What The Toot!

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Posts Tagged Internet

Malaysia IS a country?

Oct 19

Posted by khensthoth in Internet, Malaysia, Toot! | No Comments

I can almost imagine what goes on in the minds of people who made those searches:

Hmm.. Malaysia? Vaguely familiar name. Let’s see which country it’s in..
Oh wait.. You mean to tell me Malaysia IS a country?

Seriously? 165,000,000 results for “Malaysia is in which country”?

Also note Malaysia is/is not an Islamic Country

Also note Malaysia is/is not an Islamic state

Also interesting is the Islamic state search results. 3.93 million results for “Malaysia is an Islamic state” versus 1.03 million for “Malaysia is not an Islamic state”. I have less faith in Malaysia now.

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Cost and Completion Date of the Penang Second Bridge

Oct 16

Posted by khensthoth in Internet, Penang, Toot! | No Comments

October 10 2009 4:32 PM (16:32), BERNAMA News:

Bridge will be ready before 2013

Bridge will be ready before 2013

October 10 2009 6.19 PM (18:19), TheStar News:

No, it's April 2013 and it's spelled Bbridge.

No, it's April 2013 and bridge is apparently spelled Bbridge.

It’s amazing how much news can change within 2 hours.

I decided to see how much the reported cost and anticipated date of completion of the Penang Second Bridge changed throughout the year, from 2003 to 2009. So I went through all the news source here and here, filtered the similar and obviously wrong ones, and plotted a beautiful graph:

Compiled from various news source from 2003 - 2009

Compiled from various news source from 2003 - 2009

Interestingly it was not too long ago in 2005 that Samy Vellu said the second bridge is not economically viable. Anyway, following the trends of the two graphs, we should be seeing further increase in cost and expected completion date. I shall be looking forward to April 2013 – I don’t remember the last time a Malaysian  government mega-project was on-time and under-budget.

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Dear The Malaysian Insider Webmaster

Oct 14

Posted by khensthoth in Internet, Toot! | No Comments

Dear The Malaysian Insider Webmaster,

I like your online news portal very much. You provide me with up-to-date news about Malaysia and I enjoy reading the many columnist from both sides of the political divide a lot. In fact, the commentaries and opinions are where I spent my time the most, while I usually just glance through the news headlines and click “Mark all as read” in Google Reader. The news your website provide is, on rare occasions, ever-so-slightly-tiny-weeny biased, which is already a vast improvement over the traditional mainstream media in Malaysia.

However, for the longest time the RSS feed for your news items has been… dysfunctional, to say the least. Take a look for yourself:

Repeated news item, screenshot from my Google Reader

Repeated news item. Screenshot from my Google Reader

The arrows point to repeated news items. This happens, at the very least, on a daily basis. Sometimes a headline would be repeated up to three times.

I don’t know the cause of it nor if you knew this problem existed. If you didn’t, this is me informing you. Suffice to say that if you were doing that to increase your pageviews to your website and by extension the online advertisements, it is failing – because this problem is absolutely annoying. The repeated news item in your RSS Feed only encourages me to nonchalantly glance through the feed, and makes me more “trigger-happy” with the “Mark all as read” button than I already am.

So, dear webmaster of The Malaysian Insider, please fix this. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
WhatTheToot!

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What is easier to understand than Google Wave?

Oct 13

Posted by khensthoth in Internet, Technology, Toot! | No Comments

I was very excited when Google Wave was announced, so excited, in fact I grabbed the 1 hour 20 minutes video of the Google I/O conference from YouTube. Partly because Google Wave has such an ambitious goal of replacing email and online communication, it is quite complicated – Google needs to design the protocol and the software, as if each is not complicated enough on its own.

Google Wave is so complicated that many video has surfaced online to explain what it is, and a lot of them is from Google itself. One of the better, funnier non-Google ones is this:

Yet, there are still a lot of people who find Google Wave hard to understand – which is whyI had a good laugh when I found this parody website. Well, apparently a lot of wisdom can be gained from such a simple site. For example:

Men are easier to understand than Google Wave

Men are easier to understand than Google Wave

Women - definitely not so.

Women - definitely not so.

So is Obama's Nobel Peace Price

Google Wave pwned Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

Considering Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is not without it’s fair share of online criticism and ridicule, one should perhaps look at one of his ambitious, noble, still-unimplemented initiative – the Healthcare Reform.

Healthcare Reform? Too hard to understand.

Healthcare Reform? Too hard to understand.

It’s interesting to note similar amount and percentage of people find Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and his Healthcare Reform Bill easier to understand than Google Wave. I suspect these two are the similar group of people, that is to say, people who actually understood the Healthcare Reform Bills more than Google Wave are the people who find it easier to understand why Obama won awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

… coz’ I certainly do not understand.

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How do people find our site?

Oct 11

Posted by khensthoth in Internet, Religion, Site, Toot! | No Comments

After a long hiatus, this series is back. This post, however, will just be a short one, serving as a teaser of things to come.

Seriously F-up

Seriously F-up

Let’s see where this visitor came from then:

IP blurred for his sake.

IP blurred for his sake.

The Verizon hostname and the browser language flag should be a dead give away – that is to say, the visitor is an Amerifag (to use his/her choice of language), more commonly known as Americunt (Yes, it’s an Internet lingo). The IP address indicated that the visitor is from a small town in north-eastern United States.

It’s a little ironic that the keyword search landed on a category page for racism, as if his God was trying to lead him there. That should teach him/her a lesson or two about respect, xenophobia, and homosexuality.

More importantly though, I didn’t know one could find this site on the first page of Google Images search results using the keywords “allah is fag”. What that American visitor was trying to find, in Google Images no less, about THAT though,  continues to baffle me.

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