Surfing in Viet Nam

Sat 3 Dec 200503:30 AM

Two years ago, broadband internet came to Viet Nam in a big way thanks to the country’s Ministry of Post and Telematics, which brought ADSL to most urban areas throughout the country. Today you’ll find dozens of small, ramshackle shops marked with signs that say “ADSL,” “Game Online,” or simply “Internet.” It’s hard to miss them because they’re everywhere.

The proliferation of this industry is fueled mostly by Vietnamese kids nursing increasingly pronounced addictions to online gaming. The most popular MMORPGs, like “Swordsman,” are ported from other culturally complementary sources (read: Chinese game publishers) by local upstarts like VinaGame. At just about US$0.19 for an hour of playing time, the result is an apparently ferocious gaming market that wasn’t in evidence just four years ago.

You can use the machines for anything you like, of course, and so it’s not uncommon to spot disproportionately tall and/or well-dressed Westerners surfing next to thin, gangly Vietnamese kids; the former playing at business, the latter at swordplay. Such sights are as close to an advertisement for technologically-enabled cross-cultural bridges as you’ll see this side of an IBM commercial.

Feature Parity Tricks

Mon 21 Nov 200503:47 AM

To pass the time during this tryingly long flight from New York to Saigon, I picked up a copy of Mac Addict Magazine at the airport. I haven’t read it in years, but its lightheartedly written geekery is still an amusing diversion in short doses. For this trip, one nice thing about the magazine is the free CD-ROM full of trial software, shareware and on-the-cheap instructional videos included with each issue. Since to travel by plane, in 2005, still means being away from Internet access, I’ve been digging through the CD-ROM a bit and playing with its contents; soft of like surfing a very small, very limited Web.

This issue’s disc includes a copy of BeLight Software’s Image Tricks, an image manipulation application for Mac OS X. Written as a kind of demonstration vehicle of the power of Apple’s Core Image technology, Image Tricks is perhaps best described as a utility for applying Adobe Photoshop-like filters to photographic images with fantastic speed. It’s lightweight and extremely adept at adjusting an image’s exposure, color balance, gamma etc., and applying sometimes ostentatious visual effects.

G5 Numbers

Sun 13 Nov 200512:03 PM

Television without the Television

Wed 12 Oct 200510:25 PM

Groupthink Made Easy

Mon 3 Oct 200509:34 PM

37signals released Writeboard today, the latest release in what’s surely shaping up to be 37signals Office — a line of indispensable productivity applications that all happen to be intimately and prohibitively hooked into one another. So, look out Microsoft.

I’m only half kidding about that last bit, but it is true that Writeboard is now open for business and, being 100% free and almost completely great, I’m sure there will be plenty of business to be had.

The product is best described as a collaborative, versioning online text editor, and at first I thought it was the super-elegant wiki creation tool that I’ve been anticipating for a long time. As it turns out, Writeboard purposefully eschews wiki-linking (too “techy,” Jason Fried told me) and instead favors a reductive, straightforward approach to allowing people to jointly create documents.

What .Mac Lacks

Tue 27 Sep 200501:19 AM

A few weeks ago I complained about Apple’s faltering .Mac service, how it was causing my system to lock up and, in general, how it appeared to have lost the devoted attention of the management team at Apple. And then last week Apple unexpectedly upgraded the baseline storage available to .Mac subscribers from 250 megabytes to a full gigabyte, added new features like .Mac Groups for helping friends and families communicate and share files, and introduced a new, more fully-featured revision of its Backup utility.

All of which is great news, but as an effort to reinvigorate the .Mac offering, it still strikes me as somewhat meek. Raising the storage limit to a gigabyte, while laudable, is basically playing catch-up to where online Web storage stood a few years ago. And the other improvements, while not offensive, still don’t do what, in my estimation, should be done: turning .Mac into a fully-fledged Web 2.0 offering.

Metcalfe in Full Effect

Thu 25 Aug 200511:52 PM

A colleague and I, while on a long day trip to Washington, D.C. via train today, found ourselves in need of connectivity en route. We had work to do and files to exchange, but with the Eastern seaboard still unwired for the tens of thousands of commuters crawling between D.C. and Boston daily, we were stuck.

Then I remembered the long-standing but frequently ignored feature of the 802.11x wireless standard that allows the creation of ad hoc networks. Mac OS X makes this feature exceedingly easy to enable: just select “Create Network…” from the AirPort status menu, enter a name for the network and you’re done. We were instantly able to exchange files via iChat’s Bonjour messaging protocol, and my colleague was able to use his browser to effortlessly view PHP-enabled work on my hard drive, thanks to Personal Web Sharing (I never thought I’d get so much use out of Mac OS X’s built in Apache Web server, but it’s fast becoming my favorite feature ever, especially in conjunction with Marc Liyanage’s dead simple PHP installers.) On the way back this evening, we were even sharing music libraries across the aisle via iTunes’ built-in music sharing feature. The twenty-first century is here.