Just a collection of stuff (mostly from my old blog)
I came across a really cool youtube video from the amazing numberphile series that detailed how companies are already analyzing sports and farming huge amounts of data from sport events like football matches. In fact, these guys are basically farming data from events like the world cup, and then hoping that among that mountain of data lies some insights that could prove useful to football...
This is a bit of old and stale news, but in April of 2012, the Information Ministry released a ‘directive’ to ban all movies or films that featured gay characters. In their defence, the Ministry did later clarify that their facebook post wasn’t a directive, but a topic for debate. Of course, there can’t be much defending when the post itself starts with “Berkuatkuasa...
A couple of days back, I decided to buy a Christmas present for my wife. In my usual lackadaisical procrastinating style however–I only decided to buy on the 21st of December, which is barely 4 days from Christmas. In my defense, I already had a great Christmas present in mind–it was something called the fitbit, a full fledge pedometer that not just records your steps everyday, but...
As a tech blog in Malaysia, I thought it’d be interesting to see the latest Auditor-General’s report faired in terms of IT spend from the government. IT spend is a tricky thing, and most don’t understand just how tricky it is, particularly around big IT spend by governments–they often fail. In fact, one of my favorite blogs is dedicated solely to IT failures, aptly...
Tributes are pouring in for Amanda Todd, a teenager who committed suicide after posting the video above describing how she was tormented by bullies and struggling with depression. Amanda’s story was told little by little via post-it notes and it full detail about the extent of the bullying and torment and just how this poor 15-year old girl had experienced her version of hell on earth. The...
IBM have always been on the cutting edge of innovation, they’ve moved more becoming merely a computer company to what is probably the first truly all encompassing technology company, they don’t just make fancy gadgets or shiny tinga-ma-jigs, they make actual solutions for real-world problems. In 1996, IBM introduced the world to Deep Blue. Kasparov met Deep Blue and wasn’t...
Slideshare.net is a great tool to share presentations on the web. Think of it as the youtube of powerpoint presentations. I was toying around with my preview version of Microsoft Office 2013, specifically Powerpoint 2013, and I thought I’d create a new powerpoint to illustrate what I described earlier this week about How SSL works. Hope you guys like the powerpoint presentation, I was just...
I was looking for some detail on Maxis Fibre to Home service until I came across this while trying to to access the Maxis Customer Forum online: In the early days of the internet, all the data flowing through was done in plaintext, this meant that everything flowing on the internet was fair-game for anyone to hijack and view. It was akin to sending postcards all around, all the post-men and...
There are other more popular tools for big data, but today we’ll focus on Google BigQuery for a very good reason. It’s the only one I know how to use. Google BigQuery is a full fledge big data tool developed by google and stored on the cloud. There’s a lot more information you can glean from their presentation here. The short story is that Google created this tool online where...
It’s obvious that people have gotten bigger these past few decades, what’s less obvious is how data has grown bigger in the past few years. In fact, 90% of the digital data we have today, was created in the last 2 years. Put another way, in 2010 we had just 10% of the digital data we have today. In 2011, an estimated 1.2 TRILLION Gigabytes of data was created. That’s roughly...