg output, the tablet looks to have 448MB of RAM. Out of the 4GB internal flash, about 2GB was available for /data.

I’ve got to find out more about the device. Things like how to get it into recovery mode (I can see the recover partition in the NAND partitioning), download mode, or how to get ADB working with it.

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