DEDLOG

Made in Hong Kong 1974

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:45:00 +0000

Just recently my company hired a new General Manager for India. He is now spending his first month with the company here in Shanghai and is probably the only person in my office at the moment born in the 70's. He is from Malaysia originally and ciggie breaks are typically nostalgic. Not so much remembering old times, because I've only known him for 2 weeks, but about shared memories of music and television.

I only tell you this because it explains my current frame of mind. I am also reading (well more accurately listening) to The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell and I have reached Part Four of the book. Set in the USA in 1974. Because Littell's story uses a mixture of Fact and Fiction to weave his story, the story makes reference to India's first nuclear test and the Watergate Scandel that got me thinking... What else happened the year I was born.

After Wikipediing and Googling for a little while, I also learned that in 1974, The Terracotta Warriors were discovered, Darwin gets flattened by Cyclone Tracy, ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, Mohammad Ali knocks our George Foreman in the 8th Round of Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire and the Rubik's Cube was invented.

This was the world in which I was born into. Interesting but all these things happened a world away. So a dug a little further to find out what was going on closer to ground zero in Hong Kong and I found that John Woo had directed his first film. The style that we have know to recognise as a John Woo film is already evident in The Young Dragons 铁汉柔情. One of the movies stars is an actor famous for playing opposite Chow Yun-Fat as the villian. His name is Wan ZiLiang (万梓良）.

I only bring this up because my Chinese name is Lin Ziliang (林梓梁）.

Interesting? Maybe! Too much time on my hands? Definitely!

New Year, New Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:13:00 +0000

Happy new year to my readers. Yes, both of you!

And to mark the new year, I have started a new Posterous blog looking at the world from Asian eyes, aptly named Squiint. I will still be ranting and raving here and on the dedlam posterous blog but hopefully my themed blog will start to provide content that will look at the world looking from East to West.

Hope y'all had a restful new year.

The fight against censorship takes a hit because diplomats don't have the good sense to self-censor.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:36:00 +0000

I wonder if Animal Farm is still on the High School syllabus in Australia. If not then it should be! I remember reading it in ... It must have been in Year 9 or 10. It was one of the books that I found quite easy to read and very entertaining at that age but certainly that and the other compulsory reading material Lord of the Flies have shaped the way I see the world. That might seem a little disturbing but the fact of the matter is that power corrupts regardless of how good the intentions are and to begin with.

Bringing this back to living in China for the last decade, I have learned to accept certain things. Freedom of speech is something that (at least in today's China) is contained within your circle of friends. You can say anything to people you trust but as the occasional blogger, anything that goes into the public domain must be controlled. The rule of thumb that I go by is that the internet is forever and you can't take back what you put out there. So only post up what you would want your children, your wife, your parents, your grandparents or your colleagues to hear.

Not everybody knows this though. They put things online that are embarrassing to themselves as well as to the people around them and this provides an endless stream of entertainment for me. Opening up an internet browser for me is like having my own personal interactive version of Candid Camera. I learned this lesson of self-censorship a long time ago that extends to my work and personal life. Never put in writing anything that you don't want on your permanent record.

What has this got to do with Animal Farm? When you mix a destructive sense of superiority with a an inability to self-censor, you have some of the current problems the US and other nations are facing with the ongoing Wikileaks situation. Blame is being directed at Julian Assange for leaking private cables from consulate staff about other nations and leaders. Great conversation for the pub, for a private meeting, for Jon Stewart but in an official cable to the US Department of State? Show some self control. I hate to tell you but you have been called out. Your girlfriend has just been through your mobile phone and found SMS messages to your friends telling them how much of a pig she is and no amount of finger pointing, begging and lying on the floor between the aisles of Walmart and stomping your feet is going to mask the fact that you told your friends that your girlfriend is a pig and was stupid enough to leave evidence. This stupidity is not born of a lack of intellect but a misplaced sense of superiority that the World's Superpower should be making these judgemental remarks about another nation in official diplomatic communications.

In the word's of George Orwell, "Four legs good. Two legs BETTER." is what you were thinking.

A final note before I get back to keeping my mouth shut is that irony is a wonderful and powerful thing. More powerful than all of us and I hope that more than just I see the irony in that the nation that has criticised internet censorship in the media is now systematically shutting down wikileaks. No doubt they will success but at the price of looking like a complete bunch of hypocrites the next time the Chinese decide to block another site like Facebook or Youtube. Good work guys! You've hobbled yourself against the war against free speech by not having the good sense to self-censor.

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Not enough Social and too much Media in Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:56:00 +0000

Not much more than a couple of years ago I discovered the joys of social media. Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social networking sites became my link to the world outside my study. I read blogs and participated in discussion but I have recently found this dissatisfying. To the point where I have been asking myself the eternal question. Why is it so?

At first I thought it was because we grew apart. "It's not you, it's me." I said to my computer, not wanting to hurts its feelings but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the demise of my relationship with the avatarred masses was not just me. The very nature of social media has changed and, in my opinion, it is not unlike being trapped in a loveless relationship. At first it was exploratory. Everything was exciting and new. We were open and sharing information about each other. I found out about the single mothers and their lives, I learned about students and scholars both in China and around the world. I watch as journalists became social media evangelists and heavy metal guitarists become web entrepreneurs. We held hands, we shared experiences and took long leisurely strolls along moonlit beaches and listens to the waves crash against the rocks as the cool ocean breeze blew past our semi-naked bodies like long endless scarves of silk. We met whenever we could, via my browser, via Twhirl, via Orsiso, via Tweetdeck with each new upgrade getting easier to use and more intuitive. In the meantime, SNS's became mainstream. Celebrities, politicians, media groups, even Presidents and Princesses joined in this wonderful new world of connectivity.

But as time went on, we not only grew up but we grew apart. More distant. You no longer told me what you loved, what you felt, what you had for lunch. You just told me the news. Our conversations ceased to be personal and intimate but have become about what is in the newspaper. We used to snuggle up in bed all day and just chat about whatever was on our mind whilst looking deeply into each others eyes. Now we just talk about the weather, the latest cause, the plight of bonusless investment bankers. It has reached the point where I might as well just pick up a newspaper or download the FT app on my iPad because there is nothing social about social networks.
I don't need you to keep in touch with my real friends, I have their email addresses and phone numbers. I don't need a relationship with CNN, I can just turn on the TV. The reason I need you is to have faux friendships with perfect strangers and to have intellectual relationships with people from different walks of life.

So I am giving this relationship another chance, because I believe in commitment, but for this relationship to work we must open up. Tell me what you really feel, not just what is fit to print. I want to know you and in return, I will let you know me. I will tell you my deepest darkest fears and in the end we will all be better for it because we will learn again that we are not that unalike.

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An Incomplete Book Review: My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:12:00 +0000

I am not a big reader and most of the books that I am currently reading are next to the toilet in my ensuite. At the moment, next to my throne is a Fredrick Forsyth paperback, a half read sermon by Richard Dawkins and half a dozen copies of That's Shanghai that serves as a reference library whenever my wife asks me what we are doing for dinner.

The depicted red paperback however is with me at all times. It is rare that I get long stretches time to read so I read on the Metro or walking home because I literally cannot put it down. This is not my first experience with Tony Parsons. A couple of years back I read One For My Baby which I barely recall. What I did recall was that it was that I did actually finish reading it. For someone with an attention span as short as mine, it means that it was good enough to keep me interested for the duration of the book.

I picked up My Favourite Wife at Changi Airport on the way home after a two week business trip and I was at that stage eager to get home to see my wife and kids. I troll through the usual suspense and spy novels that I usually read but I settled on this one for two reasons. The first reason was that it had something to do with China and was written by someone whom I already knew and secondly it was just a little more expensive than the usual paperbacks. I figured there must be a reason this book cost SGD3.00 more than the other books.

When I opened the book and started reading, I was hooked. It described the first impressions of Shanghai and I could immediately relate. Ten years ago I arrived in Shanghai with one suitcase, was picked up by a limo and taken to the Grand Hyatt and the impressions of what I saw almost matched exactly Tony's words. The Flash-Gordonesque skyline of Pudong juxtaposed against the colonial architecture of the western bank of the Huangpu River equally left me in a confused and awestricken state that the protagonist Bill Holden must have felt.

My impressions of many of the descriptions of Shanghai also caused me to flash back to my first impressions of well know places in Shanghai. His reference to M on the Bund, the now quiet Maoming Lu and the reference to fictional bars BB's and Suzy Too that made me immediately think of Malones and Judy's Too. Even down to the apartment complex Paradise Mansion where Bill lived which reminds me of Ambassy Court (to be honest it could be one of many apartment complexes that are actually in Gubei but Ambassy Court was the first one that came to mind first) to the International Family Hospital on Xianxia Lu (actually called United Family Hospital in reality) I get the feeling that the book was written from experience rather than just observation. The descriptions actually feel like it was written by someone who had been shadowing me for the last ten years and decided to dramatise my own experiences.

The story itself explores something that I can imagine would have weighed on the mind of many an expat that may have spent time away from their family. Through stories told to me by other expatriate friends and from my own observations, the angst that is experienced by Bill having his wife and child back at home while he was carving out his future in the wild wild East was written in such as way that allows you to see Shanghai in the light of someone who actually acted on his temptations and impulses.

The book also provides an accurate depiction of other parts of China including Shenzhen and Guilin that I had also visited in the past so overall as a great story about the expatriate experience but also an insight into the perception of China and Shanghai from a local perspective. One of the memorable parts was from another character in the book Nancy Deng, a local Chinese lawyer working in Bill's firm over dinner on the streets of Shenzhen where she says two things that I find very insightful about China:

"In China the important men hate everyone's corruption but their own."

and referring to herself;

"I have no big dreams... I know I am unimportant. But I think perhaps my country's future is yet to be decided. It doesn't matter what anyone says. Nothing is inevitable in China."

So for anyone who is a foreigner living in China, or Chinese who have experienced the rest of the world, Tony Parsons' My Favourite Wife is recommended reading. A recommendation from someone who usually has a hard time finishing a book.

Another review I found about the book can be found here and provides a bit more about the plot.

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Letter from a Chinese netizen to US President Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

I know I have been just reposting other peoples stuff but I think this is worth putting into the blogospheric echo chamber.

Fool's Mountain: Blogging for China
11 March 2010 2:55 AM
by Bill

Letter from a Chinese netizen to US President Barack Obama

(Bi Yantao’s Note: Massive thanks to Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang, President of China-U.S. Friendship Exchange, Inc., for guiding me to this letter. In fact, this is the second letter I have came across from Chinese citizens to US President Barack Obama on US’s arms sale to Taiwan. Another letter is written by Mr. Tian Zhongguo, a Chinese veteran. I will not feel surprised if some Western people brush aside this letter by asserting it is masterminded by the Chinese authorities. )

Dear Mr. President,

I’ve heard that you care for the voices of web users. I’ve also noticed that you requested a direct dialogue with web users to answer their questions and concerns during your visit to China last November. Your attention to web users has encouraged me to write to you. I am an ordinary web user from China. What I want to talk to you about is the US’ arms sale to Taiwan, which has raised a heated discussion on the Internet in China. I sincerely hope this letter reaches you, and that you would be able to hear the voice of an ordinary Chinese web user and his wishes for reunification and peace and his nation.

In your speech to Chinese youth in Shanghai you said, “the strength of the 21st century is not a zero-sum game, the success of a country to another country should not sacrifice the cost. This is why we do not seek to contain China’s rise. On the contrary, we welcome to the international community, China, as a strong, prosperous and successful member.” You have called for “changes” during your election campaign; so I think your words on “not seek to contain China’s rise” shows your sincerity in making some “changes” in Sino-US relations. The first thing that comes to mind is that the US government under you, unlike your predecessors, will not annoy China on China’s reunification and the Taiwan Question, as the Chinese nationals really appreciate the current peaceful cross-Straits relationship.

However, two months after you left Shanghai, your promise “not seek to contain China’s rise” and “my administration fully supports a one-China policy” is weirdly mingled with your decision to sell arms to Taiwan. I am not sure if I have interpreted you wrongly. Either you have not changed, or you have changed so fast that I do not even have the time to picture what great peace and happiness your promise would bring to the people across the Taiwan Straits. Of course, I hope I am not wrong in understanding your promise, and you are not changing fast. Because a president who brings hope into the White House, is not expected to “change nothing” or “change too fast”.

I enjoyed your speech and admired your speaking skills. I really wish you could meet the Chinese youth and the Chinese web users, and explain whether your promise to them or to China has changed. But I’d like to add a note here. We do not need lame explanations like “arms sale to Taiwan is good for security across the Taiwan Straits”, because it is an insult to our intelligence if we believe in such excuses. It is a simple fact that for the separatists, the more advanced their equipments is, the more they would want to split from the nation. In the American Civil War, the southern rebels were even crazier in their fight with the Federal government under Abraham Lincoln after they received military support from Britain.

Mr President, when you first put your hands on the Bible that Abraham Lincoln once used and vowed to be the 44th president of the United States, many people called you “Lincoln the second”. There are even people in media counting the similarities between you and Lincoln: you are both from an ordinary family, and both have brilliant talent and eloquence. You also said you are a fan of Lincoln in your autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. But no matter how many similarities you and Abraham Lincoln might have, I, as an ordinary Chinese, think you have one deep-rooted difference. The difference is that President Lincoln had suffered from the splitting pains of his nation, and bore hatred for the external power that intervened to split his nation; but you did not.

Mr President, you are a knowledgeable man. You must have remembered the Trent Affair during the American Civil War, where President Lincoln bit the bullet and met the unreasonable demands of the British to release the special envoys the southern rebels sent to Britain. However, during that time, Lincoln told his people “that was a pretty bitter pill to swallow, but I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we could if we wished call England to account for the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us.”

Mr. President, do you know that you are compelling Chinese people to swallow a bitter pill by selling arms to Taiwan and interfering in the reunification of China? Has it occurred to you that the leaders in China might have spoken the same words your idol, Abraham Lincoln once said, that “we wished (to) call America to account for the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us”?

Yours sincerely,
LTML
A Chinese web user from bbs.huanqiu.com
Feb. 2, 2010

Chinese Edition: http://bbs.huanqiu.com/zongluntianxia/thread-309897-1-1.html
English Edition: http://forum.globaltimes.cn/forum/showthread.php?t=12869

This post was submitted by Bill.

Letters Opinion

e:dedric.lam@datacenterdynamics.com

m:+86 13816698728

skype:dedlam

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ChinaDaily News: Hackers harass government sites

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:52:00 +0000

Hackers harass government sites

(Li Xinzhu)
Updated: 2010-01-21 10:04

SHANGHAI: Government websites have seen a dramatic spike in hacking attacks, a report by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows.

At least 178 government websites had their content modified by hackers between Jan 4 and Jan 10, five times more than the previous week, the ministry said on its website.

The number of other domestic websites having content altered by hackers rose 30 percent during the same period.

The report was compiled by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, which warned of the "serious situation".

An insecure Internet environment could bring enormous risk to the online community, and website maintenance should be carried out frequently, said Shi Xiaohong, an engineer with Qihu360 security center, a popular domestic network security company.

The website of the Center of Agri-food Quality & Safety was attacked on Jan 3 when an advertisement was inserted, Qihu360 reported on its website.

An employee of the website who did not want to be named confirmed the attack, and told China Daily they were not sure when they were hacked.

"Our website server is already out of date, that's why we are upgrading it and we assume that the hacking happened at the same time," the employee said.

"We cleared the malicious plug-in immediately after we discovered it."

Compared with commercial websites, government portals often do not have enough security capacity to protect themselves from the attack, said Shi.

"Security checks as well as maintenance of government websites are not carried out in time in most cases, and they often do not install the latest patches immediately after system bugs have been discovered" Shi added.

"Many small government websites were constructed by external Web design companies and many of these don't carry out any maintenance afterwards. Hackers don't have to attack the government's server but they can use bugs in the system to hack into the websites."

IT giant Microsoft also released a security advisory on its website on Jan 14, claiming that there is a bug called 0day for its Internet Explorer users and attacks utilizing this bug have already spread online.

Network experts have advised users to install the latest patches to avoid possible attacks.

Sent from my iPhone

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ChinaDaily News: Edited out

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:51:00 +0000

Edited out

(By Hu Yongqi and Wang Shanshan)
Updated: 2010-01-07 11:48

Staff at a Beijing labor bureau received some unexpected visitors on Tuesday. Alongside the migrant workers who converge daily at the offices in Dongcheng district in the run-up to Spring Festival was a newsroom of journalists all protesting their dismissals and demanding withheld wages.

All 21 disgruntled reporters and editors were half way through an editorial brainstorm at News Magazine, a Beijing-based current affairs publication, on Dec 31 when their boss suddenly entered and told them their services would not be required after the New Year holidays.

The newsroom was to be taken over by Hu Shuli, former editor-in-chief of Caijing Magazine, and more than 70 journalists who also quit the reputed publication on Nov 9, staff was told.

Hu is credited with building Caijing into a massively successful financial news journal but walked out after allegedly arguing with the magazine's investors.

She agreed to take over editorial control of News Magazine, known to Chinese readers as Xin Shiji Zhoukan, on Dec 29. But it means that as one group of journalists finds a new home, another is now at the center of a labor dispute.

Industry insiders say the move came after Hu's company, Caixin Media, which she set up in early December, failed to get approval to start a new magazine due to China's "difficult" licensing process.

"We were all excited Hu would be our new editor-in-chief, but we didn't know we would be tossed out two days later without prior warning," said news editor Tang Yong, 28. "We will do everything to defend our legal rights."

Most of the 21 journalists dismissed have not received their basic salaries for two months or payments for stories they wrote in the last six months, he said.

Miao Shubin, former editor-in-chief of News Magazine and the man who told staff about the changes on Dec 31, is now the publication's deputy editor-in-chief under Hu.

Tang said all 21 journalists were told to stop discussing potential topics for the next issue. What followed was 14 hours of negotiations over defaulted wages, story payments, social security funds and housing allowances. The staff demanded compensation but Miao refused to sign any proposal, said Tang.

The magazine is published three times a month - 1st, 11th and 21st - but this month an extra issue produced by Hu's team was released on Monday. It was rebranded as Century Weekly and it did not carry the names of the 21 editorial members sacked.

Miao and Caixin Media said reporters could keep working at the magazine if they agreed to serve a three-month probation, according to Tang. All refused and instead posted a joint press release on a sina.com blog on Jan 3 to "claim their justified rights".

Tang said the magazine owes them two months' wages and story payments for the last six to eight months. He revealed he alone was owed more than 20,000 yuan ($3,000) in story payments. "My colleagues and I just want what we rightfully deserve," he said.

News Magazine was founded in 1988 and earned a reputation for hard-hitting reporting after it covered China's first AIDS case. It has an average readership of about 150,000 nationwide.

However, in recent years the business has struggled, and as it already has a license with the China Institute for Reform and Development in Haikou, capital of Hainan province, it was a prime target for anyone looking to take over a magazine, said industry insiders.

A company must have a license from the government to print magazines, but as licenses are rare commodities in China they fetch high prices in a fiercely competitive market.

The labor dispute resulting from the editorial takeover at News Magazine is becoming a "normal" occurrence these days due to the high demand for permits, said Hu Yong, a professor of communication at Peking University.

"Anything can happen in such a market. The licensing system lays the foundation for this behavior," he said. "Magazine licenses are issued and required by the government, and they are very difficult to get. The demand is much higher than the supply and those who have them can sell at high prices."

China now has more than 9,500 licensed periodicals, but the authorities seldom issue new permits due to a strict policy employed for the last several years, said a senior magazine editor in Beijing who asked to remain anonymous.

Hu Shuli and her loyal crew have been busily looking for a magazine license since leaving Caijing Magazine. Meanwhile, the owners of News Magazine were reportedly looking to

offload the struggling venture and its valuable publication permit.

"The magazine was negotiating with Caixin Media and other media companies in December. One side was eager to sell its license, the other desperate to get one," said Professor Hu. "In such haste, the rights of the laborers could have been ignored."

The deal between Caixin Media and News Magazine, in cooperation with the China Institute for Reform and Development, was finalized on Dec 29.

Caixin Media was founded on Dec 10 last year with a registered capital of 100 million yuan, according to the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce website, and is involved in production and distribution of advertisements, animation, television programs and documentaries, as well as financial consultancy.

Hu Shuli was unavailable for comment yesterday. However, Zhang Lihui, a spokeswoman for Caixin Media, told China Daily the company has had no involvement in the ongoing labor dispute at News Magazine.

"We are bothered about the criticism but Caixin Media has not invested any money into News Magazine. Hu and our reporters are simply employed to work for the magazine," she said. "We have nothing to do with the magazine's disputes or its decisions."

However, with the arrival of new reporters and editors, the style of the magazine will change from current affairs to financial news, she said. "Caixin Media is willing to employ the magazine's current reporters if both sides can agree on the conditions of employment. Our door is always open. It is still a news magazine but there will be an adjustment in the weight of different kinds of news - financial or social," said Zhang.

She admitted the company had discussed putting the current reporting staff on three-month probation. "We talked about the possibility before but didn't reach a decision. I don't know how word got out," said Zhang.

An anonymous source within Caixin Media told China Daily: "The issue is fairly simple. We would like to hire all 21 but a few of them did not want that and incited the others to push for higher compensation. If still not satisfied, they can appeal to the courts and we will follow the law."

For the 21 reporters and editors axed by News Magazine, Hu Shuli is a hero. Some even credit her with inspiring them to start a career in journalism.

Tang Yong said none of them blame Hu for the labor dispute, but he insisted he would not stay to work with the new editorial crew. "We have different styles. We are too grassroots for them," he said.

The reporters and editors complained in the highly publicized blog post on Jan 3 that leaders of News Magazine did not consider their existing employees in deciding to bring in Hu and her team.

Miao, the former editor-in-chief, did not even bring a seal to sign the compensation agreements when he met with staff and their lawyer, Li Xin, on Jan 4, said Tang. At the time, Miao agreed to pay the delayed money but insisted on signing agreements with employees one by one. The staff refused.

Tang explained that employees usually signed one-year contracts that expired at the end of the year. However, all 21 journalists signed agreements with the magazine on Nov 24 last year stating both sides were willing to renew their contracts, he said. Renewed terms were never offered.

Li, the lawyer acting for the axed staff, said his clients' priority is to claim the defaulted wages. They are also demanding a 25-percent premium on their delayed payments.

However, if they did indeed sign agreements on the intention to renew their contracts, News Magazine will find it hard to get out of them, said Liao Mingtao, a lawyer with M & A Law Firm in Shanghai.

"It may be called an agreement instead of a contract, but it should be looked on as a contract if it had necessary clauses and two sides signed it," he said. "Even when there is a change in the majority stockholder of the company, the enforcement of a labor contract should not be affected."

If agreements are in place, the 21 journalists should not have to go through three-month probation; if not, their employer had no responsibility to inform them beforehand about the layoffs, said Liao.

"Even if they didn't have agreements and their contracts expired, they should be compensated if they wanted new contracts and their employers didn't want to give them," he said. "The compensation is like that. If you have worked somewhere for two years, you receive two times the averaged salary of the last 12 months."

As negotiations are ongoing, though, it looks like Tang and his colleagues will be making the news, rather than reporting it, for some time yet.

Sent from my iPhone

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Wave at the geeks and religous nuts.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:35:00 +0000

Ok! I admit it. I am a try-hard early adopter. I'm not a real early adopter because the real ones will go out and "buy" something that brand spanking new gadget and I'll only partake in the free technological revolutions. That's why I love closed beta's because once you're in, your instantly popular because others need an invitation (possible from you) to be in the "in" crowd as well.

I persevered with twitter for a long time before I worked out how to make it useful, how to block out the spammers and how to develop meaningful conversations with strangers. Perhaps I'm getting less patient or perhaps I've just lost the need to be that kid with the newest pair of Air Jordon's but Google Wave seems a whole lot of something we've always had.

For about a week now, I've tried to make Google Wave useful. The problem is I don't have enough friends that use Wave. I've invited a couple of colleagues and I have a couple of friends that already have Wave accounts but even though I've made Wave my home page I can't see how I'd use it to replace what I already use. For instance, the collaborative nature of Wave at the moment is in a threaded conversation for most Public waves. Unless it's a closed bunch of friends that could happily use one of many instant messaging services, the open conversations just seem like the comment section of a blog. Sure it's in real time and collaborative but it just makes it all the more difficult to follow the conversation.

If you perform the with:public search you see a stream of waves that are open to all users. A quick scan of the topics and you will realise who the real early adopters are. Immediately you have wannabe bloggers (like myself) polling people about which is the best is the best new mobile, how to actually use Wave and my favourite, Ask a Christian. In essence doing this type of search is like watching the public stream on twitter.

In fact, I get the feeling that Google have let the lunatics (a.k.a. engineers) take over the asylum on this one. From the back end, wave really is revolutionary and like Facebook is a platform that will support the imagination of every computer science student in the world. It is a user interface that mashes up the potential to mimic every major SNS in existence. As developers take hold, someone will develop an incredibly addictive version of Mafia Wars for Wave. In fact there's already a collaborate Soduku clique in Wave. You can mimic a chat room, you can mimic twitter, you can mimic facebook, you can mimic instant messaging. The problem with a pimped up social site is the person driving that "2 Fast 2 Furious" vehicle is usually a wanker.

But seriously, I'm not brave enough to really predict that Wave is a flop especially since this is still a preview and Google has really really deep pockets but I've been trying really really hard. I like Google and I want to believe that Wave will be as successful as GMail but honestly I don't feel so confident.

I could go on about not being able to intuitively work out how to do anything or how a notifier that could tell me when my contacts came online (like when you use GTalk in Gmail) but I'm going to stop whining now and will keep trying to find function because I haven't given up on you yet Google. I will say though, Dr. Wave needs a Mr. Hyde to work on making UI easier to use.

Google Chrome OS will kill Windows.. but thats not the point.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:03:00 +0000

I've written before about the World being taken over by Google and the latest announcement about Google's plan to launch their Chrome OS seems to be another step in that direction. What I am am finding though is that because of the OS aspect of the name, many commentators are automatically putting this dark horse in the race with Windows 7 and seem to be downplaying the Chrome aspect of the equation. (Other Chrome vs Windows posts here and here) If you take a scan down the list of products that Google have in their stables, you will find that generally anything that is released to the public is done with a great deal of forethought. For instance, when Gmail was launched with one gig of storage space, it wasn't because they were generous or charitable. It was a means to an end, and that end was to change the way we use email. Over the years since the launch of Gmail the way we related to email did change. No longer did we connect to our email account via a client like Eudora or Outlook and download our messages onto our computer, but we kept the emails on the Google server so we could store and search them in the future. Other players like Yahoo and Hotmail also followed suit to offer a lot (if not unlimited) online storage for emails online. As we became more internet reliant, we began to connect to our email account in more than just through our browser. We started to use our mobile devices and we are increasingly become less reliant on one machine that stores all our data but we can now access our data through any machine with an internet browser. The point is that who dominated the webmail market didn't matter for Google, all they wanted was for email users to be more reliant on an email storage service provider. They wanted us to begin to live in the cloud.

As time went on, Google not only developed their master plan through innovation but also through acquisition, buying up startups to build their empire. Putting in place the foundation for moving not only email but documents, spreadsheets, presentations, gps maps, images and video into the cloud. Bit by bit, Google has chipped away at how we compute. Where once upon a time we used to bulk up on processing power so that we could run applications on our machine, we are now slimming down to netbooks, iPhones and Androids that can do as much as what an average computer user was doing on their own PC. Google Chrome OS is therefore not only a clever move by Google but it is the only move.

From a business strategy standpoint, what looks like a move to go head to head with Microsoft is actually the finishing touches on a battle that already won. Google Chrome OS is not a new venture for Google but the end game for a strategy that has taken years to achieve. Google Chrome OS is actually a strategy to move downstream on the internet value chain. What does that mean? To illustrate, lets take a non-internet based example.

Imagine you make lemonade. You make damn good lemonade that people like to drink but you just make it and sell it to people who come to your lemonade stand. Other people in your neighbourhood also less lemonade but it's nowhere as good or as cheap as yours so over time, they come to you and ask if they can be bought out by you so that they can play a part in your lemonade superiority. Pretty soon all the lemonade that is sold in your neighbourhood is yours and the people that sell it work for you, but the stands from which they are selling from are not controlled. Some sell from crates on the driveway, some sell from refrigerated carts outside the shopping mall, some sell from dispensing guns strapped to the someone's back at football matched. Sometimes, the lemonade is perfectly served with ice cubes in glass tumblers and sometimes it's served warm into plastic cups. So the natural way to control the quality of your product is to start by vertically integrating your near-monopolistic business to supply all your lemonade through refrigerated mobile outlets. This is not about building a better mouse-trap but it is about controlling your supply chain.

The other strategy you could have considered was to start buying up lemon trees and sugar cane plantations but in the case of Google's supply chain, they already own the servers in which the entire internet is gradually being downloaded and stored. Comparing Google Chrome OS with Microsoft Windows is like comparing a lemonade stand with a chain for shoe stores. It's no comparison. Sure they both serve customers and sell product, in the same way that GCOS and MS Windows both let you work on a spreadsheet but one is providing you access to the "cloud" that Google has been building for the last decade and the other provides you access to the information that is stored on your computer.

Google Chrome OS for the time being has no competition. It is a browser that has decided that it no longer needs someone else's operating system to exist and to let it's users achieve what it needs to achieve on a computer. The closest thing that it really would compete with is Adobe Air or a browser app that is written in Java, and even these are only cross platform applications rather than something that does not require a platform at all. (on the assumption that GCOS is actually platform independent.)

Where will this all lead? I would imagine that sooner than we think we will be doing complex computing through devices that have the same built-in computing power as the Amazon Kindle that connects us to the computing power of billions of servers spread across the planet. I predict that as newspapers slowly die off in their current form, it will be gradually replaced by something that looks similar (and is equally disposable) but was evolved from the netbooks of today.

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Justifying the GFW but nothing else

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:46:00 +0000

I was only 15 when things turned bad in T1ananmen Square on the evening of the June 4th 1989. A snotty nosed high school kid who's world did not extend beyond the confines of a Sydney suburban existence. I certainly didn't know then that twenty years later I would be living and working in the country that felt it necessary to turn its army on its own children.

My memories of that day are fleeting recollections of news stories broadcast in Australia but looking at what China has become since the deaths of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of students then (either by chance or design) I often wonder what would have become if the Government did not do what they did. Would I be living in a democracy now?

Before you read on, I'd first like to make one thing very clear. I do not support the actions the Chinese government took twenty years ago today. This is not a means to justify the use of deadly force against its own citizens. It is simply exercising the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

History tells us that dramatic social and political change often results in blood shed. From Alexander the Great's conquest of Asia Minor to the attack on the World Trade Center in defense against the infidel, there is nothing like the mass loss of life to change perception. When we look at events like 9/11 we naturally think of it as something that changed our concept of security. Even those of us who are not American begin to feel that because terrorism can strike anywhere, we are not safe. The bombing in Bali also brought this home to many Australians. When we look at China, many Chinese in the two generations before mine have a deep seeded hate for the Japanese because of what happened in the Nanking Massacre, similar to how an old English WWII vet might still feel animosity towards the Germans.

It is because of these atrocities that shape the way we as a society think and feel about nations and people. These feelings are not rational or logical but come from an emotional core that is passed on from generation to generation. I even have Chinese friends younger than me that still do not trust the Japanese even though the Rape of Nanking was before their living memory.

Twenty years after the T1ananmen Massacre, students in universities across China now would have been in diapers (or at least pants with an exposed bottom) when the anonymous man in the white shirt stood in front of 4 tanks with his shopping bags. What I see from afar is that this generation of students do not have the revolutionary drive of those left in exile from twenty years ago. They have been taught to know better than to offend the government and for the most part, the affect (from my perception) is that the generation of twenty-somethings now, the age group that throughout history is most vocal about social change, has become strongly patriotic.

Living in China, one rarely hears (or overhears) support for the Dalai Lama or people craving for democracy. In the back of my democratic, conspiracy loving, Orwellian, Australian educated mind I would love to think that this is because they fear what might happen if they harbour revolutionary thought but this does not seem to be the case. T-Shirts with 我爱中国 (I love/heart China) seem to be worn by people who do in fact genuinely love their country.

When the French protesters attacked the Olympic torch, the protests and boycotts in China were not organised by the government. They were organised by citizens appalled by the attack on a wheelchaired athlete. When news of the Great Sichuan Quake broke, normal citizens donated what they could to the cause of saving the survivors. When I think back at these two recent incidents, the only thing that I can think of is that I would do exactly the same thing.

Since the Cold War, and even so far back as McCarthyism the media loves to take the easy road of portraying good and evil. In the case of China, the easiest narrative used to be that the Chinese Government was an evil communist regime oppressing the billion peasant citizens. A narrative that Hollywood would love but by it's nature is flawed simply because evil has no motive. Evil people do bad things for no other reason than because it's evil, and for the last twenty years since the T1ananmen Massacre, there has been no motive to oppress the citizens of China. In fact there is more motivation to further support the Chinese people to succeed to undo some of the stupidity of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Governing 1.3 billion people requires a huge political machine and throughout China there are abuses of power at various levels of authority. From the local police to municipal and provincial officials. The tragedy that occurred in Beijing though was not the result of these thing. The decision to open fire on protesters, as much as we would like to label this as evil, was not. It was an act of desperation by a government that was backed into a corner. It was about disowning and turning your eldest son over to the police for drug abuse to save the future of your younger son.

I want to reiterate at this stage that this is not a justification or a defense for what the Government did. In fact it is likely that the massacre was a decision made by good people without enough foresight to foresee a potential outcome until it was too late. Using the example again of disowning your elder son to save the younger, it can be argued that as a parent you should have educated and controlled your elder son when he was younger rather than allowing him to navigate the world without enough guidance. Sacrificing a son does not make you a good parent, in fact it makes you a bad one trying to undo a past mistake.

So as I write this post through a VPN (as I cannot directly access my blog, Twitter or YouTube) I am not really that pissed off. Why? Because I see this as the actions of a good parent. One that has learned from past mistakes and is committed to not making them again. And as a son, you know that I will continue to try to circumvent your Great Firewall the same way a real son, against advice and parental guidance, might still try drugs.

So today, the twentieth anniversary of the T1ananmen Massacre, I pray for the families of the dead and oppressed, but more importantly, I pray for the future of china because over the last eight years here, I too have learned to 爱中国。

It's finally happened. Twitter has been blocked! #gfwlist

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:23:00 +0000

The end of the world is nigh

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The Battle in the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:31:00 +0000

First of all, I'd like to apologise to my readers for not posting for quite a while. It seems that the good folk at the Golden Shield project have been working overtime after the Olympics because the internet freedom we experienced last year has all but been taken away from us poor sods based in China. For the last couple of months, we poor expatriates in China have been deprived of YouTube, Blogspot, Wordpress and it seems that even much of the stuff that is going to my Google Reader has been hobbled.

My plan to develop my own personal blogging empire has therefore been thwarted and I am reduced to posting via Posterous for all my blogs. Sigh!

A shame because in the internet world is in the brink of revolution. Well at least there is a concerted effort to do so. Only last week, the internets have been all a flutter about bing.com, Microsofts new search engine which I imagine is a serious effort by the Redmond gang to topple the reign of Google. So far I've seen that bing has had a mixed reception but it will be hard to tell until people start to adopt. Of course bing is much prettier than Google so some people might prefer it to Google as a start page in their browser.

The Google camp have in their strategic move announced Google Wave. My interpretation of this is it is essentially Google Profile on steroids. This could be seen as an attack on the MSN Live front. I won't go to much into this theory (because it's just too convoluted and I am continually interrupted by pretty girls walking by and the noisy table of Hongkies on the table next to me at the Coffee Bean in XinTianDi where I am writing this) but it seems to me that the two juggernauts of cyberspace are in for an epic battle for the evolving cloud.

I'll be first to say that when I first heard about cloud computing it seemed a little sci-fi and brought to mind images of The Matrix and the Lawnmower Man but as the months rolled on it has become more and more viable. As we approached the holy grail of decentralised processing power, the peaces are falling in place for our computing lives to go online and these latest campaign by the two major combatants indicate the changing winds.

Both Microsoft and Google are vying for the dominant position in the future of computing by assembling the battalions most suited to occupy the cloud when the corpses are buried and the gun smoke clears. Take Google for example. If you imagine how Google Wave will work when it is launched, it is an amalgamation of pretty much everything that currently exists. It allow you to post messages, images, video, much like Facebook, FriendFeed and to a lesser degree Twitter. It will then integrate documents for collaboration much like what Google Docs already does and I imagine it provides some kind of control as to how you share all this information which has the potential to replace every other social network in existence. By connecting various components of cloud together it can act like Google Profiles on steriods. The good thing though is that with a public API if Wave takes off it could create a whole new ecosystem of smaller online business that would plug into Waves functionality making Google the essential glue that binds the cloud together.

In the other corner is Microsoft. Almost hiding in plain sight is their Live suite. Document sharing, instant messaging, spaces, photo sharing, MS has been quietly amassing the firepower to create it's own cloud within the cloud. Now the culture of MS is not the most open source and should the victor come from the Ballmer camp then the future of the cloud could be dark, stormy and possible expensive. Sure all the MSN live stuff is free now but because of the closed nature of anything that MS releases, that could all change in a second.

So what does the future hold for the average netizen? On the one hand we may have a cloud occupied by many service providers but held together by Google that (if the wind changes) could tax the web businesses that rely on it to connect to the end user. I liken this to the Chinese government who provides you with certain freedoms but at a moments notice could "disappear" you in the middle of the night. The alternative is Microsoft. A fascist dictator who controls everything you own from day one.

My friends! Understand that your future under threat. Heed this warning because cyberspace needs a saviour. The internet is fast becoming a bipartisan organism with no geographic borders. Who will that saviour be? Who can we trust with our virtual existence?

Disclaimer: Please read this post as you would the scratchings on the walls of a prison cell of GFW penitentiary.

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Will twitter become as ubiquitous as email or is it a fad?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:35:00 +0000

I know blogging about Ashton Kutchner now makes me a late adopter when it comes to twitter goss but it's only recently that I've had a chance to take a good look at my psyche profile when it comes to twitter.

Over the last year or so I've seen many blog posts and articles about the adoption process for twitter and unlike email, instant messaging and even sms where the benefits are obvious the one thing common to most of these writeups about twitter are that it takes a while for people to "get" twitter. Let me get back to this point a little later and jump to understanding who are the early adopters in twitter.

Apparently I joined twitter on the 3rd July 2007, or so I'm told by this site, which means that I've been using this service for almost two years. Sure, in the beginning it was on again off again but now it seems that I generally tweet anywhere between 7-10 tweets a day. Not a huge amount, and certainly enough to still stay connected with various other folk on twitter. When you look at the other people that were on twitter during that time, you'd notice that they fit a certain profile. One of the first people that I followed on twitter was @scobleizer who at the time raved about how it was a great way to tap into the minds of his then twenty or so thousand twitter friends. But if you look at him as an example, he is a tech blogger and it was his job to know what was the next big thing in social media. As I expanded my network I found that most people who were active on twitter were actually bloggers and much of the chatter was about social media (if not twitter itself). As time went on this group evolved into less tech related and through @christinelu intially, I also found people in China. Gradually my networks became less about geekiness and more about common interests.

To cut a long story short though, I would consider myself on the tail end of the early adopters and as time went by, and the audience became more mainstream and certainly more interesting. This brings me back to my point about the first stage of twitter adoption.

When you look at the early adopters of Twitter it is not like the early adopters of email or instant messaging. When I used to chat up girls in other universities in the UTS computer labs, I used it because it made sense. I certainly wasn't going to pick up the phone and make an international call to flirt with someone whom I never met. It just made sense. Email is another example where it superceded normal post. It was a new way of doing something that we always did.

Twitter doesn't supercede anything unless you are in the business of broadcasting (in the journalistic sense) or blogging (which is really the evolution of the printed word). What twitter really supercedes is the newspaper seller on the corner shouting "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"

I fully realise that I am over simplifying things and there are other issues related to engagement and interaction that I am ignoring but these other uses of Twitter are intiated by someone first tweeting something that someone else feels compelled to respond to.

That is why most people don't immediately "get" Twitter. Because the bulk of us aren't broadcasters. We don't feel the need to stand on a soap box and yell out our opinions. (The irony here is that DEDLOG is essentially my soap box.) For most of us we are quite content to just read about it and chat amongst our real friends. The early adopters who did "get" twitter were people who either wanted to be heard or are in the business of sharing information.

Now about Ashton Kutchner, CNN and Oprah. What did they do to the twittersphere? They brought with them, through their influence and popularity, what looks to be the center of the bell curve. When these people who are doctors, students, accountants, brick layers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, joined twitter they did so because they wanted to know what all the fuss is about. When they actually get onto Twitter, they are greeted with pointless ramblings from various celebrities, news they can get from the TV or newspaper. In essence they joined a platform that provides them with junk. This pretty much explains why in a recent Neilsen study, they found that 60% of new twitterers dropped out after a month.

Will twitter become as ubiquitous as email? My feeling right now is that it won't, for the simple reason that not everyone needs a soap box. The same reason why not everyone who uses MSN Messenger has their own podcast.

How long will Twitter last? It's likely that it still has a good three to five years to go before something better comes along (or Twitter evolves into something else) but give it another 12 months we will reach the tail end of the bell curve and people will realise that (unless they are willing to dedicate time away from real social interaction with this type of faux social interaction) Twitter will become another, albeit better, news and information source that is made up of bloggers, journos, advertisers and the those who manage to filter out the noise to get to the content.

China Media Project » Blog Archive » Looking back on Chinese media reporting of school collapses

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:45:00 +0000

For the record.
What happened to the Sichuan Schools 360 days ago.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2009/05/07/1599/

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Don't forget

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:42:00 +0000

Today, I was reminded that next week on the 12th May marks the anniversary of the Great Sichuan Quake. It doesn't feel like a year and even from the safety of Shanghai as I morbidly watched this disaster unfold , I was moved on a daily basis by stories of tragedy, bravery, unity and cowardice. I could not believe that such an event could happen and even now I cannot fathom how, so easily, millions of people were displaced and nearly 70,000 men, women and children lost their lives.

I still feel outrage at the disproportionate number of schools that crumbled and the loss of an entire generation of children. I am still impressed at the speed at which aid was deployed and yet disappointed at the governments refusal to accept all assistance from those with the equipment and know-how to save more lives. I still feel pride when I think of Chinese children breaking open their piggy banks to give what they could help those left homeless by the quake.

Most of all I am reminded that life is as precious as it is fragile and I write this to remind you on the 12th May to remember. To remember the humanity that this tragedy brought out in all of us and to celebrate life.

2.28pm, 12th May - Lean on your horn!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Jury's still out on the Seesmic Desktop but it's chances are getting better.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:52:00 +0000

If you've been following my twitter feed you'll know that since the Seesmic Desktop added Facebook integration and follow/ unfollow buttons on the latest version of their 'Preview" client I've made a concerted effort to give the app a fair go even though I've already said that I'm pretty much a Tweetdeck person.

To give credit where credit is due though, the Seesmic Desktop is a really nice tool. Using it as my primary twitter client for the last couple of days I've found a number of features that are really quite useful that are deficient in Tweetdeck.

First of all, the main reason I decided give Seesmic Desktop another chance was because in the latest update, it included the Facebook integration. As this was included in the latest Tweetdeck update too I wanted to see if it was a question of keeping up with the Joneses however the good folk at Seesmic have one upped Tweetdeck as it pulls not only status updates from Facebook but also wall posts and integrates images and screen grabs from links onto the window. Aesthetically it looks a lot more useful and informative especially since most people who only use Facebook (and don't update their Facebook profile via twitter) tend to update their status less frequently than they post links or images.

The other area where Seesmic Desktop has one upped Tweetdeck is that it allows you to "like" a Facebook post. Tweetdeck so far only allows you to retweet a Facebook status update. I imagine the race is on to see which client will allow you to comment on posts via the client although I am not entirely sure this will be possible as the Facebook team still probably wants you to visit the site and click on their ads from time to time.

Another feature I'd like to see is if either of the clients decides to integrate albums into the features then they will be delving into Orsiso territory which I still keep installed because it is by far still the most attractive way to view Facebook & Flickr albums all in one place. I imagine they won't do so though as it will just bloat the app too much.

The other feature that Seesmic have added in their latest update is the follow/ unfollow functions that appear in the "cog" icon when you roll over profile images which is a feature that I imagine was always on the cards but only just rolled out. All in all, as mentioned before, the Seesmic offering is much slicker than the Tweetdeck one and you'd think that switching over was just a matter of time. The problem that I come back to though is that aside from the features, I believe that for existing Tweetdeck users the issue is really desktop real estate. As you can see from the image, Tweetdeck still uses the entire screen for feeds but Seesmic has a left side column for the menu and the top side input box, both of which cannot be hidden at this stage. As a user who tends to squint at his 12.1 inch notebook from his bed rather than a 21 inch widescreen monitor, this little issue just makes Tweetdeck more efficient on the eyes. This would of course be much worse for people using netbooks with a mere 9 or 10 inches or screen space available.

So the jury is still out as to whether I will switch to Seesmic but I will continue give it a couple more days as my primary client to see if I can get used to it but the deal clincher for me will be if Seesmic Desktop will allow me to hide the input box and menus when I don't need it and which client will let me comment on Facebook first.

Apple Marketing Lesson 2: People don't want great products, they want sexy bad ones.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:05:00 +0000

Not too long ago a wrote a post about the genius of Apple and the management of the product life cycle for the iPhone. This evening as I was skimming through my Google Reader, three of the best (in my opinion) gadget blogs, CrunchGear, Engadget and Gizmodo were running posts about the next generation iPhone having video editing capabilities.

Granted that this just is a rumour, but if this turns out to be true then I question whether Apple is actually that brilliant in their product management or are we, and the marketing departments every the other mobile phone company, completely retarded.

Video capabilities on the iPhone is only blogworthy because of it's absence in the current two iPhone models on the market. Both Sony Ericsson and Nokia's N-Series phones have had excellent photographic and video capabilities for years. Not that I see anyone carrying it around anymore but the Nokia N92 and N93i even looks like a camcorder.

As an amateur marketing critic, I can only conclude that if I wanted to develop and sell a product that will become the stuff of legends, the objective is not to design the best product that ever existed but instead to design something that falls just short of expectation, and then meet those expectations over an extended period.

Ive also realised that for Apple this is not a new strategy. Just think about other products they've launched in the past. Why didn't the old white MacBook have a full featured multi-touch touch pad like the MacBook Pro even though it could easily have been fixed with a software update? How many years did it take for the Mighty Mouse to come out and provide 2 button functionality? (even though loyal Mac users still continue to argue they don't need contextual menus)

Company's like Nokia or even Microsoft could learn from this valuable lesson.

Don't launch products that can do more. Design something that SHOULD be able to do more but don't and let the consumers pine for it.

Like I said before! Genius!

The future of Google and possibly life on this planet.

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:42:00 +0000

Just yesterday, I got two invitations to connect via a social network. Not a big deal but that social network was Orkut. I can't remember when I signed up to Orkut but it must have been during my socialmediaholic stage. I first thought nothing of it but slowly but surely, like the liquid metal pieces of the evil android in Terminator II the pieces of Google's plot for complete internet domination is coming together.

I am a great supporter of a lot of Google's individual services. My main personal email address is a Gmail account and through that I can if I choose to use their GTalk IM service. I use Picasaweb along side Flickr and Photobucket. Some of the things that I don't use though are Orkut which sits in an odd market space. Not quite Linkedin but not quite Facebook either. Sort of like the poor cousin to Plaxo Pluse populated mostly by netizens from India.

I use Google Reader religiously (mainly because it lets me read blogs that are otherwise blocked in China) and of course if you're reading this blog then you know that I also use Blogger which is also a Google Inc venture. At the back of your mind you know that this was all part of a huge strategy to take over the cyber-World but all these free services were just too damn convenient to ignore. Add to that Google Docs and you almost don't need to install any software on your computer.

Nothing seems new there but if you look at all these jigsaw pieces how would you put them together? Lets break them down:

Photo site with face recognition.
Blogging platform with blogger profile information.
Document/ spreadsheet manipulation and storage.
Social Network.
Instant Messaging (that includes Skype like VOIP)
Email (that can also support private domain names)
Google News.
Google image search.
Google Checkout.

and last but not least

Google Profiles.

Effectively this search engine company that promised us that they will "do no evil" has amassed the ingredients to completely control our online lives if it chooses to do so. To their credit, each functioning part of this online monster was launched and grown independently, like the individual arms and legs of a Voltron like manga robot but when they join together they appear to be some kind of undefeatable super robot. Imagine for a moment...

You check your Gmail, that is connected to your GTalk so you can be contacted by text or voice. Your news source also comes from the search aggregation of Google News that you get via your Google Reader. What you read is then shared with people who connect to you in Google Reader's shared items but also through Bloggers who follow your profile and whom you follow back. Eventually the people you follow join Orkut and put up personal information, photos etc like what people already do in Facebook. As the networks grow then become more interconnected. Your Google addessbook is the same as your IM list which then becomes the same as your Orkut friends who become the same people who subscribe to your Picasaweb albums. Oh and should I mention they probably have your credit card details too via Google Checkout.

Big deal I hear you scream. The danger is not the interconnectivity, it's the business that Google is in. Hoarding information. From Orkut it gets a piece of your personal information, from Picasaweb it learns what you, your family and friends look like and with geotagging they know where you've been. Your communications via GTalk and email are collected which is why you are given 7 Gig of storage space for free. Even Google Docs which is a better movement to public cloud computing than even Microsoft has out will be in the Google servers. Slowly slowly, bit by bit your identity from the smallest piece of sms to information on entire family trees will be collected, tagged and made searchable on Google's servers.

To top it all off, Google's new Profiles service lets you do all the hard work by linking all your social information onto one page.

All this story needs is a little bit of science fiction to make it scary.

Remember when there was a little bit of hoo haa about adsense and context based advertising? Something that we now accept as the norm. The arguement against this was a privacy issue. We didn't want Google execs looking at our emails to put relevant ads into Gmail. Google told us only machines and algorithms were involved in the selection of contextual advertisements.

With so much of our information potentially hoarded by one company, how far are we really from developing artificial intelligence or at least those semi intelligent systems that form the basis of things like the Terminator, iRobot or Alien plot lines.

Don't laugh, when I was a kid, mobile phones were things that appeared in Star Trek and nobody knew what an email was. By the time my kids grow up, will the world be ruled by a machine?

Tweetdeck vs. Seesmic Desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:11:00 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks since the release of the Seesmic Desktop, I've been pondering whether I would abandon the Tweetdeck and head back to the creators of Twhirl (my first twitter client). My decision is finally made although I'm hesitant to actually make any recommendations about the two clients for anyone who might come across this post. The reason is primarily because I don't think one is any better than the other. I feel that both clients tailor to a certain personality types and I happen to fall into the one that is more suited towards Tweetdeck. I will attempt to explain why.

Seesmic Desktop is a beautiful app. Nice colours, intuitive placement of clicks and buttons and the kicker is that it handles multiple twitter accounts. In addition to that it allows you to easily manipulate userlists, replies and DM's. With all this to offer you'd think that the Seesmic Racoon would be wiping the floor with Tweetdeck's Window's 2000 looking interface.

Thing is, although I've had Seesmic Desktop installed on my thinkpad for a couple of weeks now, when I want to take a stroll down Twitter street, I'll still invoke Tweetdeck.

I couldn't work it out. Tweetdeck is uglier, slower and harder to use. I thought I was becoming one those people who still still carry a filofax and coins for the phone booth, but when I took a look at the tweeps I follow, I found that a lot of them (folk who geek more than me and would definitely have access to the Seesmic Beta before me) are still twittering from Tweetdeck. This gave me peace of mind that I was not adoptively inept but also made me curious why I was settling for something that was less empirically appealing.

So why did I not jump ship to a much sexier vessel? I can only speak for myself but I think in comparison Tweetdeck has become (for me) the twitter client reflection of my personality. I don't know about you but my desk is messy. I am the kind of person who has no idea what to put into my desk drawers either. If you do see my desk and open one of the drawers you'll find a collection of old pens, some working, some not, lots of dust and mostly stuff I don't use. On my desk are the things I use every day, my working pens, documents and manuals I need daily access to as well as anything that I might be currently working on. This is a lot like the way I've configured Tweetdeck. I have a column for my China tweeps, a column for people I've actually met and a couple of searches such as #gfwlist or #shanghai. I know I can also achieve this with more efficiency and ease on Seesmic Desktop but it's not splattered on my screen the same way Tweetdeck does it. I know the horizontal scroll is annoying and the column view requires practice to include the vertical scroll bar but for me it's akin to looking for that document by scanning my desk rather than going to a well organised system of filing.

I have a feeling that I am not alone in living in a world of structure in the guise of chaos, as opposed to living in a chaoticly organised world. To me Tweetdeck represents my frame of mind. Everything on my desk and nothing in the drawers whereas Seesmic Desktop is the opposite. The Seesmic Desktop gives me what I need immediately and no more. If I want more I need to open a drawer. This analogy is further illustrated by the inclusion of facebook statuses, 12seconds videos and a host of other things that could happily sit in a drawer rather than on the desktop.

Having said all that I want to make it clear I am endorsing neither client and that I am simply telling you the insanity behind my choice. If you have more than one twitter account, Seesmic is the obvious choice. If you are an inherently tidy person (neat freak) then Seesmic is probably more appealing to you. If you are the kind of person who cleans, dries and puts away dishes in the kitchen while you're cooking then Seesmic is the client for you, but if you are like me and like large amounts information (relevant or otherwise) at the tip of your fingers instantly then more than likely you're a Tweekdeck person.

UPDATE: I have an old box at home that runs on Ubuntu and because there is no "alternative link" on the Tweetdeck site, I'm running Seesmic Desktop on it. I have to admit that I miss my Facebook Updates. I also installed Orsiso on the Ubuntu box and realised that my Social Circle syncs between my desktop and my notebook. Very cool!

P.S. @tweetdeck: If there is a non-flash download link, do let me know on @dedlam

UPDATE 2: Finally got Tweetdeck installed on my Ubuntu box. I must say that it looks and performs exactly the same as on my XP notebook. Seesmic has some rendering problems and is now idle on the desktop as a backup to Tweetdeck.

Rationalizing my personal blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:11:00 +0000

I recently took a look at my blogging presence on the web and realized that the last couple of posts that I have echoed over my blogs have been, well pretty boring to be honest. Somewhat like being forced to watch a holiday slideshow of someone you neither know nor really care about. When I looked further back to some of my earlier stuff it was less personal and more insightful and actually better to read.

So in my effort to compartmentalize my cyber personality I have decided to separate my blogging over a couple of different places.

First of all is my Blogger blog. This as my first blog and even though it is the ugliest it shall remain about non-personal issues, be it technology, China or politics, it will most likely end up there. (dedlog.blogspot.com)

My other blog is dedlam.wordpress.com which will I will try to turn into my mobile blog. Inevitably the posts will be shorter and will hopefully contain more dodgy photos from my phone and give you a peek at what I see day to day.

Lastly, as I try to improve my photography skills I have just set up dedlog.dedlam.com (which is still under construction). Hopefully this will become like a gallery. Don't expect to see happy snaps there because I have Flickr and Picasa to fill those needs. Hopefully this will be more of an artistic experience rather than picture of my son's new haircut.

So that's my online persona rationalized. Eventually as my Chinese improves I'll make use of my Blogbus account but until then, depending on what you as interested in I'll be posting on those 3 personal spaces plus the occasional Shanghaiist.com piece and of course random brain dumps on twitter.com/dedlam. I realize this is a big commitment so bear with me over the next couple of post and I'll see you on the other side.

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Easter Weekend in Beijing

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:57:00 +0000

Having spend most of the last nine years in Shanghai, I've taken countless trips to Beijing over the years, but this last Easter weekend was the first time I ever went there as a tourist....(If you want to see the rest of this post, click here. It just looks prettier there)

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Lady in a Red Jacket

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Once again I couldn't resist taking a random iPhone shot of this woman
in the Metro in this bright red jacket. I hope you like my little
Photoshop Shake'n'Bake.

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Blueberry Muffins & Joshua

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:32:00 +0000

Thanks Betty Crocker for making baking idoit proof. Joshua loves the blueberry muffins.

This post has been truncated in the interest of asthetics. Click here to see and download the full gallery on posterous

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Skype on the iPhone. What's all the fuss about?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedric) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:45:00 +0000

If you've been following me on twitter then you'll already know that shortly after Mashable announced that Skype for iPhone was on iTunes, I very quickly downloaded my own version. To my dismay though after installing it on my iPhone I couldn't get it to work. I was racking my brain as to why this was so.

To be honest my first thought was that Skype had done the Pandora trick and made it exclusive to folks in the US but upon checking twitter, I found a tweet from @illuminateceo, who is Beijing who's said

Skype for iPhone 3G working fine 4 me from Beijing on WiFi. It's impressive, actually. Very iPhoney, very Skypey, and no wooop start sound

so that ruled out the regional restrictions.

My next was to look on Twitter Search (as you can see for issue such as these, I default to Twitter rather than Google). I found a comment that perhaps Clippy was the cause for my woes. So firstly I toggled off Clippy in from SBSettings. No Effect. Secondly I uninstalled it from Cydia. This also had no effect. Each time I tried to run Skype I would get the splash screen for exactly 5 seconds and then it would close and return to the Springboard. To cut a long story short (the long story can be found here) I ended up restoring my iPhone and starting with a clean slate. Having done so Skype worked "as advertised" with pretty call quality but not noticeably better than with Fring or Nimbuzz. It was only after I did all this did I discover from @eChinacities of a blog post by @zachnfine that explains that for Jailbroken iPhones I can get Skype to work in Safe Mode.

This leads me to the whole point of VOIP on the iPhone. The one thing that hobbles the iPhone compared to a Windows Mobile device (and incidentally makes the iPhone a lot more stable) is the inability for programs to run the background. Sure on a jailbroken iPhone you can install Backgrounder but it's really only a band-aid that doesn't really allow for multi-tasking.

So for those who want to know, the Skype app is pretty good. The call quality is good and it includes all the features you'd expect. The main problem is that it can't run in the background so in the same way you'd use Skype on your computer or even on a Windows Mobile device, which put simply, if the device is asleep in your pocket, you can't receive calls. You can't keep it online to receive internet calls and if you want to keep your iPhone jailbroken you actually have to switch to safe mode to make a call. I'm not just talking about Skype. I'm referring to Palringo, Nimbuzz, Fring and any IM/VOIP app you might want to develop. Don't get me wrong, if you want to take advantage of the cheap calls/ free internet calls have to offer, then the Skype app will probably meet your needs but if you're looking for something that will enable Skype to be as functional on your iPhone as it is on your computer, then you're barking up the wrong device.

That's all I have to say at this stage. Now I have decide to break my iPhone back out of jail.

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