NEC VERSA P8100 Minisite

I accompanied my neighboor to Microstation at Shangrila to help him decide what laptop to get. Along the way he told me that a just-arrived stock of NEC Versa P8100 in that store. The specs were much better than any of the current sub Php 40K laptop's he showed me before. I was even skeptical at first. Not until I saw the lappy.

The 15" screen was gorgeous! Wide screen, and was glass like. It has a DVD writer and all the ports you could wish for. It even has an SD card slot and build quality "seems" sturdy enough, not much flex on the keyboard area. No pre-loaded OS tho. Has a B/G capable built in wifi. The battery was a standard 6 cell one, which was the only one item that didn't beat the Lenovo/IBM model he canvassed (Php 36K) that included an 8 cell? battery. After inspection I found out the video chip was of the Intel kind and not the NVidia one described on the NEC site. At any rate it was still rather a good buy.

The Aquarium: GlassFish on FreeBSD

Just saw this on the Aquarium (Glassfish weblog). Kind of funny seeing my picture there. A friend of mine has commented before that from a different angle, it looks like am poking something in my nose. Hehehehe. I guess time to replace that that avatar. Makes me remember when a stranger asked me if am mobileindie.com. Weird and disorienting in some ways. :D

On the other hand, I direly need to manage my sched in order to continue with my Liferay experiments and Glassfish on the FreeBSD platform. The Liferay really just needs a few tweaks for it to use context path rather than stubbornly insisting to be on the root context. And so far the Glassfish running on FreeBSD seems to go along well like good ol' isaw and cheap red wine.

OS X VM

Doing a "du -sh /" on an OS X terminal forces the VM to reclaim inactive memory. Should be adding this to a crontab if not for the fact that it would make the disk spin at regular intervals. Hmmmmnnn...

Philips SHE9500

Philips SHE9500

A week ago, I replaced my el-cheapo in-ear phones with a pair of Philips SHE9500 that went on sale at Astrovision at SM North (at 1.4K, formerly 1.8K). The previous in-ear I blogged before was clearly lacking in bass. Am not a bass head but the bass on that thing was really inaudible even after a week of burn in period. But what really prompted me to buy a replacement was the earbud that comes it with it was made of hard rubber that's literally intolerable for prolonged use.

Back to the Philips SHE9500, level of detail was awesome! I could clearly hear the guitar pick hit the strings as Eric Clapton does his stuff unplugged, or that chuckle at the end of Norah Jones song, or the varying delays and distortion mixed with haunting melodies of Radiohead, the exasperation in Ely Buendia's voice in Ligaya, etc. I could go on and on. The thing makes you jump with joy that you ripped your audio in higher bitrates. Added bonus, bass was tight and not wasn't exagerated at all like some drivers do.

Noise isolation was quite good. Not too sealed that you won't hear the loud honking sound of a car approaching, although I still won't recommend using it while crossing the street or driving a car. But just enough to block out street noise, or the idiot talking rather loudly on a jam-packed train.

Build quality was also decent. Not as flimsy as the Sony Fontopia models I have seen at Park Square 1. Overall am pretty happy with the in-your-ear music experience that this thing delivers.

treonox
- humming "If I could be, who you wanted... If I could be, who you wanted..." on northbound train

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Dave Birch: Upwardly mobile

I think this summarizes my thoughts on where m-commerce fits. It doesn't fit very well with face-to-face transactions. Rather, its a disruptive technology that allows an individual to participate in a FLAT WORLD ECONOMY (TM).

And what does G-Cash and Smart Money need to do in order for it to fit in a flat world economy? Or at least titilate the current generations mind to use the technology?

In some angles it already has gotten its feet wet, but really, there is no point in pursuing a lock-in model when the trend is collaboration and participation. Gone are the days that proprietary technologies are the in thing. Look around, the successful models that have the fastest adoption rate are the ones that fit in a flat world domain.

In the example given on the link above, can you guess who was trying to explain that model to a bunch of close minded cellco executives circa 2003?

The world is flat. Adapt or die.

M-Commerce Thoughts

M-Commerce Thoughts

A few things on the top of my head why m-commerce has not taken off. Remember, the current local implementations rely on SMS. That means it inherits all the characteristics of SMS.

Now, my dear gentle reader, have you ever experienced:
- The text you sent did not reach the destination.
- The text you sent did reach your destination, but was delayed by more a few minutes, or even a few hours perhaps?
- You received the same SMS message more than once? But the sender sent it only once.

Now picture those scenarios on the current m-commerce platforms. What do you do if you didn't get a confirmation from your m-commerce transaction? Will you repeat the transaction? Or will you wait for the confirmation message. Now what if you received the confirmation, but the merchant in front of you didn't? Will you force the merchant to give you the goods? Force majure, the cell tower in your area goes kaput, imagine the implications on a heavily m-commerce dependent community?

Anyway, posting my thoughts here, hoping for the lazy web to summon the collective minds of similarly interested individuals. :D

treonox
- on a northbound train

G-Cash [rebelpixel productions]

Nice ongoing discussion there about G-Cash and S-Money. Another one here, courtesy of the recently resurrected ka edong

I also explained this sometime ago to a chinese gentleman from a market research firm trying to find out if the model would also fit in china. I think the main barrier is the current local m-commerce platform offered by Smart and Globe are both very limiting. Not only that you can't transact from both one platform to another, but both platforms has very few applications and connections.

On the other side of the coin, this is m-commerce, and there is more than meets the eye regarding the security considerations that goes with this kind of systems. Inter-operability is both a blessing and a curse depending on which side peg your question.

treonox
- And everybody's shouting. "Which side are you on?"

Mumblings

Mumblings

And I hereby quote:

"People will punch thru any technological barrier, if there is a real carrot at the end of that stick."

treonox
- listening to Fake Plastic Trees on a southbound train.

Snapshots of life

Snapshots of life
Originally uploaded by nocs.

It seems just like yesterday when they were still babies. Sigh...



OTOH, I direly need a better digital camera. Dear Santa...

Test blog, 1 2 tres...

I had posted 3 quickies since my last post but none seems to have successfully penetrated blogger.

Oh well back to the inevitable irony of power outages. One of the servers am maintaining currently co-located at EV1, got hit a by a mere seconds power outage and refuses to go back online since yesterday. And due to the event, remote KVM's are pretty scarce and the support guys on the other end won't give a clue how far am I in the queue.

There goes my weekend. :((