Found in JB pirated discs bust: Database of S’pore buyers. List of names, phone numbers, addresses in shop’s PC to be turned over to police here

A RAID by the Malaysian authorities on a shop in Johor Baru has turned up a list of its Singapore customers, which will be given to the police here.

The customer database containing names, telephone numbers and home addresses was found in a computer seized in the raid.

The shop in Holiday Plaza was busted three weeks ago by DVD-sniffing dogs Flo and Lucky, which belong to the movie industry watchdog Motion Picture Association (MPA). They were, at the time, on loan to the Malaysian authorities.

The list is now still with the MPA. Its senior vice-president Michael Ellis said ‘a lot’ of Singaporeans were on it, and that the list would be given to the police.

The police, when contacted, would say only that they had not received the list.

Shops selling pirated movies here have all but disappeared in the last few years, following a crackdown on syndicates supplying them, said Mr Ellis.

Some Singaporeans now order movies online, call or visit pirated DVD retailers in Johor Baru to place their orders. Runners from these syndicates then smuggle the discs in and deliver them to customers here.

It is illegal under the Films Act to possess uncensored films. The penalty runs up to $100 a film.

Offenders caught with five or more pirated items can also be charged under the Copyright Act, which could bring up to $100,000 in fines and five years in jail – although nobody has yet been charged.

Mr Ellis told reporters at the launch of the MPA’s first Internet piracy education campaign at Maris Stella High School yesterday that enforcement, while necessary, had to be coupled with public education to effect a mindset change.

To this end, he said, the MPA was giving out 200,000 brochures on the risks of illegal downloads and protection of intellectual property rights to schools and libraries.

The principal of Maris Stella, Brother Anthony Tan, added that public education aside, content providers also need to price their products ‘reasonably’ and supply them in the formats their customers want so they will not see the need to visit illegal sites.

Meanwhile, software industry watchdog Business Software Alliance (BSA) will launch a soft-touch anti-piracy programme next week.

Together with regulator Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, the BSA is encouraging companies to sign up for a free, self-administered software audit.

In the audit, the company declares the number of computers, software and licence details it has. If illegal software is found, the company is expected to delete it or get the legitimate version.

On passing the audit, the company gains for itself a one-year exemption from BSA-initiated enforcement action.

Recently I found out about Ping.sg by accident.

I realized that it has the potential and hence, I registered my blog and my development blog with it. I think it is so much better than Tomorrow.sg.

I realized that my site ranking in Alexa is higher than Ping.sg and Tomorrow.sg. LOL

lesterchan.net Alexa Rank: 23,774
Ping.sg Alexa Rank: 89,298
Tomorrow.sg Alexa Rank: 112,803

Celebrated my birthday with my polytechnic classmates last Thursday at Glass House Fish & Co. Wanted to eat Tao’s Restaurant at Paradize center at first, but last minuted I decided that it was a bit expensive, $28.80++ for a 7 course set dinner, whereas Fish & Co the most will be about $24 without any ++. We waited for like 30 minutes for our seat, it is crowded and they do not want to open up the 2nd level. And there are like 4 birthdays going on there, because the live band sang the birthday song 4 times while we are there. The ambiance was so noisy due to the live band and the loud music that we cannot even hear each other properly. I think next time we will avoid going to the glass house at night for Fish & Co. It is the worst experience I have with them.

Prison Break Season 2 ended last night, I was a late comer, I only started watching Prison Break last month and I manage to finish 2 seasons (44 episodes) within a month. There will be a Prison Break Season 3, but I have no idea when they going to end it. I find Prison Break better than Heroes because of its unexpected twist and every episode is very exciting. Heroes will start airing again on 23rd April 2007.

Next week will be my last week of school before my exams starts on 21st April 2007 to 2nd May 2007.

Birthday Celebration With Family (23rd March 2007)
Celebrated my birthday with my family at Vivo City at Dian Xiao Er one day in advance because my parents, grandparents and my uncle will be going to Vietnam for a business meeting.

My birthday cake was an ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry and they ran out of dry ice and expect to me to take home an ice cream cake box which is wrap in aluminum foil. Even my place is near Vivo City, the cake will melt before I get home. Poor service.

My uncle bought back this candle from China which is interesting, take a look here. And yes the ice cream cake design from Ben & Jerry suck. I think I will stick to Swensens ice cream cake next time.

Birthday Celebration With GF, Bro, Bro’s GF (24th March 2007)
After sending my parents to the airport, the 4 of us went to Outback to celebrate our birthday, my brother birthday is on 28th March. First time tried the $29.90 sirloin steak there and boy does it taste good, it is better than Jack’s Place, no doubt about that.

As usual, no matter how many times we eat at Outback, the food we ordered can never be finished. LOL. 4 of us ate 4 main courses along with 2 soup, 1 plate of chicken fillet, 1 Bloomin’ Onion and 1 Bushman ‘Shrooms

After the filling lunch, we proceed to Tiger Live at St James Power Station, my mom got the tickets priced at $18 for free because she bought some tiger beer from the airport. The thing is like a heritage tour of Tiger Beer and I love the 4D segment of it, it was very well done. The last top was Tiger Cool, a bar where they serve Tiger Beer between -2°C to 2°C. And it taste really different from outside, it is so much nicer.

After the Tiger Live, we spent like 4 hours waiting for our movie TMNT to start because I miscalculated the time and book a 9.45pm show. TMNT was just average, but the animation was fantastic and it is very very loosely based on TMNT 2003 (Cartoon) with Karai in it. I am a huge TMNT fan by the way.

Launch Of C&C 3: Tiberium Wars
I went to Funan to collect my Pre-Order card from The Software Botique on Sunday because I figured if I go to the launch party, I will have more freebies.

I went there at 1.30pm to Lido level 5 and the number of people there is crazy, it was so crowded, considering the fact that it will not be launch till 2pm. And Lido space sucks, it is so cramp and I think they did not anticipate the crowd. But overall it was orderly. And they should have more booths to redeem the game because there are only 2 booths, 1 booth for GDI and 1 booth for NOD, so which ever faction you prefer you can redeem your freebies according to your favorite faction. I am not the first 300 customers because I did not receive the poster =(

I got the Kane’s Edition and the box that contains the CD is VERY NICE, I think it is the best designed game CD cover I have ever bought. One of the freebie is the Razor Mantis mouse pad which I like a lot. I think I am going to get a Razor mouse soon so that it can match the mouse pad.

Crumpler Laptop Bag
Saw this nice Crumpler Laptop Bag at the Crumpler Shop at Wheelock, it cost $216 and it is called the The Part and Parcel and it fits a 15″ laptop. I am thinking of getting that using my donations I have got so far when the exchange rate is better =D

I am a bag lover and I have lots and lots of bag, till my mom and LiXiang keeps nagging at me to stop buying bag. LOL

BTW, this site also turned 5 on 24th March 2007 =D

It is now slightly pass midnight and I am officially 23 years old =D

OMGWTFBBQ, Resident Evil: Extinction Trailer is out. I have been so looking forward to this after a disappointing Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Hopefully this one will be good.

This epsiode should be the last of the Resident Evil movie sequel.

Resident Evil: Extinction Trailer

Been so busy for the past 2 weeks, end of semester is coming and hence a lot of assignments is due. Been doing my CS2261 EJB at Starbucks while LiXiang does her drawing. Now I know where to find power outlet seats in certain Starbucks. LOL.

Caught Music & Lyrics at GV VivoCity, at first I thought the show was quite boring, but after watching the show, I must say that the show is good, simple and clean love story and to add on, the soundtrack is excellent. If you watch this movie, you need to get the soundtrack, it comes hand in hand.

Tried No Signboard seafood at GV VivoCity. When it comes to seafood, normally my family would go to Long Beach at Marina, but this time we wanted to try something new. The price at No Signboard was more towards the expensive side, the crab was nice especially the white pepper crab, but the chilli crab cannot beat Long Beach.

Finally handed in my CS2261 Assignment 1 – EJB, I still have an assignment 2 for it which is using JSP and servlet. I did a module on that in polytechnic and was disappointed that I never get an distinction, just got an A. I was looking through the code and realized that I am good in JSP/Servlet during my polytechnic days, now I can’t even recall a single thing after 2 years and 2 months of brainwashing.

Serious, Java Entity SUCKS. Long live SQL queries.

EA Los Angeles (EALA) is pleased to announce that the highly anticipated Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars for the PC has officially gone gold and will be on stores shelves Nationwide March 28.

Fast and fluid gameplay, a breakthrough single player campaign, the ability to transform online battles into a spectator sport, next-generation graphics, and an epic story with full-motion video sequences featuring top Hollywood talent, mark the return of the genre-defining Command & Conque series.

Source: Press Release

Found this nice little site from HardwareZone Forums, dnScoop. dnScoop is a many domain tools wrapped into one convenient package. A domain traffic tool, a domain whois tool, a domain history, a domain popularity, domain appraisal (site value report), a link value appraisal (link value report), pagerank check, an inbound links count, an indexed pages check and more.

My site is worth: $45,630

Been so busy with my school work. End of semester is coming and hence lots of projects going to be due. 2 reports and 1 programming assignment left to do. Just submitted my CS2250 video assignment. The lecturer was very strict about the requirement. The video cannot even be a second longer than 5 minutes. It must be either under 5 minutes of exactly at 5 minutes.

Started on my programming assignment for CS2261. It is programming in Java Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0, and for the assignment 2 for tis module I will be using JSP.

I always think that Java sucks, and till today, I still take my stand. I have no idea why Universities and Polytechnic in Singapore teaches Java and not .NET.

If I can use PHP to do this assignment, I can finish it within a day. With all those Beans and JavaDB, it just makes my life more difficult. To add 1 data entry to the JavaDB I have to like code 4 classes just to do one simple thing. Grrr.