Filed under: en/Mobile
Here is a Google ad I saw on my gmail page:
BlackBerry®スマートフォン – ap.BlackBerry.com/JPN – ビジネスマンの為のスマートフォン。 世界基準のブラックベリー、販売中 !
It says, “BlackBerry smartphone – ap.BlackBerry.com/JPN – smartphone for businessman. BlackBerry, the World’s standard, on sale.
Deja Vu.. reminds me of Vodafone Japan that uses similar phrases of “world’s standard”. Either RIM is ignorant, or simply very confident it could do better than the now defunct Vodafone Japan. Japanese handset market couldn’t care less about world’s standard, the question is whether BlackBerry supports (it does not) QR code, FeliCa, 1seg TV and other must-have Japanese mobile goodies. “Always connected”, or “push mail” are simply not enough to lure users in Japan to BlackBerry, as those are available on all handsets in Japan, even the stupidest ones.
Filed under: en/General
At least currently, Google mail’s capacity grows at 4 Bytes/second. You can watch it grows on login screen like below:
I previously wrote that I need additional 4GB per year. At the rate of 4B/s, in a year there will only be an increase of 4B x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 126.1 MB 
Hopefully there will be rate ups from time to time.
Filed under: en/General
The other day I was given this link which tells about Yahoo Indonesia and a research company announcing their research on Indonesians’ online behavior:
Internet, Kita, dan Masa Depan
http://cetak.kompas.com/read/xml/2009/03/27/03024518/internet.kita..dan.masa.depan.
I am a bit skeptical about statistics like this, since research companies like AC Nielsen, IDC etc often lack the knowledge they need to analyze the market. They are already famous so they dig lots of money, though their research staffs lack the knowledge to analyze the market.
So I decided to find out by myself.
I took Facebook as my target, as Indonesians are said to be crazy of Facebook and my observation shows it is true. I wanted to find out how long is an Indonesian online on Facebook everyday. Just logging in into Facebook makes one’s status online. I thought I needed to check who among my friends on Facebook that get online and when. I decided to use Adium, since it has Facebook client and senses when a friend becomes online. I thought Macruby would be nice since it has Cocoa natively, but after trying for a while I thought it was too much to learn and I only got a few hours. I turned to AppleScript, which is also new to me, though I used to be programming on HyperCard, its predecessor. I finally coded the stat tool in a few hours using AppleScript, Adium and Growl. Growl is only used for visual feedback, because the script must be running throughout the whole data gathering session.
The next day I ran the script and gathered the data from 7:30AM to 17:30AM West Indonesia Time. I got quite consistent results, as follows:
1. Around 25% of my Facebook friends (more than about 99% of them are Indonesians) went online that day
2. Average total online time among friends who went online that day is about 60 minutes (i.e., 1 hour)
3. Standard deviation is high (around 60), indicating that total online time varies a lot among friends
4. Average total online time for the whole population (which includes those who did not go online that day) is about 15 minutes
My tool has room for improvement indeed (e.g., I am polling once every 60 seconds, so users who went online and offline in between pollings won’t be noticed), and the sample for this statistic is too small compared to the population (the sample is 259 friends, and the Indonesian population on Facebook is around 800,000 users, according to Facebook Ad). But at least this shows that there is a good probability that 200,000 Indonesians (i.e., 25% of 800,000) are online on Facebook every working day during working hours;)
Now I wanted to know what would be the result if I measure during the night (off-hours) and during weekends. This might give some insights on whether there are significant mobile users logging in into Facebook. In Japan, more users use mobile to access Mixi, a Japanese SNS, than PC. By the way, Mixi was made by an (former) Indonesian named Batara Kesuma 
No, sorry, this is not April’s Fool. I really did the above research 
Here is the AppleScript code. Comments are welcome but be gentle, as this is my first AppleScript script and I coded it in a few hours. I originally wrote the data to file, but then changed the implementation to use Sqlite, so some garbage is still in the code.
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Japan won World Baseball Classic (WBC) again. What I admire about this country is also what I think as its weakness: it is incredibly good at what others created. Americans invented car, Japan became no.1 in producing it. Americans invented baseball and home to the Major League Baseball, but Japan won all WBC so far. This time, Japan even beated USA quite easily. This has given many rising powers, such as China and Korea, a hint. Japan has copied what it can copy from USA, and worked to be number one at it. If only Japan is also good at inventing like the Americans, it would have everything it wants. Perhaps this world is fairer than I tought, no single country has it all.
Filed under: en/General
I have been having this strange problem that decreases productivity and increases stress level: the MacBook Pro would start up with a little less than 1GB of free disk space, instead of the usual 2GB to 3GB, and then it gradually decreases as I use the MBP, and then it will quickly comes to about zero free disk space and I have to reboot.
I am not sure what did I install that causes this, but before this memory has been a problem too. So I browsed around and found out that extra RAM for MBP is not as expensive as I thought (yes, I have been ignorant). I then upgraded the MBP from 2GB of RAM to 4GB, an increase of 2GB, and voila, MBP suddenly starts with 2.7GB of free disk space! I didn’t delete files, so it seems that MBP has been paging or doing something similar that uses around 2GB of disk space from the start. Now with 4GB of RAM, it does no longer need to do that, so I don’t only have more memory available but also more free disk space.
