Technology

The MCOBA ICT Committee had its first meeting for 2008 at TIR's conference room (thanks Rik!) on Friday, January 11 2008.

We welcomed the following new committee members, who are very keen to volunteer and help MCOBA to achieve its ICT goals and objectives:

• Aizad ’03
• Fuqaha ’04
• Eddie ’00
• Panda ’03
• Serah ’03
• Zaneq ’03
• Jae ’03

The main agenda was to discuss and decide the best CMS platform to build an interactive application portal for MCOBA. Both Drupal and Joomla are very favorable, but Joomla has an edge in terms of its look-and-feel and the availability of the required modules.

Eddie has been tasked to take the lead in the MCOBA portal development. Our target launch will be March 2008.

Malaysia's 2020 vision is on track, but it will require considerable will to keep it there, according to government sources. The vision is an ambitious plan to turn Malaysia into a first world country before 2020.

A presentation to the Map Asia Conference in August by Ms Puan Noriyah binti Ahmad was devoted to plans to 'move the economy up the value chain'. She is the deputy director general of the economic planning unit in the Malaysian Prime Minister's Department.

A 75-year-old Swedish woman currently has the fastest broadband connection in the world.

Sigbritt Löthberg, from Karlstad in central Sweden, enjoys a massive 40Gbps connection - many thousand times faster than the average connection speed delivered to homes. It's the first time such a high speed as ever been delivered to a home user anywhere in the world.

Sigbritt has only recently taking up computing. She is the mother of Swedish 'internet legend' Peter Löthberg, who arranged the connection along with the local council's network department.

Many Malaysian companies, government agencies and organisations use network security technology products developed by Check Point Software but many of us did not realize it is an Israel company. US government is trying to probe and block an acquisition attempt by Checkpoint over SourceFire the commercial entity of the popular Snort, open source Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS).

I was reading this story from Forbes online minutes ago and one the interesting fact about this is in the 3rd para, reads:

offside.mcoba.org 1400hrs: As the deadline drew closer to mid-night 28-Feb-2006, MCKK Old Boys (a.k.a Budak Koleq) organic website started to get heavy hits as seen by a performance monitoring web site. I can't help to notice the heavy hits as indicated by slower response time from 10pm - 6am. Someone is staying awake...

Snapshot as at 1349hrs 28-Feb-2006

I recieved the very first SMS from Joey, my 6-year-old boy today. He wrote, "Di bolih ta talifon joey at 3o kelok" (Daddy, could you call Joey at 3 o'clock?).

OK, he still has his spelling to work on, but he managed to get his message across through a piece of technology many adults I know still could not grasp. That's quite an accomplishment for a kid, don't you think?

Then again, kids today are very exposed and they seem quite at ease with gadgets and other electronic equipments. I remember my first encounter with a computer back in 1984. I was already 15 and it was a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum, which didn't do much. Today's kids on the other hand are already surfing the net and sending e-mails.

Is it just me, or are there others getting the same experience? Eversince Google intergrated a chat service in GMail a couple of days ago, their regular free online mail service isn't as responsive as it used to be. It takes a while for the screen to refresh making the general user experience not as peppy as it used to be.

Or was it because their stock plummeted and they lost USD16 billions in market capitalization last week? And one interesting site I stumbled upon has all the bad things to say about the internet giant.

I might have to go back to Yahoo!