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Google Wave … Google Buzz … Twitter … Facebook … which tool for which use case?

// February 15th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Technology

This week, one of my Friends asked for a comparison between Google Wave and Google Buzz.

I happily obliged, with this short assessment:

Twitter for this ... Buzz for that ... etc etc

A little more in-depth on the different tools for different use cases after the break:

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#brunei e-government advances the fastest in ASEAN over the period 2008 to 2010

// January 21st, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Technology

2008 to 2010 has been a great two years for e-Government in Brunei.

Some of our achievements over the past 2 years

We launched the e-Government strategic plan 2009-2014. This master plan creates a framework for all major stakeholders to work towards, it unifies the efforts of the public sector and the private sector with a common language and it clarifies the governance structures under which the continued public-private collaboration is to operate under.

The Brunei Government consolidated its efforts to deliver a common ICT infrastructure to Government Ministries, Agencies and Statutory bodies by launching the e-Government National Centre.

IFB ran it’s flagship event, the Brunei ICT Careers Day in 2008. During the Careers Day, the industry and employers had the opportunity to emphasise the importance of ICT to potential new hires, to match professionals with industrial needs and perhaps most importantly, to identify a pool of young & talented ICT professionals.

We implemented GEMS, the Government Employee Management System. This Government-wide enterprise system seeks to modernise human resource management within the Brunei Government. Reaching some 40,000+ Government employees, compared with the other e-Government projects, GEMS has one of the widest reach.

So how did this translate into our Rankings?

During Brunei’s previous assessment of e-Government readiness, we were slipping in the rankings (shout out to DebatingBrunei.blogspot.com!). Gradually slipping from a fairly high ranking in 2003 of 55/173 in 2003, down to 63/178 in 2004, down to 73/191 in 2005 and then down again to 87 in 2008.

For 2010 Brunei has risen up the rankings – we were the fastest rising in the 10-country ASEAN grouping. We went up from 87th to 68th place – an increase of 19 spots. Not quite regaining our spot from 2004, but definately a strong increase from prior year.

Extract below from UNPAN:

The down side?

On the Up side, Brunei scored well on: the e-Government index, the Infrastructure index and the Human Capital index

On the other hand, Brunei has scored pretty poorly on: the Online Service Index and the e-Participation Index.

The bottom line

For Brunei to live up to our expectations set in the National Development Plan 2007-2012, and in the e-Government Strategic Plan 2009-2014, we will expect to see some big changes.

Firstly, the results of the e-Government citizen survey (organised by PMO and IFB, in collaboration with EGNC and BAG) will come in. This will be interesting to analyse, because this will tell the e-Government stakeholders which government services are in greatest need of attention by implementing agencies. This kind of e-Participation

And to achieve improvements in the Online Service Index?

I think that very high on the Government agenda will likely be technologies like “Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) and the “Enterprise Service Bus” (ESB). I feel that a key strategy to enhancing the depth and breadth of online services being offered to the Rakyat (Citizens) is not through brute force computerisation but rather through a thoughtful and most importantly … a coherent business NEEDS driven implementation that focuses on the essence of the problem. This is neatly described by Deloitte Consulting as “Service Thinking“.

Because after all, a brute force computerisation of existing processes doesn’t have the same potential to unlock public value to the Rakyat (Citizens) or to deliver meaningful e-Services.

Once we have identified the “pain points” through the e-Government citizen survey, we can then go about tackling the problem of putting some of these services online. In the language of the e-Government Strategic Plan 2007-2014, the “SOA” is called the “Government Enterprise Architecture”.

I’m looking forward to the next 2-3 years to see the kinds of services that will be implemented in a SOA-driven approach, or as they call it, a “Government Enterprise Architecture” driven approach. And remember! This is all towards delivering e-Services and with a main objective of delivering meaningful e-Services for the public and the nation.

A model for municipal fiber networks – 100mbps @ $11/month

// August 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

With the recent interest in FTTH, WBA and regulatory strategies to achiveve growth, I thought it would be a good time to blog about the results that countries and places outside of Brunei have had with deploying FTTH networks.

Stockholm case study

Stockholm’s 100mbps municipal FTTH for $11 per month. And that’s in both directions – upload at 100mbps / download at 100mbps.

In a Swedish city – $30-$40 per month buys you a 20mbps connection. And in the US, expect to pay some $145 per month for a Verizon connection.

See the connection? You don’t have to go far to find more support for this model – OECD endorses this kind of model where the government funds the investment in infrastructure, and let the private sector do what it does best – which is innovate, develop innovative services and compete for the end-user’s dollars.

Replacing an EACS drive for an EADS

// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

So the shop somehow managed to deliver my custom PC with 2x EADS drives and 1x EACS drive. Normally, to rectify this kind of mishap would require backing up the data on the drive and restoring the data to the replacement disk.

Not so with ZFS. Because my three drives are in a raidz storage pool, ZFS automatically partitions and manages my data. This allows up to one device in the pool to fail (single parity).

Replacing the drive was a case of:

1. Pulling out the old disk.
2. Cabling up the new disk in the, now-empty slot.
3. Booting the OS as normal.
4. Resilvering the raidz zpool with a single command: zpool replace <name of device to replace>
5. Go get coffee, rebuilding the array will take some time. Once it’s done, check status with: zpool status

After the break I give some examples of what you may see:

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ZFS to the rescue

// February 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

ZFS saved my data!

root@opensolaris:~# zpool status -x
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using ‘zpool clear’ or replace the device with ‘zpool replace’.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scrub: scrub completed after 0h44m with 0 errors on Thu Feb 12 13:27:23 2009
config:

errors: No known data errors
root@opensolaris:~#

I wonder if this is a symptom of poor PSU performance? I’ll be monitoring that disk c6d0 (SATA3).

Seamless upgrades with OpenSolaris & ZFS

// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

One other benefit of using ZFS and it’s ability to take snapshots of an entire filesystems … is that I can upgrade my boot environment inside a clone of my existing system. If I have problems, I can always roll back with a single command line.

Those days of maintaining a 2nd set of hardware for testing operating system patches may be numbered!

[see: OpenSolaris getting started guide, and OpenSolaris Boot Environments docs] (more…)

Somewhere … a Windows file server just cried a little inside

// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

This is a screen shot of my OpenSolaris install. I created an approx. 2,000 GB storage pool out of 3x 1TB hard disk drives. You’d think it should add up to 3,000 GB of storage … but one of the disks is being used to provide redundancy to the pool. My data is being spread out over 3x disks, so now, if one of the disks fails, I can easily replace it with any disk of similar capacity and OpenSolaris will automatically recover my data for me.

The real cool part? After copying all my data across to the new storage pool, I took a backup of the data using a single command, zfs snapshot -r tank/share@20090205

This is all made possible by the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) feature in OpenSolaris, an open source project from Sun Microsystems.

Somewhere there’s a sysadmin slaving over some tape backups or wrestling with logical volume management, manually copying old data over to new disks. ZFS takes manageability of disk resources to a whole new level of simplicity. Adding more space to the pool is simply a matter of unboxing the new drives, connecting them and adding them to the pool. The pool automatically grows larger to accommodate the new disks and data is magically spread over the new enalrged pool.

ZFS – Finally back on OpenSolaris

// February 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

Havoc! Let me summarise my long list of problems with my custom PC. The spec is roughly:

• ASUS P5KPL-AM Motherboard, with Intel Core2Duo processor
• 3x Western Digital 1TB hard drives, WD10EADS (SATA)
• 1x Western Digital WD160GB, SATAIII HDD,
• DVD burner and USB card reader mounted internally
• 400 W PSU, 2x additional case fans

A little summary of my troubles after the break:

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FreeBSD with ZFS

// January 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Technology

So I got FreeBSD 7.1 w/ ZFS on my root file system working like a charm.

I followed the instructions at www.ish.com.au, with some exceptions, which follow after the break.

The cool thing? 1,860 GB of storage space. 930 GB of disk space is being used for automatic ZFS backups (the checksums) to protect my data. Total = 2,790 GB.

Total spent = around B$1,250.

This is 67 cents per gigabyte of better than RAID-5 protected storage. With a CPU thrown in to boot! haha.

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OpenSolaris vs FreeBSD .. .which do I go for?

// January 30th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Technology

Dilemma! I’m setting up a home NAS … but do I return to my FreeBSD roots or shall I try something new and go with OpenSolaris?

Both are Open Source, both have excellent communities etc. And most importantly? Both have ZFS.

Well, my Dad always told me to be systematic! A clear mind = a clear purpose. So a small comparison follows after the break …

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