red1 open source empire

Hooters of Bogota

2012-01-20T04:20:00.000-08:00

I just concluded my talk at ACIS, north side of Bogota, Colombia last night where I have been this January month. As usual I always divert from my planned talking slides. In fact I completely forgotten about the slides.

The loss of persistence memory started when I showed the Latino audience my translated talking brief from the ACIS website.

I was thinking of always going interactive, where instead of Talk1.0 (just broadcasting to death your audience) I will make it Talk2.0 which is asking questions first and make it viral from there.

So I pointed to my 3 point agenda of "How to become an Open Source Guru in 3 easy steps". Starting with step 1: Publish or Perish. I asked the crowd, 'Are not these steps easy? Would you be able to carry them out?'. One participant raised his hand and said that publishing is very difficult as they do not know what to publish.

I then kicked into my EgoBragAboutKarma2.0 mode and showed them how that very noon after lunch I published in my Facebook this photo on the right. With the caption on how talking about Open Source leads to talking about Chicas3.0.

So publishing is easy if you just do it on instinct rather than worrying about whether what you going to commit to the Web is controversial, inappropriate, indecent or irrelevant. Hell, people love audacious originally yours content. That is what makes the Web so, so viral. And you be running out of time if you linger.

The concept of always "Under Construction" and "Release Early, Update Often" is born the day the Web could be touched by your home computer. Web2.0 means it is interactive. And you as a human is an interactive being. One-way broadcasting has go on far too long until you have become an absolute zombie, perfect consumer down-loader, taking in every scripted line. That is boring and mundane. Your creativity has perished with it.

Your natural self of wanting to tell the world how good or bad you feel, or how close you come to arriving that morning is a schizophrenic journey of innocent guilt caught in hapless deprived childhood. Today, the Web in all its glory is waiting for you to push the highly over-sensitized 'Send' button.

So what if most of your friends gasped in displeasure. So what if no one even reads it. A tell-tale sign in this blog that has go on quite a number of years with almost no feedback comment. Hmm, well it may take some more patience. And some Hooters of Bogota may know how to help the low urge to touch back. (After the talk last night, I wanted to treat the folks for a meal and they couldn't find a good place except there in fun, fun Bogota.)

Another answer given by the audience why humans today fear about taking the red pill of getting into this dangerous, I mean, exciting life of Open Source is the 'comfort zone'. I disrupted that point of view by citing scenarios where no one, no matter in which developed nation or with a highly skilled job is safe. I quoted my experience the month before in Paris, where a French developer confessed to me that he is about to be laid off from a comfortably paid job.

Bogota is still quite conservative on the merit of publishing early and updating often. But slowly, surely, with me visiting them now and then from now on, I think I am able to get the message across to them.

(to be cont'd. That amigo who took most of the hooters' shots has not send me the photos to intespaced the text evenly here. Grrr. You, I mean I, need them badly now. Will check my email and update so perhaps in Armenia or Cali as I be flying off shortly at 10am to the land of more chicas than you can say 'chicks').

Approve SOPA, PIPA and see real anarhcy

2012-01-19T04:08:00.000-08:00

Is it not so pathetic that when someone wants to take away our God/Dhamma/Tao/Allah-granted freedom, we have to beg, beg, beg (translate to petition here there everywhere)?

To me we should do absolutely nothing. See how far they can go with this. It will create more WIKILEAKS, Anonymous Hackers, CHE Guevaras, and you better join us (those smart mere slaves among you :) ).

I would really look forward to the highly patented, lobby-backed corporate US Senate for doing this. It will really create more anarchy which what the Web is really about. From anarchy is your individual freedom.

Institutions and excessive laws are nothing but unwanted walls with solids on it. Don't get me wrong. Gandhi is an institution. So is Mandela. So is CHE Guevara. They are icons, voices of conscience. Humans. Not walls. Thus not deaf.

OK, USA. Bring it on!

GWT upgrade using Eclipse Indigo

2012-01-02T21:42:00.000-08:00

My last days in Paris for the 2012 New Year went with a bang as I prepare to leave tomorrow for Bogota. No, I was not banged by any femmes françaises. What blew me away is the last 3 days checking out ADempiereGWT, left in our project coffers since 2009, never in production but a good basis to upgrade to what latest GWT has in store.

It seems much changed since the day I first played with it. For one Cypal Studio is no longer en vogue. And has Eclipse risen to such occasion and height. After upgrading my Eclipse Indigo with the latest toolset and GWT2.4.0 app for my Mac-book, I could create a new empty project space (without sample code template) and migrate the old code to new. I could say this last sentence with ease thanks to a friend called 'Google'.

Some parts need changing starting with the gxt.jar which I ugraded to gxt-2.2.5-gwt22.jar or else it won't compile (will say something beyond french like IncompatibleClassChangeError: Found interface com.google.gwt.core.ext.typeinfo.JClassType).

After some more moaning and heaving sighs, caused by some caching of your original project namespace as your GWT class-entry point descriptor xml and changing it won't budge, I finally shut her gasps with leaving both in - old and new xmls. It then GWT Compile nicely and Run as Web Application produced an URL to test. Below is the movie of the whole 9 minute orgasm.

As you can see the ADempiere app did not go through the whole climax well. More foreplay needed it seems. We shall complete it with pleasure thanks to the compliments of our sponsor - Sysnova BANGLADESH.

À tout à l'heure!

(Postscript)
A week later I solved this in Bogota (after 4 back-to-back days of solitary hacking)

Adopting Linus Circle of Trust

2011-12-18T22:45:00.000-08:00

After a tiring long 6 year on-off war in my ADempiere project about 'trust' within a stable branch of codebase, I was led to discover how Linus Torvalds, the Lord of the GNU Kernel did it.

I then setup the same Circle of Trust he talked about in my own Sourceforge.net space. Those other admins are whom i just met on the road to Berlin from Paris, trekking through Austria.

Why do I suddenly trust them? Well they help me do things in this wondrous project and played wonderful hosts and we had face to face discussions which let us communicate and share better or best rather than online forums mostly. They also trusted my role as the 'benevolent leader'.

In fact we first met via online forums and chatrooms within our Open Source ERP project. But politically wise (beyond just these peers) I am always aligned to the best coders in town which is Carlos Ruiz and Low Heng Sin. So I have extended my circle into Rings of Trust extending quite viral throughout the world.

You can easily smell that from the Jenkins stack we setup based on our little roadmap and works.

(Pcitures: TOP - taken by Dietmar Berlinger of Austria of us having our own mini barcamp in Volker's (right) home office in Kempten, South Germany. Later, Thomas Bayen (left) topped it up by inviting us to his Krefeld home higher north.
RIGHT - Those rare sessions with the almighty coder, Low Heng Sin who happens to stay 20 minutes drive away from my Kuala Lumpur farm.
LOWER - (To be put up later a prized photo with the omnipresent Carlos Ruiz in Bogota, Colombia which i am due to visit next month from January 4th till February 14th 2012, compliments of Thomas Bayen) (Finally i arrived! And posted this last photo. So now i have completed this big circle!).

Google Gravity makes DotComs obselete

2011-12-15T01:33:00.000-08:00

I learnt something important from Thomas Bayen last week in Krefeld. I think he is the origin or quite original on this subject because i Googled 'Google Gravity' and did not quite get the same thing he meant.

What he mean is that users today do not care what site or domain name you have. It is your content that matters. Users will just Google up whatever they want and they will hit whatever content relevant to the search out there.

Say for instance we have this war going on in our ADempiere project over control of assets and domain space among which there are squatters or opportunists stealing our domain names and hoping to get alot of hits from it. Well, the truth is that no one knows your name and probably just search for the category or exact question they have for example, "Free ERP solution for beer industry" and guess where will they hit? Most likely not ADempiere or even FreeERP or OpenERP if there is some site out there already having such information within its content base.

It is from more sheer content that users repeatedly hit that makes the creator or domain name no matter how obscure famous. Take for instance I always hit roseindia or vogella when asking about Java issues. I do not hit oracle.com or java.com that readily.

Thus Thomas Bayen theory to me seems right. Create real content, and the world will find you. Not holding the right domain name does not matter. This fits into the earlier theory I learnt in the 2000s during the dot-com crash era that it is the 3 Cs - Content, Community, Commerce.

That is what I did also at my www.red1.org site which harbours content of Compiere and now ADempiere and onwards to the future iDempiere.

(pic shows Thomas Bayen with one of his twin daughter Laura up in the attic where he held me captive for some days as his guest).

The ADempiere Wars - Institution and Dictatorship in Open Source Project

2011-12-03T00:36:00.000-08:00

Oops, I done it again! I started WWIII in the ADempiere Project. Well, once a Darth Vader, always a returning Vader. And this time I am surprised there are still many Star Wars 'Empire Strikes Back' supporters out there, prompting me for a takeover and I promptly put up this notice.

Wait a minute. If what I am saying which is that the ADempiere e.V Foundation setup at my prompting in Berlin with proper by-laws and elections is too business-like, deaf, dumb and many other Oxford terms i could muster, then how come I have control of the www.adempiere.org URL? Well, uh... I hid it upon retirement when them authorities dropped by to search my home from brick to brick for the last remnant of our freedom and dignity.

Today many people in my community shudders if I had given that URL back, putting all eggs in one basket, as ADeV has also taken control in the dark of the night the ADempiere Inc, USA and brand. As John Lennon's Imagine song goes, "But I am not the only one..". I read a blog, that suggest its OK to keep such assets in another basket. So that is why during the founding days in 2006 I placed the bigger www.adempiere.com asset in Carlos Ruiz of Colombia.

Now, I want to make one clear remark about Benevolent Dictatorship. Firstly there is equal potential fault with Dictatorship as with Democracy. But what can be evil in both rules are not some trigger happy Saddam or US Marine, but an inept closed door execution of power. A Democracy can be equally cruel, vicious, deadly, suppressive, fatal, humungous, audacious, blatant, deaf, dumb and many other Oxford terms I could muster. A dictatorship like Linus can be really great as the person is open, swears outside the Queen's English, approachable and can tolerate Big Mac.

What is important is finding the right person for the job and having the streets wide enough for any eventual popular uprising to take place, just in case. Which, by the way seems to be the popular choice to make a statement in most modern spick-and-span democracies.

The ADempiere project has voiced in an anarchic fashion of their preference to return to the good old days when I was up there, inefficient but effective, clumsy but loved, always siding the top contributors, always allowing reverts of bad code, always allowing just anyone to walk in and shake my hand and sit right next to me. In fact the person who removed my admin rights was the one whom I gave the admin rights without much ceremony. Of course this time he quoted some obscure dubious convention and rule of a central command and control that is the answer to my previous anarchic rule.

Just that this new institution often do not show a human face. They show their own (interpretation of) by-laws, made in the 'silence' outside forums, without chat logs and excuses of busi-ness busy, while our top contributors slogged at it, code by code, swan egg by swan egg, feeding the masses including the Animal Farm new occupants.

Now when I open my mouth and stated a desire to return to anarchic rule, they cited need to stick to democracy, and when we started nominating citizens that supported us, they began demanding for immigration papers, and when we began exposing bad code in trunk, they cited loss of business as a direct consequence of my foolish expose. They even use Godwin's Law. I have this to say back:

To hell with your business. This is a Bazaar. 'THIS IS SPARTA!!!' would sound really cool, but I have no fight with the Persians. Just those democrats.

:)

Openbravo POS ActiveMQ integration to ADempiere

2011-09-21T14:32:00.000-07:00

The highly versatile TinaPOS, now Openbravo POS can be populated easily with list of Products, its prices, and even its On Hand Qty for different locations. And it can be synched to any remote location in the world. We tested this well in the Open Source Lab at the Asia Pacific College, Makati, talking to the ActiveMQ server in Munich. Testing done with 5 separate POS stations concurrently. Detail log notes here but you ought to see a movie of it too.

There is a detailed PDF Guide together with all the rest of the codes here.

After the daily sales are made, the POS stations can synch back to the remote ERP server again via ActiveMQ and the ERP then import the orders to get a virtual but accurate view of the different store dispensed quantities. The activeMQ flavour used is Stomp. It can be set to persistence mode as you can see the real server in use in Munich at: http://jenkins.idempiere.com

This integration might be of great interest to the community particularly that Openbravo is showing signs of 'fee' tendency:

UISpec4J with Fitnesse Test POS

2011-08-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

As usual I come running into here whenever something like this blows me away. UISpec4J is used to test Java GUI Panels,and I discovered it to test our JavaPOS. Been able to integrate it into Fitnese, which was another thing that blew me away so wicked that i forgot to come back here to tell you about it in time. Below is what our JavaPOS looks like and imagine having to do a real test you cannot avoid but getting a program to click on it like a touchscreen would:

To get UISpec4J incorporated into your suite of testing code is just a matter of introducing its interface like I did below:

import org.uispec4j.UISpec4J; import org.uispec4j.UISpecTestCase; public abstract class ModelLogin extends UISpecTestCase { static { UISpec4J.init(); }

And then in my calling test class that extends ModelLogin, I implement the getMainWindow() method:

public Window getMainWindow() { cnt = false; final Window[] result = new Window[3]; WindowInterceptor.init(new MainClassTrigger(PosApplication.class, new String[0])) .process(new WindowHandler(){ public Trigger process(Window window) throws Exception{ result[0]=window; window.getButton("Ok").click(); //1st window login preset to SuperUser return window.getButton("Ok").triggerClick(); //2nd window Client is preset to GardenAdmin and StoreCentral } }) .process(new WindowHandler(){ public Trigger process(Window window) throws Exception{ result[1]=window; //2 button pressed, with values passed from FitnesseStory script window.getButton(selected).click(); window.getTextBox("BPartner").setText(bpartner); window.getTextBox("BPartner").pressKey(Key.ENTER); window.getButton("Plus").click(); window.getButton(selected2).click(); return window.getButton("Payment").triggerClick(); // } }) .process(new WindowHandler(){ public Trigger process(Window window) throws Exception{ result[2]=window; return window.getButton("Ok").triggerClick(); // } }) .run(); return result[1]; }

The final output is resolved by the Fitnesse layer into a wiki-styled webpage:

(right click on it to View a fuller Image)

As you can see the above is done by Fitnesse and the reason why it is also very mind-blowing. All this thanks to Free Source. I am making a nice living out of it, and it feels great to make a contribution back here and in my ADempiere project as a powerful QA suite.

iDempiere - ADempiere on OSGi

2011-05-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

Finally it is out! iDempiere the dream project of ADempiere or rather a nightmare as no one really appreciate those 2 real kitchen boys that worked at it till fruition. So that is why i am dedicating my forum and thots to announce their success. I am also suggesting a free icon i found in google to be its logo for the time being. Yep, it means someone cracked the egg and cooked it for us to eat it.

Drums roll please.

Ladies and gentlemen, may i present to you the latest in Open Source ERP technological framework - iDempiere. See http://demo.idempiere.com

What Carlos Ruiz has done is to migrate the latest improvements from 361 onto the new OSGi framework done by Low Heng Sin. Carlos also created the installation scripts such as for ImportDB. He is still struggling with some multi-platform flavours and from there it is my turn to put his produce onto a NSIS Windows installer.

Been OSGi means it is now more modular and easier to maintain on a grander scale. This version release has not been named yet, and we leave it to its creator Low Heng Sin to pick its logo or baby name preference. I like to also suggest the slogan to be "To fulfill, as promised". The words 'ADempiere' was meant to be 'to fulfill completely, with honour'.

At this moment it is released as iDempiere 4.0.

Another community member, Banym from Germany has contributed a test server for the above. Low Heng Sin is in Malaysia, 20 minutes away as i often referred his location as. Carlos Ruiz is all the way on the other side of me in Colombia. This has been a truly global affair made possible via a true free software sharing spirit and the Internet, we now can make dreams happen as if we are in the same room. Speaking of which, we now have our own preferred chatroom at irc.freenode.net #idempiere.

Kudos to Low Heng Sin and Carlos Ruiz!

(postscript rant: The temporarily ruling government in ADempiere will NOT announce about this as we are considered an exiled and unofficial fork. There were calls for us to be expelled and all our work as breaking their advertising rules. We have iterated that bragging about what you contributed is the FOSS way and not contributing what you bragged is NOT.

In fact the banner that stands in www.adempiere.com says it all. May 1st has passed. Where is their release? Or in Linus' words, 'Show me your code'. In fact much of the relevant and good code in present day ADempiere has been Low Heng Sin and Carlos Ruiz's. How can taking these kitchen boys code and flaming them as abandoning ADempiere at the same time makes sense? We won't be surprised that ADempiere takes iDempiere and claimed it as official ADempiere release. That is perfectly ok in line with the spirit of GPL. And we won't be surprised that thereupon they claimed us as an unofficial project and delete any of our representation in ADempiere SourceForge project, classifying us as having 'abandoned ship'. That does not look ok, even with the spirit of GPL to maintain credit where it is due.

This may come over as queer and even tasted bittersweet revenge in someone like Jorg Janke's lips for we now can grasp how JJ might have felt when he found us in his kitchen eating his cakes. So for the record here I rather call ourselves the unofficial fork of Compiere, and not ADempiere so as to maintain that spirit of GPL.

By this we are not trying to put anyone in flames. But records must be set right and shenanigans must be exposed to protect the contributors and also the often unaware community of users.

We are not abandoning the project as we are still trustees of it (Carlos holds www.adempiere.com and i hold www.adempiere.org from day 1, never abusing but protecting it from abusers). We shall return to it once the poison is removed, either by way of fresh elections due in a year's time or a popular grassroots uprising).

Why Do I Want To Help You?

2011-04-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

If no one else is helping you. Then we can. We are contributors. We upload while others download. We want to be famous as a contributor, not as someone who just brag and actually does nothing.

Open Source is important in our work as it ensures non-redundancy, worldwide adoption and faster turn around time in quality. Many have misunderstood the non-free lunch precept and think they can lock up via indirect licensing such as now happening with 'Open Core' or commercial open source as in the likes of Compiere and OpenBravo (the worst kind of fork of Compiere as it is so unethical to reap off another project for its own profit).

Don't get me wrong. Profit is fine but patenting it is not. The Bible and Quran were not patented and opening it up only enriches the world and made them more valuable in time. So is it with contributions. We get branded. We get jobs and we feed our kids. But others keep saying, "I need to feed my kids" when they already have enough. That outlives its excuse. That is not an excuse. That is greed.

In short I want a good life where Karma shines on me. :)

I have uploaded another movie above for developers to learn how ADempiere code works. Enjoy your life while you can!

Please subscribe to my youtube as i be loading lots in coming weeks. If you want to help back just buy me a valid ScreenFlow registration number (non-crack please!) or other great software for Apple Mac use. Or just donate to my paypal (red1(a)red1.org) and say how much is shared with Carlos Ruiz as he is my partner in heaven. :)

The Killer Windows Installer

2011-02-07T15:45:00.000-08:00

NSIS is helluva killer. It creates MS Windows based installers that go next, next, next, finish. It is something that we could only imagine some years ago for our ADempiere ERP project. Imagine a killer ERP (as a FOSS offering against the killing SAP, fees wise) that works out of the box. No, i am not eating proprietary Microsoft here for breakfast. Its Windows platform is still the defacto dominant platform - about 70% in our user base, and 90% countrywide in my Malaysia. That majority will be a wasteland if you cannot push your killer wares into it. But imagine if I myself can do this killer. Why, I be more famous. But the real itch here is not just the kudos but that something smart out there that you did not conquer. That Mongol gene in me kicks in.

Someone (Kai Schaeffer) beat us to it when he created our first NSIS installer in 2009. Since then no one wanted to upgrade it making it getting older and older as release after releases pass by. That installer was for ADempiere Release 342. When i was teaching ADempiere in Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand last year, i asked some of my trainees to take on this 'easy' job and upgrade the installer, since Kai has uploaded all his scripts online. One java expert in the class did, but it was too large for him to upload back.

Back in Malaysia, that itch growls again. Why not me? I took a look at Kai's script, and without C experience, I turned my head away in fright. I left the pain of looking at it, and few months later just before last new year, with some sponsorship to review ADempiere on OSGI it bought me some time and some idea to provide the OSGI addon via a better base installer. So i gripped my teeth and took a deeper look into Kai's NSIS scripts. After a few hours the C kinda got into me. It is more straighter than Java code and that has its own advantage of grasping in thin air.

Upon further researching from NSIS online resource, i found out cool stuff such as adding in background image and background music. Ahah! Now i can force everyone to listen to my 'Promise' song i did with Mellow Mark in Potsdam and Toki of Malaysia. And so I did (described in this PDF).

At the end of it, this experience teaches me a lesson about been a good hacker or developer:
1. Learn to face your greatest fear of the unknown script. It usually take about 2 hours of stumbling around reading online. In some cases 2 days.
2. Learn to do things in solitary confinement. Having someone around to cling on won't help your learning curve. When would you graduate from been a nobody?
3. It truly feels good when you take each step up the rung of gurudom.

Why Commercial Open Source Has An Issue

2010-08-18T14:49:00.000-07:00

Reading the creator of Compiere's own words, it was both a surprise and a prediction came true for some of us in the Open Source community. His words, though grabbing me by the throat, contains fossil evidence to the contrary. He is biting lips in between the lines of what life was for him in Compiere, which he admittedly sold off to a closed thinking buyer. It was predictable that without coming to terms with the community, it will be difficult if not impossible to sustain an Open Source software project. (Not so for proprietary ones as the business model is different. They made money (first) through closed patents and license fees. But as the proprietary market is becoming saturated and dying, Open Source becomes the avant garde of softare business today.)

But to say as I said in my topic title is quite something else. There are other successful commercial Open Source projects such as [fill in the blanks], and they will argue that they have a balanced, [fill in the blanks] that are sustainable and still endeared to the community. I would say, 'Not so fast'. Community verdicts usually takes time and for Compiere it took few months that year of 2006 and about 4 years later to finally sink in that it is not only shrinking but is put up on the guillotine and sold off to a closed owner. It is a candidate of the Open Source ERP graveyard.

In Compiere's case it was at war with its community. Same as the case of Mambo at war with Joomla. In such cases, yes, the commercial side has a big problem. But for those that are taking good care of the community they are quite safe. Still, I am saying here, 'Be afraid, be really [fill in the blanks]'.

I am not sure of the latest with SpringSource, that guards the Spring Framework, but when it went cuckoo, er I mean commercial with delayed free bug reports, the community went cuckoo, er I mean nuts over it. Perhaps SpringSource has done something about it, but whatever it is, it cannot thread far from the community promise of both Freedom and Free Lunch. (This is my theory against Richard Stallman. He said Freedom, Not Free Lunch.)

The community of free riders, er I mean respectable folks have to have your ware without even a registration form to fill in. For every good contributor in a project, there is a 99.9% lurker force out there. Lurking. But it is a force no doubt. It is the viral networked unseen empire called the down-loaders. Otherwise remove the "Download" button. Just remember where all your top ranking, rave reviews, [fill in the blanks] and multi-million hits come from before doing so.

Now I also said 'surprise' because we did not take Jorg Janke to give in that easily. I mean 'selling off' Compiere is like suicide. Of your own baby that is. Ok, wrong term. Homicide. Er, I mean infanticide. Anyway it is like a reincarnation of the creator as we can now see in his blog, a series of articles that examines the model of Open Source somewhat touching on the dynamics between commercial and community aspects. Still not to my insatiable liking but it is pretty well thought out and I dare say an authoritative sounding blog on the subject. Am looking forward to what can he really do in his next life, er I mean 'do next' in his life.

Google DevFest in Kuala Lumpur

2010-07-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

DevFest from Google's team last Friday at Technology Park Malaysia was so cool to show the magic of Google API v3 and HTML5. They certainly rock.

So last nite i start playing with the toys and managed to do this for my farm home. http://www.red1.org/aaa/GoogleMapTest.html. Should not be hard to add directions to get out from there.

While smoking some hashish outside the hall, i heard a new term which is MASHUP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_web_application_hybrid

Something i looked for for quite some time which is to integrate Google Map to the ADempiere ERP application's Web Service. So next time the users need not login into an so old fashioned app but log onto a map that shows all the locations of their clients, assets, logistics, deliveries in colour codes and animated fashion.

If anyone out there is interested to join me in some pot i mean hacking let's rock together.

p/s Here is a Geocoding example from Google where normal addresses are located on the map by converting them into Latitude and Longitude coordinates! Put in your house address in the box and try it!

Open Source ERP For Muslim Market Supply Chain

2010-07-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

Because I have been stressing all this while that FOSS ERP is critical for governmental linked use to achieve 4 important national objectives, ADempiere is now getting traction in Thailand and Libya and Perak, a state in the Federation of Malaysia, my home country. The 4 objectives are:
1. Sovereignty - a country has to have absolute control over its software assets critically in the age of borderless web
2. Interoperability - a country has to have all its IT assets talk to each other without license hindrance and delays
3. Ownership - a country absolutely must have full ownership of its assets including software
4. Sustainability - having resources to take over in the long run the place of vendors' interest and lockins.

To pursue the above 4, a country must take steps to learn and build resources that is beyond vendor control. It must institutionalise such resources. I been stressing that this is the missing link and greatest advantage to countries that care to see this fact.

Fortunately there are takers and now there is the establishing of ADempiere.ASIA and soon ADempiere.AFRICA and ADempiere.ARABIYA

Below is a statement issued by the organiser of the MOU which was witnessed by the Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand:

There was some progress of this MOU since HSC, HGS and ADEmpiere have been moving for setting up a training course on HOST (Halal Open Source Technology) for SMEs and technicians at Chulalongkorn University. HSC is also in process of preparation of ICT office at our new site in Chulalongkorn University, you are all welcome to visit and utilize all services there. HIT (HAL-Q integrated technology) is underway for being implemented into 12 enterprises of supply chain including 1 transportation, 1 ware house, 1 farm, 1 abattoir and 8 food facories. We expect to integrate ADempiere ERP to our HIT within this year. The success if any will benefit all signors of this MOU, anyway, please realize that such achievement requires collaboration for field trial. We shall therefore let all of you know the progress.

Meeting With Heng Sin

2010-06-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i took time off to meet up with our ADempiere greatest java coder, Low Heng Sin. What he did, for one, with our ZK Ajax UI is phenomenal. Wherever i go among our ADempiere top coders, they revered him as a class above them. It is inexplicable that the greatest guru in our project is only 20 minutes away from my farm home, where the project was born online in the first place! Not thousands of miles away such as in Colombia where Carlos Ruiz is, in Romania where Teo Sarca is, in Bulgaria where Trifon Trifonov is from, in Berlin where Karsten Thiemann is, in Melbourne where Paul Bowden is, but just in Tropicana township off the toll highway that i often commute on, whenever i venture out physically.

I seldom meet him as often as i should out of respect and also the composition of his character. He doesn't like to hold the stage nor talk politics. Just java and more java. On Open Source projects he has much experience and my intent yesterday is to get out from him some idea on how our ADempiere project should head to. He began by saying he did not support the idea of a PMC that has control only on part of the trunk or release branch but must be totally on the whole repository of codes. He recount how other FOSS projects are strict about quality of coders allowed into their fold.

"5 mistakes and you are out", he says. This makes me wonder. I have wished to be with a guru and now Karma has brought me one right before my eyes but yet i have spent 3 years not delving much but mostly into the never ending politics of our bazaar. The infighting was fun at first but now is a drag as the software is not expanding as fast as it would, but more poision as more charlatans ride into town blasting away minus the needed contribution that makes up a world class ERP system.

After an hour long chat, i invited him to lunch at a new cafe below his small office and we chatted some more. I had Wariola with me and he also picked Heng Sin's mind on virtualization issues. We took turns taking snapshots with Heng Sin. After saying goodbye and expressing our gratitude for his time, Wariola told me that he finds Heng Sin too casual, relaxed and easily taken for granted. Well, i replied that it is always the case with the real top great guys i know.

My Last Message to ADempiere SourceForge

2010-06-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

As promised to myself and some of you i paid a visit to Heng Sin and have a cordial chat about the present situation or near 4 yr long situation with the ADempiere project. I am not at liberty to reveal the contents but only to a select few in private email as i want something from him to turn out beautiful rather than ugly and continually wasted in the end. So please no private email to me as i will not reply. I am taken in greatly by his example, deeds and soft spoken words. I asked him to be leader but he doesn't seem interested. Anyway, it is an insult to feed him to the wolves. I hereby quit referring to myself as temporal leader and follow his example of do highly and speak low. I will bury my head in coding but karma knows how many decades before i can come and show something comparable to what he does. But i will just do that. I like trifon or victor or other project admin to remove my project admin status. I surrender www.adempiere.org to ADeV and remain a honorary member there. I shall no longer monitor this forum nor speak out in defense of truth and justice. I have said i know how this will end. However i remain a friend to those who still regard me as a friend and shall talk about other things that friends do. But i cease to be signing myself as 'red1' and leave this fantasy for good. I will continue traveling to evangelise about the ADempiere project not as founder nor leader but just evangelist. I will tell the audience of the good thinkers and coders here and to follow them and them only. I will continue to form benevolent movements not for profit and help governments in software sovereignty, interoperability, ownership and sustainability.

Redhuan D. Oon

Why I Admire Bill Gates

2009-08-31T19:38:00.000-07:00

DISCLAIMER - I am not an employee of Microsoft and I am not been paid by them (Though i wish i were).

1. Bill Gates strikes me (allegorically meant that he impressed me due to some story i hear throughout the years) as someone who is a real good business thinker.

2. On the way he pulled IBM into the biggest deal of the century with the desktop MSDOS when he doesn't even have a working MSDOS yet at that time. Tell me how many business leaders you know who can do that? Most i know here only wait for subsidies.

3. On how he turned his whole ship around before it sinks during the Netscape dominance days. Tell me how many captains can turn his ship around in such a typhoon. The only i know here is Dr. Mahathir. The rest will ponder about selling their souls off.

4. On how he replied to a Senate Congressional hearing that fines him USD1 million per day under some strange law for becoming the only one,
"It is all just an idea. Any 16 yr old kid can come up with his own and wipe me out the next day. So don't punish me that the world has no such kid yet".

Well, one such kid did emerge. Its name is Google.

(here is one good speech for Harvard graduation, some 30 years later)

Live and Die Song Tribute To Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T02:16:00.000-07:00

'Live & Die' by red1, Toki (Malaysia) and Sidi Daoud (Mellow Mark, Germany) was rendered at the morning the news was breaking about Michael Jackson premature passing. May Allah bless MJ.

Song by Toki/red1 (composed August 2007)
Lyrics by red1
Music arrangement and vocals by Mellow Mark (June 26, 2009)
Raw content here is made Creative Commons 3.0 pending future arrangement.

=Live and Die=
You have always sung this song
Since the day that you were born
Till the day you're gone;
You may look everywhere
Thinking there is something there
It may take you long

-chorus-
I will make you a promise, i will take you there
To see what you've never seen before
This the path you take, this the path you die,
So you'll be and be evermore

I can take you all the way, You can be there everyday, you will learn to fly
You can sing, you can cry, the world open far and wide, you will live and die

-repeat chorus-

Here i am, wondering what will i be
In a world, full of lust, with fools of certainty

I will go up to the mountain, i will build my temple there
no longer i look down below us.
No more sorrow i will bear.

I can take you all the way, You can be there everyday, you will learn to fly
You can sing, you can cry, the world open far and wide, you will live and die

-repeat chorus-

(listen to the metal less version )
(this is the original unarranged)

A Compierean Story 2004

2009-05-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

This prospect is already a client when I introduced the ImportPrice Loader based on Compiere in 2004 This client is a large multi-national business dealing in trinkets and geomancy charms. It has many challenges such as:

1. Third party POS at retail outlets that require importing of its daily sales orders. That is done via mapping to the ImportOrder Loader. However the system does not have a Import Price one and so I need to create for it.

2. Legacy data of thousands of products and past ledgers that require scrubbing and migrating to the new system.

3. The main contractor who secured this project and engages me to resolve technical issues who assumes wrongly that this application, Compiere at that time is bug free.

This point about assuming open source projects to be bug free is interesting. In Compiere’s case, though it was open source, it was still new and maturing at that time. It also did not practice an open policy to accept bug remedies so as to protect its idea of intellectual property. Thus been a new maturing project is bound to have more bugs than expected. Also those bugs are what I termed as ‘Discovery’ bugs which are like bumping into them in the middle of the night. As I or no one else around has understanding or access to the minds behind the software we would not know what to expect from it. Any bug found is like an uncharted part of a map. They were disastrous for my client that time and the project quickly overran its banks, into months beyond the year.

For the ADempiere project, being a community fork of Compiere, there were much more practitioners and developers working with the same codebase and evolving their collective experience quickly thus producing enough ‘map’ material of the monster in their hands. Thus we could quickly resolve serious bugs and holes within the system. We could also figure out how to extend the model in its architectural sense. Carlos Ruiz of Colombia is chiefly responsible of noticing the need to control extensions by enforcing Centralised Record ID and use of the ModelValidator to protect core processes from mutating. However he was not the only one to think in that fashion.

Previously there were already the XML2AD by Marco Lombardo, 2Pack by Robert Klein, and ADCK by Trifon Trifonov.

This part of history is interesting. I actually worked with Marco Lombardo in his Compilo project back in 2004 for better Compiere technical documentation before he introduced to me his idea of XML2AD in transfering changes from one installation to another without repeating the changes of the AD metadata. I then roped in Trifon Trifonov who became active in my red1.org/forum and was about to leave his employer and ‘bite the red pill’ - another term for going fully freelance selling FOSS implementation services.

Trifon, based in Bulgaria, being a strong Java developer quickly picked up the concept of Compilo’s XML2AD and began helping to complete its opposite, the AD2XML. However Marco became part of a commercial enterprise that forks Compiere and sell their extensions on a closed basis, thus stopping him from releasing his AD2XML into the open. Trifon however introduced his part as open source but in his forked version which he called ADCK or Application Dictionary Customiser Kit.

Another developer from USA, Robert Klein in turn took a different path from the whole concept at the beginning but reuse and extended the Compilo model to fulfil what he called the PackIn/PackOut concept where the user need not deal with external handling of Druid or XML files. All the user does happens right inside the live application. It is a more automated form of ADCK. Robert called it 2Pack and released it separately into open source which he gladly assisted in integrating into our new ADempiere project.

Today the project has evolved to quite a dizzy height as a more advanced plugin architecture called the OSGI of Eclipse is now made feasible through the efforts of Andreas Schmidt but largely completed by Joerg Viola, both in separate outfits in Germany. All this coloured the wonderful world of community open source at its best which is now at its height or shall we say, it has not peaked and is still rising.

Open Sex, Not Free Sex

2009-03-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, without warning, while translating the university course on Open Source ERP into local Malay language for Malaysian readers, i came across the chapter about Richard Stallman and his definition of his struggle in FSF. I realised the true meaning of his words that he meant 'Free' as in freedom and not 'free' as in free sex. Boy! Did the sky suddenly opened up and i hear angels singing the Fort Minor tune of 'Remember The Name".

Where was my mind all this while? After about 5 years since knowing Compiere Open Source, and the last 2 or so years on ADempiere, the community fork from Compiere, only today i truly have gone to the true depths of that abstact concept that is behind our existence and battles. That is it! Free Software is not free. It is just supposed to comform to that pristine principle that the nature of software development is that it is social and thus politically it has to conform to the principle of freedom of speech. Nevermind Guantanamo Bay, just stick to that basic heavenly tune ringing softly in my heart.

So in all earnesty to call it Open Source instead should be even more closer to that percept as Free Software carries the stigma that it costs nothing. Sex is not, remember? Good sex is more expensive depending on how good it is. Now, why then, will Richard Stallman disagree with the term Open Source and insists that it does not stress the word 'freedom'? I wouldn't wana argue with his holyness on this, but look at this statement and tell me if you see what i see:

Free Sex; Open Sex

Which statement conveys the meaning of freedom better? Not free sex. That would mean that you want to have sex without paying. No wonder you end up in cheap sex.

Open Sex would mean that you have the freedom to that basic human need but you cannot demand it without payment or effort as we are now saying -not- Free Sex. You can appreciate that been open about sex, means you are promiscous but not getting it for free.

Thus not only is Free Software less apt than Open Source Software in describing that philosophical bent, it can be even be misleading. I admit that it is not easy explaining FOSS or else i would not have been unemployable the last 5 years. It is so difficult to sell this concept to idiots and those who have hormonal disorders. What more with commercial versions such as what happened with Compiere and OpenBravo that has abused the term but locking up that freedom due to their morbid fear of IP and branding dilution on the road to IPOland. Which they won't go very far, with the freedom fighters lining the whole route with the community fork that allows the freedom of anyone to come in and make a stake on our ADempiere project.

Lately we have even obtained OSGI capability thanks to a few german contributors. The point is that they have the freedom to be part of the bandwagon, and improve the culture and civilization of the software, which is growing unabatedly as its DNA dicates.

I think i should stop chanting here and move a few metres back from the centre of the bonfire.

Open Source Needs Good Salesman

2009-01-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it is so hard to sell your services around something so cheap, or in fact entirely free as in Free Software that cost zero for its licensing.

All you want is just to offer your services at a reasonable rate, but heh!, when people hear that the software is free, they do not see the need of you. So in the end you have a hard time explaining that you as a better informed expert can help the client saves money and effort and heartaches.

But no, the word 'free' has corrupted their minds. They expected even your time to be free, and demand you to give them pre-sales or presentation or even prototype as if you have SAP or IBM that pays your salary.

Thus i come to the conclusion that it is all a matter of salesmanship. You just need to have the best sales know-how you can find. Try googling for "art of negotiation" and "art of salesmanship".

I came across this 'Peeler Salesman' who could sell something that at first thought no one would wana buy. It is like selling ice to eskimos. But then we do buy bottled water don't we? So do learn more salesmanship whenever you can. It could be that you are just a bad salesman at selling yourself.

Here are some thought-provoking links:

> High Probability Selling

> Selling Idea For Royalties

> The Fox Forum

> The Art of Woo

> People Love To Buy!

> What Do They Want?

Now ADempiere Fights Itself

2008-12-21T15:19:00.001-08:00

Somehow when you reached the top of SourceForge most active rankings, you have no further need for enemies but yourselves. Lately we been seeing the community split in halves and the strongest contributors having to defend themselves against, well, their own community!

It all started some while ago over the integration of POSterita (another breakaway distro from early days) back into ADempiere. Read this record 111+ replies thread here. Then I tried to divert from the burning bush to the centre ring in the arena, but i myself came under more fire. So i am forced into a truce here. After some relative calm, an englishman fired up a small stove. This prompted a seeming plot that is still not cooled off at press time. But notice there my shrewd change of tactics. I changed sides!

Mortal combat in olden days do not last this long because, well, you really die from wounds. But not these virtual spats. As long as your keyboard has keys and your router does route, your fingers aren't crammed for tapping small horizontal spaces. And some probably do it vertically while lying in bed.

But all seemed well today when our greatest hero whom you either hate him or love him is to be overwhelmingly loved when he released these latest gems.

It was another close call and more action to come, as we have lost sight of our competition - Compiere and OpenBravo seems to stay away from the top rankings for quite some time now. There will be more days when ADempiere again turn on itself for game. To relieve its boredom on the upward march to overcome proprietary software's hold on ERP space.

Aren't Bugs Free?

2008-12-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

I put question mark there because i do not dare to end any sentence now without asking WDYT - what do you think?

My humble opinion and i am sure many in the developers' world (at least newbies) will share this common conclusion from here. That a developer ironically learns fastest or most from bugs and somethings s/he will inevitably breaks and the more the better.

Firstly its the psychological impact that he is responsible for breaking something and thus highly motivated to fix it. Thus bugs are not free and there are expensive in both cost of repair but more importantly in the cost of learning. Yep, bugs are more important to science than to life. And we are even more thankful to those bug finders out there for been the eyeballs we never have - covering areas we could never have the time and resources to as any software company will confess.

Now in the software development bazaar context, so are other developer eyeballs in their share of the psychological impetus. They equally feel responsible in trying to offer help or fix it and earn the kudo first. Call it peer pressure. It still cost something to make a whole bunch of nerds feel good. And the whole community at large feeling calm.

Now imagine the world of software without such bugs popping up now and then. I know, i know, its best there are no bugs, but that does not exist with software. Software has a very short lifespan. If its left alone it will die say in 6 months. I mean death in competition and SourceForge :-)

For us in ADempiere, there are different types of bugs. Some are elegantly discovered and we say 'good catch!' Some are very rude self created ones, and we say "What in Farmer Jones' name were you trying to do?"

Can we seriously have an utopia where all developers are born or made equal and behave equally? Not even in the Animal Farm fiction.

In the bazaar approach, Eric Raymond described it as chaos and put forward the paradoxical question of whether really good software can come out of an apparently disorganised un-cathedral approach?

Well it did. So get used to the farm-life will ya?

ERP is HIGHLY COMPLEX

2008-11-11T18:11:00.000-08:00

When Compiere first debut as FOSS ERP (for those uninitiated it is Free and Open Source Software for Enterprise Resources Planning) around circa 2000 AD, many including me jumped into it not knowing that all that scripture is not code. Having sourcecode to a full fledge ERP System is only 10% of the journey.

90% of an ERP System is the complexity of business organisation and processes itself. It is not about the number of tables that you now know has to exist in an ERP, but the sheer number of tables going off into a seeming indescribable mess with functions that seems to reach for the sky.

An ERP System is by definition integrated and that means on table joining to another joining to another, well i could go on, but for example:

C_Order join to C_OrderLine join to C_BPartner join to C_Location join to C_PaymentTerms join to M_Product, ok enough!

Perhaps the good side of having FOSS is that you can examine all this up close and tinkle with it. But the sheer size of it (around 1.9 gigabytes of code and scripts for ADempiere) can put you back say 23 years to unravel where the spaghetti begins or ends, and that may not really tell you which is an end or beginning.

That is perhaps why Jorg Janke, Compiere's owner must have sniggered when he decided to unload it all into cyberspace under SourceForge (for those again of the ignorant kind, SourceForge.net is a free repository for most of the world's FOSS projects). Having the Bible in one hand and the Messiah on the other does not deliver the Kingdom of God at hand.

You still need experts and gurus, and that is why they do not seem to die out or lose out in the speakers' circuits. If Linux maturity and global advancements are insufficient to turn your office completely Microsoft Windows free, then what more to expect from turning your whole or partial business operations such as inventory and order handling on an FOSS tap that does not easily turn right.

Don't get me wrong about FOSS now. Even proprietary software such as SAP, Oracle, Accepta, JD Edwards, and Baans possess the same demons. ERP is just 90% non-software stuff.

If you decide to go down the FOSS road, take my advice. Stick to one that is community based and not those that are plying the FOSS gospel for gold rather than glory. ADempiere is the gospel and glory whereas Compiere and OpenBravo are now just for the pot of gold.

Commercial interests take advantage of the FOSS chicks and lay out elaborate licensing and packaged traps that sooner or later you have to pay somewhere somehow at the expense of delayed bug fixes or releases. It is a zero sum game. They wish to earn more than they put in.

Here at ADempiere we already thanked the Lord Compiere the first day it was born. We made our money the hard way, that is by selling time based services and no more. All further is disastrous excessive self-defeating greed.

Can You Even Stand In A Bazaar?

2008-11-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

What do you guys think a bazaar is? Is it chaos? Or is it a higher form of chaos, as they try to say in wave particle physics or Zen, "Organised Harmony In Chaos", or "The Butterfly Effect" - what we think is chaos is actually balanced and perfect.

Do you think our project uses the bazaar or cathedral approach? Or is it using both or none? <-- Another Zen kuon for the lazy meditators who rather lurk than help us in the trunk! :-) Whatever it is, there are applications in present day wikinomics. Wikipedia is one of them. It started on the utter anarchic premise that anyone but anyone can edit it. Then the forces of good pens vs bad pens fought it out and you end up with bad pages and lock out debates, banning of individuals and i even see words that demonised Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has lots of subject matter specialists, not your simple everyday microsoft word classroom project of writing short essays. It is getting very highly organised and very encyclopedic. Somehow when you remove the borders or barriers of entry, you draw the largest crowds and hatred, i mean interests. But coming out of the classroom and into the real world here cos our our project here is unique and that is exactly exciting. Because we are not Wikipedia nor Linux but ADempiere, a defacto non-commercial project in ERP space. We are also not Compiere nor OpenBravo as we put it.

What then makes us unique? How are we so differentiated to the point we are so proud of it? What are our good and bad points? Or are they both perfect as a whole - A Bazaar with a Cathedral?

This thesis is important as it affects our philosophy and outlook in this project. How we understand and perceive things is how we shall act and react.

I have my own opinons, and of course when one believes in own opinions one can express it strongly. One can also express it quietly, in pain.

Take Obama vs 'another 4 yrs of Bush' McCain campaign recently. Both sides love US of America. Both sides want to defend her. But both are dead on against the way to do it.

But to us outside, we say, "Who gives a shit about US of A?. We just want you out of our faces". I thought i will hear that in Middle East. But i hear it stronger in Latin America. Elected Presidents scoring votes for threatening to cut of oil to the USA.

In our own project here, we see 'some chaos' in action. Someone wants to do something good, someone else comes and create trouble. What resulted seems to be chaos. Or is it? Did good finally comes out of it? Did it draw people who were once far back into the fold? Did it send more ppl away?

It is hard to see things from afar since we are right in the middle of it. If we can see our earth from the moon we say its blue and beautiful. If we see it from another galaxy through the Hubble Telescope we say its magnificient. But if we stay on Earth, we say we have 4 yrs to live before 2012 when the Mayan Calendar ends.

Right here right now in the project, we have little arguments going on. Some like to say, "this is political!" and start another bush war. Is this helping? Or is it the energy that is as old as the Universe itself?

Even if the leader is a tyrant cum a priest cum his wife behind the scene, it can draw more hatred in the form of pure energy in the long run. It is someone you love to hate. It is someone you cannot stand.

Whatever it is, i am asking you to see it from afar. From a billion light years away. It will do you a lot of good. It can calm you down. At least you are standing far from the fires.

The Open Source War

2008-10-29T00:07:00.000-07:00

You can gain more insight about this topic after reading a Richard Stallman's FSF site page here. His points are clear that if software is free, then call it by no other name but 'Free Software'. Reason i reckon is even obvious if you are to apply our name calling test - can we call it as Community Free Software vs Commercial Free Software? Oxymorons abound.

But in our case, we can call ourselves Community Open Source (ADempiere) vs Commercial Open Source (Compiere and OpenBravo). So now this cat really got away. How did we come to using 'Open Source' in the first place? I think it has everything to do with how our brains are wired when it comes to name recognition. Such as Google instead of Yahoo!, Obama instead of McCain.

Open Source sounds sexy. Cool to pronounce and doesn't sound as cheap as 'Free' anything. But if we are to extend that name abit and call it Freedom, then we have a whole different sense to it. Freedom Fighters to just plain Freedom. It has a grand league ring to it.

But 'Free Software' is a bit quirky. It needs more of Richard Stallman to keep knocking at it. Take for instance Linux. He prefers to call it GNU-Linux, which hardly anyone i know says it that way. But i was corrected by friends that those CLI stuff such as 'ls' belongs to GNU. Now i didn't know that. Well i know now. But i would inadvertently not twist my tongue and still call it Linux and call Linus Torvalds a demigod.

And as for RMS, he is just the Masstarrrr.

Now coming back to Open Source. It is now proven when we hear alot of venture capital going into funding Open Source startups, and remembering the last bubble, there is going to be a mini bubble over this space. Take our ERP sub-space for instance. There are now 3 big players - one parent project (Compiere) and 2 forks (OpenBravo and ADempiere) where the later been the community one, not having any commercial entity or even a nice suit to wear during dinner parties. We have a lousy website, but some serious stuff going on at our trunk level.

We exposed spyware put in by Compiere, removed security holes, patch up countless bugs and extend the model's model. And we still have no staff. No one is paid by ADempiere. Its only resemblance of a headquarters is at ADempiere Deustchland e.V. where its registered as a Non-Profit organisation, temporary acting for the world project, just in case.

Our sister contending projects Compiere and OpenBravo already received millions in fundings and those have to be paid back. Thus switches have to be flipped back, bills paid, advertising done, pretty long legs waxed, licensings reworded and free-riders turned away.

How long can they go on? Until they go public? Not during this financial meltdown. But even if that didn't happen, how can they sell when there is this brother ADempiere hot on their heels with betterware and still free with no melanine powder?

Open Bravo has more than 70 mercenary soldiers that has to be paid monthly with yearly bonuses. ADempiere has none, but freedom fighters buried in all those caves all over the world. Some are fanatical enough never to come out from their fox holes. Particularly me.

More and more volunteer open source army marches into ADempiere rank each day without enticements of rank or resource. Patches sent, bugs fixed, testings reported and conversations go on without ordering latte.

ADempiere is the first in many things that the others copy. First in giving a Virtual Machine, first in free migration, first in Wikisite, first in IRC room, first in getting first SF rankings fastest time since inception.

For the next millenium ADempiere shall go on, and can never die. Simple, there is no office to seal, no labour to picket and no one to kill. For us here, it is not a ploy. We are serious freedom fighters.

ADempiere Hacked Compiere To Save Lives

2008-10-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

This is a story in the interest of end-users has to be told. And it involves saving lives. It happened some months after the ADempiere project was created by the community around Compiere to fork the later for the sake of end-users who needed quality code and growth.

Been a bazaar of unabated collaboration, among the community were rebels who prefers to hack the system and smite at rotten and broken code. Among such a hacker was a young punk who by giving us a single url string could hack into any Compiere webstore window, and by definition ADempiere's also, without logging in. Some kiddie easily exposed Jorg Janke's password and took a few snapshots in the closet to prove to others that such a security flaw is real. At that time there are about 33,000 live installations of Compiere worldwide.

Now that shocked us out of our wits and immediately we had a series of bouts i mean internal heated debates what to do. The hacker school of thought is that been Eric Raymond's chaotic bazaar and a community open source project as opposed to the commercial one that is Compiere, we have to expose such a serious security flaw without ado. In the words of Linus Torvalds, "show me the code". But the other school of thought, mainly System Integrators and Implementors that seeks to protect their end-users' exposed systems objected in horror.

So we took a vote. Only those 2 hackers and I alone say aye. The rest say nay. And so as leader i supported the majority under protest to hide such flaws and refer them to a security council first before exploding the device.

We then have a more systematic approach to release such timebombs to the world. We decided to inform our sister projects namely Compiere and OpenBravo. Emisaries (emails) were sent but Compiere as usual does not take the rebels' cause heavily. Nothing was done about our patch submission to them.

So in a limbo and out of care for the many lives that are in danger for using a system where hackers could easily compromise the system's integrity, i have to send a specially encoded message that proves that I have seen Jorg Janke with his pants down. A prompt reply came soon after from Kathy Pink thanking me and the rebel for the cause. However Compiere as usual will not take our patch directly. Instead, based on our patch and telling them where to look, they created their own version of the patch. Then they announce to their unknowing end-users that they have solved a security breach. Sounds familiar?

So in conclusion, we have to reconcile to this fact of software life. Are we to treat software as some commercial commodity under patent and greed, or are we to treat it as a common knowledge capital shared under public interest to remain open and free, its community supporting it getting the honour and respect they deserve?

Or are we to continue drugging the masses and end-users with paid advertisment that has never tell the whole truth nothing but the truth?

- (above is a screenshot proof that if your password is obtained anything can be done. Such as login as Jorg Janke and read his email. So. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

Disclaimer: This is an unpaid public broadcast. No taxpayer money has been used.

Leader's Note: All you smart people out there. Join us, and have fun!

Editor's Note: This article does not reflect the position of the ADempiere Project and the majority of its peace loving community. Our standard policy is that if any security flaw is discovered it is discussed by select email, solved and then released with a patch. In the interest of public safety we only declassify certain information when ample notice has travelled far and wide.

OpenBravo Unethical Use of Compiere's Intellectual Property

2008-10-26T00:57:00.001-07:00

Many did not get irked in this case when someone else steal another's IP and gets away with it. Reason is that this crime is buried in some smart twist of words and license carpeting. This should be a clear case with OpenBravo absolving Compiere's expensive technology of the application model and design (see http://www.openbravo.com/product/others/relationship-compiere/). That is all left of Compiere's epitaph, in some products/others/relationship wasteland.

Without Compiere's (I reemphasise) very expensive investment in coming out with an application model that encompass functional and metadata, of which is fondly called Application Dictionary, we wouldn't have figured out in 10 light years how best to come out with an Open Source ERP product without investing tons of money.

When OpenBravo won an estimated USD18million (so far) for the launch of its operations, this cannot have happened if the players and investors have known the above fact and acted out of conscience and ethics. Those angels should have given to Compiere to add the sugar coating packaging instead and do history justice.

Of course Open Source licensing allows you to fork and start off your own project but not to commercialise it lock, stock and barrel without homage or proper credence to the true owner and patron behind all those hard work. All OpenBravo left Compiere with are the following disrespectful words:

Our current code base is almost entirely comprised of original, Openbravo-developed code that is continually evolving. By our estimates, less than 10% of this code can be attributed to Compiere. Any code that has not been developed by Openbravo is properly identified in the source files.

What a dumb thief who took the beehive and rid off the bees! And how apt an example of another evil commercialisation of Open Source. By confusing Open Source as an effort of mere lines of codes and not true Intellectual Property of others, they have taken advantage of the poor sheep with another set of wolf's clothings, claiming to be original and free by at least 90% in their worth. Nay! I say they still owe 90%, if not more to that old sheep.

The true spirit of Free and Open Software is to always acknowledge the original copyright and authors, but instead these clothiers chose to look for loopholes in the engine chasis license and come out with their daylight but 'legalised' blowtorch.

Their intent is clearly not altruistic, and not for the public good. Theirs are for profit and they are commercially owned. One day, they like MySQL shall pull the rugs from under the flock's paws.

If they are honest to the bone community open source, then they would have paid more fitting homage or at least do what RedHat did - give away shares to Linus Torvalds, which has always been identified as the inventor behind Linux of which RedHat depends on. RedHat has no similar propounded fine printing that says it has added 90% to Linus'.

But i tell you, if you believe in Karma, those who steal shall not sleep well. In this world nor the next.

We in ADempiere that forked from Compiere through open forum put Jorg Janke the creator of Compiere on a high pedestal and always bow to him whenever we can, and even ruled to pay him honourware royalty. Without him we cease.

Until we turn a handsome profit in order to carry out our oath, I am writing this to put my arrow to bow in his honour.

Is There Life After Google?

2008-10-24T04:15:00.001-07:00

Yes, there is.

It is called Cuil.

I tried www.cuil.com out and immediately fell in love with it. It even wears black.

But, alas, this is another capitalist notion that the web is for free rides. As long as there are such Open Source search engine like this

www.da taparksearch.org, the community will perpertually fork or roll out new ones.

Let's build an army. Our 300. Let's take over the world and keep it free.

Who Really Cares About Free Software?

2008-10-12T16:01:00.001-07:00

Like all things good, there shall also be bad. Take Free Software for instance. It is meant to be just as its namesake says, "Free as in Free Speech" but no, it has now become syndicated speech, sugar-coated or rather melamine-tainted milk powder and shoved into the throats of babes everywhere.

Today's freeness or Open Source (as i prefer to name it) is more of commercial open source if you are not careful. People who comes to me to sing praises and dedication to open source i suspect are not sincere and in the end i am proven correct when they either slipped off the pirate, i mean boat or ridicule the captain and his merrymen.

The search criteria to look out for among such fur coated men are the following remarks they make rather early in the conversation:

1) I have a family to feed

2) I have paid staff to feed

3) I have to repay my old man

4) I need money

5) I need projects that pay money

6) I know this will make money

7) I can become rich, very rich with this

As you can guess, they all seem to have the word 'money' in it. Some are now more sophisticated in their wordings:

a) This business model has the right service offerings the market wants

b) We are the champion of Open Source and fully dedicate to the cause from day one

c) We are responsible for our works and shall professionally ensure your successful implementation

d) We have a global market uptake and now in negotiations with big players

You catch my draft, and i certainly gringed even while mouthing out the above tell-tale signs. I come across more and more combinations, but somehow they just don't feel right in the spirit of Open Source.

To me and to a whole lot of people, Free and Open Source is a religion. It is something you believe and worship in. To the extent that you make sacrifices, either monetarily or momentarily.

Yea, we do eat. I do have a family of 6 including me to feed. I have staff and i often sacrifice them (relinquishing their services). But in all this, i am also very selfish. I care for my free spirit and not been bogged with monetary laced questions. It is my lifestyle. I choose to write freely or not depending on my mood. I have no position to answer to (trying hard), no phone calls to take (hardly pick up my phone if needed) and always ready to hit the open road.

Somehow we do get fed and the end of the day analysis from my 28 years of adulthood ringed with hippy days and necktie meetings, i have finally ended up content that Karma takes care of things no matter how much words you used. And condemns no matter how many billions (USD700 billion to be exact) or bubble economy regulation is there.

It all boils down to the real charity you wished for and you shall deserve it accordingly. Karma do cares about Buddhas, Jesuses and Mother Theresas, and they have an abode much better than many of us rats.

Is There Life After China?

2008-06-05T17:22:00.001-07:00

China is now the ultimate. It controls the Olympic Torch, give or take a few snatches along the way. Though Greek Olympia and that non-poofable fire case is a symbol of Zoroastrian diety of fire, nope, China believes in no god.

It just believes in itself. Not even Karma. It does not have to. For it can ban Sharon Stone instead. For having said that China has bad karma for what it did in Tibet or against the Dalai Lama. Now that is the real cause and effect for you, still sexy Sharon at age 50, with a boob job that is.

Don't care if all those ill-fated dates end up with the number 8, call it luck but call it not on its officially acclaimed worship of atheism. So blame not anything further than it been just a lifeless number.

Sharon mistook that Karma gave a reichter scale earthquake but she missed the true cause and effect of the thousands of collapsed school buildings. That is more due to bad engineering and corrupted officials approving its ill-construction. Madam Stone should appeal to undivine causes. Ever so now for her drop in worldly earnings after brands drop her faster than an empty Tao, i mean purse.

Coming bad, i mean back to China. Thou shalt not speak evil of her. Am I been cyn****? Oops! No, no, merciful almighty China! Thou art the alpha and omega. Thou command the largest market the world shall always see. Thou have the numbers. And the strength of cheap and yet entreprising human resource and depth no market can withhold. Forgive me, your ever fearful blogging servant.

We pray that you oh great China be not infected by those unworthy infidels. Do not start believing in Karma or a god. Keep it as it is. Call China a China. Do not deify it by any other name.

And return that Taiwan back to the great motherland, you, you, imperialist rascals.

Yin And Yang of Open Source

2008-05-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

One day in an Open Source class where another speaker was at it, threw one of those smart questions to the floor perhaps to snir at me for been Open with Karma where money shall drop from the tree without planting the tree,

"Why would this Red1 give away when Bill Gates does not? Who makes money and who shall die?"

Rather bit violent i must say, that speaker was trying to rub it in. He could just be more kind and say, "Why follow a man who tries to beat Jesus to the cross?" Become another Messiah of course. Fame at the end is better than always a stranger in bed.

To my kind salvage, another bazaar peasant who took the ferry to this Cebu Island where we had the short seminar just raised his hand and offered his take,

"People like Red1 should make it. Karma is on his side. It is like the Yin to the Yang. Bill Gates close up so much and makes so much money that somehow the opposite to that just got to happen."

Well it is bad to speak for oneself, hopefully not worse for another to do the same. Here i rather pay some justice to senorita Yin and senor Yang. Or is it the other way round?

Well, what is important is that they re opposites and they dynamically play with each other throughout existence. Nothing in this universe is unitary, unipolar or singular. Take US for instance. It sails gleefully off after the end of the Cold War policing the Gulf and another Yin of a force spurs forth - an open source terrorist army that raises its ugly suicidal head everywhere. Now the US spent close to a trillion and looking for a way to run, if it can. But that suicidal army just doesn't and keep growing and coming.

The opposite is highly viral. The more minutely insignificantly inate it is, the more devastating it can be or become - depending on which Heidegger chapter you are on.

Somehow out of the karma this Linus Trovalds was born. A rather obnoxious unspanked kid that calls almost everyone i know stupid. But he rightfully calls himself a god. I mean who can top that? Now at 30% of the operating system cake, with no singular registered address, no legal obstacle and no damn to give, he might as well offer to answer prayers. Most people arent even aware they are praying to him whenever they ask from Bill Gates a discount, who doesn't. Unless he gets more back.

With Bill taken care of, now a merry band of ADempiereans have SAP to take on. We are born on September 2006. That is what is said on our birth certificate. We are unfinanciable, not like Compiere or Open Bravo. We are chaos. But one thing for sure. We are still around and virally in existence, albeit in hibernation mode at far flung places.

The more hopelessly unmanageable we become the more weedy things are. There are more terrific things than making money. It is to become a lurking eternal pain in the ass to a big brother. Me not sure when and how this opposite Yang (or is it Yin?) comes to bite. Me not even sure where is it. Me just sure of it.

The Oft-Asked Question About Open Source

2008-04-20T04:31:00.000-07:00

Which is, "What the hell is Open Source?". Even though i have answered with,
"It is source codes, free and open" yet i been stopped and shackled with,

"Look here mister, it is easy for you to say since you are the so called expert. For us laymen, we are the innocent victims. We know not what you re talking about".

When i move on to, "It is not just open source codes, it is also a branding move for..."

Again, "Now look here! You are not listening. We really do not know what in the world you are babbling about. Just tell us how we can sell it!".

Red1, "Well you do not really sell it. You sell your services around it. But that is not what i meant. I just said that its a chance for you to position your brand and then you reap rewards due to a highly branded position, and for the sales thereafter i am not very sure what it is. Just that a well known brand sells."

Well by now my friend will probably have ran out of the cafe screaming and tearing his hair out.

I think he is not wrong and i am not all right. Open Source to many is still a mystery and a misnomer. If it is so open how come it is so hard to understand with regard to its business model and product model?

As for me, i always consider Open Source as none of the above. To me in my http://www.red1.org/ it came about treating Open Source as a guinea pig for the branding of my philosophy:

Information is Free - You have to know,
People are Not - You have to pay,
Contributors are Priceless - You have to be.

You see, i am an artist. On forums that is. I love provoking, encroaching and devising ways to use the threaded online medium to gain fame and flame, friend and foe, all for a nice kick and high rating. What i do with it is none of anyone else business. It is all mine. I get calls from al corners asking me to sell my time or services to implement the Open Source i seemed to relish in (http://www.adempiere.org/) but i often turn them down. For one, i am not that an expert, and i really hate work.

If i ever accept work, it is due to the number of guns from bankers held to my head. And as soon as i settled my debts, i am back to blissful unemployability. Nothing beats the freedom of painting as i please on my digital canvass. It has drawn oohs and ahhs. I know the yawns are hidden well.

Back to Open Source. It is just a damn good excuse to make me ADempiere's Leader enroute a globe-trotting evangelist. On that score, i will promise to be more coherent if there is a business class ticket and a formal letter of invitation to speak to an eager audience.

The Story of The Bally Shoe

2008-04-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

When i was in Cebu, Philippines, last year, i have the honour of sitting with the Secretary of CICT Department, Office of the President, Mr Roxas Chua, and as usual i often try to create a blasting first impression by thinking of a joke or something profound to say.

Since Cebu is heavily thinking of becoming a cyber-city like us in Malaysia, i thought of pulling the esteemed guests with a guip,

"I hear that you guys are copying us Malaysians that already has the MSC - MultiMedia Super Corridor and CyberJaya".

The Secretary quipped back,
"Now, now, who is copying who?". Laughter from all around the Filipino controlled dining hall.

Of course i knew i was just making small talk to make the secretary look good. But my smart mouth got the better of me and when i went up to speak at the CEDF-IT (Cebu Education Foundation for IT) annual dinner where i was the distinguished guest of honour, i can't help it but exploited the rostum to continue that small talk,
"It doesn't matter who is copying who, but since i am from Malaysia and knows about the architect behind the MSC which is Dr. Mahathir, i shall tell you of whose idea Dr. Mahathir copied from."

I began to tell them the story of one of Dr. Mahathir's advisors, which is Dr. Keniche Ohmae of McKinsey, Japan. He wrote a book entitled "The Borderless World" in which he forwarded the idea of nation branding. In it he mentions about rubber from Malaysia. Keniche described the story of a branded shoe called Bally, which is madeh in Italy. Now that shoe, a pair of it costs about say RM200++, and its rubber, which comes from Malaysia is only probably peanuts about say RM20- -. Now if we have an issue with the rubber, we can drop Malaysian rubber and go to Indonesia or Brazil or India. But if we have an issue with Bally, we cannot just drop Italy and go to China and take FungKeong.

Now, now, that is the story of branding which Mahathir smelt out from Keniche's story and soon he was summoned to Kuala Lumpur as a distinguished advisor and he did well when Mahathir soon unveiled marvelous branding ideas such as the tallest twin towers, eco-tourism, F1 and of course the Proton car.

Keniche's argument in his book on what a developing country particularly must do is to create brand value and equity more than relying on raw material equity which is dirt cheap and replaceable by another even cheaper contender in the world. By been branded as no. 1 no one can take that brand easily away from you and thus you enjoy receipts of the lion's share when someone purchased your Bally so to speak.

Well, Malaysia, needless to say spent billions to achieve the marvels it has now and even cost Dr. Mahathir such unpopularity that he has to step down soon enough. Nevertheless the lesson of branding has sunk in and that is why i propose to the CEDF-IT for establishing an Open Source ERP Centre in Philippines that shall brand it as a hub in this region if not the world.

I ended my speech with the words, "Madeh in Cebu, The Philippines".

How To Steal Code and Get Away With It

2008-03-30T19:26:00.001-07:00

Open source or Free Software is said to be the act of allowing others to view and download your source codes without conditions other than they must maintain the same fervour when redistributing it to others. But that is academic. My question is what if the one who takes from you break that rule? Who is the police to stop them in such an act? I know there is a site where you can report such offenders, but how do you enforce something that is dificult to trace in the wild world web?

Take for instance if someone was to take Linux and relabel it as MyStuff and not distribute it but sell it to a naive obscure country that has no web access nor ministry of ICT. He would have made his millions and be long gone. So to me here is the moral of the story. He won't be the only one who has that idea. As there are many theives who eye a bank, so are there even more, much more simpletons who eye readily available codes. So many in fact, that as we speak they are already peddling them in unknown ways and unknown places.

With such a high proliferation of smut activity, it won't be smut for long. The ubiquity of a crime renders it ineffective because the would be buyer already knows about it within the shortest time possible. The following is a probable conversation you may come across if you were to push your fast gotten wares:

"Excuse me, can you take me to your leader, you know, head of this banana republic"

"Ok, whats in it for me?"

"Hmm... gatekeeper eh? Ok, tell you what, how about you help make close the deal and i make you my country manager with 30% commissions?"

"Well, i think i prefer upfront, and in cash, and please not in my local currency. It is already at 100,000% inflation around here, so in USD please. On second thoughts, please make that in Euros. On third thought please hand me some gold bars or diamond pieces".

"Hmm, well ok, but at the moment as you can see i got no such cash or stones. Do i look like some rich punk to you? I wouldn't be here if i am rich. Ok, tell you what. Why don't i tell you a bit about Open Source, its dark secrets and you take it and make money with your government?"

"Heh, sounds ok? What must i do?"

"Hang on, not so fast. You got to pay me first before i can tell you!"

So, this kind of medicinal story can be retold in many combinations but you probably already know from your own devious attempts at cooking up your own angles of cashing in. Perhaps you like to share some of your real life experiences or otherwise fantasies here.

Now, Who Told Me So?

2008-03-15T18:16:00.001-07:00

I positioned myself for the best view of the TV screen in one downtown mamak stall enjoying the ticker tape of elections results when I heard loud cheers from another long array of tables behind me, who seemed not to be watching the screen but their mobile phones. The results were known to them and as far as they were concerned, the elections are over. They left their tables early, an unusual happening during such nailbiting nights. For me, my oohs and aahs came many excruciating hours later. The recently concluded 12th Malaysian General Elections has brought in more surprises than anyone can bear, both sides included. Post mortems are now underway. Hypotheses are abound.

In such a chaotic scenery, I set foot to conduct my own private investigation. Well, since a winning party in Kedah, Perak and Selangor belongs to the Islamic Party PAS, which i left officially in 1995, i have to dig back some old name cards and phone bills to locate some feeler to get me up to date. I first rang up Suhaimi Said, a long time social activist who has jumped from the ruling malay party UMNO to a socialist party and then the islamic party and then back to square one and so forth.

"Duan! Come back!" his clear still youthful voice rang out. He was asking me to come back into politics and join the strongest opposition faction this time around which is the Justice Party (Keadilan) headed by the ex-deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.

"But i just want to know why the huge loss!" I rang back. I am already retired from the ding dong politics for now, no thank you.

"Well, you do not have to be back in PAS if that doesn't fit your cup of tea. This Keadilan is a multi-racial one. People want an alternative to the ruling multi-racial front and Keadilan is it".

Not wishing to stick my ears with more lobbying rather than factual accounts i rang a ruling Umno stronghold cell that fell to the opposition in Shah Alam.

"Azmi, what happened to the Malays? It was all so quiet. How come no one knew this is coming?"

"Duan, we re all fed up. We do not like Pak Lah (the Prime Minister) at all. We have been like that for a long time. Its not just the price of oil and food. It is their arrogance. The Malays just want to teach those leaders a lesson."

"So you mean to say that previously with even worst problems of rising cost and bad leaders which it never happened, and now it just happened? No one told me so back then. They always say the Malays are loyal. So what really makes it snap this time? Is it Anwar?"

"No, no, not so much with Anwar. It is pure fed-up with those idiots running our nation. What is this junk they trying to feed us with? Northern corridor bull, eastern corridor bull. All copy and paste from Mahathir's time. He is not like Mahathir. He has no idea."

More preplexed, i have to sit in front of another old friend from PAS who is a constant writer and now blogger.

"Well Duan. Frankly i am at a lost myself. I really do not understand the elections results at all. If there is a mood swing. How come its intact and even increased margins for certain Umno places? Perhaps its an internal feud right up to the ex Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir who has been lambasting this present PM for some time. His son, Mukhriz was thrown to a shark infested place while other young punks in UMNO got safe seats. Now the sharks spared Mukhriz and bitten those punks instead. Serve them right."

Hmm, this sounded more analytical. Then i rang a state head of the Malay Chamber of Commerce and he came back with this, "Duan, its due to 2 big issues. One is Khairy, the son-in-law of the PM. Second is Islam Hadhari".

"I can accept the first one. I mean yep Khairy is bit too young and placing his turks all over does hurts many old toes, but Islam as an issue in parochial UMNO? I thought Islam is issue among opposition. We re talking Umno voters themselves getting their ballot papers reversed here."

"We already told the PM. But he is stubborn. He acknowledges but does nothing."

"So last question. Is he going down?"

"Nah, i think he is driving through. Bit shaky but should survive."

Still bit shaken but not stirred, I headed to someone (Malik Husin) who has followed in my trail into Umno in 1995, somewhat coincidently we not been together that election season chosed to switch camps from PAS to UMNO on our own separate accord. I eventually left politics all together when nobody in UMNO really gave me any tasks, and the Reformasi movement by Anwar send a signal up my brain that, this is enough. No more ding dong. Politics is getting dirty as usual. But for this other guy, he was close with Anwar and soon played an important think tank role on the ground, ending up been detained as well. Now he runs a highly critical NGO called Mafrel, that watches the elections process to ensure its fairness. In doing so, he is quite close to both sides.

"Duan, the elections process is a headache. Those forms 14, 15, 16 are not easy to be issued. The opposition alternative media can publish faster. But without those forms you cannot form the next government. You cannot just walk into the Sultan's palace grinning without any papers."

"Yes Malik, but what is the real cause of the swing?"

"In my opinion i think this time UMNO was too confident and committed political hara kiri when they focused on retaking the east coast, leaving the west coast undefended."

My last call was on a UMNO state information secretary. For health reasons his identity cannot be revealed at this time.

"Duan, *coughs*, i think Khairy is still strong. *coughs* So you better rethink about reactiviating your UMNO membership and support him. *coughs*coughs*"

"Yes, bro, but isn't there a second wave now? This Mukhriz has called on PM to resign and i hear heavy storm ahead for the party elections soon. Many may nominate his deputy, Najib to take over."

"Yeah, but this Khairy is different. Don't look at the fact that he married PM's daughter. He is Oxford material. I studied him. He is becoming an institution. He may survive. Let's see what people are really made off".

On my long drive back home, i kept making calls to others. Some say the 2nd wave is serious since they themselves didn't get any projects from this regime. Some say the Malays will suffer more, now that the traditional DAP is really rejuvenated as a formidable opposition in its own right, now taking control of the northern Penang, it is rearing its anti affirmative action head.

Whatever it is, it is always a case of leadership, irrespective of authority of it. Clear leadership must rise from the people, and its best to be more balanced and moderate rather than thriving in extremities. Remember, remember, for those who are as old or older than i am. For those who are younger i do fear. For they remember not.

Did the Web Bring Down Barisan Nasional?

2008-03-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

Is the internet a significant factor of Barisan Nasional's dramatic lost of 4 more states in the recent Malaysian general elections? After the wild fires of oohs and aahs died down, many have put forth grand theories as to the true and wholesale reasons of how the mighty Barisan Nasional could have fallen. Some have argued en vogue ideas such as the presence and role of bloggers from ‘alternative media’ comprising also of mobile phone smses, emails and youtube movies as a force to be reckoned with. Such theories seems plausible as it is the internet age after all, and it ‘changes everything’ as one branded vendor used to say. But is that true? Can a government be brought down in 4 states unexpectedly through the web? What else can be the reason? Is it high fuel prices? The price of chicken meat coupled with sugar and flour? Arrogance of present representatives of the people? Backlash from over-exposure in mass media of one-sided content? Barrack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ slogan ringing in our ears? How about ‘all of the above’?
Instantly messaged theories such as those above reminded the author of how pundits explained away the stock market crashes. It is often after-the-fact and never before-the-fact. No one could predict the future, but they are often perfect journalists who can tell you yesterday’s events and hoping them to be historical truths. But still those journalistic narratives aren’t quite historically balanced. If we study the history of web usage among political trends, we can see that it was used extensively and even popularly during the 1999 general elections where the sentiment against the ruling BN was even stronger. Welcome to the birth of MalaysiaKini.com. But when they didn’t make much impact on the majority of the ruling Barisan, that doomsday theory didnt gain favour among the more traditional news reporting.
At the same time all the way to the other side of the globe, where internet usage is at its highest among its populace, we see how the hot blazing American presidential elections is greatly fought not entirely in the web, blogs or mailling lists, but still highly on billboards, prime-time TV debates, advertisings and well hand-shoke endorsements. It is still business as usual in the land of the brave and free and the web is not having centre stage at all. And the author doesn’t think so even if all 6.5 billion people on the planet has internet access and an IPhone each. Battles of the hearts and minds are still affected by sometimes unsensational factors.
Take for instance an unremarkable reason here: UMNO, the main coalition partner’s infamous and now quite boring infighting. It is historically shown that a weakened or decamped ruling UMNO creates a bigger mess at the ballot box. During the previous crises such as where UMNO split into two teams A and B, with the later forming Semangat 46 we see BN losing Kelantan entirely in 1990’s general elections. Then in 1999, the Anwar Ibrahim’s factor resulted in Terengganu been swept off in similar fashion. However with the return to stability and sanity of the party machinery within UMNO it can withstand the wildest of storms and still maintain its two-thirds majority. It also won back Terengganu and almost did so for Kelantan the previous time. This time around the infighting is deeper than admitted. The telling clue is seen when Perlis’ Menteri Besar, Shahidan Kassim reverted of what could have been a clean sweep of the northern corridor when he insist on having his way of his incumbent camp for the candidates’ list. Thus we see the tsunami of change stopping magically right at Perlis’ doorsteps. So is it quite the case with the southern part of the peninsular. Or in East Malaysia where people doesnt seem to drive cars or eat chicken or surf the internet. What else can we use to explain the unevenness of the outcome? Broadband facility is so cheap and widespread in whole of Malaysia but the returning ballots are coloured clearly along where the internal machinery is stronger or not. Therefore we see that the use of the internet as an alternative media is not entirely effective. So before people start creating more dotcoms in MalaysiaBoleh land and our gullible PC salespeople started pushing more wares into undigitisable areas en route to another silly bubble, the ruling classes better stand on hard ground and take a good second look at its own human ‘infrastructure’ of rank, file and all. And that goes for the new winners too. For an all out replay in about 4 years time.

How Much Should I Pay You?

2008-01-03T23:46:00.000-08:00

I am now taking in new persons into my employ. And to my sad surprise, when after inquiring how much worth are today's university issues, to find that their wages no higher than what they were 10 years ago. The price of gold has quadrupled the last decade. So did property and oil. But not the wage of an educated human being.

I have now taken in a few, and they seem thankful of their new master, who so generously rid them of wretched unemployment But also to my sad disposition, I find their skills and qualification no different from the last decade. And i might even dare say they are more worse off now than before. They could not take to reading nor to write me any poetry. Nay, they even have no imagination nor desire to linger upon any such thought.

To pose them questions is to pose in vain. One can only ask of them to tarry on to reclaim from some remote past. Their master even have stand and wait in case they be lost in their own tracks.

But I also have learnt in the last decade. To practice kinder leadership and icon showering, for others to gain progress in their own nature and mind. Not to be any longer fanatically critical of anyone's bluff. It is after all the fault of an education system, an archaic temple oligarchy, that has its priests and issue its eternal currency of endorsement - those diplomas and degrees. I am fortunate I possess none of those papers of burden, none at all.

What To Tell My Kids

2007-11-07T20:40:00.001-08:00

Dont tell me something bad, i will tell you something much worse. :-)

I dont know about you ppl, but when i was your age, i was willing to die and work for free just to get into the back door. I did get into the back door of Bank Bumi, and thru that door got into Siti Nurhaliza's back door (up to her Hotel room and stand besides her alone in the Bilik Air where i was powdering my face and she was reading her script. Also back door now to the Bazaar Leadership. There were more backdoors but no no i am not David Copperfield, just someone looking for a reason why i m born on earth.

Even though i like u all consider this as rezeki and destinies from Allah jua, but as makhluq jahil (what Allah ordained as fitrah), i see nothing to lose by having faith in the own self and not only master knowlege but have an open daring view spirit, instead of always complaining to the Creator that He has not created you in best form or means.

But i learnt alot when i tafakur more with my family and used to cane my kids when they failed in school, but now i only smile and tell them, "praise Allah, you only fail the school report card, not mine nor Allah's. So seek for what actually is Allah's report card for you". And i somehow attain peace at home that way. Not that i m not concerned with their education, but we do it at a different level so to speak.

I told them that your father will not leave u any pusaka (takde harta pun) even if he got, he will just wakaf it. But I leave them lots of nasihat. And they see for themselves how the last 17 years their father struggle from nothing to something and through so many tribulations, and so on, without any worry except what is written in the Ayat seribu dinar that you need taqwa and tawakkal with His ilmu.

May Allah Bless those who chance to read this, and i leave you with many thanks for your time.

red1

A Story Unfolds

2007-05-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Tell of how a story unfolds
Where saints grant but sin atoll;

Of what Compiere promised forth sold
Where source is open as was told;
But then take not unless bold
For its price locks them old;

Community spurs on in a roll
Asking Red1 if he can poll;
That Compiere has been sold
And people must be told;

For Victor cast the first stone
Looking for life there be bone;
Carlos then make its name known
That ADempiere fulfills on its own;

Thru the web, hardly the world slept
They began to forge making big a slap;
Gathering moss at every tap
Soon louder you hear each clap;

In Sourceforge they make tent
Overtaking all to the top ten;
And yet Compiere pretend
As if it need not repent;

Goanookie make us at home in IRC
Karsten migrate all versions to be;
Kontro setups as fast as can be
Khalid teaches us the wiki;

Rob Klein has the twopack
Tim Weath at bottom stack;
OpenBravo tries to track
Compilo makes a comeback;

Everyday brings a surprise
Hengsin that eats not just rice;
DeathMeat dots googlemap alive
Posterita adds to the spice;

Now people begins to wonder
Is this a flash or thunder;
Will it last any longer
But here it gathers stronger;

Let us toast to the future
That codes never for barter;
That all effort comes together
The bazaar lives in each other.

Been Big In a Small Pond

2007-03-17T20:07:00.000-07:00

1) I am King as in this small pond, all others are small fries.

2) If i m a peer in a big pond, even though the quantum is more efficient than in (1), i do not get that feeling of being King.

3) Being a King is different from thinking you are a King.

4) As a King, i get to have a seat at the UN. I get mentioned in newspapers. If lucky i may even have the rotating seat at the Security Council.

5) As King, chicks check me out. I mean doesn't that makes u feel sexy?

6) U may address me as 'Your Royal Openness'. As long as there is a 'royal' somewhere which a socialistic government wouldnt dare.

7) I get to say 'rise' at knighting ceremonies.

8) I get to say 'eat' at very large luncheons.

9) I get to say, 'pardoned' when the condemned pleaded for mercy.

10) I get to say, 'done' whenever the Queen opens her royal mouth.

11) I need not say anything, and no one dares say anything.

12) Some might even interpret my silence as a call for holy crusade, and knights cried out "for King and Pond" all because i refused to sign a treaty.

13) Gee, i m enjoying this monologue.

....
in another parallel universe ....
....

DeMerits of been King in small pond:

1) The chicks that checked you out are only the ones from your small pond and they are not the prettiest in the Universe.

2) When peasantry revolts, they often chopped of the King's head. They also chopped off the Queen's head before yours.

3) You may have to exact heavy taxes so that u can throw those large luncheons.

4) U may not get a seat in the UN Security Council if you re King of Taiwan and Mainland China is a permanent member of the security council. Come to think of it, you may not even get to be in the UN at all. Come to think of it further, with the way things are going with USA diminishing in troops count and China increasing in troops count, you may not even be a pond soon.

5) If u re a King in cyberspace, u might get a fork and your peasantry abandons you.

6) U might have to impose higher taxes to hire a peasantry director to win back the peasantry.

7) You might as well bring in the bank into your palace to get a PM, an Oracle, a court jester, and a paid army to ensure the doors out of your pond are locked well this time.

8) You might have to force your peasantry to sign a PUPA (pond usage peasantry agreement). Don't worry about this. It is called Governance in most other ponds.

9) You might really have to execute a representative of the rebels. Don't worry, it is called Law and Order in most other ponds.

10) You might have to allow some of your inner palace guards have more share in the treasure chest and more of the damsels' chests. Don't worry, this is called corruption in most other ponds.

11) God forbids, but you may not be able to take a holiday on a yacht with a chick from another pond without paparazzis splashing your belly next to hers in The Daily Herald, and the 7 o'clock news.

12) On a smaller scale, you may not be able to enjoy blogging and just making humour at yourself without the pond declaring a state of emergency by reason of insanity of the King.

13) A small pond is only sexy for lazy kings and fast chicks (cutting thru the chase to big bucks) and not for serious creativity that exists in those of us spread across the domains. Been yourself in the oceon allows u to be wherever you please, become whatever u desire. But most of all freedom. And minimal taxes at the pond of your choosing.

The Thin Red Line

2007-01-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

War movies are awesome. But not so in real life. I read this soldier's controversial questioning of the Commander-In-Chief wish to go to war in Iraq:
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs19056

And i posted my comment at the end. But not sure if they re allowing mine in, i recoil it here:

I m not a US citizen, but from an asian/muslim country. I read with interest this whole piece right to the last comment. Somehow from far here may be a bit obscure about how US runs things. But i feel this brave soldier is slightly off the mark. He should know that the US Admin was never holy in many previous counts. Thus he should not be that naive even so that his dad has shown a better choice himself, joining the Peace Corps (again i wouldnt know what is the present scenario with such context). So he was jilted, fine. But isn't there a procedural and honourable way that one can take his highest commanding officer to task? US is big and steep in historical red-tape. There got to be one specific process of doing this amicably and officially i mean. Rather than going to the press, it sounds abit of a hollywood stance. And that somehow may hurt more sides than it heals. I agree with the feelings of those who went and returned to scream back, be they American or German. Thus we have to be very emphatic and careful on what we do or say next. It is a thin red line.

It Ain't Flat, Get The Point?

2006-12-01T22:07:00.000-08:00

They still don't get it. Calling this world a flat world. As if there is space left. Or there can be competition as we know it. In the Web, there is only a singularity. My point and yours are the same point. It is just a click, and it is instant. You can be at where i was, or where i am not, it does not matter.
You arrive at only one point. There can be no other point. When Yahoo! misses the point, Google takes over, and now they took 'the point'. As they say in the battelfield, "Take the point, Jo". It means you take the lead.
I do not see any other web presence able to maintain a 2nd point for long. Yahoo! is doomed. Google will soon be, when they went public and the masses don't jive with it. It is a matter of time that some other dotcom takes over, and it is another viscious cycle again.
With Redhat services now under attack by Oracle's, it is another case in cheek. Their business model relies on a flat world premise, that with all things been equal, they can reach any corner of the earth by just one click. Well, so can Oracle.
We had SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace and now it is YouTube. All this drama in between, just awed so many bloggers and news out there. You skim them and you see a pattern, a philosophy, nay, a new epistemology - The World Is A Singularity.