Hasannudin Saidin

The medium is the mass age

I was with a couple of friends, both longtime journalists, and we were discussing the impact of the internet on political awareness and activism last Friday. In the end, we agreed that the internet is a tool, which enhances any inbuilt predilections of political awareness or activism.

However, the speed in which the internet does this is much faster than any legacy medium, barring voice communications or SMS/MMS. Even so, both SMS and MMS have limitations on the size of messages they can carry, and voice communications does not scale to thousands of people.

The events in Perak over the weekend were one such example. Both the news websites I'm involved in, clearly the top 2 when it comes to organized online news, saw record traffic to their respective websites.

In both cases, it was double their normal traffic patterns. This illuminates the hunger of the man in the street for up to the minute news, augmented by pictures which tell a thousand words. In a blink, the events in Perak were disseminated, minute by minute detail, to the whole nation and the world.

The printed press, just couldn't keep up with the pace at which the news was being created. And when they finally did print the next morning, many would have called it stale news. And the derision towards the printed news, continues.

My old friend, Asohan, laments Sunday of the loss of an institution. I'm less pessimistic, and have faith that the institution he speaks of will morph into relevance again, provided its leaders have the smarts to recognize its strengths and play to those strengths.

I see the delivery of information, organized news if you will, being a dance between the Daily Me and the Daily Us.

The Daily Me covers the individual tastes and interests each of us have, the different priorities we put on events and issues. This is best served by the internet, with its RSS feeds, countless blogs, news portals with the ability to filter content and provide a personalized view of what is happening.

At the same time, man is a tribal animal, and requires his membership in his tribe. He needs to know if his priorities and interests are in line with other man, and how that differs. Editors in the printed press are faced with limited pages, and by choosing the news they publish, serve as the thermometer of the Daily Us. In essence, the filtering done by news editors serves to remind man that he's part of a tribe, and that this is what other members of his tribe collectively find important.

And this dichotomy was created by the medium of the internet, and its ability to disseminate information by the speed of light. With this in place, currency of news has been lost to the online media, for they are the only ones who can carry the written word live as it happens, and to correct any mistakes immediately. They're the ones who can show you what's happening in Kuala Kangsar, and in doing so, plant the seed of political awareness or activism in your mind. By the time you read about the same event the next day in your rag sheet, its either old news or the fervor has died.

Wither then the printed news ? On the contrary, printed news has to take advantage of the time it has, and present more detailed analysis, different viewpoints, views of experts and stakeholders as well as future directions. They have the benefit of access to the online news, and the advantage of time to provide more in depth coverage of any event.

This provides balance and relevancy, and allows the printed news to claim a new territory to offset the currency lost to online news. Readers get both their Daily Me and their Daily Us the next morning. The one question all people have after they know of an event is, how will this affect me, how will my life change, how will the future pan out ? Printed news is in an unenviable position to provide this perspective.

Asohan ends his piece with, "The loss of the newspaper is nothing to celebrate. It would be the passing of an institution that has served too important a role in society.".

I don't see it as a loss of an institution. Humanity didn't mourn the demise of papyrus or stone tablets. Its the loss of a medium, that of the dead trees. And that has been replaced by a new medium, that of sand and glass, silicon and fiber.

The institution remains, with its time tested traditions and practices. Only its channel changes, to one which has a wider reach.

Change, or be changed.

A Memo to Patrick Durusau

I really must commend Patrick Durusau's innate capability of writing the most inflammatory and outrageous publications, publications that are so divorced from reality that one cannot help but think that the dude must be hoarding some seriously good weed to be able to live so completely within his own defined existence. His latest publication, "Not With a Bang, but With a Whimper", has been receiving flak from the collective open standards community for exactly that reason and rightly so.

Patrick writes that:

Signs the document standards war was entirely fictitious have been around for quite some time. Where was the Microsoft opposition to OpenDocument in standards bodies such as OASIS and ISO? Perhaps they forgot? Didn't get the memo?

Given that we at OpenMalaysiaBlog, as open standards supporters, have been at the forefront of receiving the brunt of their vicious (and often personal) attacks on ODF, I find Patrick's assertions as ridiculous and cockeyed at best, and deliberately offensive at worst.

Microsoft has been running an anti-ODF campaign in favour of OOXML for a long long time now. In Malaysia, their campaign started with opposition to Malaysia's proposed adoption of ODF ISO26300:2006 as a voluntary standard by invoking Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on the ODF standard. The campaign continued on by personally attacking members of the technical committee who were in favour of ODF, by casting undue aspersions on their characters, in particular, insinuating that we were subversive agents of IBM intent on the destruction of Microsoft (apparently, anybody who supports truly open standards is a biased IBM agent).

In fact, during a technical standards meeting on ODF, senior management of Microsoft Malaysia printed out an unrelated and personal blog post from Yoon Kit (in which he was slightly critical of a Malaysian government agency whose representative was also present during the meeting), passed it around to all members present in the meeting and demanded for proper ethical conduct from members. That's right, folks - he printed out a non-technical blog post and attempted to cast a false and misleading charge on the character of a member of the technical meeting.

To the credit of the representative of the government agency in question and the chairman of the meeting, the meeting was quickly brought to order. The representative of the government agency did not have a problem with Yoon Kit's blog post but Microsoft Malaysia did. Note that this is not hearsay, I witnessed this first hand and was thoroughly shocked at the extent Microsoft would go to destroy any perceived threat to their Microsoft Office cash cow. The Microsoft Malaysia representative in question also distributed printed blog posts from OpenMalaysia and circled the name of a member of this blog who also happens to be an IBM employee, insinuating to all that members of OpenMalaysia are influenced by IBM in pushing for a pro-ODF stand. This happened during a meeting to discuss the technical aspects on ODF!

That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with).

If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).

That's right, Patrick, every single negative letter on ODF can be traced back to Microsoft. And you ask where was Microsoft's opposition to ODF? Here is a letter by Yasmin Mahmood, Microsoft Malaysia Managing Director to the head of the Malaysian standards organization, opposing ODF as a voluntary standard (note that I have digital copies of all the letters in questions, if you wish to read them):

Patrick, you write that:

Need more? Watch the reaction to this announcement by Microsoft. Remember the cry has been that Microsoft should adopt OpenDocument. Microsoft has now adopted OpenDocument and it will be devoting resources to its development. For those unfamiliar with the concept, that means Microsoft will be making a positive contribution to the ODF development effort.

My recommendation is that everyone put up their noise makers and welcome Microsoft to the OpenDocument community and prepare to work with them to advance its development

Patrick, you make the assumption that those who are opposing OOXML are doing it solely because we oppose Microsoft. You couldn't be more wrong and I think it's high time you recognize the most excellent effort by many parties in helping improve the OOXML specification.

Yoon Kit and myself have spent countless weekends and many, many, many man hours finding ways of improving the proposed standard. My report to the TC, based on the reading made of the proposed standard, have always been on a solely technical basis, and Patrick, you of all people, should accede to the fact that there are/were severe technical deficiencies in the proposed standard and that input from members of National Bodies helped improve the specification.

The campaign against Open XML was at its start, in the middle and at the end an anti-Microsoft campaign. The merits or demerits of Open XML were simply a convenient launching point for criticisms of Microsoft.

Making the dangerous argument that "the merits or demerits of OOXML were simply a convenient launching point for criticisms of Microsoft" works to undermine the important constructive value of  criticism, which is to improve the proposed standard in question. The logic you have employed, that any attempt to criticize the technical deficiencies in OOXML is equated to criticism of Microsoft, is superfluous. By any measure, our criticism and feedback has helped improve the proposed standard immeasurably and you simply must recognize that, if intellectual honesty carries still carries weight with you.

Patrick, to further claim that we are solely "noise makers" does irreparable damage to value of the work we have put into improving the proposed standard. In fact, some of the decent folk at Microsoft (yes, they actually exist) helped arrange a conference call to Brian Jones, whose input helped clarify some the issues I was attempting to understand. I subsequently revised my technical contribution to the TC based on the clarification by Brian Jones. Your assertion that we are doing this so as to criticize Microsoft is an unfair charge and only serves to undermine your already dwindling reputation among the open standards community.

Now, when I was first told about Microsoft Office support for ODF by a Microsoft employee, my reaction was: "Awesome!". Then I puzzled for a minute over why they didn't do this two years ago and avoid opposing the passage of ODF as a Malaysian standard. In any case, the following day, I relayed this message to Yasmin Mahmood, the Microsoft Malaysia Managing Director, with an invitation for OpenMalaysia Blog to interview her on this positive and constructive development. I've not heard back from Yasmin on my invitation, but let me publicly assure the lady that the invitation is still open and we are committed to publishing the interview verbatim (word for word). Yoon Kit and I also offered to publicize the good work Microsoft is doing on ODF by running an interview with them. Brian and Doug, that invitation is still open if you choose to accept it by answering the questions we sent to you 11 days ago.

So all in all, Patrick, you owe us an apology for your thoughtless remarks, your unfair insinuations and biased connotations on our character.

Onward Pak Nan -- cycling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing!

Pic: On flag off day, 27 May 2008, Adnan Osman with Dato' Dr Low, Commander-in-Chief of St. John Ambulance Malaysia

My uncle, Pak Nan (Adnan Osman) is 65 years old. He's cycling all 9,000 km from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China! This will take him 2 months, from Malaysia through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and into China for the summer Olympics.

Datuk Johan Jaaffar first highlighted Adnan's quest in the New Straits Times early this month. Datuk Johan said a duo will be cycling to Beijing, but no, when I called Pak Nan last weekend to wish him well, he said he and his partner will cycle to the Malaysia-Thailand border town of Bukit Kayu Hitam; from then on he will ride alone!

You can read updates on his adventure at his own blog: http://oadnanxtreme.blogspot.com -- please post your comments there and lend your support!

Update 1 June 2008: Join the Facebook Group: Adnan Osman Cycling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing

God, and all people meeting him in Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China, please take care of Adnan Osman. When I was 21, I cycled from KL to Langkawi. That was not even 1,000km. But my uncle is making history. It's arduous, but I know he will make it. Safe journey, Pak Nan.

Happy 2nd. birthday, Open Malaysia blog!

May 17, 2008 is Open Malaysia blog's 2nd. birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The first post 2 years ago declared, "This is a blog
about openness, saying that the changing times call for innovation through open collaboration." Open innovation, ODF, open standards and open source were what we championed then and what we still champion today.

Malaysia had voted Approval of ODF as an ISO standard just before this blog started 2 years ago. OOXML came into the picture since then, but in the last one year, Malaysia cannot be considered to have officially accepted OOXML -- the Malaysian National Body committees  (TC4, then ISC G) voted Disapproval of OOXML, and the Malaysia final vote of Abstention decided by the Minister is at best non-committal to OOXML.

On the blog's 1st. birthday on May 17, 2007, there were 194 posts and 163 comments. In the one year after that, we added 111 posts but the number of comments tripled to 512 comments within the same one year! The worldwide dialog created by this blog was awesome.

In the 1st. year, we had 32,000 visits (by Sitemeter). In the 2nd. year, the month of March 2008 alone had 32,000 visits, with a total of 100,000 visits in the whole of this 2nd. year. The most popular post was definitely The Last Lap on the OOXML results which attracted thousands of visits every day.

Yes, the times they are a-changing. I leave it to you to recount the changes you have seen in "openness" in Malaysia and elsewhere over the last year -- do write your comments below.

Episode 69: Rebel Employees Strike Back

Note: We have been featured in the news. w00t!

Taking a break from the entire OOXML saga, some of us decided to execute an elaborate April Fool's plan on Dinesh Arnold Nair, our collective QubeConnect boss and a (self proclaimed) Sith Lord. The plan ("Operation Coverup") involved wrapping up all items in the Sith Lord's office with aluminum foil. It's one those things that is actually a lot harder then it sounds (who knew wrapping cables in aluminum foil would be such a bitching effort, eh?).

I brought up the idea initially several months to some of the Sith Lord minions. It was initially a simple effort to wrap up all belongings of the Sith Lord. Over teh tarik (Malay sugared tea) and many beers, the idea expanded to wrapping his furniture in aluminum foil, plastering his walls with brown wrapping paper, covering his car with even more brown paper, adapting the Star Wars intro crawl text video for the finishing touch and dressing up in Ku-Klux-Klan style robes. At one point, we discussed involving his wife into a more elaborate scam involving wrapping up stuff in his apartment, but decided against it when we realized his wife is truly Sith and we may end up getting skewered in the process.

Anyway, as  the plan grew and grew, before I realized, there were more volunteers then there was room in his office. No problem, we could always parallelize the wrapping tasks, right? I thought we could have been done in a couple hours with seven of us. Hah, that turned out to be woefully over-optimistic.

31st March 2008 arrived and three minions marched over to the nearest hypermart to buy the supplies. We ran into our first hurdle - who knew that there were so many grades of aluminum foil? We decided on the smartest engineering decision that made sense to us then and bought six rolls of the cheapest foil available. It later turned out to be not such a bright idea as the cheapest foil also was the thinnest which made wrapping a tad bit difficult. Oh well. We also bought a roll of brown wrapping paper which came with 10 pieces of 1x1 meter sized paper.

So, evening came and SMS's were flying wildly, planning this and organizing that, but mostly we were jumping with excitement. We waited for everybody to leave, and waited a bit more, and waited some more and everybody left except for the Sith Lord. Oh all days, he decided to spend this day running load tests on the QubeTalk (our IP-PBX). Grrrr. No matter, we left for an early dinner hoping that he would have left by the time we got back.

At 8pm approximat-ish, we get back (all seven of us!) and apparently he had left for the day, so we start in all earnestness. Fuck, it was tiring work. We wrapped, and wrapped, and wrapped, and wrapped. We wrapped his ashray, his loose change, his lighter, his papers, his laptop, his picture frame (hey Sith Lord, there's a surprise waiting for you underneath that foil), his wastepaper basket, his awards and god knows what else. And while we were wrapping, one of us was working on creating the Star Wars intro crawl text video (I had adapted the original Star Wars text earlier in the day).

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Tak Mahu tak malu

Tersebutlah al-kisah si botak yang bernama Tak Mahu. Dalam satu drama di pagi Jumaat. Drama minggu ini.

Tak Mahu yang tak malu. Kita orang Melayu ada adab. Tapi takkanlah Tak Mahu faham adat atau adab Melayu. Kita kalau tak diundang malu nak hadir. Tapi Tak Mahu tak malu. Tak diundang pun masuk jugalah rumah orang!

Did blogging matter in the Malaysian General Elections?

Saturday's General Elections in Malaysia had voters swing heavily to the opposition. I had expected the opposition to win more seats than in 2004, but the size of the wins (some call "tsunami") went beyond my expectation, and from what I read beyond the opposition's expectation, let alone the ruling coalition's. See "BN Retains Power With Reduced Majority, Loses Four More States."

I had seen the news and commentaries on the Internet about views on the state of the nation which were not in the mainstream media. I had not thought that the alternative media would have much impact on the General Elections, especially because some of the alternative views were extreme and polarized. At least I thought the impact would be greater in future General Elections when access to the Internet would be more widespread than the mostly urban access now. I was right and wrong. I now think that technology (especially Internet blogging, YouTube and SMS) did contribute significantly this time already!

Of course, information dissemination and election campaigning using other means, and a host of other factors have played their parts in the result of the elections (for example the world view of Kelantan people is unique, so they keep the ruling PAS party for reasons that are different from other states).

Kuala Lumpur had 10 out of 11 federal parliament seats swung to the opposition. Penang had 11 out of 13 parliamentary seats to opposition and 29 out of 40 state seats (creating more than 2/3 majority to form a new state government). The Internet must have had an impact in KL and Penang! Also the major towns and cities in Selangor state, for example Petaling Jaya (Selangor, too, will have a new state government after the opposition won 36/56 seats).

I cannot conclude that the Internet played the major factor, but the Internet did reveal a few sensational issues, as in the report by Reuters entitled "Malaysia opposition win shows power of cyberspace", giving examples of 2 bloggers who actually won elections seats.

These major urban areas did matter in the final tally that combines with rural areas, to deny the ruling National Front coalition 2/3 majority at federal level and to have the opposition gain the states of Penang, Kedah, Perak and Selangor, in addition to Kelantan.

The trend of technology, especially Internet blogging having impact on the Malaysian scene cannot be underestimated.

Doug Mahugh's Talk at TechEd SEA 2007

This is a long delayed post on Doug Mahugh's (Technical Evangelist, Microsoft US)  talk on OOXML at TechEd SEA 2007. Yoon Kit has already written a post on it, this post covers my perspectives on Doug's talk.

Well, to start off, we were almost late for his talk. Not because of tardiness of our part, but rather because I insisted we go collect Yoon Kit's bag from the Handout counter. But no matter, it seemed that we didn't miss anything because as we sat down, Doug had just started.

Doug spoke about XML being a 10 year evolution and observed that with 6,000 pages, everybody agrees that OOXML is a big topic. He then gave a 20,000 feet birds-eye visual overview of the entire spec and explained the individual sections in the specification. The meat, according to Doug, is in Part 4 (Language Reference) which in itself is 5,000 pages according to Doug. He quipped that "Nobody would sit down and read it, a statement that raised a number of eyebrows in the room. The remark did seem to be a non-sequitur. After all, how does one implement a specification without reading exactly how the specification is to be implemented?

Doug went on to describe the WordML and SpreadsheetML architectures. He is a most excellent presentator and I truly enjoyed his description of the OOXML specification. The examples he gave were fairly instructive but I must say that a few people did get lost (I saw one guy give his colleague a bewildered look) because Doug's talk required some basic understanding of the structure of document formats.

On one point, he mentioned that independent implementations of OOXML would differ from Microsoft Office 2007's implementation of OOXML because of "arbitrary details of (Microsoft) Word's implementation". He showed an example document from Microsoft Word which had a "Word" folder and he indicated that the folder contains data that Word always writes. Given there is no independent reference implementation of OOXML to date and that Microsoft Office 2007 would be used by most people as a reference implementation, one wonders if this would lead to a splurge of OOXML documents requiring the use of the "Word" folder as an unfortunate necessary dependency.

Doug went to speak about SpreadsheetML and outlined four optimization goals of OOXML's spreadsheet approach:

• small tag size
• shared strings
• shared formulas
• sparse markup

He mentioned that each of these bullet points represents a specific method of speeding up loading spreadsheet documents. While the focus in speed is clearly necessary, I would only be convinced if Doug would provide publically available code that actually demonstrates speedups in non-trivial spreadsheets.

Doug also spoke on PresentationML and gave some examples. He noted that VML and DrawingML were two methods of representating shapes but gave no good reason for the reason VML was in the specification when DrawingML would clearly get the job done. Well, he did say it's "very simple to use VML" in passing, but given the feedback technical observers have made on this apparently unnecessary duality, one would have imagined he would have spoken on it.

Doug then showed an interoperability demo (running on Tomcat/Linux in the backend) where some OOXML documents were manipulated by a backend engine. This wasn't particularly impressive, at least to me, given that I had actually written an extensive document manipulation engine for the document standard which would eventually become ODF 3 years back. As one can imagine, trivial document manipulation is easy - real interoperability, however, requires extensive tests running on nontrivial real world documents and use cases.

Doug also presented the MindManager Map interoperatibility demo, which actually did not work the first time around. I was particularly concerned when Doug showed DOCM and indicated that macros are not necessary for interoperability. Sorry Doug but given the extensive use of macros in today's documents, I really beg to differ on this point.

Doug outlined some developer tools for OOXML on various platforms:

• Available .NET libraries
• Microsoft OOXML SDK is provided. The SDK, unfortunately, is .NET based which means that developers are forced to use C#. I wrote previously on this blog that Microsoft's focus on building interoperable tools seems to only focus on the Microsoft stack. Guess I wasn't wrong on that one.
• Package Explorer (only on Microsoft Windows)
• Altova XMLSPy (only on Microsoft Windows)
• File convertors (only on Microsoft Windows) to convert OOXML backwards to binary formats
• and several other generic XML processing tools for Linux and the Mac

In response to a query by an audience member, he mentioned that OOXML allows for document software to use custom defined encryption algorithm as OOXML "does not specify encryption algorithms". Does that mean document readers need to implement all known encyrption algorithms, no matter how flawed the algorithms may be, to be able to correctly read OOXML documents? Does that mean document creation software can use patented encryption algorithms? How does that pass for an open standard? In this day and age where encryption algorithms are vetted and standardized by expert bodies, it seems a backwards move to not explicitly specify acceptable encryption algorithms. Not to mention that this design choice would raise implementation costs and efforts by third party vendors.

Well, time was running short and the session had to be wrapped up. We later had the opportunity to ask him some questions directly:

• On ODF vs OOXML: Doug mentioned that ODF was an "elegant" document format.

• On what happened at ISO: Doug was frank and said that the current ISO processes are not really suitable when the proposed standard is contentious and when there are substantial commercial incentives behind OOXML and ODF.

• On what will happen after the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting: Doug has no idea. But he mentioned Microsoft will continue extending the OOXML specification. Oh, wait a minute. Isn't OOXML an Ecma standard and no longer in the control of Microsoft?

• On whether OOXML is in the control of Microsoft: Doug looked like deer caught in headlights of an oncoming truck. Then he grinned and said "Freudian slip".

That's as good an ending as we could have expected :)

An Afternoon With Herr Proprietriness

For the last two years, I have been working almost exclusively with Free Software. The last time I decided to have a looksee at the proprietary software, it was a MIND event which focused solely on Microsoft software. I was distinctly underwhelmed during the event because the speakers seemed to carry a strong anti Open Source agenda (which was an unfortunate irony as we later saw a speaker using Python extensively in his application). In any case, I thought it was high time to see the technology Microsoft has been developing recently. So, when I saw Jeff Ooi writing about a blogger's meet showcasing Microsoft software, I thought I'd register and see what the software giant was up to.

Sembang Tech Ed 2007 was held yesterday (Sunday) at Bangkok Jazz Bar in Chulan Square. I arrived on time but apparently there was a lack of parking, so a further 20 minutes was spent hunting for parking. No matter, I arrived slightly late with high expectations and discovered that the event was starting late anyway.

Oliver Scheer (Microsoft Developer Evangelist Germany) started off by speaking about Microsoft Silverlight. Well, actually he started off by saying "I can code, I can develop" in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice to emphasize his developer skillz. It was bizarre enough that I had a good chuckle over that. Anyway, he went on to give a demo of a Silverlight application which can be used to book airline tickets. This demo has been online for quite some time to highlight Silverlight purty-ness, so I wasn't really impressed (on a sidenote, this very same demo was again used in the TechEd 2007 keynote today morning). Is there any other impressive application of Silverlight that Microsoft can demo besides this one?

Oliver spoke about building a media player using Microsoft Expression. Essentially, he built a "self-contained" player for a specific video by using existing controls available in Microsoft Expressions. He mentioned that this player works on FireFox but gave no details as to the licensing of the plugin. I later spoke to him and he mentioned that this plugin only works on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, so those on other platforms (including open source platforms)- you guys are out of luck at this point in time. Well, you can dance under some Moonlight and make sacrifices to a Novell demi-god to officially support other platforms, but at this point in time at least, you're (fortunately or otherwise) out of luck.

Oliver made a specific reference to the fact that Silverlight only supports the Windows Media Video (WMV) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) codecs. This seemed to be awfully restrictive to me, particularly when one takes into account that WMV and WMA codecs are not officially licensed for use on an Open Source platform and more shockingly, the WMV codec has software patent issues which deny independent implementation by a third party. Microsoft has actually sent a cease-and-decease letter to an open source implementation of WMV, so you can imagine how restrictive the decision is to only support WMV and WMA. Oliver later told me that Silverlight also supports MP3 (which is also patent encumbered) and WAV files (which went out of style with bell bottom pants).

What about other codecs, I inquired? Oliver seemed to be flabbergasted at the thought of somebody using non-officially-sanctioned codecs and flatly stated that "in the interest of keeping the size of the runtime small, only these few codecs are installed". I decided to push my luck and ask him about streaming new codecs to the end user. Oliver told me that this is apparently impossible.

Hmmm. Woop-tee-doo.

Oliver mentioned that 40 languages are supported in Silverlight, mentioning Python and Ruby (presumably through the IronPython and IronRuby execution environments). However, despite interest from the floor on Python/Ruby support, there was no focus on using languages other then Microsoft XAML and Microsoft C#.

Color me cynical, but I've heard more marketing speak from technology vendors then I care too comment on. A classic problem that we have traditionally seen with the Microsoft stack is simply that components and frameworks tend to only officially support other parts of the Microsoft stack and those wishing to use it on other platforms have to figure out an implementation strategy on their own. In other words, true interoperatibility works only within the Microsoft stack: a definition that is oxymoronic in itself.

My impression of Silverlight is that it seems to be a souped up Flash player with a focus on building web applications. That in itself is fine, but as an observer from the floor noted, Flash is signficantly more mature at this point in time and is increasingly being used in the area of rich Internet applications. From that perspective, there is little new groundbreaking technology that Silverlight contributes at this point in time.

Next up, Rohan Thomas, a developer evangelist from Microsoft Malaysia, spoke on Microsoft Popfly. I had difficulty following his presentation because I had no idea what Microsoft Popfly was and only realized towards the end of Rohan's presentation that it is a hosted service by Microsoft to create mashups using Microsoft Silverlight. He showed how Microsoft Popfly supports drag and drop mashup creation and cooly informed us bloggers that the difference between Flash and Silverlight is that Silverlight renders on the client side. Whaaaaat ???

Ok, maybe the free flowing alcohol was getting to presenters too (quite understandable, if I may say so myself). Despite this gaffe, Rohan went on to show how webpages could be created through Popfly, which didn't work out too well because the Save button was hidden lower down in the page and the website didn't have scrollbar. Maybe the developers of Popfly were also enjoying free flowing alcohol in Redmond when designing this application? I didn't see anything particularly special about the webpage creator other then fancy look and feel.

In any case, I was getting mighty bored at this point in time and was contemplating leaving. I mean, mashups are cool and all but it's not exactly the next iPod, is it? Somebody in the audience had the same thought and pointed out that Yahoo Tubes and Google Mashups provide similar tools and asked why Microsoft's version was better. It was a fair comment, in my opinion. I mean, why use Popfly when there are great tools out there already, right? What separates Popfly from the rest?

Rohan answered that Popfly has Team Foundation Server running ("ooooooh"), that it's updated every two weeks ("aaaahhhhhh") and that Team Foundation Server is still in alpha and Popfly users are effectively alpha-testing it ("WTF?!!"). In other words, Rohan is saying that we should be using Popfly over Y! Tubes and Google Mashup only because Microsoft needs to be provided with free feedback on their alpha software? If this was an open source project, I'd have more sympathy to Rohan's answer but considering Popfly is as proprietary and closed as a pyloric sphincter is, I failed to see the reasoning behind Rohan's answer.

Chewy "Chewbacca" Chong (Microsoft Developer Evangelist Singapore) jumped in later and said that Popfly helped fuel much of the development in Y! Tubes and Google Mashups. Whether this is true or not is completely irrelevant. In an open industry, competition drives innovation. Just as Yahoo and Google's mashup tools forced Microsoft to enter this area, Microsoft's subsequent involvement certainly would have helped improve the general state of the mashups. That it inself is an indication of an innovative economy, not a sign of any benevolence on Microsoft's part. More directly to the point, however, is that this is certainly no reason for end users to use Popfly over Y! Tubes. Nobody from Microsoft really did satisfactorily provide an answer to why users should use Popfly over Yahoo's and Google's existing tools.

The second last presentation was by Chewy on Microsoft Home Server. His presentation focused on how easy it was to use Microsoft Home Server to control and backup machines within a home LAN. The technology itself, as Chewy admits, is not new. What Microsoft has done is to put a GUI front end to manage all the systems within the LAN. I think for those who are solely on a Microsoft Windows platform, the technology can possibly prove itself useful (if it works as advertised).

But what about the rest of us? Pffft. There is nonexistent support for non-Microsoft platforms so those on a Mac or Linux or even FreeBSD are out of luck (in my case, that counts as a triple whammy). The second problem I saw was that Chewy kept pimping the software as easy enough for his Mom to use. I'm not sure if his Mom works as a system administrator but from what I say, it's definitely not easy enough for the layperson. A closet geek maybe, but definitely not a layperson. To a real technologist, there was little being offered that could be appreciated because most of the functionality already exist in other forms. So, thanks Chewy, but I'll stick to my shell scripts and Samba mounts for now.

The final presentation was by Zeddy Iskandar (Academic Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Indonesia). Zeddy certainly had something impressive to demo: Microsoft Robotics Studio. Well, it was impressive to me anyways since I'm a true-blue geek with an electronics engineering background. I enjoyed the idea that one could program and build a robot and have it run within a virtual environment with true physics. Very cool, but unfortunately fully proprietary, which means one cannot contribute to its development and have the freedom to extend it where needed. It's strange the Robotics Studio would be proprietary when one would assume that the freedom to adapt the code to one's need would be a killer feature for the product. Hmm, I wonder if Open Source equivalents exist. Btw, Zeddy, if you're reading this - your sample code did not work in stopping the robot because you failed to explicitly include zeroing out movement in your final output.

That was that with the presentations. During the Q&A, a member from the floor asked about possible free tickets to TechEd 2007. A representative from Microsoft Malaysia (whose name I failed to capture) curtly informed those present that Microsoft, as a principle, does not offer complementary tickets to its business partners. Now, this is fair enough, except that its completely untrue. I know for a fact that several complementary tickets were offered for TechEd2007 to some companies. This answer (and the curt tone itself) turned me off quite a bit.

Anyway, there you go. That's what I saw and experienced. Microsoft certainly makes for a great host (food and free flowing beer!) but I had seriously expected more from the technology presented and from the quality of presentations. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Open Source events, where one listens to the actual developers and it is easily possible to get into the thick of things, ie to become a participant instead of a customer.

This is the stark difference I noticed between Open Source events and Microsoft events. The former is almost always informal, acceptive and has substantial technical details presented for all and sundry to learn from (and contribute). The latter seems to be "Hey, this is the latest version of a Microsoft product which has X,Y,Z features and sells at RM $$$". In other words, Microsoft events are geared towards making its audience Microsoft customers (as Chewy starkly admitted: "I've got a convert!") and Open Source events are geared towards making everybody a participant in improving the software for the common good of all. The long and short is, if what I saw was the best Microsoft had to offer today, one could certainly be forgiven for thinking that the greatest innovations are now coming from outside the land of Redmond.

My second observation is: where are the Microsoft hackers? You know ... the Raymond Chen's of the world. Where are they? I'm quite sure they exist but I've not met a single one, not even at today's at TechED conference.

When I was in FOSDEM this year, we had presentations directly from folk like HD Moore (security), Miguel de Icaza (GNOME, .NET etc), Andrew Morton (Linux kernel hacking), Jeremy Allison (Samba), Keith Packard (X.org) and many more. At AsiaOSS in Kuala Lumpur last year, we had Yukihiro Matsumoto of Ruby fame presenting. At FOSS.in last year, we had Malaysia's very own JayaKumar (who has contributed drivers to the Linux kernel), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP founder) and many others presenting. I distinctly remember my first international Open Source conference, LinuxConf Australia 2005 where Tridge (of Samba fame) presented. Tridge delved deep into the CIFS technology itself and it was  an incredible rush listening to him explain the design decisions made in Samba 4.

So, why are the equivalent Microsoft hackers sequestered away? All we have been meeting are developer evangelists who end up giving the same tired demos we have seen online. Hearing from the real developers  themselves really makes all the difference in the world.

Anyway, I'm tired. The night is nigh, and it's a good time to end this extremely long blog post. Upon spending some time grokking the reflection of the glass of amber liquid sitting in front of me now, I believe this blog post probably wins the most number of times the word "mashups" has been written ever in the history of OpenMalaysiaBlog.  Urgh., I am indeed feeling sick now.

ps: A note to Chewy: Prime numbers actually start from 2, not 1 :)

Happy Birthday, Open Malaysia blog!

One year ago today, the first post in Open Malaysia blog was entitled For the times, they are a-changin'... from Bob Dylan's song. Let's celebrate our blog's birthday with the song -- play this video of an ad from several years back that I found in my archives:

                 

Advert LINUX - Freedom

In that first post I said, "As this Open Malaysia blog unfolds, over the coming months and years we will witness more changes, but there will be obstacles, e.g. FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt)."

What a year! 194 posts, 163 comments and over 32,000 visits (by Sitemeter) later, Open Malaysia has indeed chronicled, debated and discussed FUDs and changes in the openness and freedom scene, especially in the Malaysia setting.  Open Malaysia has had an increasing readership, been linked in several other bloggers' posts or online news and appeared in quite a number of blogrolls.

I feel however small a difference Open Malaysia has made to the cause for openness and freedom has been worth it. Fellow authors at Open Malaysia and esteemed visitors and readers, you be judges, too -- comment below on what you feel about Open Malaysia at one year old.