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.

Note to self:

Create a swap partition after launching a micro-instance.

You’ll need it.

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.

Recap:

- It marks the first full year I’ve been with a political party
- It was the first time I was actively involved in a political campaign
- I graduated
- I entered the banking industry at a multinational investment/private bank
- I left the said bank
- I coded more, much more than I used to
- I became my own boss (I do freelance webdevelopment work. Hire me!)
- I started to return to photography
- I bought a 24-70L f/2.8
- I bought a kindle!
- I started to do strobing

See you in 2012!

All developers should spend at least an hour a day reading tech blogs, watching tech/conference videos or writing blogs. Even if you’re at work.

There’s no substitute for being aware of what’s happening in your community. If you want to be a decent developer you have to know what is out there and what your peers are working on. At the very least you need to have an opinion on technology issues. Be it, SOPA, be it Protect-IP or even code other people wrote.

As an employer, I’m looking out for someone who shows a desire and passion for the technology and/or industry they are in. All too often, CS, CE and IS schools churn out highly technical individuals who are so focused on their specialized skill set that they become what is like a hermit in a cave. Good at what they do, but unable to put A and B together to create something even better.

What employers should be looking for are people who may not be necessarily technically strong, but whom at the very least have the correct attitude and passion for self-improvement.

Go on. Watch videos at work. I won’t fire you. Hell, I may even give you a raise.

With 4 out of 5 of Taxi Operators here in Singapore, announcing that they will be raising their prices in tandem with ComfortDelgro, perhaps it is time for us to start thinking about how we can liberalize the market again to bring some form of real competition into the picture.

Bring back the Yellow-top taxis. Allow individuals to own their own vehicles again. Let them set the price. Let them decide how to conduct their business and then we’ll have a real free market. PTC can come in to make sure that no player undercuts each other to a point of becoming loss leaders, but keep government regulation to the minimal. Safety and Comfort has to be regulated but everything else, let the capitalists decide how much to set on their own.

With real competition, the real winners would be you, the commuters. Let us bring back entrepreneurship.

In light of the consecutive hat-trick scored by SMRT, perhaps it is time to re-look into putting back bus service routes that used to travels on existing MRT routes.

Commuters need to have alternative form of transport when things go wrong and having a ready bus service that commuters can take to reach their respective destinations would be a much better way to mitigate income loss of commuters during such incidents as well as to reduce the impact of inconvenience caused.

I remember back when the North-East Line (NEL) first opened, bus services like 502, 111 and many others were rerouted by SBS Transit seemingly to push and increase NEL utilization. I never quite agreed with that I was forced (and I still am) to take a bus all the way to the nearest NEL station before being able to reach my destination. Before, I had direct buses which were not only faster but much more comfortable.

So far its been fine and dandy but if NEL suddenly breaks down one morning (luckily they still have a pretty decent track record), what then? An alternative transportation route will go a long way to restoring public confidence in our public transportation network.

I do urge the Ministry of Transport to look at increasing the bus services to key areas along MRT routes.

Hey,

Its been a while.

Yes, I’m still alive, just that I’ve been quite busy preparing my speech for the last YouthQuake, that is why I haven’t been updating this blog for so long.

What’s new is that I’ve gotten a Strobist Package A from SGCameraStore which comes with a light stand, white umbrella, flash holder and a 3-in-1 wireless trigger and have been playing with it during my non-speech writing time.

Feels pretty good to be back doing semi-serious photography again and I think its much needed now that its a lull time for me on the business end. The past week have gotten me thinking, perhaps I should try and take on an apprenticeship as a photography assistant. Maybe its time to try and pursue something other than IT which I have been doing pretty much all my life (since Primary 2 to be exact).

I’ve been bitten by the photography bug again.

Been spending the whole morning doing setting up a DIY tabletop studio environment to take some product shots and now I can’t help but keep thinking about getting a proper strobe setup. A light stand, flash holder, umbrella and a wireless flash trigger for a start.

Maybe its a good thing, just something to get me back into the creative mode again.

So for those who are curious here’s what I’ve been working on:

At the same time, let me leave you with some hungry and awesome food photographs. Oh and check out my photoblog. I’ve uploaded some shots from my Beijing trip last week.

Edit: I realize that the compression is really bad. The photos look unsharp. I may need to reupload a new one so please bear with me for the time being.

Draft.

Faith has always been a cornerstone of all religion whether it is monolithic like the Abrahamic faiths or polylithic like Hinduism and Taoism. All religion in one way or another talk or describe events and people that may sound not only far-fetched but also impossible to have taken place in the natural physical world. It calls on its followers to have faith and believe that such events did happen or take place.

Now I am not going to talk about religion in this post as I think that religion is a very personal thing and no one can ever take that away. Instead, I’d like to ask the question, does politics require faith?

After all, isn’t believing in political ideology almost the same as believing in a religion? Both follow a set of doctrine and dogmas, and both has not been fully implemented, tested and proven to be the one and only ‘true’ system.

Communism in theory is supposed to be the provider of a utopian society where everyone lives fairly and in abundance, but look at how Russia, Cuba and China turned out? Poverty, strife and tyranny.

Liberal democracy is supposed to give citizens the power to choose, elect and despose their leaders and is supposed to be the most efficient form of governance which some like Francis Fukuyama calls the ‘final form of human government’ (The End of History), but yet look at how American politics turned out. Political bickering and deadlock between the parties prevent any form of solution to pull the country out of its economic mess.

Just like religion, every different political believer believes that their chosen ideology is the right one and in many case, some would even be willing to die for it (Taliban, Weather Underground, freedom fighters).

So which is the right political ideology? Who’s right, who’s wrong and will there every be a single one that becomes the ultimate truth?