A lonely house. An image made using Blender 3D

How do you know your page rank?

This is a nice site to check out your web site popularity:

http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/

Which is the better car?

The latest fiasco about the Proton Perdana versus Mercedes Benz was really the much awaited dessert after the heavy meal of Anwar’s sodomy conspiracy.

Back to the little story about Proton Holdings Berhad’s (KLSE: PROTON, stock-code 5304) top range Perdana V6 Executives. It’s awesome just how much the cost of ownership is to maintain a V6 and taking the cue from the estimated RM132,357.36 maintenance cost for a single car from 2004 as reported, it would whack a cool RM33,089.34 a year just to ensure the national car can roll on the road. Holy cow! That’s really a good money generator for Proton and could easily put Mercedes Benz and BMW to shame. No wonder the Terengganu’s Chief Minister (Menteri Besar) was quick to conclude it would be more economical to change the fleet to 14 RM245,000 (I thought such model costs at least RM340,00 each?) Mercedes E200 Kompressors (for RM3.43 million) as it’s no brainer that in the long run the Germany car was the solution to prevent such huge “leakages”.

Of course people started to curse the Chief Minister for being lavish during such period but can you really blame him for such a shocking maintenance cost? The Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) was surprisingly fast in their action to probe into the high costs of maintenance with the Chief Minister cheekily told the ACA to be equally efficient into other high-profile projects such as the prestigious Monsoon Cup sailing event and the Islamic Civilisation Park. Obviously irregularities can be seen all over the place in this Proton Perdana V6 Executives’ maintenance cost case.

Nevertheless you do not need a rocket scientist to jack-up the repairs or services charges at other workshops since Proton said its records showed that there had been no warranty claims made on that particular vehicle (cost more than RM100,000 in repairs and maintenance) since October 2004. However Proton Holdings Bhd managing director Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir claimed the average maintenance cost for each Perdana car sent by the Terengganu Government was only RM542 per year (huh?). So some geniuses must have pocketed the differences.

The question is do you have that many foreign dignitaries or VVIPs visiting Terengganu? If not wouldn’t it be more practical to sell or auction it off? I’m sure many interested parties would snap the Mercedes Benzes even at 20 percent discount. At least by selling it off the state could cut lost and it’s better to lose RM686,000 than to spend RM3.43 million keeping the cars in the cold storage. But then how could the PM say anything else when he himself spent huge amount of money on yacht and luxury jet? Maybe the government should consider Toyota Camy or Honda Accord for reliability.

What People Search For On Internet

Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web's query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are:

• AOL Hot Searches: Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
  


• Ask IQ: See top searches at Ask.
  
  
• Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
  
  
• Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.
  Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review:
  Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches.
  
  
• Google Zeitgeist:
  What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
  
  
• Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
  
  
• MSN Search Insider: Top 200 queries on MSN Search (annoyingly in random order), top "movers" in TV, sports and music, and a "duels" feature pitting top queries in a race against each other.
  
  
• Yahoo Buzz Index:
  Shows you what's hot and what's not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.

Good way to be anonymous

If you need to always work from different locations, for example, work from office HQ, then travel to client side; and surfing web after coming back to home at night, this may be the right tool for you:

1. Firefox 3, plus
2. FoxyProxy

If you want to go one step further, to be able surf anonymously, also use TOR, and i found this one particularly useful which doesn't required you to install the application, look out for this app:

PortableTOR

This is a standalone application which can even be run from USB pen drive. It can be very handy if you don't like the idea to install some additional program on your PC.

Data Warehouse Landscape update

Year 2007 Gartner Report update:




















The use of SQL Server 2005 for data warehousing is accelerating... Do you think given time it will catch up with Oracle?

You will not know if you are younger than 60 years old

Yesterday having tea time with my old colleague, who is a veteran IT professional who have been in this line since 70's ... The conversation had added knowledge to me. I found that is was so interesting at one time:
- Software always came with free, and given out free by IBM to MAS. There is no SLA, it's up to the airline to change the code to cater their needs.
- There are limited software vendors at that time, airlines used to buy software from one another.
- Airlines is one of the pioneer embrace IT, at one time, the head of IT in Maybank and Southern Bank were came from MAS.
- Mainframe is so robust that it doesn't down even running for a decade.
- ...
i enjoy the conversation a lot.