SNGLISH L.A.

"Of all the driveways in all the streets in the world, you had to stumble into mine.." This caused a mild double-take and u-turn while traveling down Rodeo Drive in LA with a colleague..

Blogarhythm: I've got your number - Elbow.

McCheeky

Blogarhythm: Top Jimmy - Mean Street (covering Van Halen)

iPhone, smiPhone

Looks like DBS have decided that iPhone is now the official generic name for any kind of smart phone!

Click on their Win an iPhone ad and read the not-so-fine print (it's an HTC HD mini ;-)



iPod has arguably already attained genericized trademark status for any kind of MP3 device (taking the mantle from it's predecessor, the Walkman).

And it seems Main Street has long since given Apple another category winner with iPhone joining the likes of Escalator, Zipper, Butterscotch, and even Heroin(!)

Which can really piss off pedantic technologists and the people who have to sell the phones - as brilliantly captured in the iPhone vs HTC animations by the guy that Best Buy wants to fire.

Casuarina Curry

Google Street View is pretty amazing. Here's my favourite prata place. Local and also one of the best in Singapore;-)

View It's a Prata Map in a larger map

Soundtrack for this post? Eat 'Em and Smile - David Lee Roth

Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics in your City (or not)

Tweet: "How to Find the Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics in your City on a Google Map http://bit.ly/19rAOR #twitter"

It is actually pretty amazing - see the screenshot below for what was trending just now in Manila.



But, aren't we missing a whole lot of information? Apparently nothing has been trending recently in the whole of South East Asia. Despite the fact I just watched a bunch of tweets from friends in Singapore/Thailand/Malaysia/Indonesia just scroll by. Hmmm.

It is a nice experiment, and a good start, but big gaps like this will inevitably raise the question whether any of the information can be trusted.

Oh boy, got to get one ...Zimplistic Rotimatic

This sounds great, and congrats to the winners of Start-Up@Singapore 2009 for the Zimplistic Rotimatic.

But I want to know ... can it also do the perfect prata?

Chapati or roti is a staple in Indian diet. Yet it can take over 30 minutes to prepare a simple meal of roti. Repeating this at least three times every day is a cumbersome process.

Zimplistic’s invention is an elegant automatic roti-maker set to be the rice cooker of India. With a push of a button, the roti-maker can mix, make and bake rotis from just the addition of water and flour to the machine.

Zimplistic’s founder Pranoti Nagarkar Israni is no stranger to product design. Only in her 20s, she left her job at a leading electronic manufacturer to start-up on her own. She graduated from NUS and majored in mechanical engineering. Zimplistic aims to go one step further by developing more innovations such as the roti-maker, to make every meal more convenient to make and consume.

Morning Skies in Singapore

Hot Pink Flying Saucers and Other Clouds

I stumbled upon Hot Pink Flying Saucers and Other Clouds in Kinokuniya last week. This is a mischievous little "gift book" with some 30 utterly amazing pictures of "clouds that look like things". I had to get it, despite the fact that the 3" x 5" format just doesn't do the subject justice. If anything deserved to be a full size coffee table book, this is it! The book is produced by the Cloud Appreciation Society, and a magical gallery of images is available on their website. It truly reinvigorates your faith in mankind's inner child that organisations such as this exist.

At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them.

The book has made me look afresh at the skies of Singapore. Living here you don't tend to spend a lot of time looking up. The tropical humidity and general lack of turbulence make saturated blanket cloud cover pretty much the norm. We don't have a big weather section in news broadcasts, and no-one really talks about the weather. At night you are lucky to see the glimmer of a dozen stars (half of which turn out to be 747s coming in to land at Changi).

But, no, since picking up "Hot Pink.." I've been drawn to looking up, and I think my prejudices might be misguided. Not everyday, but I realise now there is a little more interesting action going on than I had assumed. I have my camera on standby now, ready to catch any flying saucers, dogs, ducks, or skateboarders that may make an appearance in our skies.


As an aside, you can join the society for just £4.00 + postage. I was really impressed by the playful and transparent disclosure of how membership fees are applied. Certainly the best I've seen for any club or association, short of ploughing through a really dry P&L statement. Makes me want to sign up, simply as a nod to the good job they have done! NB: as of 22-Jun-2009, the image link on the cloud costs page appears to be broken.


PS: shortly after posting this, I discovered another cloud lover here in Singapore. Anonymous_X has been posting cloud pictures on The Clouds Represent My Heart site since August!

The New Yishun Library

Well, weekdays being weekdays, I didn't manage to get up to Yishun last Thursday in time to enjoy Issak's world-exclusive, personally-guided bloggers' tour of the new Yishun Public Library before the doors were thrown open to the masses on Friday 14th.

I did pop in on Sunday though ... along with the rest of the masses. I mean masses. Just collage a few hundred faces on this picture and you'll get the idea:

The new library stretches across the entire upper level of both the old and new extension of the Northpoint shopping centre (correction: it only seemed that way. Apparently it's just in the new extension). That's a pretty huge space, and aside from some scary cubes in the kids' area, it's pretty much all given over to the collection itself.

Kind of makes sense for a library in a mall: drop in; pick up and move on. Side thought: my cynical mind wonders if the centre management insist the library limit the study space and reading corners. Can't have people inside a mall being distracted from spending money for too long, can we?

Sunday was very busy, and it did show up a few "scalability" problems in the layout. With hindsight, NLB may regret jamming the kids area right up to the entrance, having the customer service queue cut across the walkway, and not making space for a few more checkout machines. There seemed to be a perpetual log jam of people trying to get through the kids area to the adult collection. I guess things will quieten down over the next few weeks, but the floor plan could do with a few tweaks before the library can comfortably handle crowds like this on a routine basis.

I didn't mind too much - this once! After all, there's something very reassuring and downright wholesomely right about a LIBRARY opening attracting so much interest.

mrsburdak did make the blogger preview and posted a great photo tour. Also didn't pass up the opportunity to campaign on a few of the hot issues for library users in Singapore;-)

• The whole nlb.gov.sg/nl.sg/pl.sg website confusion (and broken: go to pl.sg and click on a menu. Doh!)


• Messing with the Dewey system by thematically arranging the library. Yep, I also find myself having to check every aisle to find the right section (I dare you to guess which section a book about google maps hacks is in). DBAs call that a "table scan" and hate them like the devil's spawn:-/

OK, so nothing as important as Obama still failing my spell checker, but it's emotional and heady stuff for people who love their libraries.

As I do;-) And now with Yishun I have a fantastic, fully stocked library a door-to-door bus trip away (rather than walk and bus, or walk and train).

PS: thanks Ivan for putting out the call to bloggers about the new library. Hope you continue to get bloggers involved (can't get us to turn up? Make your own: teach the kids to blog at the library). Libraries and blogging are a perfect match in my book.

Designing the Obvious, the Moment, Not Thinking and how bad design can make you physically ill

I had a violent adverse reaction to the design vomit that is soshiok.sg massive visual overload poorly aliased graphics used instead of heading text shockingly low-res advertising images (at least DBS have had the initial ads used on launch replaced) "social networking features" that pervert the term, like submit a recipe that is an email link!! Deserves a Daily Sucker award and should probably be renamed to soseow.sg I could go on, but it just makes me choke. Best medicine: jump to hungrygowhere, who got there first and have done a vastly better job on the web site. The other essential part of my recovery was to go back and luxuriate in the clarity of thought epitomised by Robert Hoekman's two books on design: Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Voices That Matter) These are two books I think every web designer and, yes, every developer should read. Or have on a bookshelf in easy reach. Designing the Moment is the one I find myself returning to. It takes a case study/cookbook approach and nuts out many of the issues in contemporary UI design. It's not an encyclopedia or complete reference - you will need to go elsewhere for that. But it does get you in the groove (in a "teach a man to fish.." kind of way). Even if my immediate design challenge is not directly addressed, it is great for getting in the right frame of mind for cutting through all the confusion and honing in on my core issues and purpose. It also contains the single best argument for using "sign in" rather than "login", and some great discussion of form alignment considerations. Designing the Obvious is the first book, and contains the full discussion of Hoekman's philosophy of the obvious. You could probably get a web design job on the basis of studying this book alone! My only slight qualm is that while it presented a methodology and process for requirements analysis for example, it doesn't really give you a glimpse of other established practices and advice on how to harmonize in a larger and more diverse team situation. This may sound like sacrilege, but I find these books even better than Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Krug's book is great in its own right, but I feel that Hoekman has taken the art one step further. I'm sure he would agree with Isaac Newton: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.. But there's no doubt Don't Make Me Think has some great advice. Some of my favourites: Don't use a mission statement as a Welcome blurb (aargh!!) Usability testing on a budget. Spend one morning a month with a few testers. Debrief immediately over lunch. Act. Mad magazine parody of the NYT tagline: All the News That Fits, We Print..

Looking down your tailpipe from level 56

The RSAF Black Knights got the nod to perform at this years National Day celebrations, which means aerobatics between the buildings in the CBD. Yeehaw!


Now, I've been in Singapore long enough to know that NDP celebration preparations are taken seriously, and you never have less than 4 practices of anything (including fireworks, to everyone's great enjoyment).

So with about two months to go, its seems the RSAF have started daily practice flying around the city. From my desk on level 56, I get a stunning view of the F-16s fly by at arms reach and then get thrown into a 180 degree climb. Stunning.

Looking forward to the next two months of this. Oh, and NDP itself;-)

bookjetty - a great new site to track, share, buy and borrow books

I've fallen in love with bookjetty, a great new site for books by Herryanto Siatono.

Although this blog is officially dedicated to prata (and always will be!), you can tell I use it to keep a diary of the books I'm reading. I probably always will, but I do try out all the "book tracking" sites, facebook apps and so on that I come across.

None have really jiggled my worm until I discovered bookjetty.

The killer feature for me is the great library integration on the site. It helps answer all the usual questions I have whenever I hear about a new book..

• Have I already got it or read it before?


• Does one of my friends have it? Maybe I can borrow it..


• Can I get it from the local library?


• Can I buy it online?


• (oh, and if the last two steps fail, I may actually visit a real bookstore!)

The library catalogue checks work a treat - right within your booklist. I used this feature yesterday as I knew I would be heading to the library. Within 5 minutes on bookjetty I had added a few books I'd been interested in reading and found out that 3 of them were available and on the shelf at my local library. An hour later, I had them checked out.

The bookjetty developer(s?) have done a great job of integrating the libraries, especially considering that most are still running archaic web 0.1 systems which are not very mashup friendly. I've posted before about a kludge to do library lookups from an amazon page, but it never works very reliably because of the dumb library catalogue it needs to talk to, so I can appreciate some of the challenges they may have had.

And here's an example of how the library checks appear...


If you are into books, I heartily recommend you go and register at bookjetty and check it out!

Mas Escape - In Lego!

Monster Moth

By far the biggest moth I have ever seen! It was in the bushes at my place in central Singapore, but I have never even had the hint of anything so large flying around at night.

Sorry - we've upgraded!

Upgrades: just what customers look forward to, for the new features, stability and performance?

Or as this supermarket admits: source of pain, frustration and disappointment!

A380 - how to spend €billions and still get simple things wrong

lancerlord@tomorrow.sg picks up on a Telegraph article asking "why are there still ashtrays in the Airbus A380?"

Good question, but not the only example of seemingly stupid "missed opportunities" to innovate in the A380.

One of the first I noticed was the new positioning of the inflight entertainment controller in the seat back. At first it seems perfect, since it avoids the accidental activation which is a real problem when the controller is built into the armrest (which is the case in most other cabin fitouts I've seen).

But then consider the way it is oriented - mounted on the side. This results in a classic failure to "get the mappings right" (one of Norman's design rules in "The Psychology of Everyday Things"). If you use the controller without removing it from its holder (which turns out to be a very handy usage), then you need to transpose the controls 90°. Up means right, down means left etc. Ironically, when the controller is mounted in the armrest, the horizontal layout tends to "get the mappings right" if you use it in-situ because of the way the hand is positioned.


It could have been so perfect if the controller designers were collaborating with the seat designers, with a clear focus on usability. The controller could be mounted vertically, or redesigned for a side-side layout.

As it is, a missed opportunity to produce the very best design. And a very, very minor usability problem is one of my lasting impressions of my first A380 flight, overshadowing all the billions of euros invested in the plane.

What else? Well, I'm surprised they persist in using the special 2-prong audio jack. I'm sure there's some weird logic about discouraging passengers from nicking the headsets (even though policing headset issue and collection still seems to rate as one of the cabin staffs' most important duties!)

But as I look around the cabin more and more people are using their own earphones. The ones that aren't probably forget to bring the special adapter. For planes like the A380 starting their service life in the 21st century, I'd expect it would be the norm for most air travellers to be carry a headset of some description, and it would make sense for cabin designers to take advantage of the fact and use standard audio sockets, and provide headsets "by exception". Win-win: passengers get to use their own familiar headsets without needing an adapter, and cabin crew get to save time for more important things.

See, I can get cranky about the smallest details;-)

Quick NLB Catalogue Lookups

Postscript: I've given up all ambitions of hacking NLB now that I have discovered Bookjetty - a bookshelf site with library integration. Check it out!

OK, so this post won't mean diddly unless you live in Singapore, or have a local library using the CARLweb system.

But say you are browsing one of the book retailers on the web - like amazon - and you want to know if the book is available in your local library?

Here's a little trick to help you find that out in one-click (not patented;-). It is inspired by some posts over at The Box Factory.

Below is a link that you save to your bookmarks (Firefox)/favorites (IE). Once saved, when you are on a book page at amazon etc, just select the bookmark/favorite and it will pop-up a window to Singapore's National Library Board catalogue system and try and find the book in the library for you.

NLB Book Lookup <-- Bookmark/Favorite this!

Simple steps: How to Use It

1. Right-click on the link above, and select Bookmark This Link.. (Firefox) or Add to Favorites.. (IE)


2. Go thru the steps to save the link. you may get a warning about "javascript:" links not being recognised. Ignore/proceed .. trust me!


3. Check you Bookmarks/Favourites menu - should now find NLB Book Lookup in the list.


4. Navigate over to a book retailer and find a book (try the Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly) at Amazon for example)


5. While viewing the book page, select NLB Book Lookup from your Bookmarks/Favorites menu


6. A new window will open to display the NLB Library Catalogue record (if there is one)

Grumpy Stuff - But Looking Forward

The NLB is still using CARLweb, which is an ancient product from TLC.

Once of the really nasty features of this system is that it using session tracking in the URL query string of your request. Not only does this prevent deep-linking (so you can't easily email a catalogue link to a friend for example), it makes the catalogue un-indexable by web search engines like google.

It also means that the Bookmark/Favorite link I gave you above has to go in the front-door, and creates a new session each request. So unfortunately that means that if you use this a few times in quick succession, you may get a maximum sessions exceeded error. Sorry, for now you'll just have to close the windows and wait a while for sessions to expire.

Yes, CARLweb sux. It truely belongs to an earlier era of computing!

The good news: I've heard whispers that the NLB have a project running to upgrade their catalogue search facilities. Hopefully we'll soon have a much better service to use. My top wishes:

• Support for deep-linking. No user/session-related information in URLs.


• A nice robots.txt that allows the search engines to fully index the catalogue


• Flexible RSS feeds - as well as the usual "latest acquisitions" etc, a flexible and published approach to parameterising the feed e.g. by library location, by subject and any other search criteria. Or another way to express this would be "get any search result as RSS"


• Getting ambitious now ... a published Web Service/REST API


• A mashup developer's guide - encourage people in Singapore to exploit the NLB catalogue! A competition even?

Originally posted on tardate

Silverfish New Writing 1

New Writing was published in 2001 by silverfishbooks. It is a collection of works in English by writers from around Singapore and Malaysia. At the time it was quite a risky business proposition. Was anyone going to buy a book like this? Mainstream sentiment was generally quite negative towards works in English (either because the national languages held more prestige, or a perverse expectation that local writers by definition couldn't be any good if they used English). Well, with six editions now in print, I think the critics have been silenced and the series has I think given the local writing scene more self-confidence. I recently went back to read some of the stories in the first edition. I like the little sketches of life. Either contemporary such as Hong Wee's The Drive Home, or reminiscing on the past as in 14 Leech Street by Bernice Chauly. Of course must pay homage to the local fascination with ghost and zombie stories with Kaysidayat bin Ishak's The Last Train. Or something a little more tender and juicily experimental like Plat du Jour by Muslin Abdul Hamid. And much more. Pick any book in this series to try something new and different. Its a bit like nasi padang - get to sample a whole range of small dishes with great local flavour.

Singapore wins!

The perfect choice to host the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in 2010!

Supporting Singapore's bid to host the Youth Olympic Games 2010

I just discovered the online campaign to support Singapore’s bid for the Youth Olympic Games 2010. It would be truely great to see the event held here, and Signapore's certainly got the location, facilities, environment and culture to do a great job. And to be fair, better chances than ever hosting the full Olympic Games! So I've registered my support, and you'll see the logo flying on my blog from now on;-) If you want to support the bid on your blog, just register here.