An excerpt from BusinessWeek

Blyk—a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which piggybacks on the Orange network and gives users 217 free texts and 43 free voice minutes per month in exchange for receiving no more than six targeted ad texts/picture messages per day—has reached its annual member target half a year ahead of schedule.

The key factor here is targeted advertising. Google has shown the potential of relevant content based advertising on the Internet. Now applying that same logic to mobiles but with more user specific information such as location, presence and etc makes for much more targeted advertising. The results from Blyk may well be a forerunner to what may be the next era of mobile services that are driven and supported by ads.

Considering that later this year we will be seeing the first handsets based on Google’s Android platform, ad-driven mobile services will be so much more interesting. Perhaps the catch here is that you don’t get a free phone supported by ads. Still, would you sign-up for a free mobile based service for receiving ads (annoying as they may be)?

Oh no, you actually want to see sexy PC fair babes more than gadgets?! Haha

Be patient, let’s check out some cheap offers from the fair. Look at the Sony Walkman offer. RM399 a piece, since when can you buy a Sony Walkman for such a cheap price? Consider this for its industry renowned sound quality, don’t buy those made-in-Malaysia or China MP3 players although they might cost less than half of this price.

Toshiba flash memory should be pretty good as well. The price of their flash memory, or pen drives have really dropped damn lot from last year. Now, 1GB costs only RM19, while a never-heard-before 8GB costs RM94 only! Last year, 1GB costed how much?

If you don’t fancy Toshiba, don’t worry. You can check out those pendrives from SanDisk. The SanDisk Cruzer 20 4GB was selling at RM48 also. Same price with Toshiba.

Let’s check out some beasts!

Was the above computer case beast enough?! That alien look-alike computer case was from Whitebox’s Xtremus series. The case’s sides were transparent to allow you to have a peek at its lighted components inside, the front was shaped curvy black.

Some people were obviously trying to outsmart their competitors. They came up with amazing tricks to get your attention.

No, Whitebox didn’t like chicks. Instead they had these two dudes. Pretty catchy, right? At least, they did catch my attention and I fired a few shots on them.

Let’s move to the audio visual hall where some of the most well know names were showcasing their latest offerings. They included Altec Lansing, Philips, EACAN, SonicGear, and Edifier. If you asked me, I would still prefer speakers from the good old Altec Lansing.

As usual in PC fairs, you can get some really nice Altec Lansing speakers at reduced prices. If you purchased an Altec Lansing speaker, I can assure you of its sound quality. One of the best in the PC speakers league.

OK, I know you have been waiting for PC fair chicks. Let me show you a few pics then.

FTec laptops and their girls. Is FTec a Malaysian brand?

Girl from Toshiba. Red and beautiful! Notice the boys were trying to avoid being framed in my photo? Funny lar… haha.

Benq girls. Although I don’t really fancy their gadgets, but their girls were not bad at all.

This girl wasn’t the sexiest we have in PC fair but she certainly was one of the friendliest. She was at the Infolient Broadband booth, and I am pretty sure not many of you have heard about this new broadband provider in Malaysia before. At least I haven’t heard of it before. She took some sweet time to explain to me what this new broadband is all about. Perhaps I will tell you more about this next time…

Nice girl. Got next door girl feel.

They did have a go with an attack on P2P users a couple of years back, but the Japanese government told them that their plans could backfire and they could be violating the piracy law if they (the ISPs) went spying on the Internet usage of their users. With that, the plan was abandoned.

Just in case you are wondering (or for the new Internet users out there) but peer-to-peer files sharing software is a software that allows users to share files among themselves. Users that are sharing the same network will be able to download files if their peers have them and needless to say, this has created “headaches” for a lot of parties as they cannot control their product or materials from being passed around the globe, losing out on royalty and license payments.

Users are already able to find any kind of files from the Internet, even more so from the peer-to-peer file sharing network. File types from music to movies, from books to published research papers; these are all readily available to be shared on the network. For FREE!

This is also because there are, for example, users who would take the time to digitize a book into an e-book and circulate it without getting any fees at all. Not to mention users who would take time to upload music and movies for other’s enjoyment. Even though it is very convenient (not to mention free!), it is by any other name, piracy and it looks like the Japanese ISPs are trying to put a stop to it.

You might want to try to by-pass the piracy violation, but the Japanese ISPs have an idea on how to trace you down! They (along with the software companies of course) decided to implement or use some sort of detecting software to keep track on the original copyrighted material. And if any person is detected to be making illegal copies from the original ones, the ISPs will then send them an email to warn them. If the emails are repeatedly ignored, the ISPs will then take action and disconnect the users from their line.

An excerpt from the TechNewsWorld website: Japanese ISPs Agree to Shut Down Illegal File-Sharers

Under the new agreement, copyright holders will use “special detection software” to identify people who repeatedly make copies illegally, and then notify the appropriate ISPs, the Daily Yomiuri reported. The ISPs will first send warning e-mails to the users in question; if the illegal copying doesn’t stop after that, the providers will either temporarily disconnect their Internet access or cancel their contracts altogether, it said.

Bummer, what’s life without the Internet?! But then again, that sounds like a bit too easy, doesn’t it? There’s no mention about any legal repercussions against the perpetrator, does that mean that even if the person was detected to be making illegal copies, they would just have their lines disconnected, and that’s the end to that story. I would certainly like to hear what would the Americans thought about that (given that they can sue on absolutely anything!).

And most importantly, will Malaysian ISPs (Streamyx, Maxis broadband, Celcom, IZZInet, U Mobile especially) do the same? Well, there’s that thing with the capped bandwidth with Streamyx. That is already a very cruel punishment to many of us. But looking at how pirated stuffs are still on sale at large, I somehow doubt that the Malaysian ISPs will make any drastic change for now. The Streamyx people already have too much complains, they might need to pay us to go online next.

On one hand, it’s good someone is actually doing something to crack down on piracy. On the other hand, it’s not as easy as it sounds. They’ll need collaboration from ALL parties; the music industry, the software makers, oh hey, what about e-books? I bet you they can’t put any electronic tracking devices on books. Or can they? Perhaps I am wrong… thus I need to hear your ideas on this.

Well, this solution might work for a month or two, and then someone will come up with a brilliant idea to write a crack code to either replace the detecting software or to remove it once and for all. Oh Come one, I think we’ve all learn by now, there’re no “uncrackeable” software, only software waiting to be cracked!

Piracy is somewhat unethical (it depends on who you ask actually), not to mention illegal but all things considered, I think everyone can agree that it is awfully hard to resist the temptation of having something for free! So, enjoy it while you can, because you’ll never now when someone bright would come along and take it all away.

Avatars are virtual identities that with today’s better bandwidth and more graphics crunching capacities on machines provide a custom identity to the netizen. With the sprucing of more and more virtual services online, there is an increasing need for users to be able to take their avatars across services.

An excerpt from the Technology Review

Efforts to carry avatars from one world to another or out onto the Web are still plagued by the lack of interoperability among virtual worlds and inconsistent standards for graphics. Though more than 20 companies announced last fall their intention to develop standards for virtual worlds, those standards are yet to come. Patrick O’Shaughnessey, vice president of software development for the Electric Sheep Company, which makes content for virtual worlds and works with many different platforms, said at a panel during the conference that the interoperability forum is still “talking about how they want to talk about” standards. In the meantime, companies have gone ahead with their own efforts to connect worlds, supporting standards to whatever degree they now exist (for example, DAZ 3D supports COLLADA and FBX, two popular formats for 3-D images).

The above development is interesting considering that the data portability org seeks to achieve the same for the meta identity of a person, i.e. the profile. As online worlds get more immersive, expect the social worlds and the virtual worlds to meet with profiles, contacts and avatars becoming portable across the Internet.

The success of Second Life has also shown that businesses have a lot to gain from virtual worlds. While the big debate goes on about whether social networks are worth all that they are hyped to be (consider FaceBook’s valuation at $15 billion), virtual worlds have been known to have good and working economies and more promising advertising estate. Mix together a lot of disparate developments in the online space (such as Google’s Street View) and the move towards web platforms and speculation reaches new highs.

Perhaps the future will be about individual developers selling programs (for virtual currency) that perform virtual tasks in a virtual world. No matter how far the speculation goes, expect the tech biggies with the server infrastructure necessary for driving such services to drum up products to this end.

We have already seen how one killer application on the Internet can create massive competitors. Google did it to Microsoft by monetizing search and targeting consumers. Facebook could do the same with a search application that makes it redundant for users to use Google. And the convergence of the social and virtual world could well see the making of the next big web-tech firm.

What this means is that, put simply, the technology will rapidly increase the data bandwidth available on internet, which is a must for all the bandwidth guzzling media downloads that is becoming the norm.

An excerpt from Technology Review

“Think of a network that provided hundreds or thousands of high-definition channels and also provided on-demand video capabilities,” says Rick Summerhill, CTO of Internet2. He foresees a commercial network that needs both high bandwidth and high quality of service, like some current academic requirements. “The methods for supporting that network are under investigation.”

The Internet2 has been in the academia for quite a while now and there is no doubt that the research there will contribute to commercial networks in a significant way in course of time. The optimism that researchers have for bandwidth enhancing technologies needs to be tempered with the reality of spam and botnets that could feast on such technologies. There is a serious threat here considering that a major chunk of emails sent out on the web constitutes unsolicited mails (aka spam).

Nevertheless, the Dynamic Circuit Network technology represents progress in developing technologies that can take upon the increase in media based traffic that is burgeoning the Internet infrastructure today.

Fear not. Svchost.exe is actually a system process belonging to the Microsoft Windows Operating System which handles processes executed from DLLs. Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files for the sake of better re-usability. However, this created a little problem as a .dll file cannot be executed directly. Thus, the svchost.exe process was born to facilitate running those .dll files.

Exert from Microsoft knowledgebase, a description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP Professional Edition.

The Svchost.exe file is located in the %SystemRoot%\System32 folder. At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services allows for better control and easier debugging.

So, svchost.exe is not a virus nor a trojan. You may then ask why there are so many instances of them? Let’s take a look in my Windows XP system.

Right click on an empty area on the task bar and select “Task Manager”. Select the Processes tab. Click on the Image Name header to sort it in either ascending or descending order. Now, you should be able to see a list of svchost.exe running.

If you are checking this on a Windows Vista machine, you may not see svchost.exe by default. You need to click on the option “Show processes from all users” located at the bottom of the Processes screen. Enable this option.

You can right click on one of the processes and select “Go to Service(s)”. This will switch over to the Services tab, where the relevant services running under that particular instance of svchost.exe process will be highlighted. See a screen shot below.

Great. Now we can see a slightly more meaning full name of the service it’s running and then you can decide whether it’s safe for you to disable or kill the process.

Of course it’s always good to play safe. If your computer behaves normally, you don’t hand itchy and kill those processes.

According to the salesman at their booth at Bandar Puteri, U Mobile is now operating the new 018 prefix mobile network. As one of the 3G mobile technology license holders in Malaysia, apart from wireless broadband, it’s going to offer Mobile Live TV also. Instead of typical 3G streaming, the videos delivered via Mobile Live TV to subscribers should be of DVD quality.

Now, of course I haven’t tried their unlimited broadband service. But they do look pretty good. At RM78/month, you get unlimited broadband access, together with a HSDPA USB modem for free. If within 8 days, you are not completely satisfied with their service or the access, you can return the modem for a full refund - including the RM50 activation fee! 8-Day money back guarantee, what’s there to lose?

However, since this is a new service, coverage is fairly limited now. Only certain areas in Klang Valley are covered so far and these include Petaling Jaya, Cheras, Subang, Ampang, Gombak, Kajang, Klang and Puchong.

What sort of speed you can expect. According to the salesman, up to 3.6 Mbps. All these craps are true or not I have not idea, I will leave it up to you to try and share with us. Go to their booth at the food court in Bandar Puteri, Puchong should you need more information or if you wanted to sign up.

You go sign up, test, and share with me how well it works. You can also take this opportunity and I might just pay you US$10 for it?

Anyone knows any news on WiMAX?

I think one of the advertisements was having problem because in a short while it recovered and continued to entertain the drivers stuck in the heavy traffic jam.

From the picture above, clearly they are running the display on Internet Explorer and most certainly Windows operating system! They should change to the more stable Mozilla Firefox and better still run it on Linux! No doubt much more stable and robust!

This came just a few months after Advertlets.com (Nuffnang’s direct competitor) went down for many days due to a silly reason: they forgot to renew their domain name! How many days did Advertlets.com went down I can’t really recall, but could be up to 1 week.

This time what could be the reason for a hard disk crash and no hard disk redundancy? Maybe Nuffnang used a single 80GB hard disk bought from Lowyat at a discounted price, and plugged it in a clone PC. Haha…

At about 12.00PM today on the 19th of February 2008, the hard disk for one of our servers crashed resulting in server downtime and some loss of data.
The good news is that our team has taken necessary precautions for uncertainties like this and have backed up whatever data we had.
We are in the midst of restoring our servers and getting them up and running again so please bear with us for these few hours where our site will be down.

It’s hard to place an exact timeline on when everything will be back to normal again but if everything goes as planned, everything should be up and running by 6.00PM today.

Until then, your blog will load just fine as normal but with all the Nuffnang ad units minimized or hidden.

What I don’t understand is why their servers do not have hard disk redundancy? In the event that one hard disk failed, there should be one or more hard disks running so that there will not be any down time at all. Something like that, although I am not exactly sure if this is possible because I am not an expert in web server and database server management. How can a hard disk crash bring Asia’s First Blog Advertising Community down for 6 hours? This is if everything goes as planned which does not happen usually.

Good luck to their technical team! I want my money in my account to stay intact!

In fact the day before I have already identified that table as it’s the only one near to a power socket. You need a power socket for your laptop to run a few hours, right?

However, what I totally miscalculated was that their Internet didn’t work! I could connect to the router, but it failed to connect to the Internet… local access only! Frustrated, I checked with the staff… not surprisingly they didn’t know anything.

At one point, I tried to hack into the configuration of the router… Let me check if your router really works or not!

The branch manager was very helpful though… he spent nearly an hour troubleshooting his router setup but in the end gave up… time to call Streamyx he claimed!

Big problem. How would I update my blog now?! I can’t afford to not update it otherwise you all will think that I have “close shop” already. Haha… anyway, before long I found a simple looking cafe which doubles as a cyber-cafe. Upon inquiry, I was delighted to find they can give me free WiFi access… hahaha…

Obviously, this wasn’t a good place to use a computer. It’s too bright until I can only see my own face. Needless to say, I was utmost glad there’s another table at the back of the cafe where I could use and I happily moved there!

Now, excuse me please… I have not 20, but 1184 emails to download and read.

I definitely welcome free WiFi access facility at KFC, and this is of course a very good move ahead of McDonalds. But, I think it would be much better if they can provide more reliable WiFi facility and have more tech savvy personnel service and check the access to make sure they are OK before they put up that “FREE WiFi Available@KFC” banner.