Product Seminars
This morning I attended the Panasonic IP Camera Seminar at Panasonic Malaysia in Shah Alam. The drive was smooth but I was lost in Shah Alam trying to locate the place. I did not bring along my GPS but I managed to get to USJ11 where I was a little more familiar with. I took the long way by getting to the Federal Highway, paid the toll and found Panasonic Malaysia at last.
The seminar was organized by Panasonic and its distributor. Not so much of interesting talk. Organization was a little messy but overall good. Speakers were not very well trained and lack of exposure. The entire presentation was not too bad at all and it wasn’t boring as there were some people asking interesting questions. Most important of all was that I managed to establish contacts with Panasonic Malaysia.
Panasonic treated its guest very well with a nice buffet lunch. I took the lunch, washed down with dessert and drinks. Talked to my vendor and to establish closer relationship.
Then I had to rush to Hilton PJ to attend another IP camera event. It was a dealers gathering organized by Axis Communication and one of its distributor in Malaysia. The event was organized in Uncle’s Chili, a restaurant pub. Nice setup and cozy environment. The presentation was presented by Axis Singapore. The presentation was absolutely good and informative. Axis is a Swedish company and its IP cameras are world number 1.
Axis presentation had been very entertaining and educating at the same time. The presenter, Nafis Jasmani, had done a great job.
Axis and its distributor treated their guests very well too. Excellent and delicious food. I had a great “meal” with a beer together with some people I met there. Dessert was great too! The only thing I disliked was that people began to puff cigarette after food and beer. The smoke immediately destroyed the cozy environment and the nice cool air.
I spoke to Nafis before I left. We talked about Axis Developer Program and some technical details. As I understood from him, there are 4 developers in Malaysia developing some vertical Axis solutions. Quite an interesting fact.
Shuttle Lift
If you require reliable material handling, then you should take a look at the Gantry Cranes at ShuttleLift. The company has over 20 years of vast focused engineering expertise and experience in designing and engineering lifting solutions to meet toughest material handling requirements. The products are designed for heavy duty and they are all covered by 2 years or 2,000 hours warranty. All products come with 5 years structural warranty.
Spam emails and your privacy
Have you been wondering why are you receiving those spam emails? Worst when you check your email with your colleagues around and suddenly a porn email pops up. It is so embarrassing. There is a convenient software to remove porn. It can delete any files using secured method is higher than government standards, making sure the files you have deleted can never be recovered.
The software, Evidence Blaster, does not only securely remove any files or folders, it also protect your privacy by clearing all your private information about you in your browsers and email clients leaving no trace of what you did on the Internet. The software helps you to safeguard your job by covering your tracks before your employer can find any from your computer.
Make a copy of your favorite website
Have you ever come to a website and found the contents very interesting, you saved it but later after a month, you can no longer find that page again? Some websites have dynamic contents. After a certain period, the contents will be removed to conserve disk space. But, that article has something for your research paper and now it is gone!
Well, there is a website to allow you to copy web site, save it to your local hard disk. Unlike save page in web browsers, the software saves the html code, grabs the graphics, audio and video at lightning speed. Once these have been downloaded and stored on your local hard disk, you can browse off line anytime even though the original page has been removed.
This Web Site Downloader is an useful application to archive websites and/or dynamic contents for future reference. It is easy to use. Just 4 simple steps: 1. Create your project, 2. Enter the URLs, 3. Begin downloading, 4. Start browsing off line!
Steganography and Information Security
One of the major threats in this information age is the exposure of sensitive information in the Internet. The most common method of securing information is through encryption technology. Today, 128-bit technology is the commonly used encryption method in emails and documents. Recent upheaval as my ISP closing down port 25 for SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) has rung an alarm to my computing needs on the Internet. My ISP’s decision is to curb spammers who have abused direct SMTP access to email servers. The act is a foolish one as this will not stop spams but at the same time, it affects those genuine users.
A 128-bit encryption can be broken into with cluster computer. A cluster computer consists of computers, called nodes, with one or more CPU. These computers are connected to a network. A special program capable of distributing calculation tasks to all the nodes is needed. This architecture is called Beowulf. Breaking a 128-bit encryption is just a matter of time depending on the number of nodes and the number of CPUs on each node.
My ISP forces all direct SMTP connection to be routed to an unsecured proxy server. As an emergency contingency to my Internet use, I quickly setup encryption for my email client. So far, the closing of port 25 has not affected me.
As I have the need to send sensitive work information across the Net, I feel the encryption is not enough on a unsecured proxy server. I would elevate the level of information security by using steganography together with encryption.
Steganography is a technique to embed information to a digital photo or picture without altering the photo or picture at eye level. The technique uses advanced algorithm to manipulate bits of data in the digital image with the bits from the information I am going to send. To extract the information from the encrypted digital image, an original image is the key. Only my intended recipient has an original copy of the digital image.
Portable Duplex Scanner
I have a Canon LiDE20 scanner and it works perfectly on my desk. One annoying fact about desktop scanner is that it can scan both side at the same time. The scan job becomes quite tedious and tiring if there are a large number of double-sided document to be scanned.
This portable duplex scanner, ScanShell 3000DN, can scan double-sided document in one pass. Its portability and weighing at 0.59kg make it easy to tuck along on any business trip. Besides scanning documents, it is also useful to scan business cards.
ScanShell 3000DN plugs into any USB2.0 port. The scanner does not require external power supply. It can scan any documents and save to PDF or any of the following graphic formats: BMP, JPG, TIF, PSD, PCX, PNG or TGA.
When I am on business trip or visit project sites at universities, I need to scan some documents during most of the visits. I also like to scan business cards of whom I met so that I can keep organized and I am not afraid to misplace those valuable contacts. Perhaps I should put this in my wish list as this year Christmas present or may be include it in the budget 2008!
Smile!
Have you ever experienced you missed a smile with your camera? Smile! Oops! This is especially true when you are taking a photo of a toddler. Now, worry no more. Sony’s revolutionary smile detection technology can recognize the subject’s facial expression and automatically click the shutter when a smile has been detected.
Simply select Smile Shutter, the camera will automatically click the shuttle whenever a smile is detected on the subject’s face. Cool!
Looking for a home based business?
Have you noticed your neighbor and your friend’s husband do not need to go out to work? Do you ever admire them having their own home based business? Well, if you do and you don’t know how to get started, here’s a good tip for starting your first home based business.
The Internet has opened up a whole new dimension in our lives. We are able to communicate face to face looking at each other across continents, able to share information with a click of the mouse and etc. Many people has turn home based in this century to conserve earth resources like gas, time and to reduce company expenses. Many businesses also go home based to minimized operating expenditure.
Many people like to have home based business because of minimal capital involvement, flexible working hours, don’t need to meet clients, business across countries’ borders, and you are the boss! Just to name a few. The benefits of having your own Internet home based business have no limits. It is time to discover yourself the benefits of home based business.
What kind of business is good to start you off?
How about phone card affiliate program? USPrepaid.com offers you an attractive package to start you off with a website of your own domain name. Sign up is very simple:
- Think of a catchy unique .COM domain name.
- Sign up at USPrepaid.com.
- Setup your website.
- USPrepaid will provide you some training.
- Market your site.
USPrepaid offers over 850 phone card brands with commissions up to 50% but mostly about 22%. Your operating expenses are the $74.95 one-time setup fee and monthly subscription fee of $19.95. There is minimum risk as you don’t have to pay a huge capital upfront. When you have made some sales, your commissions will be paid with cheque. But if you are not residing in the U.S., your commissions will be paid in the form of traveler’s cheque (in U.S. Dollar) via Fedex.
USPrepaid will provide you training for setting up your site, checking inventory, sales and profit; selecting products and setting up prices and all you need to run your Internet home based business. USPrepaid will also design your website and it will be up within 72 hours!
If you are thinking of starting up a low cost home based business with minimum risk, USPrepaid’s phone card affiliate program will be a good start for you.
Mobile Marketing
Have you ever received a SMS or MMS for marketing some products or services on your mobile phone? I have received many recently. Many are not local origin.
Technologies such as Internet and mobile phone services such as MMS and 3G have opened up a whole new dimension of marketing channel to businesses and corporation. A new marketing strategy called mobile marketing is increasingly becoming the most popular marketing tools. Businesses can deliver marketing content directly to the palm of targeted consumers.
A survey has found that more brands are ready to spend larger proportion of their marketing budget on mobile campaigns in the very near future. About 71% have projected to spend more than 10% of their marketing budget in mobile marketing campaigns in the next 2 years. The survey have also indicated about 10% of consumers receiving SMS marketing have requested for more information on products and services grew from 32% in 2006 to 58% in 2007. More survey details can be found here.
How do you perform mobile marketing? First, you need to have mobile marketing software. GoLive! Concierge is a industry leader in mobile campaigns management suite. Setting up your campaigns with the software is fairly easy. You can provide services such as: subscription, ring tones and wallpapers download, SMS voting, Text-To-Win, reminders, polling, auction, chat and much more; to your targeted recipients.
GoLive! Mobile is also having an in-house design team to provide your company WAP Site Design or Mobile Website Design. You can host your content with GoLive! Mobile’s WAP Site Hosting or Mobile Website Hosting plan. If you are looking for a complete suite mobile marketing products and services, GoLive! Mobile is the right place to look into.
Website for business
Many people are still having the wrong idea of having a website for their business. They know a website can be accessed from anywhere in the world as long as one has an Internet connection. They assume by having a website, it can generate business for them like a snap of their fingers.
Having a website involves many processes:
- Web design – involve many interviews and literature study of the company history, products and services, customer care, business strategies and a lot more. This also includes choosing a suitable theme for the company.
- Search engine submission – Once the website is up and online, the url has to be submitted to search engine with keywords for indexing. This is a huge job as there are thousands of search engines out there.
- Online marketing – Having indexed by search engines is not enough. It is still like a sitting duck. You need to have online marketing to spread your web presence.
- Lead generation – You need to attract visitors interested in your products and services to your website.
You need a complete package of small business web design. At Website Pros, they provide everything you need from making your website from scratch to online marketing and lead generation at a very affordable small fee. Website Pros offers All-In-One-Package for a small starter business. Or you can choose Signature series which offer custom designs that includes Flash graphics.
They have very creative minds in web design. Their designers are also very patient with clients who have absolutely no knowledge of how website works. Their professionalism guides you through every steps of design requirements all the way to the end. It is risk free for All-In-One-Package because there is no contract and no setup fees required. Perfect for a small starter business who knows absolutely nothing about website.
Reliable remote data backup
Being a road warrior, the utmost important priority is to have important data backup while on the run. Carrying a USB/Firewire hard disk storage around the globe has been a hassle to many people, at least for me. Sometimes, I have to share my files or folders with my business associates and/or co-workers at the other corner of the world. Sending a huge zipped file across continents via email is unreliable and sometimes take a lot of time to finish uploading the email. Some mailboxes have limited the size of attachment in an email. In this case, the email will be bounced.
IBackup provides reliable and secured Online Backup service at a low fee. It features scheduled backup from my computers via Internet with SSL encryption. My backup is password protected to prevent unauthorized access. Backup my data on my computers is easy. Just point and click, select some operating parameters and my data will be safe.
One significant feature is the “Collaborate and Sharing”. I can email my associates the link to access my backup at IBackup‘s server. I can set the link to expire after a period of time. With this, I can share my files or folders easily and securely with anyone.
For business and enterprise, IBackup also provides SQL database backup, keeping valuable business data safe.
IBackup provides both browser-based and downloadable application with 128-bit SSL encryption for secured connection.
Rules of thumb when burning CD or DVD
From my experience of burning CD (and DVD now) as well as the research I’ve done over burning CD and DVD, the rules of thumb for important data:
- Never ever burn a disc faster than it is rated for.
- Never ever use a high speed media. Use lowest speed media possible. 2-4x speed medias are excellent. You may save burning time but you compromise on data longevity.
- Never buy cheap media. There is reason that it is cheap.
- Scan at 10-24x when you’re making C1/C2 scans.
- Scan at 2x if you make PIE/PIF scans.
- Nothing last forever! Reburn after every 2-3 years.
- Never expose burned CD or DVD to any light source, particularly, UV. Keep them in dark place.
Atomic commit
I wasn’t quite sure what atomic commit meant even after my friends and co-workers explained to me. Atomic commit is a feature of Subversion. In Subversion book, it says:
A collection of modifications either goes into the repository completely, or not at all. This allows developers to construct and commit changes as logical chunks, and prevents problems that can occur when only a portion of a set of changes is successfully sent to the repository.
The text is very clear. But I could not imagine how it works until today.
I had a network failure a moment ago while I was committing some work back to my Subversion server. The power to the router was cut because something fell and knocked its power adapter out of the socket.
I quickly checked if my local and server copies are synced. Luckily, nothing happened. The copy on the server was not touched. Neither the copy on local. I was able to commit my local copy again to the server. Thanks to Subversion. If I were still using CVS, disaster could have been knocking on my head!
So what is atomic commit? If you have modified the contents of some files in, say 10 folders. When you do CVS commit to CVS server, the network is suddenly disconnected. What will happen if the commit is 50% completed? CVS does not support atomic commit. It upload single individual file after another from folder to folder. You have just committed 5 folders to the CVS server. The other 5 folders will not be committed. This will render the server and local copy out of sync. Huge trouble!
With Subversion, atomic commit will perform diff at local, then transmit all diff data and metadata to the server. The server will not commit the diff and metadata into its repositories if complete change sets is not received by the server. Therefore, when the above scenario happens, there will be no commit at both server and local. Hence, your local copy will not out of sync with server copy.
Blog almighty, a potential business resource
When I started blogging, it was some kind of addiction to me. Now after 2 months, I start to realize blogging is a very powerful tools for marketing and to get messages across.
My karate blog, for instance, has generated many inquiries and interests. It has brought some passionate karate-kas to my training place at Bukit Beruang. It has also sent my messages and ideas across so many readers locally and across continents. My blog has initiated their thoughts and passion. I find these people are of same thinking and share similar ideology who dislike political skirmishes. These people like to seek self-betterment instead of heroic display.
My recent iBook posts, another instance, have brought forth people with the same experience via comments and mostly through my contact form. There is even a guy who has bad experience with a local Apple’s authorized reseller. The post and comment(s) may be bad for their business. On the other hand, this will alert potential buyers to be more careful when selecting vendors, forcing these company to improve their services or let die. That’s business all about.
A blog can be a massive vault of useful information for a business. Marketing, services, opportunity, and list goes on. Blog can be a new powerful business tool able to transform traditional business in many ways.
Blog is a great tool to collect public opinions before making any business decision. The responses of the public or groups are crucial. Proper strategies can be shaped by effective use of the blog and public opinions received.
I can still remember my friend, Robert, told me about young people wasting their time blogging in University. Robert is an associate professor and head of department at UTAR. I always remind myself of his comment. I agree with him to some degrees. It is the ignorance and misuse of blogging in most young people. Blog is their loyal friend. I have read about people blogging about their anger and fuss about their work and about anything that does not favor them. They have even used 4-letter word such as F*** to express their emotional feeling towards some incidents or people. I used Sh!T to express unbalanced worthiness and dislike about things. Anyway, it does not matter simply because it is just an expression to balance stress. Readers should not take these expression seriously but to understand the emotion, feeling, psychology and intention of the poster. With the understanding, one can find enormous useful information which is relating to the event or things in their post.
I was involved in a business meeting yesterday. Together with the information I obtained in the meeting and my experience in blogging, ideas have begun to spark in my mind and I shall develop new business soon.
Credit cards go RF
Major credit cards like Visa and MasterCard have gone RF (Radio Frequency). The contactless smart card uses RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) that is fully compatible with global EMV smart card standard. No signature is required and there is no need to hand the card to the cashier – simply wave, pay and go. This RFID technology allows consumers a fast and convenient way to make payment within seconds. The world’s first Visa Wave cards are issued by MBF Cards in Malaysia and the first live transactions were made April 27 at a launch ceremony in a Delifrance restaurant outlet in the popular shopping mall at KLCC.
The contactless payment system marries together the credit cards system along with either an RFID-enabled plastic credit card or some other tagged item. When requested for payment, the cardholder can simply wave the RF credit card at a close range (4cm) from the payment reader. The antenna, a thin copper wire inside the RF credit card, then sends an RF signal, transferring information to a reader connected to the merchant’s point-of-sale terminal. The transaction is then processed through trusted payment network, as with all other conventional transactions.
It sure provides an easy, convenient and hassle free transactions. But the question is how reliable is this technology?
Someone with a tag reader can easily download your card information. It is simple. The person just has to stand near to you. He can put the tag reader in his trouser pocket and come very closely to your trouser pocket where you put your wallet. And perhaps there is even some tag reader that is able to read your card at longer distance, in this case, the person just has to sit and let everyone passes by him and his gadgets will start downloading countless number of credit cards.
It is just a matter of time to have a pocket sized tag reader to be built. Recently, security consultant Lukas Grunwald of German company DN-Systems demonstrated the cloning of a biometric passport.
I, for sure, will not want to carry RF credit cards with me.
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