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Hmmmm….

Its that time of the year again!

Wishing all my family, friends, colleagues and clients a very prosperous Year of the Dragon ahead!

Stay healthy, stay happy and keep truckin’ on!

The Taiwanese elections may be over, but Gothamist LLC’s Shanghaiist.com still manages to pick up a couple of interesting Weibo (China’s Twitter) reaction from Mainland China.

If it’s at all possible to assign scores for democracy, then today’s Taiwan is probably a lot more democratic than many of the more established democracies of the world. These people are like you and I — yellow skinned, brown-eyed, speak Mandarin, and eat Chinese food. Those people that think democracy is not suitable for the Chinese people can now shut up. Those people that say democracy is not possible because the Chinese people are not well-educated enough, or that China is too unique for it, can now shut up. Those people that are still going on about how socialism is superior — please, either go to North Korea for a taste of real socialism, or shut up.
如果民主可以分度数，那么今日台湾要比许多老牌民主国家更民主，这些人和你我一样，黄皮肤，黑眼睛，讲中文，吃中餐，那些认为民主不适合中国人的，可以闭嘴了；那些以素质论、国情论来否定民主的，可以闭嘴了；那些仍在坚持社会主义优越性之说的，要么去朝鲜体验一下真正的社会主义，要么可以闭嘴了。

Some of those ‘tweets’ (seriously, what do you call Weibo updates) seem indicate some sort of dreaming about how a democratic China would look like. This reminds me of the interview I saw over the TV on Channel News Asia, where a local Taiwanese said she was encouraged with the improvements in Cross-straits ties under Ma Ying-Jeou (KMT), and that it is good for Taiwan to get closer to China. She continues, “That way we can show China what democracy is about and hopefully change them.”

I guess she may be onto something.

Oh Colbert!

Rails-god and 37Signals guru, David Heinemeier Hansson, tweeted:

(adjusted for chronological order and aesthetics)

Building apps is the new gold rush. Non-techie friends are constantly asking me how to get in on the action. I would short this market.

It’s like looking at the music billboards and asking anyone who knows how to play a guitar if they can help making one of those hits.

(also, it’s always iPhone apps they want to build. Never hear anyone talk about Android or even web)

True and it also creates giant egos for some non-technical founders. Stay grounded people. Appreciate people and talent for who they are and not just what they can do for you.

If you’re reading this, you’re viewing this blog on a Singapore EC2 instance.

Note to self:

Create a swap partition after launching a micro-instance.

You’ll need it.

I’ve been playing around with Rubber, the EC2 deployment script for Rails lately and I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to get it to work.

Here are some of my notes:

1) To setup:

# Put this into Gemfile
gem rubber

2) Vulcanize! (Create the deployment scripts according to your specifications)
On Rails 3.x, in your Rails application’s root directory

 
davidc@davidc:~/my/awesome/app> vulcanize <option>
 
# with option being any one of the following
minimal_nodb, redis, passenger_nginx, complete_passenger_nginx, cruise, postgresql, resque, apache, 
sphinx, monit, minimal_passenger_nginx, mysql_cluster, complete_passenger_postgresql, cassandra, mongodb, 
complete_mongrel_mysql, complete_passenger_nginx_postgresql, base, memcached, minimal_mysql, 
complete_passenger_mysql, complete_passenger_nginx_mysql, munin, mysql_proxy, complete_passenger, 
mysql, nginx, jetty, passenger, haproxy, mongrel

3) Edit /config/rubber/rubber.yml

4) Use Alestic.com’s list of Ubuntu AMIs for the southeast region (Edit the image_type and image_id fields)

    image_type: t1.micro
    image_id: 'ami-5e215b0c'

Tip: Use t1.micro if you are on the Amazon AWS Free-tier.

5) Create a keypair via your AWS EC2 Console. Make sure you’re creating the pair in the region that you’d like to launch your instances from. Once created, copy that private key into your ~/.ec2 directory (Create the folder if it doesn’t already exist)

6) Your private key should be in the format of keypair-name.pem. Rename it to just keypair-name without the extension.

7) In ~/.ec2, generate a public key that you’ll use with the following command.

# substitute gsg-keypair with the name of the private key that you've downloaded
ssh-keygen -y -f gsg-keypair > gsg-keypair.pub

Note: If you’re getting an “UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!” warning, do a chmod 400 before generating the public key.

8) Make sure your server_endpoint field (/config/rubber/rubber.yml) is pointing to the correct endpoint. In my case, for a Singapore AWS instance, its:

server_endpoint: ap-southeast-1.ec2.amazonaws.com

9) Modify the relevant /config/rubber/rubber-*.yml files to suit your needs

9) ???

10) Profit!

davidc@davidc:~/my/awesome/app> cap rubber:create_staging

Just got back from a basic introduction course to Ardunio over at HackerspaceSG.

I’ve always wanted to try out the Arduino and when this class appeared in the HackerspaceSG mailing list, I knew I had to jump on it.

Thanks Dave Appleton for conducting the class.

Maybe I should pickup a Starter Kit now.

28c3 (The 28th Chaos Communication Congress)

My video picks from 28c3:

These are some of my picks which are selected to be as comprehensive and interesting without being overly technical. If you have a slight interest in computing and politics, these should be very interesting to you.

The coming war on general computation (must watch)
Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginning

Keynote – Marriage from Hell
Evgeny Morozov: Marriage from Hell
On the Secret Love Affair Between Dictators and Western Technology Companies

Reporters Without Border: From Press Freedom to the Freedom of information
This talk is about: Information freedom and the issues for the citizens

Data-mining the Israeli Census
Yuval Adam: Data Mining the Israeli Census
Insights into a publicly available registry

Resilience Towards Leaking or Why Julian Assange Might Be Wrong After All
Kay Hamacher: Resilience Towards Leaking or Why Julian Assange Might Be Wrong After All.
An historical look at the philosophy behind Wikileaks

Changing techno-optimists by shaking up the bureaucrats
Meet the Netherlands: a nation filled with techno-optimists protecting our freedom by puting in place restrictions on what you can do, reducing our privacy and have technology as a solution for anything and everything. When you make a trip we store your details for two years, your airplane meal selection from two years earlier is good data to test with and when migrating the government website we keep the old website running in an unmaintained state. If you have nothing to hide nothing can go wrong and there is nothing you can do. Well not quite.

Interesting Shorter clips (less than 10 min each):
Dead Drops

Project “Memopol”
Memopol is an art project that maps person’s personal information sphere. Wishes to work with German ID-card.

Hacking a Train’s intercom

Wished I could watch (non-English):

Politik hacken

Piraten im AGH von Berlin
A short story about the Pirate Party Berlin entering the parliament of Berlin and what we want to do with our data

For more videos, head on over to the 28c3 youtube channel.