[Specific to Singapore]
Received a mailer from HSBC informing me that now I can pay my income tax using the credit card I have with the bank. "Cool!" was my first impression, since this will mean earning the rewards points for something I will be spending on in the first place.
However, upon reading the brochure in more detail, I realised the procedure is as such:

• make a GIRO arrangement with IRAS to deduct your income tax from a bank account every month
• Send HSBC the GIRO payment plan and the said amount will be paid from the credit card into the said bank account

The interesting thing for me is that the same bank account I will be asking HSBC to credit will the be the same bank account I will be drawing my cheque against to pay HSBC at the end of the month.
Makes little sense for me to sign up for something that will put money in my account just for me to pay them back a few days later. Upside is the rewards points I will get, but the downside will be the interest and penalty I need to incur when I forget to pay my credit card bill in time (which I might, given my absent-mindedness).

Nice photo of the baby after he has successfully turned from his back to his belly.
pic posted using

The previous photo was taken using a Sony Ericsson T610. This one is taken using the new Nokia 7610.
pic posted using

At a certain time of the day, with a certain amount of sunlight, the toilet bowl in my office looks like it glows from within. Just an interesting sight that I thought I wanted to share.
Posted by Hello

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page An interesting way to produce an encyclopedia. Using the opensource methodology, it is possible to author quite a lot of things out there. I found this page when I tried "open source government" in Google, and discovered a new concept where government policies are drawn up very much the same way source code is written in the open source environment.

Recently I have been uploading my baby's photos to blogpost via hello.com's IM client. However, one problem I encountered was that when I attempted to delete a wrongly uploaded image, there was no way for me to do it.

I was using my Yahoo Mail Plus! account (the one where I pay $19.99/year for bigger space and was informed that they will be upgrading my mailbox to 2GB at no extra costs. This sounds like good news to me. However, as I continued to surf the site, it seems like the engineers are still working on the roll-out, on the production servers!

Sometimes I will see a plain interface, sometimes I see the new interface, and sometimes I see the old interface. Sometimes I am told I have 25MB quota, and sometimes I am told I have 2GB quota.

The most interesting thing is that I actually received an email from yahoobot telling me that my quota is -2048MB and I am currently taking up 2MB, which is way too much over the quota I am given. hahaha!

Anyway, I trust Yahoo engineers know what they are doing, and I think I won't complain about a little interface issues, when I am given a 2GB mailbox upgrade at no extra cost.

I am in the midst of cleaning up what I call my "online identity". Basically this means cleaning up the pointers that point to pages either created by me or about me.

Along the way, I remembered there was a domain forwarding service I subscribed to and I have a domain name like this: dunpanic.rulestheweb.com. Egoistic, but it is something that I can remember really well even after years. So I looked up the site hosting it (in fact I forgot that www.v3.com was the correct site, so I tried www.rulestheweb.com and found it.) and realised (remembered) that it is now pointing to my old Radio site at http://radio.weblogs.com/0106689/. Ok, time to update it to point to my jroller site at http://www.jroller.com/page/dunpanic.

It had always been my dream to be able to blog from a mobile device. In my opinion the best use case of blogging is to allow one to write down snippets of thoughts anywhere, anytime.

Now that my latest gadget acquisition has bluetooth built-in, plus the fact that I already own an Ericsson T610 phone with a SingTel GPRS connection, this is no longer just a dream.

Of course the second way is to connect to a WLAN using my iPAQ. This is made possible by the SDIO 802.11b card from Socket and of course WLAN connection.

Finally I succumb to the temptation of buying the Jabra FreeSpeak bluetooth handsfree set. A trip to Funan during lunch today, and I am now trying it out in my office.

It took about 2 hours for a full-charge, and setting up was a breeze on my Ericsson T610. The manual guides me through the process of setting the set ready for bluetooth pairing, and I had to go through a few steps on the T610 to get it to work.

First go to Connectivity->Bluetooth->My Devices->New Device. The T610 would detect the Jabra 250 device. After this, go to Connectivity->Bluetooth->Handsfree->My handsfree and you will see JABRA 250. Click on JABRA 250 to select it, and you are done.

Making calls and receiving calls is as documented in the manual, either by using the phone or the button on the handsfree. Sound quality is not as good as that from a corded handsfree set, I liken it listening FM radio with 0.5 MHz off the exact frequency -- lots of extra noise. However, a decent coversation can be carried out, and that's what matters. Do take note upon first use to lower the volume, as the default volume is a little too loud.

Did not know that there is this thing about Weblog Awards

My neighbour asked me to help install a copy of The Sims Deluxe Edition, Hot Dates Expansion Pack and Vacations Expansion Pack. Spent about two and half hours in front of the Windows 98 computer, I managed to install all three successfully. Too bad the documentation did not mention the correct order to install the various version. There is a list of recommended order of installation for someone with ALL the various expansion packs, but there wasn't a list of recommended order of installation for the 3 editions specifically, although the 3 editions were packages into a same retail box.

Anyway, since I spent my time on this, I think it should do some good to get this documented.

• First install the The Sims Deluxe Edition - this involves 2 disks
  
• After that, install the Vacations Expansion Pack.
  
• After successfully installing the Vacations EP, start the start.exe in your CD. It will ask you to insert the Disk 1 for The Sims Deluxe Edition. Change the CD and launch the program again.
  
• You can choose to launch either the 800x600 version or the 1024x768 version. The Sims Deluxe Edition will detect that you have installed a new expansion pack. This message appeared in a dialog box that was launched behind active windows in my case.
  
• Choose the option to insert the Sims Deluxe Edition disk for updating the files. This option will re-copy files from both the Disk 1 and Disk 2 of the Sims Deluxe Edition. After the installation is completed, you can launch the Deluxe Edition again and you can find that in the main screen (Neighbourhood view) there is another icon to bring you to the Vacation Island view.
  
• Installation of Hot Dates Expansion Pack is similar to that of the Vacations Expansion Pack. The only difference is that one of the steps require you to insert a Livin' At Large Expansion Pack CD to continue installation. If you do not have that CD, you can try either inserting Disk 1 of the Sims Delux Edition, or click "Next" a few times at the dialog box that asks you to insert the Livin' At Large EP. (I don't know which works, because I did both at the same time. Let me know if you tried one of these)
  
• After Hot Dates EP is installed, you can launch the Sims Deluxe Edition and find that there is another icon "Downtown view", which will bring you to the Hot Dates EP
  

MayDay's Singapore concert is tonight! If you don't know what/who MayDay is, go to www.gogorock.com to find out!

Ever wonder what is that program that is running in your windows task list? I was looking for carpserv.exe in google, and came across this site which explains the common executables found in the windows task list. Helps if you want to optimise your windows system.
Task List Programs

Most of the time spent in a development project is not in the actual coding, but in the time to communicate and make clients understand what you are trying to do. Sometimes the clients are really so clueless that educationing them is a full time job!

Someone wrote a lucene search implement for BroadVision, and also took the time to do up this image.

Using RSS in JSP pages describes the usage of Informa, a new open-source Java API for parsing RSS files.

I am terribly excited at the rate of development of the RSS/weblog related technologies out there in the web. However, one of the things that I had problem with is how to categorise and collectively call this set of technologies. (To call it 'RSS/weblog related set of technologies' is a mouth full and does not give the technology justice.

Through some readings, I came across the term Semantic Web, and it does seem to shed some light on the path that RSS/weblog related techonlogies are all to solve the problem of make information machine-understandable.

Hey, wait a minutes, doesn't machine-understandble information sound suspiciously like Web Services, the buzz word of the last few years? Yes it does. In fact, my view is that Semantic Web technologies (now I can call them 'Semantic Web Technologies' instead of 'RSS/weblog related technologies') will lead the adoption of web services with its ability to ease and assist in Content Consumption.

Just like the HTML-brochureware-to-transaction-heavy-sites kind of evolution, I believe that web services evloution will follow the same path, gaining popularity and wide usage first based on content, then follow suite with transaction capabilities.

John Robb's Weblog
Aggregators are going to be the next killer-app!

JESS is a derivative of CLIPS, an Expert System Engine. Seems like it has gotten more acceptance recently.

TheServerSide.com J2EE Community - Jess and the javax.rules API