Month: August 2008

There has been some smoke being blown with regards to the Universities & University Colleges Act 1971 (UUCA). This act has generally been treated as an evil monstrosity by many political activists and civil rights people in Malaysia. Seeing that the government is planning to push through some ammendments to the Act, I decided to see what the big problem was.

Since I dread reading through legal documents, I googled around for some summary information and found that the various university websites only listed extracts of the Act. Unsatisfied, I decided to download a copy of the Act and skimmed through it.

It seems that most of the problems that people have with it are related to Section 15 of the Act, which has broad provisions that curtail the freedom of members of a university. In particular, the political parties are generally in disagreement with Section 15(3) of this section: (3) No person, while he is a student of the University, shall express or do anything which may be construed as expressing support, sympathy or opposition to any political party or trade union or as expressing support or sympathy with any unlawful organization, body or group of persons.

However, I am a little confused with what is stated in Section 5A(1) of the Act: 5A. (1) The provisions of this Act shall not apply to any higher educational institution with the status of a University which is authorized to be established by an order made by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong under subsection (2) and any private higher educational institution conferred with the status of a University or University College under any written law.

If this paragraph means what I think it means, the UUCA isn’t a very big problem. It does not apply to any of the private institutions, which is about 50% of the national student body. As for public institutions, the UUCA may not apply to all of them either. According to wikipedia, UPM was established with the Incorporation Order signed by His Majesty The Yang Di-Pertuan Agong as provided for under the Universities and University Colleges Act, 1971, and published in the Government Gazette as P.U.(A) 387 dated 29 October, 1971.

If the paragraph means what I think it means, it means that our government has been using the UUCA as a FUD weapon. While this is not right, it is the standard procedure used by all governments to keep people in line. So, I don’t blame them for using if it was there. I just think that the big amount of smoke being blown about by all parties is a bit too much.

If the paragraph means what I think it means, changing the Act would only benefit a small fraction of the student population. It would be better for us to focus our attention on fixing the deep problems at our universities, many which are not directly tied to the UUCA.

I have been using Konqueror as my main browser for a while now. It works very well for almost everything but once in a while I need to fire up Firefox to access certain websites. One of these problem websites is GMail.

The problem when using Konqueror is that GMail ends up falling back on the old-school HTML mode. This mode is a little less efficient than the newer AJAX mode as everything needs to be transferred through and from the central GMail servers. After doing a quick search on the web, it seems that a lot of other people experience the same problem and complain about it. Well, I’ve found a quick fix for the problem.

The simplest way is to change the user agent setting for Konqueror. When browsers visit websites, they identify themselves to the webserver in the user agent identifier. This information typically includes browser name, version, and operating system information. GMail uses this information to determine which browser is being used. When it detects Konqueror, it defaults to the old user interface.

So, the only question is what user agent to fake. At first I tried IE and Firefox, but it did not work. So, I thought that I should try faking Safari. Safari is the default browser on the Mac and it is derived from KHTML, which is the engine that is used in Konqueror. At this point, the user interface would load, but I was unable to click anything. So, finally, I faked it as Opera and voila, everything worked.

To fake Konqueror as Opera, just change the settings under “Browser Identification”. Then, customise Konqueror to identify itself as Opera9 to mail.google.com servers. This is illustrated in the screenshot below:

I had just read an article in TheStar about some trumpet blowing by our government on some technological matters. As I can never resist a good opportunity to bash the stupidity of our government, especially when it comes to technological matters, I thought I’d give it a go. MIMOS has design two new low-cost computers: a RM500 desktop and a RM1000 laptop, called the MakCik line of computers.

First, the name. They obviously lacked suitable people in marketing. It is so blatantly obvious that MakCik is Mac Kecil (small Mac). However, I doubt that the designs would be anything like a Mac. Each model is then named after our PM and his wife. This is just disgusting. A potential technological product getting the derriere kissing treatment.

Next, the price tag. RM500 for a low end desktop and RM1000 for a low end laptop is not particularly cheap. I’ll give you a breakdown of what is necessary to build a modern desktop at prevailing market rates:

• Motherboard + Processor (1.6GHz) + Video + Audio + Network – RM230
• 512Mb Memory – RM40
• Power Supply + Casing – RM 150
• Keyboard + Mouse – RM20

As you can see, a fully working computer can be assembled for less than RM500 off-the-shelf, today. As for the laptop, RM1000 is terribly expensive. The OLPC laptop only costs US$199 (RM650) to buy one. That’s a whole 35% cheaper than the cheap laptop of RM1000. Maybe MIMOS should have just bought the OLPC in bulk and re-badge them all as MIMOS computers. Or it can even possibly talk to Intel and get it’s classmate PC in bulk prices too.

I had previously admonished some researchers at MIMOS for extremely money wasting and frankly, almost immoral (in terms of technology morality) research. However, I have come to understand that their hands are tied in many ways. MIMOS is our governments’ applied research institute. It has to do whatever the government tells it to do, regardless of the technical merits. However, as our government has plainly shown in the last 6 years, it has no idea on what to do with technology.

Personally, I see a lot of potential for MIMOS, if only it is taken out of the hands of the government. There are some good people working there. But unlike politics, if something is not technically feasible, no amount of hand waving and sweet talking is going to make it work. So, I think that MIMOS should be left alone instead of being ruined by the government.