A proper holiday…

…at last. I’m off to Thailand for a week in mid-Feb; just bought the ticket.

All about India

A lot of India-related topics appeared in the feeds today…

My fellow blogger from my MBA cohort, Cogito, hasn’t posted much on his Indophiles blog for a long time; I guess being married now has something to do with that, eh Cogito? However, the Indophiles RSS feed twitched in its sleep or something, and sent out a whole bunch of articles dating back a couple of years. It was opportune, because the last article discusses nanotechnology, currently much on my mind after reading the Diamond Age. Cogito links to a Red Herring article (subscriber-only, unfortunately) about Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, who now plans to establish a nanotech city in north India…

The prominent UK thinktank Demos has just published a series of reports on innovation in Asia: The Atlas of Ideas. The four papers (one on innovation in Asia generally, and one each on India, China, and South Korea) are 10 pounds each, but there are other free downloads. The press release for the paper on India says:

“Many Indian policy makers believe that the UK is in danger of complacency, with most young Indians now choosing the US and Silicon Valley over the UK.”

(Also interesting is that apparently the researchers also spent time in Singapore: why no paper on innovation here, I wonder…?)

Meanwhile, Information Week inform us that Accenture now have more staff based in India than they do in the US:

The tipping point is here. For the first time, a major Western outsourcer will have more staff in India than in the United States, as Accenture says it plans to increase its head count on the subcontinent to 35,000 by August.

However, there is still some hope for those in Europe and the US who are willing to chase opportunity, as quantity of employees in India doesn’t necessarily equate to quality – or, these days, affordability. Asia Times discovers that executive search firms in India are fielding more and more queries from Westerners who, with their greater experience at senior levels, combined with the increasing cost of local staff, offer attractive value for money if they will relocate to India.

All of the above applies more or less accurately to China as well, of course, but the language difference complicates things more.

Through the Great Firewall: unblocked in China

Well, on December 8 2006 I discovered that a commercial website I maintain was inaccessible from China. There is nothing controversial or inappropriate on that site, which had been running happily, and with a great deal of Chinese traffic, for over two years.

I did my research, and came up with this article from Danwei, which linked to this Chinese site that gave recommendations on what action to take in order to get unblocked. I can’t read or write Chinese, so I passed this on to a colleague in China – who unfortunately isn’t at all technical, and wasn’t able to do anything with it.

By a stroke of luck, a new colleague came on board just afterwards; he’s got a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and consequently knows as much about I.T. as it’s possible to know and still be human*.

He took the ball and ran with it, contacting the three main Chinese backbones (China Netcom, China Telecom, and CERNET) to complain about us being blocked. A few days later, I noticed a single Beijing IP address in the server logs, going through the site.

That was two weeks ago. Today, my colleague contacted me to say that he can access our site from Beijing, and friends of his have been able to access it from all over China. So, this goes to show that the Great Firewall of China does have gateways, and the gatekeepers are willing to listen.

* I may be exaggerating a bit here.

A vanished niche

Who killed the webmaster? asks (Yet another web development blog), with a fun discussion of the same on Slashdot. Hehehe, readers, I was a webmaster. I had that title on my business card for a while. It was a fun niche job to have in the mid-to-late nineties and early noughties, created because the skills were rare and it was still possible for one person to know enough about them all. Then database design, CSS and graphic design, targetted on-the fly dynamic content, search engine optimisation and so on all grew more and more complex while good software design made it possible for more and more people to do at least one area on their own without needing a dedicated webmaster. Soon, the role vanished, replaced by project teams of area specialists… It was fun while it lasted, though.

Mitigation, adaptation and suffering

Those are our choices, according to Harvard scientist and climate expert John Holdren. According to this article in the IHT, it’s becoming clearer that climate change is going to occur more quickly and more dramatically than expected. There just isn’t any good news, it seems. The only option we have left is to influence the proportions of mitigation, adaptation and suffering: we’re going to do some of each, but it may still be possible to do more of the first two and less of the third.

Monsoon worries

Singapore only exists because of the monsoons. It was the alternation of the winds that brought traders from both China and India, and caused Singapore to be established as a trading port where they could interact.

This year, the monsoon rains have been especially heavy; in Singapore (which is well drained) there have been incidents of flooding, but nothing too serious. However, Malaysia has suffered very badly, with a number of states experiencing very serious flooding, leading to the displacement of thousands of people.

That gives an indication of what’s to come, if this article on Newseek is any indication. If global warming is affecting the the Indian Ocean it could mean either much more rain, or much less – either of which could have big repurcussions for this little island…

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the US, “weather-related catastrophe losses have increased from about $1 billion a year in the 1970s to an average of $17 billion a year over the past decade” according to another Newsweek article, and insurance companies are withdrawing coverage from coastal areas. Apparently, ‘The damage from a Category 5 storm directly hitting a major city, could, researchers say, “exceed the total capacity” of the U.S. insurance industry‘. Wow.

However – and this is what I picked up on, given my ongoing advocacy that Singapore should be investing heavily in the development of Green Architecture – ‘some insurance companies are creating incentives for customers who build with climate change in mind. Fireman’s Fund Insurance offers discounts to commercial owners who rebuild damaged property using “green” building practices, which tend also to improve building safety‘.

If the monsoons really are going to become more intense, then it’s yet another argument for building green…

The soundtrack to my life

Since I don’t have anything much to write here at the moment, I’ll steal a meme from Mr Brown, and experiment with the soundtrack to the movie to my life. It’s easy to do: look at the different themes, put your iPod or iTunes on shuffle, and note down the tunes as they come up! I wanted to do this a while ago, but had to wait until I’d rescued all my old music from my ailing Powerbook. And remember – BE HONEST! No editing allowed!

• Opening Credits:
  Abie Baby/Fourscore, Hair-Original Soundtrack
  “All men are created equal”
• Waking Up:
  Agarijo, Tsuwa / Omiya . arranged by Taylor and Gordon, Ryukyu Underground
  Hmm, ok, might be a chilled-out start to the day
• First Day At School:
  Thien Mi Ti Ai, Sally, Buddha Bar Presents Flying Carpet
• Falling In Love:
  Cordero De Dios – Bulerías, Paco Peña, Misa Flamenca
• Fight song:
  Spark The Sound, Blood Is Shining, (not sure where this is from)
  Hehe, seems quite appropriate>
• Breaking Up:
  Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Thievery Corporation Feat. Gunjan, The Cosmic Game
• Prom:
  Comptine D’un Autre Été: L’après Midi, Yann Tiersen, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
  Oooh, a bit cheesy, but OK…
• Life’s OK:
  Tande M Tande – Listen To Me, Boukman Eksperyans, Kalfou Danjere – Dangerous Crossroads
  Hmm, going off track a bit here…
• Mental breakdown:
  Tinker Of Rye (Part 2), Paul Giovanni, The Wicker Man
  … but recovering somehat here…
• Driving:
  Yizhihua, Chen Jun, Erhu Classics:
  … oops, driving to erhu music? I don’t think so!
• Flashback:
  I’r Llwyn Banadl, Aled Lloyd Davies, Gwin Hen a Newydd
  Oooh, but spookily appropriate here.
• Getting Back Together:
  Suite In Rast, Sufis, The Music Of Islam, Volume 9 – Mawlawiyah Music Of The Whirling Dervishes
  Eeerm… no.
• Wedding:
  Hello Dolly, Louis Armstrong, 100 Years Of Cinema – Soundtrack Collection (Disc 2)
• Birth of Child:
  (Lookin For) The Heart Of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, Asylum Years
  Hahahaha!
• Final Battle:
  In The Bath, Lemon Jelly, The Chillout Session (Disc 1)
  Oh noooooo! NOOOOOOOO! How less appropriate could you get????
• Death Scene:
  Das Main Ki Pyar Wichon – Lal Chand Yamla Jatt, Various Artists, 50 Glorious Yrs. Of Punjabi Music VOL 1
• Funeral Song:
  Suhe WE Cheere Waliye, Surinder Kaur & Parkash Kaur, 50 Glorious Yrs. Of Punjabi Music Vol 2
• End Credits:
  Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, Trudy Richards, The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert
  I don’t remember ever buying this album… where did this come from????

Additions to my library

I recently mentioned that Borders were offering a 40% discount to their email list subscribers. I bought a lot of books, but most of them are more relevant to my other blog, so I’ve talked about them there. However, in the same period I’ve also bought a number of books from the second-hand shops in the Bras Basah Complex, and the bargain books stack in Carrefour, so here’s the list:

• Someone comes to town, someone leaves town by Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. I was looking for something geeky, and eventually settled on this. It’s a very odd novel, the story of a man whose father is a mountain and mother is a washing machine, his struggles with his very odd siblings, and his romance with a girl with wings. It’s a neat parable of geek alienation, but I found the resolution of the main storyline to be ultimately unsatisfying. From Borders.
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. A fantastic novel, with lots of themes that are currently very relevant to my life. I’m going to talk about this book in more detail in a future post. From Borders.
• The Many-Headed Hydra, by Linebaugh and Reider. A hefty book on the roots of the modern world, and the growth of the Atlantic trade and the Americas, seen from the viewpoint of the ordinary people who did the dirty work, and whose voice is rarely heard in histories. I haven’t read much of this yet; I plan to take it on holiday. From Borders.
• Samurai William, by Giles Milton. The true story of the English adventurer fictionalised in James Clavell’s Shogun. Set in a slightly earlier period than the Many Headed Hydra (William Adams, the central character, died in 1620 – the year the Mayflower sailed to America), it describes the early period of Northern European discovery of, and interaction with, Japan and Indochina. From Carrefour.
• The Play Ethic by Pat Kane. I’ve been reading his blog for a long time, but haven’t ever gotten around to reading this exploration of the need to re-evaluate our approach to work and personal motivation. Another one that I’ll be taking on holiday. From Carrefour.
• The Hacker Ethic by Himanen, Torvalds, and Castells. Another that I’ve been meaning to read for years but never got around to. From Carrefour.
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. I have read, and written about, this one before, but I wanted to get a copy of my own; it will be useful once I start my new job. From Bras Basah.
  
• Genetically Yours, by Hwa A. Lim. A massively wide-ranging discussion of the life sciences industry, covering the science, innovation, marketing and management, amongst many other topics. Written by a Malaysian entrepreneur, this is one of the most detailed and informative books I’ve seen on the industry, and one that I’m surprised isn’t better known – bear in mind that I took a course on managing the Life Sciences during my MBA, plus another on the management of innovation. I wish I’d had this book then! This is another one that’s likely to be useful when I start my new job. From Bras Basah.

Added 29 Jan:

I forgot to add these to the list:

• Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Anybody who;s been involved in an activity they really enjoy has experienced the sensation of ‘flow’; I used to get absorbed in programming, for example. I often referenced Csikszentmihalyi’s concept while I was doing my MBA based on articles, but I haven’t actually read one of his own books. That will now change. From Bras Basah.
• The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life, by Robert Fritz. Actually, this was just an impulse buy, but looks interesting. From Bras Basah.