The 2nd annual Open Web Awards (OWA) by Mashable is here! LiewCF.com is proudly be the OWA blog partner again.

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories.

The first and final voting rounds will be held from November 19th till December 15th. Winners will be announced at December 16th, 2008.

Place your votes now!

Voting is one vote per Category per Email Address Per Day. Vote in up to 26 Categories for every 24 Hours.

Finally, I decided to buy the 1st car in my life! Yesterday I booked the new Honda City 2009, which will be available in Malaysia at the end of 2008.

Honda City 2009 (blue) (image: PaulTan.org)

The Honda City 2009 priced at around RM90,000. The car’s refundable booking fee is RM2,000. There are 5 colors available, if I remember correctly: gold, silver, black, blue, and “polished metal metalic” (like gray).

I picked blue because it is special and unique. Honda City 2009 is the first Honda car with the color. For your information, there is NO red color Honda City 2009 in Malaysia.

I have a driving license 10 years ago, but I never drive a car since then. I will need some practices of driving before receiving my Honda City 2009.

For the past years, my friends and family have been fetching me here and there. I owe them too much. It is my turn to be their driver to pay them back. Also, many friends are looking forward to sit in my car.

You may read more about Honda City 2009 at PaulTan.org.

After Facebook translated to Bahasa Melayu, PayPal also added more local languages for users in Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

You’ll find the new language link in the upper right corner of most pages to select your preferred language. Though large part of PayPal site has been translated, there are still some pages that remain in English.

No Bahasa Melayu?

PayPal Malaysia website in Bahasa Indonesia

Though PayPal stated users in Malaysia can choose their local language, which is Bahasa Melayu, but I don’t see the language option in the drop down list. There is only English or Bahasa Indonesia on PayPal Malaysia website (as shown in image above).

Hey, Malaysians do not speak Bahasa Indonesia! Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu are 2 different languages! Now I don’t think PayPal really understands Malaysia.

More Information:

• "PayPal For Dummies” listing at Amazon.com
• "Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert’s Voice)" listing at Amazon.com

LG Electronics is conducting a holiday survey. The participants stand a change to win LG mobile phones.

The LG holiday survey contains only 8 questions cover topics such as which person would you most likely to spend the holidays with and what would be the ultimate gift you’d like to receive.

Other questions probe are what you dream as a perfect holiday and what creates the most stress during the holiday season.

LG is offering the hottest and most attractive trio of mobile phones launched in 2008 to 3 lucky Malaysians as prizes: the stylish LG Secret, the ultimate 8-megapixel LG Renoir camera phone and the just-released LG Cookie.

Take LG holiday survey. The survey result will be released at the end of November 2008.

[hat tip: Cheryl Yab]

Finally, the official Apple Online Store in Malaysia is now open! A free limited-edition Apple T-shirt will be given with purchase of a new Mac or iPod by November 24, 2008.

Why buy from Apple Online Store?

Beside the general advantages of online shopping, there are some reasons why one want to buy Apple products on Apple Online Store, instead of Apple Resellers.

• Mac customization — ability to order your customized Mac system online, reduce the waiting time.
• Personal engraving and gift wrap — Add your personal laser-engraved message at the back of iPod. Give as a gift? Apple will ship it in a signature gift box with a personal greeting card.
• Student and teacher discounts — eligible student, faculty, or staff member can get discounts on Apple products.
• Speak to Mac and iPod experts — Call 1800-80-6419 to talk with Apple experts to answer your questions and get advice you need.
• Free shipping — get free shipping with orders over RM250.

Why still buy from Apple Resellers in Malaysia?

There are few reasons why one will still buy Apple products from Apple Reseller in Malaysia, even after the Apple Online Store has opened.

• Play before you buy — you get to try the Apple product first before you buy.
• Pay and Go — pay and walk off with your Apple product immediately (Apple Online Store takes 1-2 business day to deliver your order).
• Free gifts — Though no discount, most Apple Reseller will give free gifts along purchase of Apple products.

My two cents

It is a great news that finally Apple opens the online store in Malaysia! Now I can shop for Apple products at home without traveling to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore!

Plus, the engraving and gift wrap services make it a perfect choice as a present for your family/love/friends.

I am tempting to get myself an Apple iPod Touch…

If you no longer want to see a friend on Friendster for any reasons (perverts, quarrel with friends, etc), it is easy to delete him/her from your Friendster friend list.

1. Login your Frindster home page.
2. Click “View All” at the upper right hand side (next to “My Friends”).
3. List of your friends will be loaded. Find your friend ex-friend.
4. Click on the X button in your ex-friend’s box.
   
5. Click “Yes” to confirm delete the friend.
6. Done. No more friend!

That’s easy! So far there is no way to do “batch friends delete” on Friendster yet.

Well, I think it’s time to clean up my Friendster profile…

At June 17th, 2008, I ordered a Firefox 3 t-shirt on Mozilla Store International but it hasn’t yet arrived after 5 months! I think I have lost it…

According to my account’s order information, the item has been dispatched on the next day of order (June 18th, 2008). But I received no news of my order until today.

I contacted the related parties, Mozilla Foundation and Merchandize Mania by emails but did not receive any reply!

The Mozilla Store contact page’s title is “Customer First” and stated that:

At the Mozilla Store the customer always comes first. It is our goal to make your shopping experience easy and pleasant.

Now I have a very unpleasant experience! I love Mozilla Firefox but I will not shopping at Mozilla Store anymore!

By the way, congrats to Mozilla Firefox’s 4th birthday!

Like a PageRank for website ranking, Twitterank is a ranking for your twitter profile, except that it is not useful.

How does Twitterank work?

According to ZDNet interview with the author, Twitterank secret algorithm takes incoming twitter replies in the formula. The more people talk to you the higher you score in Twitterank.

What’s your Twitterank?

While some got ZERO twitterank, my twitter (@liewcf) scored a nice 98.84, which is higher than around 90% of other people.

Here is the Twitterank Top 50. Apparently, 100 is not the full mark. The Top 50 are the people with over 200 twitterank. I wonder what’s the “perfect score”?

So, what’s your Twitterank?

More Information:

• "Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online" listing at Amazon.com
• "Twitter: How Short Messages Can Make A Big Difference To Your Business" listing at Amazon.com

I was hoping to see Apple version of netbook. But it is not available, at least not in 2008. Someone installed OSX on MSI Wind and mod it to look like Apple MacBook Nano.

(image: Mickphoto/flickr)

It looks good, I must say! The fake MacBook Nano has the same glowing Apple logo as other Apple notebooks. It has 320GB hardisk space with hacked OSX installation.

The photos of the fake Apple MacBook Nano can be found on Flickr, as well as the process to mod MSI Wind to Apple MacBook Nano.

Will you buy the official Apple MacBook Nano, if available? I will. I wanted to get a MSI Wind netbook but a Apple version would be much better!

Of course, have to take the price tag into consideration too.

More Information:

• "ASUS Eee PC 901 8.9-Inch Netbook listing at Amazon.com
• "MSI Wind U100-016US 10-Inch Mini Laptop listing at Amazon.com

AirAsia announced it is the 1st airline in the world which get rid of fuel surcharge and giveaway 500,000 free tickets in 2009.

(image: life in technicolortype[a]/flickr)

Due to the free seats promotion, the AirAsia website is having heavy load. You will get a much faster response time by using AirAsia mobile site.

My two cents

This is a good news for my friends and me, as we are planning for holiday trips next year. We haven’t decided where to visit yet, probably Thailand or Vietnam.

I like Taiwan and Japan but they are not reachable by AirAsia (yet?).

Where do you plan to fly to in 2009?

WordPress.org added a new section on the site called “Showcase“. On the page, there are lists of featured, top rated, most votes, and recently added sites. All powered by WordPress.

On the showcase listing page are the thumbnails of the site, description, rating (based on implementation and use of WordPress), flavor (wordpress.org/com/com VIP/MU), and tags.

If you would like to showcase your WordPress powered site, you can submit yours too!

By listing on WordPress Showcase, your site will get more exposure as well as some SEO points from the direct links of WordPress.org.

More Information:

• "WordPress For Dummies listing at Amazon.com
• "WordPress Theme Design" listing at Amazon.com
• "WordPress for Business Bloggers: Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO" listing at Amazon.com

So, you want to make FAST money by blogging? Someone from Singapore is looking for part time bloggers to write about Asian celebrities. Each blog post get paid for $1 USD.

Will you take the job? Personally, I think $1 USD is under paid. If you are willing to blog for $1 USD per post, please let me know.

Writing paid blog posts is a fast way to make money online. The more you write, the more money you get.

For me, it is not an ideal way. If you are able to write many blog posts, you would better setup your own blog and start making money from your blog.

You will need to take some time to learn about setting up a blog, blog marketing and promotion, and some tips and tricks on blogging. Here are some books that might help:

• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Blogging For Dummies
• WordPress For Dummies

I watched Quantum of Solace with my friends. If you like action movie, you will like this one too. The cars chasing, bullets shooting, building exploring… You won’t want to blink your eyes and missed the scenes.

The story? I don’t quite understand it until I read the synopsis after I was home. This is normal for me. I rarely understand 007 story line by watching the movies.

IMDB has summarized Quantum of Solace story in a sentence “Seeking revenge for the death of his love, secret agent James Bond sets out to stop an environmentalist from taking control of a country’s water supply.”

For the technology in the movie, none has surprised me. However, I like the “touchscreen table” (looks like Microsoft Surface) and the interactive glass when Bond is calling “M”.

I like the cute car (Ford Ka) drove by Camille (Olga Kurylenko), the bond girl. The phone is Sony Ericsson with fancy phone source tracking and GPS. By the way, Bond uses no gadget this time.

More Information:

• James Bond 007: Quantum of Solace (Xbox 360) listing at Amazon.com
• Quantum of Solace (Soundtrack) listing at Amazon.com
• Quantum of Solace [Theatrical Release] listing at Amazon.com

Facebook has now been translated to Bahasa Melayu with the help of many Malaysians.

Users can change the Facebook interface language via language menu at the bottom of the page.

I am not sure how many Malaysians will use the Bahasa Melayu translations. I myself don’t use it. The Bahasa Melayu translation looks weird and confuses me.

Something similar are the Friendster in Malay and Windows XP in Bahasa Melayu.

Do you use Malay interface of the social networking sites?

Google Gmail launched 3 new features: canned responses, emoticons in Gmail, calendar and docs gadgets.

Canned responses

If you received a lot of emails everyday asking about some common questions, you will find Gmail “canned responses” very useful.

It allows you to compose your reply once and saved the message as “canned responses” then later you can open and send the same message again and again. You can also create Gmail filter to automatically reply incoming emails with your canned responses.

Emoticons for Gmail

After Gmail added group chat and emoticons in Gmail Chat, now Gmail added emoticons to email message. The emoticons sets are available when you are composing email messages on Gmail.

Calendar and Docs gadgets

Google Calendar and Google Docs are useful online tools to organize your schedule and documents but both are not well embedded with Gmail.

The Calendar gadget allow users to show Google Calendar agenda and receive calendar alerts. The Docs gadgets show a list of recently accessed Google Docs and allows you to search documents right from Gmail.

Happy Deepavali 2008, or the “Festival of Lights”! I have made another batch of charity donations for this festival. Hopefully the small money will light up some lives.

The beneficiaries are all multiracial non-profit charity organizations in Malaysia:

• Malaysian Red Crescent Society
• Buddhist Tzu-Chi Meris Society
• National Kidney Foundation of Malaysia
• World Vision HOPE Fund

P.S. I have got my first cheque book from UOB after rejected by Maybank.

WordPress 2.6.3 has been released to fix a vulnerability in the Snoopy library. Also, WordPress is looking for icon designers for version 2.7.

Snoopy is used to fetch the feeds shown in the WordPress Dashboard. It is a low risk vulnerability. Users can download the new version right now.

If you do not want to download the whole installation package for the minor update, you can download wp-includes/class-snoopy.php and wp-includes/version.php and replace the existing files of your WordPress 2.6.2installation.

WordPress icon designer wanted

The next major version upgrade, WordPress 2.7 will be released at November 10th, 2008. WordPress is now looking for icon designers to design the icons used in the menu of WordPress 2.7.

The icons should be subtle, with classic look. Thin lines. Grayscale by default and color version for active menu items. The icons need to be ready within two weeks.

If you are experienced designer and interested to design icons for world’s famous blogging platform, drop an email to WordPress.

Britney Spears, the most searched celebrity, is now officially twitting on Twitter.

Britney Spears on Twitter

Britney Spears’s twitter (@theRealBritney) was started at Oct 11th, 2008. Currently, the twitter account has 5,787 followers and following 1,560 twitter users.

Strictly speaking, it is not her OWN twitter account. The twitter updates were published by her team and website, beside Britney herself. So far, I only see 4 twits by Britney, out of 31 updates.

Follow @theRealBritney on Twitter. Or, follow my twitter at @liewcf

The newly launched Maybank2u 2.0 (M2U 2.0 review) online banking portal has been reverted back to the classic version due to some technical problems.

If you access Maybank2U website now, you can still see the new web design but there is a notice on the front page stated that users will log in via the classics Maybank2U website instead of the redesigned Maybank2U 2.0 site.

Maybank apologizes for any inconvenience M2U users may have experienced

It is not a surprise to most of us who had a preview of M2U 2.0. The new website had slow response time when we were testing.

Maybank2U 2.0 is SLOW

When Maybank2U 2.0 launched in public, Colin Charles compared the speed of the new website against the classic Maybank2U website.

The result? The new Maybank2U website is a lot slower than the classic version! M2U 2.0 has about 50% more HTTP requests and 95% slower!

Maybank2U 2.0 needs better system

I have been tracking Maybank2u website uptime and response time since its public launch. The website has a great downtime at 19 Oct 2008 for 44 minutes.

Maybank2u website downtime

The Maybank2U website also has a rather slow response time. The average response time is only 4,706ms. The slowest response time is up to 6,489ms!

Maybank2U website response time report

For your information, 1,000ms is equal to 1 second. Meaning, Maybank2u website took about 5 seconds to answer your request. It is very slow… A website should keep the response time to less than 1 second.

Maybank should do some real system optimization and/or upgrade the hardware system.

Anyway, good luck to the Maybank2U development team. Hopefully the Maybank2U 2.0 will be back soon!

I have a new interest — Photography. I am gonna buy a DSLR camera and it will be the Canon EOS 450D. My first DSLR lens will be Canon EF 24-105mm F/4 L IS USM lens. It is a great (and expensive) general purpose lens. As a beginner, I also ordered a few of photography books on Amazon.com.

The photography dream of a kid

I remember when I was a kid, I “played” with my dad’s SLR camera and lens when parents were out. I enjoyed the view of the world from the small viewfinder.

However, it is impossible for a kid to own a camera at that time. I own my first camera only at 2 years ago, when I was 26 year old.

I bought another digital camera, Canon IXUS 860IS, earlier this year. Now, I am gonna get my first DSLR — Canon EOS 450D.

Why Canon EOS 450D?

I like Canon. My previous 2 compact digital cameras are Canon. The images produced are high quality. Canon is also one of the top brands of DSLR.

Canon EOS 450D (dpreview review) is the entry level DSLR with an affordable price, yet produces pro-like image quality. It is suitable for beginner and amateur photographer.

The suggested retail price of Canon Malaysia is RM2,699 (body only) but you can get 450D at less than RM2,500.

Which Lens?

The major difference of DSLR and compact camera is that DSLR can do nothing without attaching a lens. A lens is just like the eye ball of the camera. Without it, your DSLR sees nothing.

The Canon kit lens is good enough for beginner. If you have the budget, you should buy a couple of better built lenses to have higher image quality.

After some researches and friends’ suggestions, I have chosen the following lenses to match my Canon EOS 450D:

• Canon EF 24-105mm F/4L IS USM lens — one of the best and most popular Canon general purpose lenses. This is the lens you want if you can only have one lens. (review)
• Canon EF-S 17-55mm F/2.8 IS USM lens — Wide angle lens. Very high image quality, one of the best general/multi-purpose lenses available. (review)
• Canon EF 100mm F/2.8 USM Macro — Excellent macro lens. The 100mm focal length along with great bokeh (foreground/background blur quality) makes this a great portrait lens as well. (review)
• Canon EF 70-200mm F/4L USM — Telephoto lens, arguably Canon’s best value “L” Lens combining professional grade build and optical qualities. (review)

Of course, I don’t buy all of them at once! I am not that RICH!

I will buy the Canon EF 24-105mm F/4L IS USM lens first because it is a great all around general purpose lens. The 24-100mm lens price is around RM4,000. More expensive than the camera body!

Best photography books for beginner

As a wannabe/beginner, I need to learn photography from experts. One of the simplest way of learning is reading books by experts. Here are the top photography books on Amazon.com and I ordered all of them.

Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography Boxed Set, Volumes 1 and 2 (Includes The Digital Photography Book Volume 1 and The Digital Photography Book Volume 2

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition)

What else?

I probably also need to get camera bag, tripod, flash, lens case, filter… seems like photography will dig a black hole in your wallet huh?

Your DSLR combo?

Do you own a DSLR? Which model? What are the lenses that you own?