Extreme Valentine! I do cherish you...

My beloved new... Developer G1.

It came in a UPS express box, delivered by the sexiest delivery boy, the F.

Finally after hesitating for months, and waiting for the USD to drop again, I held the box in my hands and then dropped it. Twice.

Who wants to bet how long will the phone last at my hands?

The minute I opened the box, I declared my love and eternal loyalty, to the phone, much to the chagrin of the F.







After I put in the prepaid card I bought later in the afternoon to register the phone and access the Internet, I discovered to my horror, that about S$2 was eaten in less than 25 minutes after connection. I was reminded of David Neiger's "Bill explosion: Google Android silently phones home" (5 Jan 2009) article I read about T-Mobile's G1 calling home (albeit from UK to USA) like ET, silently despite manually disabling data roaming, data sync and 3G. The article said that T1 Mobile G1 loves the Internet. Well, turns out Starhub G1 loves you too, Internet.

Now I have to stick to my emulator. For better or for worse (for my wallet). To think I used to bitch that the emulator takes hell of a long time to boot up? Well, the phone does that too. And it is plenty hot as well. Sucks. Worse than my enfant terrible Samsung.

Do we hate Leonardo Dicaprio or what? That lucky bugger!

This is who he is bonking while we are sad, lonely and preventing prostate cancer in the privacy of our miserable tiny bedrooms on Valentine's Day. And now I am really being cruel *muahahaha*. Happy V Day!

Saturday Munchies 5 - Pineapple dinos

I almost forgot that I made pineapple dinos the weekend before Lunar New Year. Being incredibly efficient (read: lazy) I bought 1kg of ready made pineapple filling at Phoon Huat for S$3.80.

Dudes, do I seriously regret making it myself, despite disliking the raw material (real pineapples). The pineapple filling does its job, at about 30% satisfaction. Too sweet, not enough tart and too much flour.

So I added the juice of half a lemon and shredded all its rind into about 0.5kg of the filling. In the meantime I made the dough using milk powder, egg, flour and butter (no sugar, filling being too darn sweet already). This is where I made my critical error, I mixed in the egg I was going to use for eggwashing the cookies, into the dough, making my dough wetter. I had to add in more flour and milk powder, resulting in a less buttery-tasting while still crumbly crust.

Notice I didn't use the traditional shapes, but shaped fat little curry puff- looking ones. I still prefer to call them my little Stego Dinos.

Betcha Ya Din Noe 1 - Cloud Computing???

Apparently Google and now $^@#! Microsoft's moving apps and data online is called Cloud Computing, likely rendering the OS a thing of the past soon. Note this includes web services :D. And here I thought it was only called "SaaS" (Software as a Service).

Updated!!!
Jon Ottsik mentioned in his article "Nebulous Cloud Computing" that Cloud Computing can also be termed as

1) Cloud processing.

To me, this is the foundational notion of cloud computing where businesses can rent MIPS (millions of instructions per second)-- a measure of computing capacity-- for computationally intense processing tasks. This is very attractive for basic research and should appeal to universities and small companies that can't afford supercomputers. Nevertheless, this will remain a niche market. On another note, didn't we call this grid computing a few years ago?
2) Cloud infrastructure.

Remember Exodus and Storage Networks? Cloud infrastructure is a more modern version of these Internet boom icons. AboveNet, Rackspace, and Savvis have been making money on basic hosting services for years, but most large companies still want control of their IT assets and are willing to over-provision to maintain control. Cloud infrastructure also brings up tons of privacy concerns, just ask computing godfather Richard Stallman. This area will also remain small.
3) Internal clouds.

The idea here is to set up an IT service and then chargeback for usage. While the cloud folks equate this to a utility services (i.e. simply plug and receive compute and storage capacity) this too is nothing new. Remember IBM's "autonomous computing" initiative? We are still a long way away from this type of simplicity.
4) Software as a service.

Everyone points to Salesforce.com as a model of success and it truly is. Beyond CRM, there are also plenty of successful SaaS offerings for e-mail, security, payroll, etc. Ten years ago, we called these folks ASPs and MSPs. Some, like Salesforce.com, were wildly successful, but most, like Jamcracker, are either ancient history or barely hanging on. This will be where the action is. Why dedicate capital budget dollars toward on-site e-mail security appliances when Google, Symantec, and Trend Micro can provide this as an operational service?

Read
CNET's article on "10 cloud apps that slam-dunk their desktop counterparts"
Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing Programming API Tutorial

Microsoft going to play on Cloud Computing without building a phone ??

Microsoft My Play Beta Site

TBBT 1 - Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock

First learnt Sam Kass' new variant of the old "Rock Paper Scissors"on my new favourite show, "The Big Bang Theory".

Apparently if you know the other party well, it is likely you will end up in a draw 75 - 80% of the time. But even if people use RPSSL, I think they will still tie a lot, cos everyone wants to be Spock.