PKR's Burden

I read this article in TMI and almost puked.

PKR wants Pakatan Rakyat (PR) partners to share the burden of contesting in hard-to-win seats in Sarawak during the coming general election to avoid a repeat of the just-concluded state polls.

PKR strategy director Rafizi Ramli told reporters today that he will raise the matter during the PR secretariat meeting tomorrow.

He pointed out that PKR had been forced to stretch its resources thin during the April 16 state polls when it contested in a whopping 49 state seats, a move that had likely contributed to its failure to win in more than just three constituencies.

The party, he revealed, had originally only been intent on contesting in 25 seats where it felt its presence was strong but had to field candidates in an additional 24 ‘impossible-to-win seats when neither one of its PR partners were willing to take on the challenge.

“Even SNAP was not willing to reach a compromise and only wanted to field its candidates in the areas where PKR felt it had a chance of scoring.

“We did not have a choice,” he told a press conference to reveal the party’s first analysis of the Sarawak polls.

Do you get it?

There are some seriously flawed people within PKR with a sense of entitlement. Let’s ignore for the moment, that PKR were only willing to give SNAP three seats and also took a few winnable seats away from DAP. However, let’s just look at the fact that they ran in 49 seats – almost double that which they had originally planned for.

This is the problem with the political scene in Malaysia. If you do not have the wherewithal to run so many seats, don’t. If nobody else is willing to pick up the slack, then don’t bother. There is no need to run in seats just for the sake of running in seats, particularly if they are not winnable seats.

You need to pick your battles – in order to win the war.

Run only in the seats where you think you stand a chance, and then pour everything that you have in there. If PKR had chosen to run only in 25 seats, it would have been able to double it’s concentration on each seat and possibly, ensure victory in a few more seats (e.g. Senadin).

However, it had to field candidates all over the place. This makes me wonder on the kind of candidates whom they actually chose to stand on a PKR ticket in an area. It is the same kind of mistake that they made in the last GE, random candidates in random seats.

PKR’s strategists need replacing, and their strategies need re-thinking. Maybe they should sign up for a Blue-Ocean Strategy course. 🙂

Multiple Hats

Dock/Xu/BoshiAnd I do not mean the colourful hats of De-Bono.

During meetings with potential partners and client, I always have this problem of which hat to wear. I am currently wearing multiple hats and I sometimes switch hats in the middle of a meeting.

Like last week, I had a meeting with a company where I went in with one hat and changed into another hat during the meeting. I also had a situation of visiting another company with one hat last week, and I will be visiting them again in a fort-night with another hat.

I am actually wearing several dynamic hats these days. Sometimes, people get confused as to whom I represent. I try to fix this by having multiple name-cards and presenting the one whose hat I am wearing at that point in time. I sometimes end up giving out several name-cards to people.

It is not confusing for me because I have been multi-hatting since I was young. I am used to adopting several roles at the same time. Maybe this makes me a little schizoid, which is supposed to be a good thing for entrepreneurs. So, I’m not complaining.

However, I suddenly realised this weekend that there is precedence for multi-hatting – super-heroes. Peter Parker – Spiderman, Tony Stark – Ironman, Bruce Wayne – Batman, etc. (Fools too – shhhh!)

So, it seems that multi-hatting is a norm for a super-hero, not that I claim to be one. However, I definitely have to become one if I am to succeed at what I am doing at the moment. It is not easy to be a boot-strapping solo-founder of a cutting-edge engineering company.

Daily Difference

While I have only left my previous employer for about 4-months, my daily life has already changed tremendously – even the regular daily routines. I noticed it this morning as I was coming to work at AESTE. I thought to myself, I no longer think about where to go for lunch.

This may surprise some people but the main activity to look forward to at my previous place was – lunch!

Nowadays, I hardly have time for lunch. I have often had lunch while on the road – driving. I know that it’s not a very healthy thing to do but that’s what I do when I am pressed for time. I’ll just grab a sandwich or energy bar with one hand while I drive with the other. That’s another reason why lunch is rarely the highlight of my day. I rarely have lunch with other human beings anymore.

The highlight of my day these days is – building things. 🙂

1MalaysiaEmail Bail-out?

Mock Up!
Mock-up image from Facebook.

According to the news, the Malaysian government has decided to approve a project to give every Malaysian above 18 years of age, an official email account for government correspondence. The news goes further to say that the RM50 million project is being managed by Tricubes and will be using Microsoft software.

I will leave the political commentary to others more suited to do so. I will also leave out the wisdom of awarding the contract to Tricubes, whom I have had the opportunity of dealing with previously. Rumours are that they are about to be de-listed from the stock-exchange and this news boosted their share price up from 9.5sen to 16sen. Hallelujah!

However, as a truly technical person, I would like to talk about the technical issues. The path of least resistance would be to take Windows Live/Hotmail and just point our 1Malaysia domain name at it. Otherwise, the next possibility is to setup our own email infrastructure, which would be a dumb idea since it will be re-inventing the wheel and not be very cost effective.

However, I would like to question the selection of Microsoft technology for this. FISMA – Federal Information Security Management Act – is a United States federal law that, “recognises the importance of information security to the economic and national security interests of the United States and requires each federal agency to develop, document, and implement an agency-wide program to provide information security for the information and information systems that support the operations and assets of the agency, including those provided or managed by another agency, contractor, or other source.”

Google Apps, which also includes an email service, is FISMA certified. Windows Live is not FISMA certified. I would not build an email system for official government correspondence, on an uncertified system.

Next, I would like to question the logistics behind running this programme. In order to access an email account, we would normally be asked for our credentials. If Tricubes wishes to pre-generate our credentials for us then the question is how are they going to send us our credentials. It would not be feasible to send it to our registered IC addresses as many people do not live at their official addresses.

If they wish to use our MyKAD as an authentication mechanism, then everyone needs to be supplied with a smart-card reader, which might be their game plan since Tricubes does sell a MyKAD reader. You can actually see some of their readers at the local banks.

If they want to have every Malaysian aged 18 and above sign up for voluntary registration on-line, then they will miss out a lot of people who are not bothered to sign up for such an account. I already have a dozen email accounts to manage. I do not need another one, especially an insecure one provided by the government.

Besides a branding exercise and a way for helping Tricubes sell more MyKAD readers, I do not really see the rationale behind this project. Everyone who needs the email, already have a number of free emails provided by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel and it is far easier for the government to have people opt-in and have them register their email addresses if they wish to correspond on-line.

As for the argument of this being a secure method of communication – NO EMAIL COMMUNICATION IS SECURE. Email is, by definition, transmitted in the clear. That is why we have technologies such as PGP to help protect the privacy of our conversations. Geographical location is not a factor in this. There is no way that the government can build a secure email system unless they use PKI. Incidentally, all the 64K MyKADs can be loaded with a certificate that can be used for this purpose. The story deepens.

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Race Sub-LIES

I sometimes wonder what has happened to the standards of journalism in the country. When lies are perpetrated and continue to be promoted by the main-stream newspapers, I wonder if they should be sued for disseminating mis-information.

Some noise was recently made about a sub-race requirement in university application forms. According to TheStar:

The application form was available at the UPU website http://upu.mohe.gov.my and applicants were required to fill up the “race” column and indicate their sub-race or dialect group under the sub-divisions column.

Applications had closed on April 4.

For example, under the Indian category, there are eight sub-divisions: Malayalee, Punjabi, Sikh, Tamil, Telegu, Malabari, Indian Muslim and Orissa.

Malays are sub-divided into Bugis, Boyan, Banjar, Jawa, Jawi Pekan and Minangkabau.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are sub-divided into Cantonese, Foochow, Hainanese, Henghua, Hokchia, Hokchiu, Hokkien, Khek (Hakka), Kwongsai, Teochew, Kongfoo and Hylam while the sub-divisions for the Orang Asli include Negrito, Semai, Semalai, Temiar, Senoi and Penan.

“The information is required because the ministry needs to tally it with the data at the NRD to check their citizenship status when processing the applications,” said Higher Education Ministry management of student admission division principal assistant director Rosmin Md. Amin.

What a shit-load of LIES!

Any Malaysian with brains will know that this is bull. The excuse given does not hold muster, even under a cursory examination. I would like to ask how they plan to check this against the NRD when the NRD does not even collect that information. The only information that the NRD collects in their forms is keturunan (ethnicity/race).

Please, do not believe me. Go download the forms from the NRD yourself and check to see if they collect the information. I have checked the MyKAD application form, the MyKID application form, and even the birth-certificate form.

As an Assistant Registrar for the SPR, I have seen hundreds of ICs in the country. Sometimes, I have to read the contents off the MyKAD chip because the person may not know what is the official information inside. I have yet to see someone claim to be a Chindian. We all invariably fall into one of the ‘official’ races in Malaysia.

NADA. I call your bluff.

I challenge TheStar to actually verify the information that they are given. All they needed to do is to call up the NRD to find out where such sub-race details are actually captured correctly. Otherwise, they have just been fed a shit-load of LIES by the Ministry and it is their duty as journalists to point it out.

Why can’t they even do the simplest thing. Sheesh!

Gently Falling Ill

Damn, I think that I’m falling sick.

Working 7-days a week and pulling late-nighters does take its toll, I guess.

I am a zombie today. I can hardly stay awake but I need to do so. I hope that I’ll be able to get a good night’s rest tonight and kick up a storm tomorrow morning. Actually, I just hope to be able to wake up healthy tomorrow.

Sigh.

Meeting a Student

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet a former student of mine, at the local HSBC head-office. I was attending a talk there and this student of mine was there to sell HSBC products and services to the attendees. She seemed familiar but I could not place her exactly but she did remember me – I used to scold her a lot.

She was my very first piano student. I started teaching piano at the age of 12 and she was living next door to me at the time. So, while we were teacher and student, we were also neighbourhood friends and I often played together with her elder siblings. I can still remember hanging a string across lamp posts and using that for our street badminton games.

I could also remember that she had a bit of trouble with English. She came from a Chinese educated family and in those days, they did not teach English in Chinese schools until Primary 3. However, as I registered my students for examinations under the ABRSM, all the examinations were conducted in English – including written papers. So, I had to teach her some English too.

The solution to this problem still surprises me until this day. While she could read little English, she could understand the questions after reading it for more than a dozen times. If she did not understand the question, we would skip it and come back to it later after she answered some of the other questions. Honestly, that’s all I did. I made her repeatedly read the questions until she understood what was asked. It must’ve seemed like torture at the time, but it worked. I do not understand the reasons why, but it worked.

Today, she speaks English really well. She ended up graduating with a Finance degree and working at HSBC – dealing in customer service for Premier customers. If I ever qualify to open a Premier account in the future, I’ll probably call her up to do it – let her meet her quota and earn some commission.

This is a small world, really. I sometimes wonder what happened to the other dozen or so students of mine.