OCBC & Lim Tan securities were down due to a Power Failure at Hosting site

Source: CNA

Strange enough, SingTel came to the news once again for not so good reasons. According to the press release from OCBC there was a "electricity" fault at the Hosting company premises and it caused the four hour outage this morning.

Also Lim Tan Securities servers too failed. Now the big question is how come both the servers failed at the same time unless the entire power feed in the row of racks tripped or both servers hosted in the same rack and the rack power supply tripped.

Seems both were hosted at Expan (SingTel Hosting services name). My guess is based on IP addresses of iocbc & trade.limtan.com.sg

iocbc.com - 203.126.125.141
trade.limtan.com.sg - 203.208.245.168

Both were owned by SingTel (first block is old block from SingNet and those days they used to give /27 or /26 blocks to customers. So the address in APNIC shows OCBC).
http://wq.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl

Hopefully this is not going to affect DBS :)

Anise, Mugwort, Fennel - Absinthe; Common herbs in Indian kitchen.

Ok. If you ever seen Absinthe or the green fairy logically you'd think that this is an European stuff and for asians this is not a traditional drink.
But I was curious and tried finding out how it was made. Believe me guys, you'd be surprised how widely we use the ingredients of Absinthe in our day to day life :).

If you are from India and not a spoiled kid of rich parents I'm sure you'd know these things.

Jeera (జీలకర్ర), Saumph (సోంపు), Risht/Mashipatri (మాచిపత్రి), then what exactly is the association with Absinthe which has the most concentrated alcohol content?

I'm dumb surprised to know that Absinthe is made from these three main ingredients.

Below link from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe

SP Services charges are up again from Jan 12..

Source: SP Services

As you can see from the graph if you are wondering how SP Services manage to keep the 'costs' moderated while the fuel oil prices are going to the roof then you're an innocent person who doesn't know this phrase

 "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Below is the graph I reproduced from the data given by SP Services. (I've checked the numbers but please let me know if you see any typos. I am not an accountant but an engineer with some interest in $ & C). This is similar to what SP Services is showing in their web site or sharing with public in news papers. It simply gives an impression that they are doing a good job moderating the charges or normalizing the charges by some intelligent/smart way of planning or hedging.

Now the thing is I want to introduce "logarithmic graph" concept. If you see the charts from stock market or technical analysis the recommendation is always to use "log" option. Reason is it graphs the growth in % terms but not in absolute $ values. This is quite critical because if the stock value grows from 10 to 20 and 20 to 40 the rate is shown the same on logarithmic graph. But on a normal scale the slope looks much higher :)

So now lets see the logarithmic graph of SP Services.

As you can see from the image the variation is perfectly in sync. Which means when fuel prices are increased by 10%, the Electricity charges are increased by 10% (one may argue that the rate of increase is diff which is true because of backdated pricing) or if it drop by 10% then the Electricity charges are dropped.

Conclusion: There is no smart guy sitting down there and seriously hedging the prices and moderating the impact. :)

By the way I know that we are not using Petrol but natural gas and I don't want to make things more complex.

Sometime back I did some noob calculations on inflated vs normalized charges too. It can be found here.

http://srichakrak.blogspot.com/2011/03/singapore-electricity-prices-2000-to.html

Ang Mo Kio Ave 10 Upgrade - MUP

Here is the main entrance/lobby pictures of the recently completed upgrade.

Air Asia - X Cuts Indian routes to Mumbai & Delhi from Malaysia

Source: CNA

You'd be surprised to hear the news that a carrier is cutting the capacity to India. We all used to hear the news how world is looking at India and how carriers are expanding in to India. But the fact is compared to the potential the actual traffic is close to zero. Look at Indonesia or Philippines or even to Srilanka (I stopped comparing to China. They are two generations ahead in each and every single aspect), all these nations are 'attracting' people while we are stopping them at our doors.

The reason sighted by Air Aisa is because of 'higher charges'.
Cut because of rising "airport and handling charges" and visa restrictions hampering travel between India and Malaysia.


If you check the charges the charges in major Indian airports are atleast double compared to the region. Compared with worldclass Changi in Singapore Mumbai charges 2.6 times. Same with Hyderabad, Bangalore & Delhi.

One may argue Singapore need tourists so they might be subsidizing it. Fine, then how about comparing with bangkok or Jakarta or Manila. All these airports charge half or less than Indian counterparts.

The overall cost structure is so terrible, it costs the same for a person to travel to Chennai (3hrs 45min) or Sydney (7 hrs).

Expensive/restricted landing rights, airport charges & bureaucracy coupled with terrible process adherence is crippling the industry and causing a terrible image issue to the country.

Similar:

http://srichakrak.blogspot.com/2012/01/visiting-india-felt-like-penalized.html

Waze - Free GPS with Voice guidance

www.waze.com

If you see the Appstore GPS perhaps this is one of the best out there. Even lifehacker mentions it as the best free tool for GPS on iPhone.

I've used it in USA and I was expecting similar experience in Singapore but trust me guys you'd be terribly disappointed with Waze in Singapore. First of all the maps are not updated and when I tried to update it gaves me an error " I don't have rights to edit". This is the same road I take almost every day to work.
Secondly the routing doesn't work at all and the country manager/area manager seems not bothered to add/edit the routes.
Most importantly I don't understand why can't they simply use Google Maps and add the voice capabilities instead of trying to recreate the maps again :|

After a month of using it now I gave up and going back to the good old tomtom.

Non Camera Phones - Secured Office

I am trying to find mobile phones (preferably smart phones) without camera but I am quite surprised that I couldn't find any in the market right now.
There are a couple of smartphones but they are running windows 6.1 (HTC Snap & Fuze) and one from Blackberry.
Seems like the best bet is to go for ipad v1 & use VoIP :)

So my plan is to subscribe to MIO MOBILE and use the soft client on iPad for incoming and outgoing calls. Let me see how it goes.

Chennai Airport

Here are some pictures I've taken @ Chennai airport. The new terminal/expantion works are pretty fast it seems and I was told that it'll be ready in 2012. 

Also the Chennai Metro team is working to connect "tirusulam" suburb station with the Airport using underground walkway. I'd think it as a great idea and if they can add travelators that'd be perfect. 

Hopefully they won't start charging the "user fee" like in Hyderabad or Newdelhi.

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth (NY Times Report)

Source: NYTimes

Here is an interesting article about the usage patterns

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.

Part of the reason for the increase in download volumes may be Apple’s Siri voice feature on the iPhone 4S, Mr. Flanagan said. Siri allows consumers to dictate to the phone and enter more text and data into the network in an easier way.     

I don't really agree with the above explanation. Rather what I see is the 'video' and 'cloud' driving the usage. For example if a user makes 10 SIRI queries it'd use approximately .5MB data. On the other hand if a person takes a picture and syncs to cloud (dropbox or other such services) it'd use 2MB+ of data.
Similarly if a person watches 5 minutes of youtube HD during his commute it'd incur more than 10MB data.

Coupled with the background applications the actual number of calls are multiplied and the end result is 10% of users consuming 90% wireless bandwidth or signalling space. Data usage is still 30-70 or 20-80 depending on the country/location. For example in Singapore its 20-80 and in Indonesia 40-60(telkomsel analysis).

I am not a great fan of "policy" or throttling as user will always find newer avenues to overcome the network based limitations. So the answer I've is the 'volume' based charging rather than 'unlimited' plans. Let the end user decide on how much he wants to pay rather than operator meddling with experience.

Pogaku Bellu - Cured tobacco package

I've taken these pictures at Manduvavari Palem or Patimeeda palem near Ongole, India. Although government is discouraging tobacco farming, still majority farmers are still opting for tobacco. Reasons are very simple, 'money' :)