Zhongnanhai: I’ve taken great interest in a couple of stories recently which are exposing well-formed – but for many, unseen – cracks between the Mainland and Hong Kong. The first one is this: luxury retailer Dolce & Gabbana found themselves thrust onto the front pages of Hong Kong (and international) newspapers after refusing to allow Hong Kong customers to take photos of the Hong Kong...

This free downloadable tool includes step-by-step instructions and explains fundamental concepts. The wide range of tools to help students with complex mathematics includes a full-featured graphing calculator that’s designed to work just like a hand-held calculator and ink handwriting support to recognize hand-written problems. It can solve equations, graph equations, and function as a...

.nxt reporting on ICANN, the entity in-charged of keeping the internet working: Despite repeated and blatant abuse of its rules, despite active community support and information-gathering, and despite repeated efforts through its own rules and procedures to get ICANN to act, the organization has consistently failed to deal with a clear-cut compliance case for more than 18 months. It has...

Fraser Speirs: There are five sections to this video demonstrating: An app going from active to background to suspended Instacast HD requesting extra background time to finish a podcast download TomTom running indefinitely in the background Batman Arkham City Lockdown and Real Racing 2 HD competing for big chunks of device memory Batman Arkham City Lockdown forcing several...

Tightwind: Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile...

Yahoo!: We’ve tallied up a list of Asia Pacific’s highest paid politicians based on figures from a number of publicly available sources including The Economist. Singapore still tops the chart by a margin, even after a pay cut.

Siew Kum Hong: There have always been two types of criticisms leveled at ministerial salaries. The first category comprised criticisms of the formula itself, that it led to distortions and did not achieve the outcomes we wanted. These are technical criticisms that implicitly endorsed the principle of pegging ministerial salaries at a discount to supposedly equivalent private-sector salaries. ...

The Telegraph: Critics immediately swamped online forums to slam the new salary scheme, which was recommended by an independent committee whose proposals Lee has agreed to implement. “Ordinary minister’s salary still higher than US President! Still too high! Pure Nonsense!” wrote a reader who signed off as Lim Lao Pe on the Yahoo! Singapore portal. Honest article title.

The Worker’s Party: Rather than an approach that assumes top earners are also top talent, WP recommends a whole-of-government, people-up approach to determining ministerial salaries. WP has identified this approach in the way 12 developed economies determine their politicians’ salaries. The economies are Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand,...

AsiaOne News: A Straits Times special report today detailed his list of accomplishments to date which, the paper said, has fuelled talks that he is the frontrunner to become the next prime minister. So, they’re trying to sweeten people’s impression of this person? Icky.

Forbes: In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value, which Jack Welch himself has called “the dumbest idea in the world”, the situation is the reverse. CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services. Makes good sense. I...

Yahoo! News: Many commuters have also complained about SMRT’s bad communication of the disruption. Skyee Alfonso said, “Bus bridging service was only activated after an hour. No instruction and no help was given by SMRT staff to show the commuter where to take the buses.” Themis Thng agreed and added, “Commuters at Raffles Place MRT Station did not even know about...

Design Festival: The following collection is a one-​​stop-​​shop for CSS. From the official home page of W3C to gradients and button generators — each of these resources has been carefully reviewed and tested. With these tools, you can accomplish any CSS design task that you want using CSS as the primary, if not only, system for implementing the look and feel. Quite a nice collection to...

NYTimes Opinion Pages: China’s success in stealing American secrets will provide a continuing challenge to the spy catchers. And Washington’s counterintelligence agents, accustomed to the comfortable parameters of the cold war and more recent battles against Al Qaeda, must rethink their priorities and shift their focus, resources and energy eastward to counter China’s spies.

Nettuts: We won’t travel as far back as the beginning. That’s an entire book on its own. Instead, we’ll rewind the clock to to the release of HTML 4.01, at the tail-end of the nineties. It’s a very good read if you’re one of those history buffs. Just that it’s history with a much shorter/smaller scale, and wars without bullets. =)

Did the National Taxi Association (NTA) breach anti-competition rules when it issued a statement urging taxi companies to follow ComfortDelGro’s example and adjust their fares? Don’t you say. All unions that I’ve seen so far, fight for their workers’/members’ welfare and compensation, i.e. fighting for a reduction of rental, increase in healthcare benefits, or...

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is ready! No, not really. Google is done with Ice Cream Sandwich, but the process of getting it to customers is far from over. Having Google release the source code is just the first step in the process — now the real work for handset makers begins. Motorola and Sony have outlined the process still left before it hits customer’s phones. As Motorola...

Popular Mechanics: Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447’s flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash. A good read. But it really is an unfortunate tragedy.

Recently, I’ve been hunting around for a blogging engine that can replace this ageing installation of Serendipity. The reason why I went with a full-blown PHP on-the-fly dynamically generated…

Flag down fares will also go up by 20 cents across its ComfortDelGro’s fleet of 15,600 cabs here, while distance fares will be increased by 2 cents. Advance booking fees will also be increased by $8 to encourage more drivers to accept such bookings. The S$3 city area surcharge, which is currently in effect between 5pm and midnight from Monday to Saturday, will be extended to included...

Jonathan Christopher: I’m not sure how I missed it, but a new feature to OS X Lion is a Preference Pane called Network Link Conditioner. This is a thing of beauty for Web developers the world over; built in network throttling on an OS level. Great find!

To corral Office to just some future Microsoft tablet would be a mistake. That is, essentially, betting Office’s future relevance on the possibility that Microsoft will become a dominant player in future mobile computing. Instead, what would happen is that the millions of iOS and Android users will snap out of the Office trance and move on. Once they realize they don’t need office on their...

Marco Arment: A truly open facet of Android — the open-source codebase, minus Google’s apps — has enabled one company with a strong market position to step in, effectively close it, and make themselves the gatekeeper. And as gatekeepers go, Apple looks quite benevolent by comparison. Sounds absolutely plausible. I’m delighted actually.

What quickly become evident to me was, that there exists no perfect blogging platform. Eventually I went with Jekyll, after having tried and dismissed several (more popular and mainstream) solutions. In this post I will document the considerations that lead me to pick Jekyll, how I got Jekyll up and running exactly the way I wanted, and why you should or should not do as I did. A great post...

An awesome set of slides that teaches graph-theory and the various maze generating algorithms. Even if mathematics aren’t exactly your interest, this set of slides is sure to raise your intelligence a few IQ points.

Tom Preston-Werner: Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical incantations. Doing anything out of the ordinary will be...

Yahoo! Southeast Asia has filed a memorandum of appearance with the courts to defend itself against allegations by Singapore Press Holdings that the digital media company had infringed on its copyright. “We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against this suit,” said Yahoo! Southeast Asia Managing Editor Alan Soon. “Our editorial business model of acquired, commissioned...

Cryptography online course by Stanford University: Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. This course explains the inner workings of cryptographic primitives and how to correctly use them. Students will learn how to reason about the security of cryptographic constructions and how to apply this knowledge to real-world applications. Apart from...

InfoWorld: iOS 5 version of online course covers nuts and bolts of building an iPhone/iPad program and getting it distributed through the App Store Awesome! Stanford is truly on its mission to educate the world. Read their press release.