Do Malaysian need open source?

No matter it is a Window XP that cost about RM500 or a game that cost RM200, we still can acquire them at the price of RM5 (sometime even cheaper as you get many software in a CD).

Unquestionable, pirated in this country is in very serious stage. People only buy original software when they are doing business openly and affraid of BSA. Gamers only buy original games when they have built a loyalty in it. Whereas, nearly all student are still buying pirated software to do their assignments.

Although this is not a topic about pirated software, but please allow me to talk about it as it is tightly related to the need of open soruce software development. Why the government has more interests to combat pirated VCD than software CD? Why there is no BSA action to the education firm or household? The answer is: pirated software do helps to boom the nation's IT indsutry.

Our youngster need only spends RM10 and he can gets a ALL-IN-ONE Macromedia softwares CD plus a Flash tutorial CD. If things work well as what our government wish for, we will have all Malaysian teenagers that know how to create flash movie.

Of course, not only Malaysian buy pirated CD. All developing country do, even Japan in 10 years ago did. Me myself have many time saw "Guai Lou" (western people in cantonese) purchasing pirated software. So, developed country do purchase pirated software too, while they keep on condam others developing countries.

Back to topic, in a nation that can acquire any software I wants in a price that near to NULL (imagine 10 macromdia software in a RM5 CD, each only cost RM0.50 cent) , do I still need Open source software that usually are lower quality and I might even pay more to download them through broadband? This is from a home user prespective.

Microsoft have excellents .net solution where all module I wants are come with it, even the advance one I can get from pirated CD version. What for I need to study my degree that only teach me those old and low leval stuff? Why I need to learn to install FreeBSD with Apache and PHP while I can easily install a windowXP pro that with just a few click can get a IIS server running?

to be continue......

Reconstruct miniMAX studio website

It has been one and a half year since the last update of contents on miniMAX studio's website (http://minimax.xullum.net). For your info, miniMAX studio is my startup company with my team mates: lih-hern and chin foo.

I still remember the taste of spending days and night to "craft" the backend and frontend of miniMAX studio website; and that was during the exam week of my Gamma's 2nd semester. In result, i gave up my Internet Computing Test study, and get a very bad score on it... However, I still feel happy at that time as i am able to put my knowledge into pratical than just memorize deadly on those html tag, javascript and php syntax.

Well, it might seem i did a stupid act at that time because the old CMS system that I wrote for the miniMAX website has been replaced by MAMBO CMS. Now, I din't even wants to look at the old code or try to improve it because the underlying architecture suck... it will be easier to rewrite the whole things.

Whatever... I understand that it is an important process to go throught in software development. We all write suck code, bad architecture, bad design.... At that time we wrote these code, we might think they are brilliants! When time passed, we found that how suck they are and this is what we call improvement.

We will get better and better by making mistake. So, don't affraid of trying. No one can come out a design of perfect software system architecture that can last forever. That's why, all software system has a lifetime. That's why, programmer keeps on having jobs to do.

When Open Source meet Malaysian

The Government of Malaysia has decided to encourage the use of Open Source Software(OSS) in the Malaysian Public Sector. The Malaysian Administration Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) of the Prime Minister Department is given the responsibility to implement this OSS Initiative.

Under the Public Sector OSS Master Plan procurement & implementation targets, the Malaysian Government has targeted that by 2005:

* 60% of all new servers (hardware) procured will be able to run open source operating systems
* 20% of schools' IT labs will have OSS installed (e.g., office productivity)
* 60% of web servers (software) will use OSS
* 30% of office infrastructure (e.g., e-mail, DNS, proxy) will use OSS
* 30% of desktop solutions (e.g., web browser, e-mail reader) will use OSS

I feel happy as Malaysia government are able to see the benefits of OSS to this developing country. After all, the less dependancy you have on commercial software/technology, the more money you save. Besides, OSS software could act as a channel for the student to "import" oversea technology in a much cheaper method in compare with old day's manufacturing era.

The government do have an informative website at http://opensource.mampu.gov.my.
From the list of OSCC Spokes at the righ panel on the main page, we could see that MMU is not included while most of the government university are already in action.

MMU FIT (Cyberjaya) do try to encourage its student to use open source software. Programming language classes are using DevC++ and mingW compiler; Object oriented classes are teaching in JAVA (althought JAVA is not OSS); Internet programming are using PHP (althought sitll on WAMP environement); OpenGL for computer graphic; most of the lab have dual boot (linux+window)...

However, the students, are still pretty much rely on Commercial software especially Microsoft products. Majority of student's final year projects are using either .net or java technology. Lots of Microsoft/Cisco/JAVA seminar are running arround the campus and students are willing to pay extra to attends extra courses as they think the job market are all commercial software supporter.

Even the lecturer divided themselves into 2 groups: OSS supporter VS microsoft supporter. It will be your unluckly university life if you propose OSS FYP to a MS supporter lecturer.

MMU IT faculty do need more concrete action to promote OSS among the students. From what i observe, the majority of student here only see the benefit of OSS as: the free code that they can acquire easily and pay minimum effort on tweaking and last submit for their school projects.

If these student keep on having this attitude, it will be a threat not only to the OSS community but also the nation: we will only produces a bunch of knowledge workers that know how to take from others but don't know how to contribute back.

Blame the machine

Computer system glitch slows rush to pay fines
KUALA LUMPUR: Thousands of motorists in the country were unable to check and pay their fines when the traffic police’s main on-line computer system at Bukit Aman went down for three hours yesterday.

Visit The Star website for more detail.

In Malaysia, it is common to say "technical problem" and "system down". And the miracle of using these terms is: nobody will be blame except the machine. Sound unfair to the machine and thousand of Malaysian would be sue by the machine if machine could talk. What happen to the technical support, the system designer, the programmer that wrote the system, the networking person and the internet service provider?

People get to run away from their responsibility by saying these terms. The consumer who never get serious on technology would not mind on it. Afterall, they still prefer the traditional way by holding the misconception that technology is not reliable.

For sure, this attitude could stop the nation towards the goal of a modern high tech IT society. The party that operates the system should first create trust among the user; and reliability is part of the trust.

Developers have to be aware that developing a large scale online application for such large amount of user is not just about coding. Optimization is the hardest part. You can't do it without prediction, statistic collection and analysing. I am sad that local people here put more focus on the suger coat than these underlying things.

Government should not always chase blindly for the latest technology before completely research and study on it. No system can be just setup one time and leave it there. You need a good maintenance team who keep on monitoring and update the system. And oftenly, the on-going cost is higher than the initial setup cost!

M-Commerce

"Thanks to the latest technology[...] When Malaysia is talking about 3G/Pentium4, others countries has implemented 4G, 5G [...] Pentium 8!? [...]- DR Axx, MMU FOM"

Despite how true about 5G and Pentium 8, everyone is talking about m-commerce nowsaday.
To me, M-commerce is all about doing business on mobile devices. In this case, even a notebook can be counted as a mobile device; with wireless network implemented, a normal e-commerce website is now m-commerce enabled too.

Of course, not much people would want to carry a notebook everywhere they go. Mobile phone and PDA are the focus nowsaday. However, these devices have many limitation such as small in screen size (could be one of their benefits too). The problem come now: in order to presents a large amount of information, you will end up in deeply nested navigation links.

That could be one of the reason why people give up WAP.

What about SMS? In Malaysia, undeniable, it is making money. The youngster could use sms for chating and have their chat contents display on the TV. I was surprise that they can afford it.

But, where the money go to? The developers? For my information, the sms/rington/game download are still very much controlled by the telco (Maxis, Digi, Celcom). A java game for example, telco help you host your game, cover download bandwidth and provide download channel; you pay them 50% of your income. For SMS, it work roughtly the same way too. This seem ridiculous to me who is born in the www age where i don't have to pay for sending Email, using messenger and so on.

Hopefully, with 3G(always on connection, high bandwidth) , merging of PDA-MOBILE phone, standardization (XHTML, Flash), mobile content providers in the future could get rid of telco control. That would be a boom for mobile contents. Ya, thanks to the latest technology.....