Category: Technology

My take on some of the latest technology news and issues.

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I got hacked and I didn’t know it

So I logged into my website recently and discovered I’d been hacked since 6th of July 2012. These hackers have been squatting in my digital real estate long enough for a slice of bread to become a thriving mushroom colony.

Fixing it was surprisingly simple. A few tweaks to some files and everything’s back to normal– “normal” here meaning “a website that continues to attract approximately the same audience as my post-modernist avant-garde dance performance.” I have to wonder about the hackers’ motivation. Did they think they’d struck digital gold? ‘Finally! We’ve infiltrated that random guy’s blog about… whatever it is he blogs about!‘

To my digital intruders: I’m genuinely flattered you considered my website worth the effort. It’s like finding out someone broke into your car to steal your collection of car park receipts and that half-eaten KitKat from 2007. I appreciate the validation, though I must inform you that you’ve been performing for an empty theater. My website traffic could generously be described as ‘immediate family members who clicked by accident.’

There is one silver lining to this digital home invasion– they left my original site intact enough for me to restore. That’s surprisingly considerate, like a burglar who only changed the lock on my front gate while leaving my TV, money and valuables in the house intact.

Was it professional courtesy? Pity?

Or perhaps they realized that tampering with my collection of poorly framed photos and rambling posts about nothing would be unnecessarily cruel…

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Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac

Even though I love Apple’s iWork, I’ve always had a soft spot for Microsoft Office. In my mind, iWork is like a sleek Ferrari—fun, stylish, and exhilarating for the occasional joyride—whereas Office is the reliable Toyota you use daily to get from point A to B.

That’s why any new release of Microsoft Office for Mac piques my interest. It’s the collision of two ideologies: Apple, the temple of aesthetics, meets Microsoft, the creator of Fisher-Price-themed operating systems like Windows XP (we all remember the bright blues and lime greens). Their offspring can sometimes be spectacular—like the very first version of Microsoft Excel for Mac—or an absolute train wreck, like Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

To give credit where it’s due, Microsoft writes excellent code for office productivity software. I can’t imagine a workday without Microsoft Outlook keeping my schedule in check or Excel helping me wrestle meaning out of chaotic data dumps with complex pivot tables.

But that’s the office.

At home, in front of my big-screen Mac, I just want to enjoy my work. I want to cleanse my brain of Windows’ clunky interface and bask in beautifully crafted icons. When I do need to handle office tasks, I prefer to use elegantly designed software like iWork. But Pages and Numbers can only take me so far. Sometimes, I have to brace myself, fire up Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and get the job done.

And that’s when my Mac transforms into something unholy—a Windows PC.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is so poorly designed, so utterly perplexing—especially on big-screen Macs—that J.J. Abrams could have set Lost on its interface. Common features are buried so deep within the labyrinthine menus that they rarely, if ever, see the light of day.

Thankfully, this may finally change with Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. It’s not quite a Lexus, but Microsoft has clearly learned a few lessons. After taking it for a test drive, here are the key improvements I loved:-

Fast and more responsive: I’m blown away by the speed. Applications load up almost instantly, and within seconds, you can dive into Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. Typing in Word feels snappy—letters appear instantly as you type. Compared to the sluggish, unresponsive mess that was Office 2008, this alone is a compelling reason to upgrade.

Snazzier Templates: Okay, Steve Jobs probably wouldn’t be caught dead using any of these PowerPoint templates, but they’re the best I’ve seen in Microsoft Office—hands down. In fact, they’re even better than the ones in the PC version. The best part? Full compatibility. No more exporting beautifully crafted Keynote presentations just to make them PowerPoint-friendly.

Microsoft Word

Improved User Interface: The dreaded floating “palette” is gone! In its place, we now have the ribbon, which first appeared in Microsoft Office 2010 for PC. Some people love it, others hate it—but personally, I’ve grown to appreciate it. When you’ve got 12 different windows open at once, the ribbon’s structured layout makes life much easier.

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Astro B.yond HD

Astro compared the launch of B.yond, its HDTV service in Malaysia, to the arrival of color television broadcasting. That’s quite a claim. And as much as I hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember the day RTM first switched to color. I recall the excitement—curious neighbors cramming into the living room, eyes glued to the rare color TV set, gasping in awe at every vibrant hue. We didn’t care what was on—we religiously tuned in to any program that aired in color, even if it was just a news anchor talking about rubber exports.

Astro B.yond, on the other hand, while delivering on its HD promise, isn’t nearly as revolutionary.

High-definition content is nothing new. If your PC runs at a resolution higher than 1280 x 720 pixels, congratulations—you’ve been enjoying 720p HD for years. If your puny 2-megapixel camera takes images at 1600 x 1200 pixels, you already have more height resolution than 1080p, the current gold standard for HD. Blu-ray discs (and before them, HD-DVD), gaming consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360—they’ve all been HD for ages.

So unlike the color TV era, Astro B.yond doesn’t have a major novelty factor. It’s hard to imagine your neighbors barging into your living room just to witness the breathtaking detail of David Letterman’s forehead wrinkles.

The Hardware & Channel Lineup

At launch, B.yond offers just four HD channels—NatGeo HD, History HD, HBO HD, and Astro Supersport HD—with ESPN HD “coming soon.” To access them, Astro requires you to replace almost everything: the dish, decoder, smart card, and even the remote control. The new Set-Top Box (STB) is smaller and sleeker, with a redesigned on-screen menu system. It also has a front-facing USB port, possibly for future TiVo-like features—if Astro ever decides to roll those out.

Originally, I had stripped my Astro subscription down to the bare minimum, partly as a protest against their ever-increasing prices. This left me with mostly documentary channels, so my TV diet consisted of Mega Disasters, Ice Road Truckers, and Mega Movers. What I quickly discovered is that the HD versions of NatGeo and History don’t just offer higher resolution; they actually have different programming schedules from their SD counterparts. HBO HD, on the other hand, is just HBO SD with a 60-minute delay, while Supersport HD is essentially Supersport 2 in HD.

The Good: Jaw-Dropping Documentaries

The documentary channels look phenomenal. The colors are richer, and the level of detail is incredible—you can read tiny background text, spot imperfections in ancient artifacts, or count the number of wrinkles on the expert’s forehead as they discuss the fall of the Roman Empire.

Feeling optimistic, I upgraded to the movie package to check out HBO HD.

The Not-So-Good: HBO HD’s Disappointing Quality

That’s when my excitement took a hit. Unlike the razor-sharp clarity of the documentaries, HBO HD looked… soft. The compression Astro uses for this channel seems aggressive—action scenes suffer from blocky artifacts, making them resemble poorly compressed pirated DVDs. Some sequences are downright unwatchable, especially when there’s a lot of movement on screen.

The Ugly: Audio Issues That’ll Drive You Crazy

Astro B.yond boasts Dolby Digital sound, but in practice, it’s a hot mess. The audio channels are often encoded incorrectly. The most common issue? Voices don’t just come from the center speaker—they’re also leaking into the left and right speakers. And to make matters worse, the vocal track isn’t even properly synchronized across the channels, creating a weird out-of-phase effect that makes dialogue sound echoey and unnatural. It’s like listening to an interview inside a tin can.

The Road Ahead: Can Astro Fix This?

For Astro to succeed, they need to fine-tune this service. With just four HD channels at launch, it’s unlikely they’ll attract the masses—except maybe during World Cup 2010, when all matches will be broadcast in HD. Right now, early adopters like me are willing to pay the extra RM20 a month for the technology, but for mass adoption, they need to:

  1. Fix the compression issues, especially on movie channels.
  2. Sort out the audio disasters.
  3. Rapidly expand the HD channel lineup.

Because after watching HD, one thing becomes painfully clear—Astro’s standard-definition channels look really, really bad.

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New iPhone by June 2009

I know I might sound biased, but now is really not the best time to get a Maxis iPhone.

And no, it’s not just because the blogosphere is buzzing with complaints about how absurdly expensive it is to legally own an iPhone 3G in Malaysia (which, to be fair, it absolutely is).

Nor is it because the iPhone still lacks basic features that even the cheapest dumbphones have had for years—like forwarding SMS, sending and receiving MMS, making video calls, or the almighty copy and paste.

Nope.

The real reason to hold off? A newer, third-generation iPhone (not to be confused with “3G,” which was actually the second generation) is almost certainly dropping this June.

The Evidence: Why June 2009 is iPhone Season

  • AT&T spilled the beans—like an overenthusiastic cowboy at a campfire, they let slip that something big is coming.
  • The code detectives—geeks with way too much time on their hands have meticulously dissected every line of iPhone Firmware 3.0, unearthing hidden references to new phone models lurking in the source code.
  • Paul Schiller’s divine revelation—Apple’s Senior VP of Product Marketing (a.k.a. not Steve Jobs) hinted via his chosen prophet, David Pogue of The New York Times, that June is traditionally when Apple unveils new iPhones.
  • WWDC 2009 is set for June 8-12—Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is the perfect stage for them to unleash all the pent-up coolness they’ve been secretly working on, sending Apple fanboys into a collective frenzy.

Put all the clues together, and it’s almost certain that a brand-new iPhone is dropping in June 2009. And if history tells us anything, it’s going to be hot, hot, HOT.

So unless you enjoy buyer’s remorse, wait a few months. Your patience will be rewarded.

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Spotify on the iPhone?

I’ve been using Spotify for a couple of months now and I have to say that is one of the best music service out there, bar none. Of course, when I said bar none, I meant bar none if you happened to live in the UK.

Unfortunately, customers outside the UK can only select from a limited number of content due to licensing restrictions. This has severely impacted the user experience of the service. I created an account (don’t ask me how) and was presented with an impressive collection of songs. After a few days, the server prompted me that it detected that I was “roaming” and asked if I wanted to change my country in my Spotify user settings.

I did that and I came to regret it as it removed more than 3/4 of the songs that I had put in my playlist. Drats!!!!

But I digress because the reason I’m writing this is because of this:-

Could it really be that Spotify is coming to the iPhone? How about latency over EDGE? Will it work the same way as the desktop client (ie. download music file to local harddisk and then obtain DRM play key from server for every play)? So many questions, so little facts.

Wow…I really can’t wait (even with the limited content now)

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately simply because the web provider that my blog is hosted on is also hosting some malicious web codes (according to Google anyway if you use their Chrome web browser).

Anyway, I though that the problem could be with my website so I tried to upgrade my WordPress engine to the latest one. Lo and behold, I realized that I was really sitting in the docks while the versions rolled on by! The latest incarnation was the slick WordPress 2.7 while I was still running on a really arcane version.

Googling around, I found this very interesting site that will be very helpful in case of future upgrades. It contains a little plugin that you can access from your admin Dashboard that will automatically do the upgrade for you.

I filezilla’ed the small plug in over and the followed the steps. The upgrade was completed in less than 5 minutes.

Sweet 😉

What are you waiting for? Head on down to Luke Gedeon’s site