Procedures for the approval for house extensions and/or renovations

The following serves as a useful FAQ that you should know as a house/building owner who plan to extend and/or renovate your house/building in Malaysia.

What is meant by building extensions / renovations?

• Any demolition work to the original building
• Any extension work to the original building (enlarging floor area)
• Any renovation work to internal building layout
• Construction of car porch, fencing wall and refuse chamber
• Any other extension / renovation as prescribed in Act 133, Road, Drainage, and Building Act 1974, and Building By-Laws 1984

Steps to be taken by home owner for submission of extensions / renovations application:

• Obtain letter of consent from neighbours should extension / renovation work involving housefront bordering neighbour's house
• Appoint an architect or a registered draughtsman for preparation of building plans
• Appoint professionals should extension / renovation work involving concrete structures
• Obtain Development Order approval from municipal council should the extension work exceed 50% of the original floor area
• Ensure the proposed extension / renovation work comply with the Building Guidelines & Standards
• Ensure construction work commence only after proposed extension / renovation application has been approved

Documents in submitting application for building extension / renovation:

• Form A
• 4 complete copies of the building plan
• 1 copy of the most recent income tax returns
• 1 copy of the Certificate of Fitness
• 1 copy of the Title Deed or the Sales & Purchase Agreement
• Consent letter from neighbouring residents (if applicable)
• 1 copy of the structure plan and structure measurement from a certified consultant engineer (if applicable, or purchase the Standard Plan from Department of Building)

Examples of standard plan available:

• Back extension
• Front awning extension
• Building of gazebos
• Concrete fence
• Air-well
• Store and fish pond

Processing fees for plan submission:

• RM500 for extensions / renovations that involve the lower level / storey
• RM1000 for extensions / renovations that involve the lower and upper level / storey

Steps to be taken by home owner after extensions / renovations approval:

• Apply for permit to place building materials on the road shoulders prior to commencement of renovation work.
• Contact Alam Flora for collection of debris of building materials before construction begins.
• Display Letter of Approval of the extension / renovation application during construction work.
• Ensure construction works is carried out within own boundary and adhere to the approved extension / renovation plan.
• Notify construction stages to municipal council by submitting the relevant forms.

40% of IT jobs will be related to open source by 2020

Last week, the 78 pages 2020 FLOSS Roadmap Version 2.16 has been tabled in the Open World Forum (OWF) in Paris. OWF is a forum dedicated to free/libre/open source software (FLOSS), its players and projects.

This 2020 FLOSS Roadmap report is the OWF’s main manifesto, and is designed to support discussions taking place during the different OWF seminars and forums. It is a prospective and projection to the influences that will affect FLOSS between now (2008) and 2020, with descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by OWF contributors over this period of time. It also highlights all sectors that will, potentially, be impacted by FLOSS, from the economy to the Information Society.

Studies have been carried out in seven key areas:

• Theme 1: Public policies: promoting sustainable development of sharedresources
• Theme 2: FLOSS: the key to future innovation and competitive differentiation?
• Theme 3: Ensuring sustainability for FLOSS developer communities and businessecosystems
• Theme 4: Technological and economic breakthroughs: challenge or opportunityfor FLOSS?
• Theme 5: IT 3.0: towards new governance for information systems?
• Theme 6: FLOSS: a lever for employment and careers
• Theme 7: FLOSS in an Open World: Innovations and best practices from Brazil

The report predicted that within the next 12 years, 40% of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world.

The roadmap has outlined seven areas of change for 2020, which are:

• FLOSS will become mainstream. It will be the de facto standard for areas such as development tools, infrastructure and scientific computing, as well as being widespread in other sectors
• 40% of IT jobs will be related to FLOSS
• FLOSS will free businesses from vendor lock-in, providing a "vaccine against abusive behaviour from a commercial vendor"
• FLOSS will help reduce the global digital divide, as it is a collaborative effort that works for sustainable development of a shared resource
• Open source communities will help build business ecosystems for specific markets
  Green datacentres will lead to business models with a low ecological impact, in "the next industrial revolution"
• Cloud computing will be ubiquitous, and social networking will be the main way to communicate with businesses and government

Click here to download the comprehensive 2020 FLOSS Roadmap Version 2.16.

Developing and implementing .NET applications in Linux, Unix, Mac, etc. with Mono 2.0

Microsoft has been promoting their .NET application platform quite some years ago, and supporting the development of .NET applications with their Visual Studio development tools. They even introduced a new programming language named as C# targetting to the .NET frameworks.

If you have the impression that .NET applications can only run on MS Windows platforms, and that you can only develop .NET applications using Visual Studio in MS Windows, probably you are still not aware of Mono which frees up all the .NET developers and their applications to the rest of the world other than Microsoft, which includes Linux, Unix, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, etc.

Mono is an open source development platform based on the .NET framework, which allows developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications with improved developer productivity. Mono's .NET implementation is based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

The Mono runtime contains a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine for a number of processors including x86, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, S390 (in 32-bit and 64-bit mode), x86_64, IA64 and SPARC for 64-bit modes.

The Mono project started in Ximian since 19 July 2001, which was about 7 months earlier than the release of Visual Studio .NET 2002 (first release of Visual Studio that supports .NET framework) by Microsoft. Ximian was a company that provided free desktop applications for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform, and has been acquired by Novell in 2003. Mono is currently sponsored, led and supported by Novell.

Mono version 1.0 was released in June 2004, one year after Visual Studio 2003 was released. Current version of Mono is 2.0.1, which is API complete in regards to .NET 2.0 and supports for Visual Basic.NET as well as C# versions 2.0 and 3.0.

Mono includes compilers, an ECMA-compatible runtime engine (the Common Language Runtime, or CLR), and many libraries. The libraries include Microsoft .NET compatibility libraries (including ADO.NET, System.Windows.Forms and ASP.NET), Mono's own and third party class libraries.Gtk#, a set of .NET bindings for the gtk+ toolkit and assorted GNOME libraries can be found in the latter. This library allows you to build fully native Gnome application using Mono and includes support for user interfaces built with the Glade interface builder. Furthermore, Mono's runtime can be embedded into applications for simplified packaging and shipping. In addition, the Mono project offers an IDE called MonoDevelop, Debugging, and a documentation browser called MonoDoc.

As an open source software, you can download, copy, distribute and use Mono for free. Here is the download page of Mono.

There are a lot of information about Mono in Wikipedia. There are also many resources and documentations about Mono in its official website.