It’s a tough day today. Got into office and heard that a colleague passed away.
He killed himself.
He killed his only child, his daughter before killing himself.
He lost his wife a few years ago to illness.
I feel upset. I did not see this coming. He was always jovial, friendly, and an overall nice person. Heck, he even joined me on a hash run.
But today, he is gone.
Is there anything I could have done? He never seemed moody or reserved. Always smiling, always friendly.
Goodbye Arvind.
So, my 3 am post from January 3rd 2013 is now on
http://www.tremeritus.com
, probably not a good thing, but then this is the way things move.
For what it’s worth, going by the comments in that post, this is not about scoring points against the Coordinating Chairman or the PAP or the WP. It is about highlighting the facts in a way that was clearer and not wrapped up in words and more importantly, offering a better way to do things for the betterment of this country.
At the expense of being ridiculed for stating the obvious, all the information and analysis done at 3 am on January 3rd 2013 that is in my original post is from that one media release put out by the Coordinating Chairman on January 2, 2013.
There is confusion about what the various issues which sadly are related albeit tangentially.
Let me try to give a map of the issues that are being looked at.
a) The Ministry of National Development put out a Town Council Management Report for 2012 on December 14, 2012. Of the 15 town councils, all except for the Aljunied Hougang Town Council scored green in “S&CC Arrears Management - Examines the extent of Town Councils’ S&CC arrears that residents have to bear.” AHTC is the only non-PAP Town Council.
b) Because of that red score, the question arose as to what happened? To that extent, the AHTC released their comments.
c) It then was known to all of us that there was a company, Action Information Management Pte Ltd, that was providing the IT solutions to the town councils.
d) That was when the issue blew up with regards to who is AIM, why did this company get to do this business, how did they come to own the IT system etc etc.
So, there are two chunks of issues:
1) The poor performance from the Town Council Management Report 2012 perspective of Aljunied Hougang Town Council
2) Who is this AIM and what is their role in all of this?
Both are important issues. I am in no position to comment on the first point. That is for the AHTC to address to the satisfaction of the residents of AHTC as well as us Singaporeans.
My interest centers in the second point. As a computing professional, having been in this industry since 1982, this interests me personally. I am also an advocate of using and growing the use of open source technologies especially in the public sector. The Town Councils are public sector organizations. It pains me to see good money being thrown at IT solutions only for the vendor(s) to obsolete it in a relatively short time, and get the customer to pay up again and again. This becomes even more acute with public sector IT spending. It is yours and my tax dollars that get spent wastefully.
Sure, there as a time when the open source solutions and frameworks did not quite provide good alternatives to address the varied IT needs. But that was a long, long time ago. Today open source is so very prevalent in every nook and corner that there is no longer any justifiable reason not to consider open source first for any IT need, especially in government and public sector.
People who know me would have heard the repeating groove that I have become, in that we need, at least in Singapore, an official government policy to do open source FIRST for all public sector IT procurement and for government agencies to file justifications for exemptions if they want to go with a proprietary solution and these exemptions have to be public knowledge.
Why is that needed? It is because monies spent by publicly funded agencies especially in reusable technologies like software, should not be wasted and locked away in some proprietary solution.
I am not proposing nor suggesting that open source solutions don’t come at a price. They do. They will need to be supported (as any software needs to, open or otherwise). But the huge upside when used in the public sector is that the solution can be worked on and enhanced and re-factored by entities that the public sector organizations could engage. This grows the local, domestic IT sector. It grows it in a way that benefits the local econoomy and SMEs who then get opportunities to become conversant in domains that otherwise will be hard to get into. With the code being open, anyone can contribute, but, and this is the part most people miss out, you STILL NEED commercially contracted support.
This opens up opportunities to SMEs in Singapore to take up the various solutions to manage and maintain and gain expertise and in the process begin expanding outside Singapore as well.
Eight years ago, as a reservist SCDF officer, I was mobilized to support SCDF’s Ops Lion Heart to help with Search and Rescue after the 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami. My country called me to serve at a time of need and I put on my uniform and was on the ground in Banda Aceh for about two weeks.
The lessons I learned then was that in a disaster situation, the various international agencies and military/civil defense forces on the ground had very little common technology (other than walkie talkies) that could be used to coordinate the work. We, the SCDF, had our comms equipment (we had a Immarsat vsat satellite and satellite phones and GPS devices) but other than that, nothing else to interface with the other forces on the ground. Why? Because each of those entities had their own proprietary software tools to work with. At a time when there was a massive natural disaster, as rescuers we were not assisted by the technologies because of vendor lock-in.
Out of that disaster, came Project Sahana - put together by Sri Lankan open source developers. Sahana is now a UN sanctioned tool for disaster management.
Why do I bring this up? Because it seems that we are heading to a Sahana-moment in Singapore. Public sector IT services should be decoupled from political parties. Public sector IT solutions must open up the source code so that there are no opportunities for being taken for a ride.
So, to draw back to the beginning. Mr Coordinating Chairman, this is not a contest per se. This is a genuine offer to help us, the collective us, to do the Right Thing
As the date to the dissolution of the current parliament looms paving way for the parliamentary elections, I would like to thank Mr Lee Kuan Yew for the years of service he has given to this country. He and his team comprising Dr Goh Keng Swee, Mr S. Rajaretnam, Dr Toh Chin Chye, Mr Hon Sui Sen, Mr Lim Kim San, Mr Edward Barker and Mr Othman Wok helped steer this country from the late ’50s through to the ’80s and set this nation on a path to be viable and successful.
All of Mr Lee’s team mentioned above, have stood down and paved the way for the next generation to take helm. The nation is waiting for you, Mr Lee.
Your place in history is assured. You have helped along by writing part of the history yourself with your books so that part is done. I think the nation will both applaud you for that and even honour you by naming some institution (already done - Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy), or some road – perhaps Oxley Road as Lee Kuan Yew Boulevard.
But all jokes aside, this is the best time for you to retire. Your pension is guaranteed. Your place in history is guaranteed. You can now sit back and watch how this country you and your team helped shape beginning to finally flourish and excel. The evolution of the political process, the energized population who will be able to finally be counted as Singaporeans cannot but help push this nation forward.
On that happy note, thank you. Here’s to a happy and fun retirement!
I had the privilege of speaking to a great group of network operators as part of the South Asian Network Operators Group conference held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from Jan 11-18, 2011. The topic I spoke on was entitled ">“Virtualization and the Internet”.
[Personal note: I moved to wordpress.com from livejournal.com because I was rather disappointed with the lack of community around livejournal.com's code. It not being open source did add to my decision to move. I did get to move out all of my posted on harishpillay.livejournal.com with the help of wordpress.com's techies because my initial attempt failed. So, kudos to them.]
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 23 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 659 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 106kb.
The busiest day of the year was October 11th with 276 views. The most popular post that day was Rescuing a SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 machine to run in a VM on RHEL5.4.
The top referring sites in 2010 were planet.fedoraproject.org, twitter.com, facebook.com, Google Reader, and rdist.root.org.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for starhub leaderboard, starhub toolbar, illegal starhub box, starhub wishfi, and weblink.singapore.wishfi.com.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Rescuing a SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 machine to run in a VM on RHEL5.4 February 2010
3 comments
StarHub’s illegal code injection October 2010
5 comments
Automatically connecting to the Wireless@SG hotspots February 2010
6 comments
More twists and turns November 2010
GPG Keysigning at FOSS.in 2010 December 2010
I have the pleasure of attending two interesting events this week – both in India.
Really nice to see that there are people with the right motivations and ability to live their lives in honesty.
I was disappointed that the Brother DCP-135C is not within the CUPS database. However, kudos to Brother, they do make drivers available on their website.
I have the USB version of the printer/scanner/fax machine and I had to download the drivers from DCP-135C. Pick the 32-bit or 64-bit rpms as needed.
What I did was to download the LPR, cupswrapper drivers, then went to scanner section and downloaded the brscan2 and scan-key-tool rpms.
With the 4 rpms downloaded, I switched to a terminal and:
yum install brscan2-0.2.5-1.i386.rpm brscan-skey-0.2.1-3.i386.rpm \ dcp135ccupswrapper-1.0.1-1.i386.rpm dcp135clpr-1.0.1-1.i386.rpm --nogpgcheck
I hope Brother will set up a proper repo so that these can be done automatically!
Filed in BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=550651
Just updated Chromium via Spot’s page using yum update for Fedora 12. SELinux permission issues on three libraries. Need to grant permission to SELinux to run the following:
#!/bin/sh chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libmedia.so' chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libnacl.so' chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libsandbox.so' #to make the change permanent semanage fcontext -a -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libmedia.so' semanage fcontext -a -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libnacl.so' semanage fcontext -a -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/chromium-browser/libsandbox.so' #
Put those 6 lines above in a script, run it and chromium should work there after.
BTW, Chromium was from:
[chromium] name=Chromium Test Packages baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=0
Why would anyone continue to put any more credibility with the entire Digital Restrictions (mis)Management that our Redmond friends continue to implement in their software? DRM is bad enough, being locked out of your own files is completely unacceptable. Does this warrant a class action suit? I don’t know for I am a happy user of OpenOffice.org which does not have any of these abominations.
I like the following comment on /.. I think it is 100% spot on.
