Black Orange – Peter Du’s Blog

If you are using the pirated iWork 09 from the torrent network (instead of just downloading from Apple and use purchase a serial, you might be in serious trouble). According the friendly people at Intego, their security alert showed that more than 20,000 might have been infected with the virus: iWorkServices

iWorkServices is the infected file

It has indeed dawned on me that the mac people are generally not equipped with virus prevention software. Though these virus rarely spread on a real Mac hardware, as comparing with thsoe hacked PCs. The starting of threat of virus might be exaggerated. Soon enough, marketing department will roll out more schemes to ask people to buy in. Or are they simply bored just to create the virus?

That’s the message I hear from business people who are involved with virtual world applications in Singapore. James Ong from Origami Frontiers put it very straightforward in the following video clip, talking about why he came back from the states after 20 years.

(If the connection is slow, just click and watch the low definition version)

Singapore government is providing funds with a committed $70 million for this sector, if you ask me, that’s a whopping lot of money for a toddler industry. We met up with Dan Lejerskar, who would share his experience later today @ DXO for a casual chatting session. The thing that stroke me is that he knew all along that this industry is hard to form for the general consumers. It takes years to the virtual worlds to come to maturity with other infrastructures of the consumers. Meanwhile, he is focusing on the application of virtual reality of corporations who has the deep pocket to be the early adopters.

Singapore Government’s acquiring 2nd life’s land was certainly a good gesture to this industry. Though my hope is that the government could get more involved with regulating and directing companies like Twinity, who does not have a company vision of its own but merely “a neutral platform which provides everyone with a change to create anything.” That tagline sounds nice, until you realize the quality and the design of the experience could only come from a more focused goal like World of Warcraft from Blizzard.

That’s why I don’t foresee that these companies who are the sole platform providers for consumers could make money that soon. The problem we are solving now is that are we are NOT READY to pay for the things that could only exist on-line, and doesn’t give you much physical satisfaction as you do like eating meal. I think the most important thing for now is to simulate a unified experience throughout the platforms and locations. People don’t want to pay the same price for vastly different experience. It takes years to build an experience like in World of Warcraft.

Singapore government is betting on the future, and I wish her the all the best.

Because I am caught in between all the social websites, I am trying to have a life as well. I think the following video does speak some of our geeks’ heart out, well, only occasionally.

There are few things I am monitoring lately, starting with Google’s I/O conference with much attention on the upcoming Android system, the event is covered extensively online. If you are a devel geek, and in love with Google’s awesomeness, wait for the Google I/O videos to be online.

Then I started to use Twitter more often since days ago, which unfortunately had lately a lot of down times and service outbreak because of the backend service platform they are using are not quite scalable than they had thought.

Since Estee and I started our own show with Michael Cheng and Bernard Leong, I am constantly thinking how to improve, and when I stumble upon this video interview of Leo Laporte, I am really inspired.

That’s pretty much all is happening, remember to Follow Me Me, and Kevin Lim. If you really like Leo then follow Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose.

http://twitter.com/dusenyao

If you have not followed me yet.

And more people I think you should follow:

Louis Gray:

http://twitter.com/louisgray

Andrew Lih:

http://twitter.com/fuzheado

Chris Pirillo

http://twitter.com/chrispirillo

It’s Monday Again. Aww.

Note the loading speed of the video is relatively slow

Awesome project done, and I really really like it, for both its creativity and the message conveyed.

HP Mini Launched in Singapore yesterday. After listening to so much online buzz, I finally got a chance to get my hands on the product. Previously, I played a little bit of Sabrina’s ASUS EEE PC, I thought Mini would weigh equally light, but I was wrong. The machine felt rather sturdy, with the metal casing and acrylic protector, but that was at the cost of the weight. In my hand, it felt almost as heavy as my MacBook Pro. I was contemplating on the idea that putting Mini into my bag and forget about it, and take it out to use whenever I want to, now, my dream was shattered by the sheer weight of this device.

The price for the Mini was out of my expectation as well. $999 for the usual version with Vista Home Basic version, and $1399 maximum for the high-end version with Vista Business, 2G RAM and Bluetooth. And to make things worse, the battery only lasts about 3 hours on a 3 cells and 5.5 hours on a 6 cells, and the keyboard is still plastic. If I have to purchase the device at that price, I would already start thinking of the alternative products like Sony VAIO: 4 times the price, 4 times the battery length with internal DVD burner and a fairly fast CPU.

So much for the dark size of the story, there were quite some bright spots I saw from this laptop.

Designing started last August, initially for kids in the classroom, this laptop is simply kids-resilient: you can pour water on the keyboard (I tried with Soda water), you can try dropping the PC a few times, and you can pretty much sit on it, I guess, if you are not that overweight. HP put another piece of acrylic board in front of the LCD so that you can make sure that the screen is not that easy damaged when you use your ball-pen writing over it.

And it has skins, no longer naked! I saw a lot of skins yesterday. According to HP, these skins are provided by a Singapore vendor. I think these skins will really help in kids’ showing off game. “I’ve gota cooler skins than you, dude! Oh man, this dude has no skin!”

And this Mini has an interesting design for the power connector, a modified Apple connector in my eyes, where the connector could provide you (or rather the computer) with some useful information about the current power adaptor, therefore showing your charging time more accurately. And it has an accelerometer built in to provide damages to the hard disk from moving around.

So in conclusion: I love the form factor of Mini, but the relatively slow speed of the CPU and expensive price tag are killing me. Since HP chose VIA to avoid rapid update from Intel, I have no intention of buying it so soon. And the UMPC war has just started. With Dell, ASUS and HP (and perhaps more) participating, I am just looking forward to the day when I could enjoy a 12 hour long UMPC at below 1000$

There are some images and stored at HPMini.wordpress.com

I was listening to the one of the recent episodes of TWiT:

There is this site about prediction market called InTrade. It is totally cool site, because you can trade predictions using the market they have created, like David is going to be the next American Idol.  Recently, the most traded predictions are the success of Barack Obama (His Twitter Page) of being president along with that of Hillary Clinton. Take a look at the web page, and realize you can even trade the predictions of the weather tomorrow!

To me, many things are related to gambling, but with different degree of risks. Insurance is gambling, trading stock is gambling, doing a PhD is gambling as well! I always feel like there are large part of us like to gamble with some ways of getting control.

Speaking of twitter, the machine through which people strip their social communication to the bare minimum – Typing out words and Hope someone will see those – I hope the following comics entertain you:

Totally awesome video on new media. Got that from Jeremiah Owyang’s Post(awesome)

I remembered seeing a similar video in one of the nexus2007 session when second life people are presenting. (Can somebody gimme a hint where to find the video? I remembered it was a website) Here is the video done by the same company. Read from Jeff Javis’s post (thanks):

Both video tell a story of how the world is merging and developing into a place where the line between virtual society and real world is constantly being blurred, content intermixed and interaction extended.

“Prosumer”:
A person who produces knowledge and consumes knowledge at the same time

I am seriously waiting for the day to come where I can tough the virtual world. This was the excitement for new things, the anxiety of hoping it to be true earlier and the worry that “what if (virtual robots start controlling human brain)”.

I want to be part of this history, do you?

How I wish I could have this pen with me when I was doing my undergraduate course.

Live Scriber a point-and-click voice memo recorder with on-pen calculator and a nice bluish display.

There is one existing product I know does the job: Logitech io2.

Both of products require special paper which has micro dots on it. If the price of the paper is cheap enough, I’ll consider getting one – Carrying a laptop to digitizing information is too expensive – provided I have not gotten an iPhone or Palm Foleo.

Or if someone donated to me an UMPC like Samsung Q1 Ultra

Watch the demo and you probably love it.

I heard from one guy who was participating in Startup Singapore that his team was developing a similar looking device, which (I think) consists of a motion sensor and a wireless/bluetooth link to the computer, so it operates like a mouse for inputing information into the computer. (sounds like a mouse with a little magnifier at the tip)