TR EMERITUS

Asimo robot from Honda Japan In a blogpost [Link] today (May 20), National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan wants construction companies to consider using robots at construction sites. As an example, he said, "One of the most labour-intensive processes in construction is tiling." "Each year, over 40 million tiles are laid in new construction projects here. There is therefore great potential to automate the tiling process and make it more labour-efficient." Mr Khaw said that government researchers at the Singapore-ETH Centre Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) and ROB Technologies have conceptualised and developed a robotic tiling prototype for automated floor tiling. It is still at the research stage. He said: But if the robot becomes commercially available, the estimate is that the robotic tiling machine can lay tiles two to three times faster than the human tiler. An added advantage is that robots can deliver high precision and consistent quality. Such a robot will be able to work alongside workers at a construction site and do the menial tasks of laying floor tiles while workers focus on higher-value added work such as refilling and grouting the tiles, and cutting odd-size tiles to fit the corners. Mr Khaw said that using robots will help to increase productivity and reduce the risk of work site accidents. "Robotics is not new, but we hardly see them in our construction sites. The Building and Construction Authority will be happy to provide some funding support to help change the status quo," he added.  Read More →

I don’t normally want to criticise websites, but I’ve heard so many complaints about our National Day Parade (NDP) website and I can’t help but agree with them. It’s almost a national embarrassment that a country with such advanced and developed infocommunications capabilities could not find someone better to showcase its most important national event on the Internet. It’s not even just one aspect where the NDP website is failing. There are problems with security and privacy, design and layout, HTML coding, and more. Let’s start with security and privacy. It’s one of the biggest thing on the Internet that everyone is concerned about. You see, the ticket balloting submission, in the sub-site http://eballot.ndp.gov.sg/, does not use SSL to encrypt its web communication. They are going to ask people to submit private personal information, but they don’t think to use encryption on their website. Really? Click to expand As you can see above, the form data is submitted in a plaintext HTTP POST. Adding SSL is such a simple thing to do, but apparently there was no one on their team with even some basic common sense to think about it. The personal data comprises full name, telephone number, and NRIC number. Our government frequently talks about Internet security, data protection, and most recently the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) which will become fully enforced from 1 July 2014, yet the NDP website doesn’t think about their basic sense of responsibility to protect the transmission of personal data. Sure, sure, I know, the government is excused from the PDPA. I’m not done with security. Have you heard about SQL injection attacks? Unvalidated input? Well, the fellows behind the NDP website seem to know a little bit about that. They decided to be so paranoid about restricting input that your name, for example, is only permitted to contain alphabets and spaces. So, I’m very sorry, Singaporeans with See-Toh or Aw-Yeongfamily names, you are not permitted to join the ballot. The same goes for those who chose fancy names like D’Souza. Similarly, Nagaratnam s/o Subramaniam and Rajadarshini d/o Balakrishnan, you can’t be in the running either. Whoever wrote the specs for this app ought to be fired. The HTML coding of the NDP website is also nothing short of atrocious. Totally embarrassing. 176 errors according to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service. Full of HTML errors Yes, there are no doubt many repeats of the same type of error. But there are plenty of examples showing a complete lack of grasp of basic HTML. Or perhaps a total disregard for writing proper HTML. Whichever way, this says so much about their level of professionalism. Let’s talk about site design. Oh dear, where do I start. At the top navigation bar, as you mouseover its various links, they become highlighted as you’d expect. However, the drop-down panel is completely the same. It’s the same because the drop-down panel is already populated with all the 2nd level navigation links. Then, in that case, there’s no need for so many individual entries in the top-level navigation eh? Click to expand Next, let’s talk about those greyed out links. Sure, I can understand it may be far too early before the actual NDP event, so some of the links may not yet be relevant. For example, they may not be ready to give out traffic information at this time. That’s fine. Then why put the link there at all? There’s no excuse for so many links to be not working. There are a total of 29 links in that drop-down panel, 15 of which are greyed out. That’s more than 50% of the links not working. Please tell me what impression that leaves you. I’d say this website is a mock up to show how the final product will look like. That’s what a web design firm might do to demonstrate to their client what they propose to build. You don’t go live with such a half-baked website. It gets worse. On the main page, as you mouseover the big tiles, you’d notice some tiles are clickable (indicated by your mouse pointer). The Photo of the Week, for example, seems to be clickable. Click on it, but nothing happens. Oh yes, that’s right, it’s probably not ready yet. This is a mock up. I’m sorry, let’s not dwell on not-ready things anymore. Let’s talk about how the information is presented. For example, in the Media Releases page, the link for Theme, Logo & Concept is a ZIP file. The link for Ticket Balloting is a PDF. In fact, this style of just tossing in files, instead of putting proper content on a webpage, seems prevalent in other sections of the NDP website. Another example is the page on the Junior Red Lions, which simply contains a link to a JPEG picture about, well, the Junior Red Lions. Click to expand There’s yet another example in the Big-Hearted Family page. There isn’t even an effort to, say, properly lay out the image, again another fault that seems to be repeated in other pages. If you ask me, this aspect of the NDP website almost seems to be a document repository. Just stash PDFs, ZIPs, and JPEGs in there. Let’s talk about design again. Can you see the plethora of fonts used on the main page? Usually, you shouldn’t use too many fonts together. The page will simply look very haphazard, lacking consistency, lacking an identifiable style. It’s definitely possible to pull off a design that includes a myriad of carefully selected fonts. Obviously, this NDP website isn’t that. Moving on, let’s check out the NDP website on a smartphone. Oops. They did not design for mobile. There’s no responsive design, and there’s no mobile site. It’s alright. Maybe they did intend for mobile users to use their prominently featured mobile app. Let’s take a look there. There’s a link to download the Android app. But wait, there’s no iOS app? Wow. Last, but certainly not the end of it, the NDP website is not on IPv6. IDA has been pushing hard for IPv6 adoption in Singapore. They’ve said last year that 95% of government e-services are IPv6 enabled. It’s probably true. Oh, but not the NDP website. I suppose someone in the organising committee didn’t get the memo about IPv6 adoption. I know the NDP website is fronted by Akamai, but Akamai does support IPv6. So it is strange that the NDP website would not be served on IPv6. I want to mention Akamai here, because it brings me back to the issue on security and privacy. Yes, the ticket balloting sub-site is also served through Akamai. Would you believe it, your personal data is being sent in plaintext, unencrypted for anyone in-between to see, across the Internet to a Content Delivery Network? What is wrong with the people behind the NDP website? You see why I’m dismayed with the NDP website. We are a nation that’s strong in ICT capabilities. But we put up such a website for the most important national event. This is an embarrassment.   Zit Seng * The author is a technology and lifestyle blogger at zitseng.com.  Read More →

President Tony Tan Keng Yam opened a new session of Parliament on Friday night. Tony Tan said many things in Parliament in his opening address and there will be many follow up comments on what he said. He wanted the govt to do many things. What he has laid out are the bones, a broad framework and the govt would need to flesh them out with the details. That is the frightening part and I already have seen one, flashed in the media like Santa Claus in coming to town six month early. All I can see is nothing good. I will write about it subsequently in another post. What Tony said in brief is that the Govt has screwed up big time and need to reflect on the failed policies and to rework on them. And he has laid them out, the areas that the Govt must redeem itself, to address the ills it has created in recent years. Ouch, no one sees it this way, and all were thinking that everything was fine and Tony was just reading a brief written for him and means nothing. Another thing Tony made it very clear is that it is all about Singaporeans. In his speech, he has never mentioned a single word, the most offensive word in today’s context, about ‘locals’. Tony has made it doubly and triply clear, that it is about Singaporeans and those jokers that have been sputtering the word ‘locals’ better take heed. I hope Tony really meant what he said and the Govt takes note of this and erase the word ‘locals’ from their vocabulary and reports. What else did Tony said? Oh, he touched on the political debate that is going on, where else but in TRE and cyberspace. He acknowledges that it was good and healthy for a constructive debate to improve the lives of Singaporeans. Destructive and crude attacks are not the right thing to do as they would distract the readers from the real issues. When people start to attack other people personally and viciously instead of addressing an issue, the debate ends there. The other party will just ignore what is being said and walk away. For a constructive debate to carry one to a fruitful ending, both sides must feel comfortable to engage. Confrontation politics is bad and must be discouraged. Now this last sentence is a tricky one. Some opposition politicians have stood up to defend themselves. And some ruling party politicians have spoken smugly and derisively about opposition politics as if Tony was telling the opposition politicians off. Wait a minute. Is Tony addressing this confrontational politicking at the opposition? Who are the real culprits that have been indulging in confrontational politics? Who have been hitting below the belt, using all means and power to attack viciously at their opponents? Don’t look at me. Read Tony’s comments and ask yourself, are you the guilty one? Don’t always presume that it is always the other party that is at fault. Historical evidences and facts pointed to one direction, when politics were confrontational, vicious and destructive, you know who came up on top and who the victims were. Like that also cannot see, or still so thick, thinking that only other people must be at fault, and self is always an angel. Tiok boh? Or did I read Tony wrongly? Chua Chin Leng aka redbean * The writer blogs at mysingaporenew.blogspot.com.  Read More →