Recently, one of their photographer uncover the sad fact that a person under police detention for corruption charges, can easily bribed his way out and watch a tennis match in Bali. Below is the photo of that infamous detainee:

(taken from Multibrand)

Gayus Tambunan

And last night they captured a photo that made me smile:

(photo courtesy of Kompas)

Nurdin Halid bows down to SBY

The photo was taken last night (16 Dec 2010), at Gelora Bung Karno, after Indonesia beat Philippine in AFF Suzuki Cup 2010 semi-final match. The guy bowing down is Nurdin Halid. He is the head of Indonesian Football Association. People wants him to step down as Nurdin Halid is a convicted corruptor. You can even check this List of Nurdin Halid’s Sins (in Bahasa Indonesia). The way SBY did not even bother to look at Nurdin gave me a chuckle.

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Hari ini, Wakil Presiden Indonesia Terpilih, Prof. Dr. Boediono berdialog dengan warga Indonesia yang tinggal di Singapura. Dialog ini diselenggarakan di Gedung Ripta Loka, Kedutaan Besar Republik Indonesia Singapura yang berlokasi di Chatsworth Road no 7.

Dialog ini dibuka dengan sambutan Duta Besar Indonesia untuk Singapura, Bapak Wardana. Berikut adalah rangkuman poin-poin yang disampaikan oleh beliau.

• Informasi tentang data demografis warga negara Indonesia yang tinggal di Singapura. Saat ini ada kurang lebih 150 ribu warga Indonesia yang berdomisili di Singapura, dimana sekitar 80 ribu bekerja sebagai Penata Laksana Rumah Tangga (PLRT)
• KBRI Singapura telah memfasilitasi pembentukan organisasi-organisasi profesi untuk menampung aspirasi WNI di Singapura. Organisasi-organisasi tersebut akan menampung aspirasi para pelaut dan PLRT Indonesia.
• Hasil akhir Pilpres 2009 di Singapura, dimana lebih dari 80% suara mendukung pasangan SBY-Boediono.
• Program-program yang dilaksanakan di KBRI Singapura untuk meningkatkan profesionalisme PLRT Indonesia. Antara lain dengan membuka program kursus Bahasa Inggris, Komputer dan Universitas Terbuka. Program-program ini dijalankan dengan partisipasi para mahasiswa Indonesia di Singapura.

Bapak Dubes selanjutnya mempersilahkan Bapak Prof. Dr. Boediono untuk menyampaikan sambutan beliau. Bapak Boediono membuka dengan salam dan ucapan terima kasih kepada para hadirin yang telah hadir dalam dialog ini. Beliau juga berterima kasih karena warga Indonesia di Singapura telah memberikan dukungan kepada pasangan SBY-Boediono dalam Pilpres 2009.

Beliau juga berharap bahwa demokrasi Indonesia saat ini akan menjadi demokrasi yang bermanfaat bagi masyarakat. Hal ini mengingat pada tahun 1950-an Indonesia juga menerapkan demokrasi, tapi gagal karena demokrasi saat itu tidak bisa memberikan manfaat yang bisa dirasakan oleh masyarakat.

Beliau memaparkan tiga garis besar program Pemerintahan SBY-Boediono ke depan. Tiga program itu adalah

1. Pembangunan infrastruktur fisik. Saat infrastruktur fisik Indonesia sangat tertinggal jika dibandingkan dengan negara-negara tetangga. Infrastruktur ini antara lain pembangunan/perbaikan jalan, penyediaan listrik, dan transportasi antar pulau.
2. Pembangunan infrastruktur lunak. Hal ini akan diwujudkan dengan membuat iklim ekonomi yang mendukung pertumbuhan. Antara lain dengan melanjutkan proses pembentukan pemerintahan yang bersih dan transparan, kebijakan-kebijakan yang mempermudah tumbuhnya ekonomi.
3. Bantuan kepada masyarakat yang tertinggal dalam pertumbuhan ekonomi. Tidak bisa dipungkiri bahwa dalam perkembangan, selalu ada elemen masyarakat yang akan tertinggal. Hal ini akan diwujudkan dengan melanjutkan program BLT, pemberian beasiswa untuk pelajar miskin yang berprestasi dan subsidi kesehatan untuk warga yang tidak mampu

Acara kemudian dilanjutkan dengan memberikan kesempatan bagi para hadirin untuk menyampaikan pertanyaan kepada Bapak Boediono. Rangkuman pertanyaan dan jawaban akan saya tuliskan di posting selanjutnya.

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Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations!

My fellow countrymen has done all of us proud. The team of 6 high school students has claimed the top prize in Global Enterprise Challenge 2009. The team consist of

• Wismaya Adi Purnama (SMA Taruna Nusantara Magelang)
• Lita Gunawan (SMAK Yahya Bandung)
• Rizki Satrio Nugroho (SMA Madania Bogor)
• Evelyn Antoinette (Bina Bangsa School Jakarta)
• Asyraf Firas Abdurrasyid (SMAN 1 Bandung)
• Christa Yona Twedrian (SMA Regina Pacis Bogor)

This year’s challenge is to “To produce a working model of an innovative product or service that will reduce food waste in your country and help to alleviate starvation in one of the world’s poorest countries.“

Below is the Team Indonesia’s presentation (YouTube):

Source:

1. About Global Enterprise Challenge
2. GEC 2009 website
3. News about the winning (in Bahasa Indonesia)

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But today a friend sent me this link that BBC caught in public mass deception regarding Iran’s Election. The disputed BBC article is dated 17 June 2009. I don’t know this is a coincidence or not, but when Ayatullah Khomenei gave Friday sermon, he called Britain as the most treacherous Iran’s enemy. And Britain protested this remark. BBC also has issued a statement regarding this issue.

Anyway, somehow I feel slightly less naïve than yesterday

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Anyway, it definitely exceeded our expectation. The dinner was good considering that it is a free conference There was a XBOX 360, and Internet Kiosks for killing time while waiting for the conference to start. That building is brilliant, the view from level 21 is beautiful. You could see the sea, the Esplanade ‘durians’ Theater, the floating platform where the recent NDP was held.

The session opened by a keynote from John Fernandes. He is definitely has a good sense of humor. I think it’s going to be difficult to not remember him with the way he introduce himself to us His short keynote highlighted Cloud Computing as the direction of the future system architecture, with Software plus Services at its core. With emphasis on how Microsoft Tools will help us the developers to build such architecture.

The second speaker was Apurva Lawale. His session, titled “XAML: Enabling Designer and Developer collaboration”, shown us how Microsoft Expression can be seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio 2008, to produce a rich and stylist content with Silverlight/WPF. He exhibited impressive examples like the Grid Girls Website, Taiwan’s Library Website, and a real-time Airport monitoring system used in Germany (my bad, I totally forgot to take note the URL of the last two examples). He also demoed the ease of combining the artwork created by the designer, with the program created by the developer. At the end of his presentation, he opened up a QA sessions and offered books as a prize to whoever raise a questions. It was pretty amusing QA session with interesting questions such as “How to use XAML without Silverlight?” , “How to apply XAML to dynamic objects/control at run time”, etc. The last question raised was from me, yes, myself. I raised my hand, then my brain went blank. I know I had this interesting question on my mind. But somehow the one that came out off my mouth was, “Is Silverlight is Microsoft answer to Adobe Flash?” *Blush*. Okay, I lied .. it was worst than that So to redeem myself, me and my colleagues thrown more qualitybetter questions to him after the whole session finished.

The third session was a showcase presented by a group of Temasek Polytechnic students that used .NET 3.0 with WPF to build Coral Monitoring System. They were the winner of Singapore’s Imagine Cup. They call it Coral Tellus. Pretty impressive project. Unfortunately the more interesting details such as how .NET 3.0 interact with the Temperature Sensor/Controller, Salinity Sensor/Controller were left out.

The last session was presented by Maung Maung Phyo (Anyone knows where is his blog/website?). His presentation titled “Visual Studio 2008: The Swiss Army Knife for Web Development”, introduced us to the new interesting features of Visual Studio 2008. He highlighted features such as:

1. Better designer. Faster loading, with a split view between designer and code
2. Javascript Intellisense. Impressive CSS handling
3. LINQ
4. Integrated Testing Project
5. AJAX
6. WCF

His presentation was superb. The transition between explaining the concept and the hands-on coding was smooth. He covered a lot of materials within relatively short time. If you want to download his presentation it’s available HERE. His session apparently a rerun from the previous Mix It Up session.

When we thought it was over, another speaker stepped up and shown us the new Grid Girls website. Very enticing and attractive, especially for guys. OK, maybe also for girls that into pretty girls. He highlighted that the Grid Girls website was build only in 4 weeks. From the initial concept to the final delivery, all in four weeks. And he said he will walk through with us the process of building Grid Girls Website in the next Mix It Session. So I think it is going to be very exciting and you should not miss it. Book your seat by Online Registeration. See you there!

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This Sunday Helloween will have their concert here in Singapore. I have booked my ticket for the concert. Anyone going to watch them there?

Few bloggers that I think will be watching the concert are:

• MetalBloodyMetal
• Niezza
• Ahinayo
• ScorpioGal08
• ladysemut

See you there!

UPDATE: Added few photos that I took.

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This research concludes that a bad sleeping habit might expose yourself to diabetes.

So in short, there are two effects of bad sleeping habit to your Diabetes risks:

1. Direct effect. The research found that the insulin level in your blood is reduced significantly when you didn’t get enough sleep.
2. Indirect effect. Bad sleeping habit increases your chance of developing obesity. And being obese gives you higher risk to get diabetes

Short summarize of Diabetes taken from Wikipedia:

1. Diabetes is an illness where the blood sugar level in a body is very high. This high level of blood sugar will cause the body to get easily fatigue, excessive urination, blurred vision, impotence for male, and bad ability in healing wounds (difficulty to stop bleeding).
2. There are three types of Diabetes, Type 1, Type 2 and Diabetes resulted from pregnancy.
   • Type 1 is characterized by low insulin production caused by the autoimmune destruction of the cells that produce insulin.
   • Type 2 is characterized by insulin resistance by the cells in the body.
   • To some women with certain genetic condition, when they are pregnant, the pregnancy hormone will cause the insulin resistance, symptoms of Type 2 diabetes.

So what should we do to stay healthy and stay away from Diabetes?

1. Obviously, have a better sleeping habit. Have enough rest every night. Don’t forgot to switch off your light. Sleeping in total darkness will help to beef up your immune system.
2. Stay fit. Don’t let yourself enjoy the comfort of being overweight, let alone obese.
3. Stop smoking (hmm.. this is like talking to a mirror … )
4. And don’t forgot to pray …

Hmm.. this should become a good reason to motivate myself to stop smoking keep on reducing the number of my daily cigarettes consumption (and eventually stop), and kick off that ‘getting fit’ program that has long forgotten delayed by complicated reason.

Happy New Year and stay healthy people!

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Lesson to be learned:

1. Blogger, in a way is similar to journalist . Although bloggers are not regulated by the journalism code of conduct, but a common sense might need to be used. Unless you are living in United States, where your freedom of speech is protected by the 2nd Amendment. But a defamation/libel lawsuit is still possible to be made against you.
2. Blog entries are accessible to public. Whatever said in public might be used as evidence in the court of law. So please help yourself by not having any blog postings with any potential liability
3. I really need to control my mouth (T_T) and re-checking my previous entries for any potential liability. Any comments?

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Summary of the Bill (please READ the online document for clarification, I might summarized it incorrectly):

1. It applies to commercial email, commercial SMS/MMS
2. It doesn’t apply to telemarketers
3. unsubscribe request is effective maximum 10 business days after the submission of the unsubscribe request
4. It applies if the SPAM committed in Singapore (sender/organization is physically reside in Singapore)
5. sending email to addresses obtained by harvesting email address in the internet is ILLEGAL
6. Buying email address list obtained by harvesting email address in the internet is also ILLEGAL
7. The damage is not to exceed SGD$25 per message, and not to exceed SGD$1 Million in total, unless the plaintiff able to show that the SPAM has caused damage more than SGD$1 Million

So in order not violating the SPAM law, the email/SMS/MMS should:

1. for email, the subject must started with “<ADV>”
2. Must have unsubscribe facility

Hopefully this article helps, If you are going to send any commercial (please refer to the document, the description is quite long) message, please make sure you are not violating the law.

PS: Hmm… although it sounds like I’m advocating the spammers, I’m not. I hate spammers.

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• Singapore Government will spend almost USD$1 Billion on IT

Copied from AsiaOne.com:

The city-state will spend up to 1.5 billion Singapore dollars (US$989 million; €727 million) on the system which is intended to standardize training, software and maintenance, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore said in a statement Thursday.

Personal computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard Co. and electronics maker NEC Corp. are leading two of the four groups expected to submit proposals for the project by its June 7 deadline, The Straits Times newspaper said. The contract will be awarded by Oct. 10, it said.

So where does that leaves the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises)? Does they have the chance to participate in the tender? Unfortunately, in order to participate in the tender, a company must have a certain amount of capital. So this is one the possible barrier for a company to participate in the tender.

So where are the tender? And what is the minimum capital required for a company to participate? Unfortunately I can’t list them here, too many of them. Check out Gebiz for the details.

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