卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

That’s what I’ve heard many people say since I joined Twitter a month or so ago,and it’s true; all of the thoughts that might otherwise have been stored up as potential blog posts are instead released immediately into the Twitterstream… Sometimes they spark up a conversation, more often they don’t, but never mind. At its worst, Twitter is like being on the fringes of a series of interesting conversations, where I learn a lot just from listening. Twitter isn’t the only culprit, of course - work, and a slow network connection, have rather more to do with low blogging frequency recently. Still, I need to make a bit more effort to actually blog longer posts!

OK, I grant you that I could have done all this before, but really: which genius decided that the best time to take Singapore’s online tax-filing system down for two days of maintenance was the last weekend before the filing deadline? For goodness’ sake…

No-one likes paying tax, but it can at least be made easier. Online payment is convenient - when it’s done right.

I spent a long time last night  trying to submit my Singaporean tax return. My last employer had entered all the necessary details, so that was already on the system. Very convenient. However, the job before that had overlapped into 2007 slightly, and that employer hadn’t been connected with the tax system, so I had to amend the form to add on that income, subtract CPF, etc.

Except - it wouldn’t work. Every time I tried to submit, I was stopped by a pop-up that informed me “Only positive numbers are accepted”. Try what I might, this stumped me. There was nothing in the FAQ.  Why on earth was the system thinking that I was inputting negative numbers?

Eventually, after much frustration and wasted time, I had an inspiration. What if I took off the 67 cents from the end of the amount..? Bingo! It worked!

Note to the retard who wasted my time - find a dictionary, please! “Positive number” and “round number” are very different things!

Sometimes I really have to wonder why Singapore persists in calling itself an English-speaking country…

• The Times: Ditching the office is the most modern way to operate these days, it seems.
• Paul Graham: In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

Even though I can, obviously, get access to this blog from China, it’s been slooooooooow - at times, it can take up to ten minutes for a page to load. This discourages me from blogging - and if I notice typos after I’ve posted, it’s a real pain to try and fix them.

Happily, this is now much improved - I’ve finally discovered and installed Tor , which is giving me much faster access (plus, of course, letting me see lots of web sites that are normally not visible from China - a list which has expanded a lot over the last week…)

According to Stephanie Martin, the new worldwide lead for IBM Developer Relations, the number of young new IT developers is falling fast in the US, but rising fast in East Asia.

“In China what we’re seeing is interest in core technologies in the open standards area,” Martin said. “We’re seeing the most interest in learning more about Java, JavaScript and SOA as well as how all those work together. We’re also seeing interest there in Web 2.0 technology.”

Japan and Korea are also growth areas for developers; the latter apparently seeing 57% more people join IBM’s Developer Network in 2007 than in 2006. What’s interesting is that this represents collaboration between skilled and enthusiastic participants, which will hopefully means rising standards. Add this to the innovation and experimentation we’re seeing in other fields (eg the approaches to mobile phone design I wrote about recently), and it looks like we can expect to see lots more exciting developments coming out of the Confucian zone soon…

Interesting - I just clicked a link in Bloglines to open an article in a new window… then found that the page was hosted on Blogspot. And it opened!

Blogspot has been inaccessible from China since I arrived…. I’ve tested a few sites now, and they are all loading normally. My own blogs are also loading normally; even though I’ve been able to access them over the last few days, each page has taken over a minute to load.

Seems like the Great Firewall is becoming more open - for now, at least.

My computing resources, as of yesterday lunchtime, consisted of:

• a Toshiba Satellite, running Windows XP;
• a Powerbook G4, with a non-functioning screen, but which still works fine with an external monitor;
• a G3 Clamshell iBook;
• a G4 late-model iBook;
• my 8Gb iPod Touch.

The Toshiba is my main desktop machine, and is going to China with me. The Powerbook and Clamshell are going into storage. I wasn’t sure what to do with the iBook. I’m going to need a mobile computer that I can easily take with me as I move around Beijing, and perhaps elsewhere in China… The G4 iBook has been my mobile computer here in Singapore, but it’s getting a bit old… plus, it’s heavy! Weight really is an issue for me, as I’m taking a lot of books with me.

So, I made a decision. The G4 will also go into storage here in Singapore. Niti had been raving about her Asus EeePC, and it seemed like it would also suit my requirements. Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Challenger superstore in the Funan IT mall, and bought a white one.

It cost S$598, which is a fixed price - even the cheapo shops in Sim Lim Square were charging the same price. This is real mobile computing - forget the MacBook Air I was able to use it on the MRT and the bus last night to draft a business report, and it worked really well. I have some SD cards lying around that I can use to expand the storage, and it looks really good. So… I think it was a good buy. It is certainly very small and very light, so no more sore shoulders from lugging a laptop around all day…

Well, I seem to have spent a lot of time lately on moving all my blogs from wordpress.com, and setting up a self-hosted solution. I hope - really, really, hope - that the bugs are all ironed out now! With luck, I’ll have the energy soon to actually start posting real content.

Of course, I do have to do some real work as well. Lots of stuff going on in the background…

Since wordpress.com is not accessible from inside China, I won’t be able to post to it once I move to Beijing at the end of this month. So… my blog at http://trigram.wordpress.com is now at this new home. Thanks for coming along!