Founder of lesterchan.net, a Singapore tech and gadgets blog running since 2002. An engineering leader by day and a WordPress plugin developer since 2003, with a soft spot for gadgets, smart home, and a good deal.
An interesting blog post by yeeguy, How Facebook Ships Code, and mig33 shares some of these traits. Among the highlights: all engineers go through a four-to-six-week boot camp learning the system by fixing bugs and attending lectures from senior staff.
Li Xiang and I head to Jakarta tomorrow to visit my secondary school friend Sugih and meet Pei Jun. My iPhone 4 is a paperweight overseas thanks to pricey data roaming, so I'm finally trying SingTel's Bridge DataRoam Unlimited.
A.C. Ryan has announced the Playon!HD2 and Playon!HD Mini2, just after I got my Playon!HD back in November 2010, argh! I love the new gigabit wired networking, since the original's 10/100Mbps made transferring files over my gigabit LAN painfully slow.
Verizon Wireless announced last night that it too will sell the iPhone 4 in the US. Unlike the AT&T and most worldwide units, this is a CDMA version rather than GSM, with three slight differences in its metal band.
Apple is holding a one-day Chinese New Year sale this Friday, 14th January. They run it yearly; instead of America's Black Friday, Singapore gets a red one. I skipped 2010 but bought a Belkin Auto Charger in 2009.
The Mac App Store is live, bundled with the OS X 10.6.6 update, where US$4.99 is the new US$0.99. I haven't bought a paid app there since I get software directly from the makers, fairly useless to me.
If you're reading this, the DNS resolved correctly: I've moved the site from my dedicated server at Frro to a VPS at Vodien. I did it to play with more Linux without risking downtime for other sites.
Last year in Looking Back 2009 I said I wanted a job, and I got one as a Web Engineer at mig33, starting 1st February 2010, nearly a year now. I'll spend this New Year's Eve in the cinema again.
Wishing all my readers and visitors a Merry Christmas, and may you receive lots of gadgets in the years to come! My top two Christmas songs remain My Only Wish (This Year) by Britney Spears and Wham's Last Christmas.
With more gadgets come messy wires and crowded power sockets. I'd eyed Bluelounge's Refresh station for days but it's hard to find here, stocked only at EpiCentre Ion Orchard, so I settled on the Konnext SynCharger.
Update: we're back after about three hours of downtime. The site will be offline for a few hours between 10pm on 18th December and 6am on 19th December 2010 (GMT+8) while the co-location server rack is relocated.
Got the HTC 7 Mozart from Mobile Square for S$670 without contract. After trading in my Nokia N82 and my mom's iPhone 3G, I paid just S$260. Now I own every major mobile OS except BlackBerry!
Inspired by DK, I'm finally posting my geek bag over two years later. It rides to work inside my Crumpler Moderate Embarrassment. Contents include two 8GB USB drives, a 1TB WD My Passport and some Sanyo Eneloops.
Hoist the sails: Uncharted Waters Online, the historical massively multiplayer online role-playing game, officially launched today in Singapore. It's distributed by Netmarble, the game portal from CJ Internet, a global entertainment company.
Looks like a good alternative to Apple's sixth-gen iPod nano. The Sony Ericsson Fitness Experience Pack targets sports enthusiasts, bundling the LiveView display, the SportyPal Pro sport application for it, and a carrying case for your phone, ideal for exercising.
I've spent the past few months building the mig33 Android client with colleagues, tasked with styling the native UI in Java and XML plus the HTML5/CSS3 webpages. It's tedious, but the first beta is finally ready for download!
Google has officially announced the Nexus S and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Co-developed by Google and Samsung, the Nexus S pairs the latest Android with a 1GHz Hummingbird processor and 16GB of memory, making it one of the fastest phones around.
The earliest Christmas party goes to Nokia! At their media party at Serenity, VivoCity, I won a Nokia E72 White Edition in the lucky draw, since most journalists left early, leaving about fifteen of us competing for ten prizes.
Moonchild, an animated short film by Singapore's Stick and Balloon, needs donations to finish its final production leg. A shy fiddler named Niki meets a lovely moon-spirit and her strange musical band, and nervously tries to impress her.
The Sanyo Eneloop Stick Booster KBC-D1BS was announced in Japan in August 2010 but never came to Singapore. My mom's business friend brought one back for 2,980 yen, about S$46.30. I love its design, and it outputs 5.0V.
Bought the Huawei MiFi E585 for S$185 from Amos on HardwareZone forums. This mobile router uses your SIM card to get online and shares the connection with up to five devices, unlike 3G USB modems that serve only one.
My second hoot from SITEX 2010 is the A.C. Ryan Playon! HD at S$349, bundled with a 2TB drive and a free Wireless N dongle. I chose it because it plays nearly every format, including RM and RMVB.