How to use a condom

I posted a link to this image on a local news site that is much more likely to post comments of the kind "Ya, we think the same as you!" on a story about the Commonwealth Games' drains being blocked by condoms. One of the comments suggested that perhaps the condoms weren't being used for sex. A reply to that comment mocked the obviously ridiculous idea that a condom could be used for anything other than sex.

They didn't publish my comment, but then they rarely do. Unless that is I post a comment that says "Ya, I agree with you!". I get bored with that kind of comment - I'm a disagreeable sort of person, if the truth be known.

Anyway, here's a beautiful photo from the BBC's Day In Pictures from 30th September 2010 demonstrating how to use a condom to bring beauty and joy into someone's life. If you've got your 'rainbow pony blinkers' on, click on the small image for a larger version and inspect the top of the balloon near the upper edge of the picture. See?

Facebook / Marijuana / Malaysia

It's time I dusted off this blog. I love commenting on forums and blogs. I've got a lot to say and the great thing about saying it online is nobody tries to shut me up. Except on Malaysian blogs and forums. OK, fair enough - this is a totalitarian state, but when the 'movement for change' is censoring me it does chafe a bit.

Facebook is very popular here. The government have ruined the print information industry by giving licenses only to those information sources which say nice things about them and horrid things about anybody they don't like. Probably a great idea in the short-term - if that's your cup of tea. It has been a disaster in the long term. Nobody reads anything any more because everybody knows it's either written by an idiot or (occasionally by someone who should know better) in praise of an idiot. Everybody just consumes opinion - and it shows. Please overcome your sensitivity to irony and continue reading my humble opinion.

Since the 'political tsunami' of 2008 - in which nobody actually got wet - the government has been fighting back in the information theatre. Everybody who consumes public money now has at least 5 Internet portals each. That's more portals than they have holes! The Prime Minister's facebook page is linked from his shiny 1Malaysia website, as are those facebook pages of many prominent Malaysian members of the mediacracy linked from their respective fundamental portals.

Are facebook pages called 'pages' or are they 'walls' or something? I don't know, I had a facebook profile once, but I closed it and asked AdBlock to never show me anything from facebook ever again. I had to disable AdBlock to look just now. It was as awful as I remember.

Anyway, in today's news a couple of the co-founders of facebook have been putting their Web2.0 windfall to work and are sponsoring the Drug Policy Alliance, a campaign organisation proposing the legalisation of marijuana in California. Far from marijuana being legal to do whatever marijuana consumers and traders wish to do with it in California, drug traficking in Malaysia is punished with the death penalty.

So that makes me wonder: how do Malaysians, who live under threat of capital punishment for involvement in the drug trade, feel about patronising an Internet property whose proceeds are being used to openly recommend the consumption of marijuana? Let's not beat about the bush (!) here: marijuana doesn't magically appear under your pillow when you go to bed wishing you'd had a better day. To consume it, you have to buy it, and to buy it there must be a trade in it. So doesn't it seem odd that a nation should attempt to 'reach out' [bleck] to its citizens using a medium that (however indirectly) supports something they think it's okay to kill people for?

This in a country where the government recently scolded one of the opposition states for giving a "We love you" payment to residents of the state. You see, some of the recipients were Muslims and since the money was public money, some of it had to come from taxes on gambling and alcohol. Those things are haram (forbidden), so the money is also a bit dirty. I don't know - I don't follow the reasoning, but it made perfect sense to the Deputy Prime Minister who is also a Muslim and collects a very fat salary from precisely the same source. Maybe you only have to give dirty money back if you're poor or something.

So anyway - if you're not allowed to accept money from a dirty source, are you allowed to associate with a medium that supports a drug trade that you kill people for participating in? I seek enlightenment. Over to you, Malaysians.

The ‘One’ theme again: 1Malaysia, Unifi, Monopoly

TM has announced its new ‘High Speed Broadband’ products, called Unifi, with the Prime Minister making the announcement. TM is Telekom Malaysia, the telecommunications monopoly in Malaysia. There is an alleged telecommunications regulator called the MCMC (Multimed… Commission, or something) but it doesn’t seem to actually do anything but help TM.

More bandwidth ought to be good news, but TM aren’t offering bandwidth, they’re offering an expensive new bundle which includes Video On Demand (VOD). In better regulated regimes, what TM is doing is against the law – it’s the same practice that resulted in Microsoft being forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows in the EU. Internet access in the EU is fiercely competitive, which is why you can find 20Mbit/s (TM’s new ‘flagship’ package) connections available in the UK for RM35-RM80 per month. That’s in a country where the technicians’ (and customers’!) salaries and business overheads are many, many times that of TM’s!

We had a phone call from TM this morning, offering an upgrade from 512kbit/s to 1Mbit/s for an extra RM5 per month. Before moving to Malaysia, we lived in the UK and had ADSL for about 6 years prior to 2005. After the first two years (starting at 128kbit/s) , BT doubled the bandwidth every year or so FOR FREE. We were on 2Mbit/s when we left, for the equivalent of about RM40 per month, 5 years ago. And it never – ever – had a single problem or slow-down in that time. In the UK we lived in a hill-farming community in a little village of houses which were between 200 and 800 years old. In Malaysia we live in a modern development near a town. Before this year, it was a rare week that we didn’t have trouble (often complete breakdowns for days) with our TM Internet connection.

If you’re not in Malaysia, you might think this kind of thing is a joke. But if you’re in Malaysia and all you want is decent Internet access that works, at a fair price, so you can get more work done (and coincidentally contribute more tax to the government), it is desperately unfunny.

This is a re-post of my article at http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/2010/03/26/the-one-theme-again-1malaysia-unifi-monopoly/, because I want to get the little image to appear on bloggerunited, and this is quicker than figuring out what's wrong with the RSS on my WordPress blog.

Pos Malaysia Shipping Price World Map

The Pos Malaysia World Shipping Map is an example of what you can do with an API. Given a weight and a shipping method, you can draw a global map of relative shipping costs. Now that the Pos Malaysia data has been converted to use ISO3166-1 Country Codes, it’s trivial to take data from it and merge it with useful resources from elsewhere which also comply with international standards.

The map is a public domain SVG file from Wikipedia. The creators of the map specified ids for the countries using ISO3166 2-letter country codes. I generate CSS colour codes from the country code / relative price data obtained from the API, and build a coloured map on the server. The coloured map is about 2MB in size, so I convert it into a smaller PNG image and send the URL back to the browser.

Note that I’m not suggesting Pos should create fancy coloured maps. These maps arguably could be handy for checking completeness of shipping data coverage, or ‘eye-balling’ the global map to spot inconsistencies in charging. The world shipping map is just another example of what is possible for third parties IF Pos Malaysia exposed a usable API.

If you want to play with the world maps, be aware that spider.my is hosted on a tiny VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the USA – it only has 64MB of memory and 2GB of hard disk. It can be a little bit slow to convert the SVG graphics into an image. As long as I haven’t given up on getting Pos to adopt the API, you should be able to access the same features at pos.spider.my – that’s a bigger server sitting on my desk in Malaysia.

If the maps inspire you to try out an idea of your own, make sure you contact me first to encourage me to leave the API online! Better yet, find someone from Pos Malaysia to tell “Hey! Let that guy set up your API for you so we can do good stuff with your data!”.

You can send 10kg by Pos Parcel Surface very cheaply almost anywhere, except Bolivia and is that Uzbekistan?

Pos Parcel Surface doesn’t permit sending 15kg to nearly as many destinations:

And you’ll get eye strain spotting the countries to which you can (by Pos Parcel Surface) send 15kg, but you can’t send 20kg:

These are tiny images, but they’re created from SVG on the server, so enormous versions are available on request!