Online share trading brokerage fee for RM8.88 only at CIMB Clicks Trader

Online share trading is the current trend. In majority of the securities firms, this method usually enjoy 30% lower brokerage rate than traditional trading with phone calls to remisier.

Currently, most securities firms set the brokerage rate at 0.6% for normal below RM100k trading. A 30% discount means an online trading rate of 0.42%. Day trading rate could be lower, as well as high trading value (> RM100k per transaction), which rate is negotiable with the remisier.

It is a good news for long term investors that CIMB is currently offering brokerage fee of only RM8.88 for transactions done with their online Clicks Trader system. I say it is a good news for long term investors, because its trading limit isn't attractive, which is set to only 1x cash value only. Speculators and day traders might not be attracted by such a strict limit.

CIMB has set a condition that your Clicks Trader Account must have a minimum balance of RM10,000 before the T+3 cut-off time in order to have a trading limit and enjoy the low brokerage rate at RM8.88 per transaction.

Currently, they are running a promotion until end of year 2008 for new signups of Clicks Trader Account. The first 2 matched online purchase orders via CIMB Clicks will be free. This mean the brokerage fee will be RM0 for the 2 transactions. That would save you a total of RM17.76 in brokerage fee, not so attractive but good enough for you to use the money for a good meal.

About 4 months ago, I mentioned about hold on your money and do not dump in for investment purpose because the market was sinking then. Now, I think it is a good time for long term investors to start to plan for some bottom fishing. I also wrote about how to observe a bear's bottom. Probably you can apply that simple strategy to look for the best buying time.

For more information about the CIMB RM8.88 brokerage Clicks Trader Account, click here.

Burn audio CD from MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, APE, VQF, MP4 files with GoGo MP3 To CD Burner

You might have a compilation of your most favourite MP3 files ripped from various pieces of audio CD. It would be nice to burn your favourite compilation of MP3 music back into audio CD so that you could play them with CD player and/or car audio player that unfortunately doesn't support reading of MP3 CD.

I've found a freeware called GoGo MP3 To CD Burner which can perform this task. All you need to do is select and add the supported audio files into its list for up to a total of 80 minutes play time, then click the Burn CD button to create your own audio CD.

The only set back of this handy utility is that it doesn't support non-alphanumeric filenames, which include the CJK (Chinese-Japan-Korean) characters. If you intend to add those files into your list, you have to rename their filename to English first.

Click here to download GoGo MP3 To CD Burner. Its file size is just about 1MB, and it is free to use. Supported platforms are Windows 98 and above.

Fix Windows slow shutdown problem with UPHClean

Recently, I found my Windows PC became extremely slow for the shutdown process. It used to shutdown without 30 seconds, but then it took as much as 5 minutes.

A check in the Application Event Log found 2 warnings whenever I shutdown the PC. They are:

• Windows cannot unload your classes registry file - it is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.
• Windows saved user PCname\username registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

I'm not sure why this happened, but I've found out a solution from Microsoft to fix it. Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service (UPHClean) to resolve this problem, and it did solve my problem.

Click here to read about the root cause and solution of slow shutdown problem from Microsoft's knowledgebase.

Click here to download and install the UPHClean program from Microsoft Download Center.

Handphone fair @ Giant Bandar Puteri Puchong

Currently there is a handphone fair at the outdoor carpark area of Giant hypermarket of Bandar Puteri, Puchong. Apart from handphones, accesories such as bluetooth headsets, bluetooth speakers, batteries, chargers, etc. are also available. Mobile operators such as U-Mobile, Celcom, Digi and Maxis are having their booths there too.

Although majority are China brands which are selling in really cheap price and rich in features (those selling for a few hundreds ringgit only can even watch TV), there are also booths selling original Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and other renowned brands.

I have just purchased an original Sony Ericsson HBH-PV710 bluetooth headset (warranty by Midland) for only RM128. This is a decent mid-range bluetooth headset that offers a talk time of 12 hours and standby time of 300 hours.

Getting extra mileage and save fuel cost with Fuel Saver

Ever since the petrol price in Malaysia skyrocketed by 40% from RM1.92 to the historical high of RM2.70 on 5 June 2008, I had been looking for effective fuel saving product to help in saving some fuel expenses. I heard and read that many fuel saving products are in fact non-effective, until I decided to try out this product called Fuel Saver.

The reason I gave Fuel Saver a try was that it is inexpensive at the price of only RM99 including installation. To date, I have installed this Fuel Saver in my car for more than 3 months, and so far it performs pretty well.

Before the installation, I put it near my Ultra Racing Stabilizer Bar and it shown its magnetic nature by sticking onto the steel bar. You might want to visit to Fuel Saver's website to learn more about the theory of how it works, and read about its emission test result and Dynamometers test results to show it really works.

Here are some of my observations after installation:

• I feel that the engine run smoother and a little bit more powerful than before.
• I notice that when the engine is started after resting for quite a while, water will be dripping from the exhaust pipe. This is a sign of complete combustion which produces only carbon dioxide and water. The water will be vapourized when the engine turns hot. In fact, the sign of water dripping already shown after I installed the Zaptor performance voltage stabilizer, but the amount was not as much as now.
• I can get the most extra mileage when travelling long distance (>100 km) at high speed, compared with the same travelling distance and style before installation. This Toyota Avanza 1.5G auto 7-seater (using semi-synthetic engine oil) can run more than 60km further with the same amount of fuel for such a long distance journey, challenging the 600km target before the fuel tank warning light up.
• If the car is frequently travelling in short distance with some traffic lights at speed not more than 90 km/h most of the time, the extra mileage is minimal and there is not much fuel saving. The extra distance could be merely 10km only.

I find this fuel saving gadget a good investment, even though the petrol price in Malaysia has been gradually reduced to RM2.30 now since 15 October 2008 and could be further reduced again in the near future.

Mobile phone screen capturing with the free TOSC utility

My reader asked about how I captured the screen of my mobile phone and paste them in my blog here.

I installed a small open source utility developed by Pal Szasz called The Open Screen Capture (TOSC) into my Sony Ericsson P1i, and that is the tool I used to capture the screen.

TOSC is an open source and free screen capture utility for mobile device running on Symbian UIQ3. Example of such smartphones are Sony Ericsson P1i, P990i, W960i, G700, G900, etc.

TOSC is very simple and easy to use. You just need to set the timer for the screen capture to happen, which can be 0 second (immediately), 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Then, get ready with the screen you want to capture before the timer timeout, and TOSC will capture the screen and save it as PNG file in the root directory of your M2 memory card.

When TOSC is running, you can see a green icon on top of the screen, which will show the timer countdown when a screen capture is initiated. Don't worry, the green icon won't be captured by TOSC.

You can click here to download the SIS installation file for TOSC version 0.3.

PuTTY for mobile devices

PuTTY is an open source SSH client distributed under the MIT licence, originally written for Windows platform. Many system engineers use it as a handy tool to remotely connect to their Linux/Unix machines with the secured SSH protocol to administer the system from their desktop.

Nowadays, PuTTY has also been ported to run on mobile devices such as PDAs and smart mobile phones, so that you can access to your servers for emergency troubleshooting, restarting a service, rebooting the server, and so on. Of course, you need to have Internet access from your mobile device to your server, either using GPRS, 3G, Wifi, etc.

Here are some of the ported PuTTY for various mobile devices:

• PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 - http://coredump.fi/putty/
  
• PuTTY for Symbian OS - http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/
• PuTTY for Windows Mobile 2003 - http://www.pocketputty.net/
• pssh for Palm OS 5 - http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/
• pTerm for iPhone - http://www.instantcocoa.com/products/pTerm/

And you can see the PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 in action in my Sony Ericsson P1i here.

Backup P1i contacts from phone to M2 memory card

There is a built-in function to backup the Sony Ericsson P1i handphone contacts information from the phone internal memory to the attached M2 memory card.

To do so, in the Contacts application, tap on the More button to pop up the menu. The menu is so long that you have to scroll down to see the Contact Manager option (and this is the reason I have been spending quite some time before I finally located it). Tap on Contact Manager, and you are presented with 3 options:

• Synchronize - this will call up the Remote Sync application and allows you to sync your contacts / calendar / tasks / emails /bookmarks / notes information in your P1i handphone with a SyncML server in the network.
• Backup - this is the option to backup your contacts information from the phone internal memory to your M2 memory card. It will backup into \Other\Backup\Contacts folder in the memory card. 2 files will be produced: Contacts.vcf and Groups.dat.
  
• Restore - this is the option to restore your contacts from the M2 memory card to your phone internal memory. You can also tap on the \Other\Backup\Contacts\Contacts.vcf file in your M2 memory card to perform the restore.
  

If you have done a backup before, you will be prompted with a last backup information, and your new backup will overwrite and replace the previous backup files.

The new Maybank2u website is extremely slow

Maybank has changed their Maybank2u website to a new design since yesterday. Unfortunately, extensive use of AJAX has render the website extremely slow, to the extend that it is unusable most of the time.

Maybank should be well awared that although AJAX could bring some fancy user interface experience, as a trade-off, it greatly reduce the web application loading speed. Even great application from Google such as GMail which started to use AJAX extensively recently also experiences the same problem, and that's why Google has made available a special link to access GMail without AJAX as a backup plan for their users.

The slowness intensifies over secured SSL connection, which is a must for the bank online services. There is also increase vulnerability for the server to encounter Denial of Service (DoS) Attack, since even without attack, the service is already close to useless due to time-out respond time.

In addition, AJAX application performance is largely depends on the performance of JavaScript execution and browser DOM operations. This mean, the user's web browser play an important role in the AJAX performance too. AFAIK, Safari performs much better than Firefox in handling AJAX, and Firebox performs much better than IE 7 in handling AJAX. Unfortunately, I'm sure they have the most users using IE7, and least users using Safari.

Therefore, too much of AJAX on any website (or a full-Ajax-enabled website) is not a good idea. Maybank2u must find ways to resolve this problem, either to reduce usage to AJAX, or invest more money in upgrading their network equipments and servers. Luckily, they still maintain a link to fallback to their previous website interface. Not so fancy, but at least usable.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now on general release

Finally, the long awaited OpenOffice.org 3.0 is on general release now. Strong demand of this state-of-art open source office application suite made them to temporary changed their website into a simple download page only to overcome the traffic.

Pre-compiled installation package is available for download for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Intel-based Mac OS X in various languages.

Right from the opening screen, OpenOffice.org 3 has a fresh new look, with a new start screen, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements.

The Writer word processor has a cool new slider control for zooming, allows multi-page display while editing, has powerful new multilingual support, and boasts improved notes capabilities. As well as conventional office documents, Writer can now edit wiki documents for the web.

The Calc spreadsheet has been given another increase in capacity - now up to 1024 columns per sheet. It also has a powerful new equation solver, and a great new collaboration feature for multiple users.

Draw can now cope with poster-size graphics (up to 3sq metres), and Impress supports multiple monitors for presentations. Chart now produces much more clean looking graphics by default, and has a range of additional features requested by power users.

The popular built-in PDF export facility has been further enhanced with PDF/A support and a range of new user-selectable options.

OpenOffice.org 3 is now also available for the first time as a full Mac OS X application, bringing the power of the world's leading open-source office suite to a whole new group of users. And it's even easier than ever to persuade MS-Office users to upgrade to OpenOffice.org, with new support for MS-Access 2007 'accdb' files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS-Office Open XML files (MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 documents)

OpenOffice.org's support for extensions is really coming of age with OpenOffice.org 3. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add great features such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, and a whole new way of supporting additional languages.

Click here to read their official press release.

The OAC Centennial PA Personal Accident Insurance

I believe most of us already insured with some kind of life insurance, which covers compensation on total permanent disablement (TPD). Have you ever think of what if the disablement is "non-total", for example, you just lost one single finger in an accident?

Life insurance won't cover for that, and in fact, you need to find such insurance under the general insurance category (note that not every life insurance agent is also agent for general insurance). I think you should have heard of the term before, it is called personal accident (PA) insurance.

If you are an employed employee, most probably you are already covered under the group PA policy that your company buy for you. You might also be insured with PA under some promotion of car loan, car club, credit card, bank account, etc. The question will be is the insured amount enough? What if you change company and the new one doesn't provide such employee benefit? What if you are retired?

After some consideration, I finally signed up with the Overseas Assurance Corporation (OAC) Centennial PA Personal Accident Insurance this year. What do you think of when you see the word "centennial" here? Yes, OAC is part of the Great Eastern group.

The premium of this policy is RM100 per year (less than RM9 per month) with the sum insured of:

• Accidental death: RM100,000
• Permanent disablement: RM100,000
• Medical expenses: RM5,000

There is a "no claim renewal bonus" with an increase of 10% on the above sum insured for renewal each year up to 100%. This mean if no claim is made, 10 years later, the sum insured will become:

• Accidental death: RM200,000
• Permanent disablement: RM200,000
• Medical expenses: RM10,000

If any claim is made, the sum insured will be reverted to the original amount.

Under this policy, the following are covered:

• Accidental death
• 26 items of permanent disablement
• Medical, surgical and hospital expenses for injury
• Bereavement allowance for death resulting from accident, dengue fever, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, scarlet fever or coxsackie
• Repatriation expenses if the accidental death happen outside Malaysia
• Rehabilitation allowance
• Disapperance for more than 1 year (while travelling)

I believe this policy will complement my life insurance policy as well as cover up any shortage in my company's group PA insurance scheme. It is very affordable too although the premium will be burnt off every year and does not carry cash value like most life insurance products. It is renewable up to 100 years old (and I believe when we get old, we are more risky in getting accident).

Editing the Sony Ericsson handphone theme with Themes Creator

I find that the themes (yes, more than one...) downloaded from the Sony Ericsson website for my P1i mobile phone have a logical bug with the listing checkbox. Once the theme is applied, the unchecked items will all shown as checked, and the checked items shown as unchecked.

After some troubleshooting and confirmed that the problem is with the theme, I found the way to fix it by editing the "checked" and "unchecked" icon to the order, and here is the way.

First of all, you need to download the theme file in .utz format into your computer. Make a copy of the file and change its extension to .zip. For example, download Shards.utz, make a copy named as Shards.zip.

Then, unzip the file Shards.zip with PeaZip or 7-Zip or any other file unarchiver tool.

Use a graphics editor to edit the file named as ListboxCheckbox.png in your unzip folder. Here is how it looks like before and after the editing.

Before:

After:
(you may right click to download this edited file)

You can now use the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator to open the file Shards.utz. To fix the problem, go to "List View" tab, and click on "Check boxes". Then, click on the Import button to import your edited ListboxCheckbox.png.




You can then see from the preview display that the checkbox is showing correctly by now.

Save the theme file Shards.utz and transfer it to your phone. You have to ensure that Shards is not in use as the current theme in your phone. Delete the existing Shards theme, and install this edited one. Woolah! You are done.

Malaysia Salary Guide 2008/09 from Kelly Services

I have been waited for this for quite a few months.

Kelly Services published their hardcopy of Malaysia Salary guide 2008/09 around June 2008, but the softcopy only made available on their website yesterday.

You might notice that the figures in this guide is comparatively lower than those published in the ZDNet Asia IT Salary Benchmark Survey 2008 and Robert Walters Global Salary Survey 2008. One probable reason I found out is that Kelly Services' Malaysia Salary guide focuses on executives with less than 5 years of working experience, hence we can't expect the figure to be too high. In the guide anyhow, a Lead Electrical Engineer with 7 years of experience gets a salary range from RM5,000 to RM15,000.

Click here to download the Malaysia Salary guide 2008/09.

You might probably also interested to read on:

• Result of Robert Walters Global Salary Survey 2008
• Result of ZDNet Asia IT Salary Benchmark Survey 2008
• JobsDB Compensation and Benefit Survey Report 2009

Benefits of having smartphone

I wrote about "Choosing a mobile phone" last week, and I've chosen the Sony Ericsson P1i, which is a feature rich PDA smartphone that has been around in the market for more than a year and is still a hot pick for many people. I believe now is a good timing to buy it, as its price has dropped for a few hundred ringgit since its launch, and has been stabilized and maintained over than past 3 months.

This is my first smartphone, and I find it very interesting compared with the traditional mobile phone. If you are a technology savvy who like to explore, modify and hack around the phone, then smartphone is your choice.

When I got the phone (supposingly for the Malaysia/Indonesia market), I found that Chinese was not supported by its original firmware. The first thing I did is to replace its firmware with the Singapore version with Chinese support. And now, it can read and write Chinese in SMS as well as all the installed applications. Its touch screen handwriting recognition now can recognise Chinese writing too!

Beside this, other benefits of smartphone over traditional phone include:

• There is no limit to the contacts information (only limited by available memory). Traditional phone has fixed limit on number of storable contacts.
  
• There are a lot of applications in vast variety available (free and non-free) for its OS, and the number keeps on increasing as development is continuous. Traditional phone is very much restricted to Java based small applications/games only.
  
• You are able to modify (mod) and extend its existing features, such as adding the cool Touchlight function with its camera light. This feature is available in some other mobile phones, but not in the original specs of P1i. There also exist mods to the camera to add more function (such as continuous shots) and enhance the photo quality.
  
• You are even able to explore and hack into the Symbian OS file system, tweaking it for faster and better performance.
• You are able to upgrade the applications that come with the phone to a newer version.
• You are able to add plug-in to its web browser, such as enabling the capability to display flash animation.
• ...

Well, if you are not keen on mods and hacks, and will probably use your phone as-is without installing additional application too, then the benefit of having smartphone to you is probably having bigger memory for contacts/SMS/MMS etc. If you like mods and hacks, you can find quite a lot of such discussions in various Internet forums about your phone.

Choosing a mobile phone

Nowadays mobile phone has evolved into an integrated electronic gadget with lot of features and capabilities making it more than just a phone. It is of course good to have everything in your phone, with the richest feature, the latest technology, the finest capability, the longest battery life, ... with everything "in" and perfect.

Unfortunately, such phone doesn't exist. Mobile phone are designed to be strong in certain area, but secondary or weak in some other domain. There exist phones that are close to perfect, but always come with a skyrocking price tag that might be even higher than a brand new PC computer.

From the personal finance perspective, it is advisable to get a mobile phone with all the features that we really need, and forget about those features that are good to have but seldom or never use. Then, among the features that are required, we identify them according to importance to our need. This will help us to choose the most suitable model for us, and without wasting money in features that we will never use.

Here is my way in choosing a new mobile phone.

Firstly, I'll look into the features that I need:

• 3G - Am I ready to pay extra in monthly bill for 3G usage? Am I always need to use the phone to check emails or surf Internet? Do I have a need to make video calls?
• EDGE - Am I a Digi subscriber?
• Wifi - Do I prefer this way to connect to Internet rather than using 3G? Is my home and office equipped with Wifi access point?
  
• Bluetooth - Am I buying a PDA phone or Smart Phone which will frequently interact with my computer? Does my computer support bluetooth? Am I necessary to use a bluetooth headset?
• Camera - Do I just need a basic camera or a high resolution one in the phone? Do I prefer to take pictures with my digital camera or with my phone? Is flash important? Do I need the phone to be my "torchlight"? Is autofocus, night mode, zoom, etc. important?
  
• Screen - Do I need a high colour and big display for watching movies, see pictures, surf the net, use GPS, ... etc. or I just need a normal screen?
• Video capture - Do I really need this feature?
• Speaker - Will I use my phone as MP3/MP4 player?
  
• FM radio - Will I use the phone to listen to radio?
• TV receiver - Will I use the phone for TV, such as getting the news?
  
• Keyboard design/layout - Am I often sending SMS? Can the keyboard facilitate for faster and easier typing?
• Java - Do I plan to install additional applications or play games other than those come with the phone?
  
• Touch screen - Do I really need this feature?
• Stylus - Is this my preferred way which is faster for me to write, draw and manipulate the phone?
  
• GPS - Do I really need this feature?
• PDA functions - Do I need a sophisticated calendar or just a basic one? Will I use the phone as convenience device to take notes (or I still prefer paper and pen)? Is there occasion that need me to open and work on MS Office files with the phone?
  

By getting the answers for the above, I should have a clearer picture of what kind of phone do I plan to buy. This should help me in shorlisting some brands and models that suit my needs. Then I'll look into my preference for:

• Design - what design I like? Big screen, flip, twist, bar, block, ...
• Size - what size I like? slim, compact, normal, PDA style (bulky), ...
  
• Memory - how much internal memory? Do I need the phone to support for external memory card?
• Weight - everyone love a light weight phone.
• Battery - how long can the battery last for standby, talking, online, playing video, using apps, ...?
• Price - how much am I willing to pay?
  

Until this point, I will be able to choose the mobile phone I'm going to buy. If you are also planning to buy a new mobile phone, hope that this can give you some useful guides.

10 questions to assess your job satisfaction

Are you happy in your job? How satisfied are you with your career? Do you agree that employees are happiest and most satisfied when they consider themselves fully engaged in their roles in the company?

Well, what could be making you to have such a good feeling? The 10 questions below can help you to perform a career audit and assess your job satisfaction. Ask yourself:

• Is the company capitalizing on my special talents?
• Does my supervisor have my best interests at heart?
• In the past six months, has my supervisor honestly evaluated my performance?
• Am I receiving challenging assignments at work to help me grow professionally?
• Do I have a mentor guiding me as I move up through the organization?
• Do I have friends at work in whom I can confide?
• Is there a career track to get me where I want to be in five years?
• Does my work give me a sense of higher purpose?
• Are my coworkers trustworthy and committed to excellence?
• Am I receiving the training I need to do my job well?

If you are an employee, the assessment above will help you in clarifying your career prospect and worthiness; If you are an employer or a human resource personnel, the assessment above can give you some clue in improving employee's relationship and hopefully reduce turnover rate; If you are a job seeker, don't be shy off to find out the answers from your potential employer.

If most of your answers to the above questions are "no" but you are still staying with your company, perhaps you are one of those not-so-happy employees who hang around mainly because of the 11th point: remuneration.

(Source of the above 10 questions are from Allyhunt, an executive sourcing company in Malaysia)

We are only liable for max RM250 after credit card lost or stolen

Do you know that pursuant to Sections 19 and 26 of the Banking and Financial Institutions Act 1989, Bank Negara (Central Bank of Malaysia) has issued a Credit Card Guidelines in March 2003 to all credit card issuers. The Guidelines were intended to promote active consumerism and consumers’ understanding of credit card usage and protecting their interest as card users.

Any party who fails to comply with the guidelines may be found guilty of an offense punishable under Section 104 of the Act.

Here is what inside the guidelines say:

• Clause 13.2: "the cardholder's maximum liability for unauthorised transactions as a consequence of a lost or stolen credit card shall be confined to a limit specified by the issuer of the credit card, which shall not exceed RM250, provided the cardholder has not acted fraudently or has not failed to inform the issuer of the credit card as soon as is reasonably practicable, after having found that his credit card is lost or stolen."
• Clause 13.3: "where the amount imposed on the cardholder for unauthorised transactions due to loss or theft of the credit card is in excess of the maximum liability limit, the issuer has to prove that the cardholder has acted fraudently or failed to inform it as soon as reasonably practicable of the loss."
• Clause 13.4: "the issuer shall ensure that the cardholder is not held liable for any unauthorised transactions charged to the credit card after he/she has notified the issuer verbally or in writing. The issuer shall take imediate action upon notification by the cardholder to prevent further use of the lost of stolen credit card."

In layman terms, it means that if your credit card is lost or stolen, and you informed the bank immediately, the bank has to suspend your credit card at once. You are only liable to a maximum of RM250 caused by unauthorised use of credit card after you found out your card was lost/stolen and before you report it to your bank. If the bank wants to charge for more than that, they need to prove that you were negligent in handling your credit card and/or didn't report the lost/stolen immediately. Once you've made the report to the bank, either by phone or by fax or any other means, you are no longer liable for any amount charged to your credit card thereafter.

You should remember this information to protect your rights and benefits, just in case (touch wood!) anything bad happened to your credit cards.

Malaysian household monthly income distribution

The pie chart below indicates the Malaysian household monthly income distribution. The information is sourced from MP Amirsham’s reply to Dr Michael J Devaraj's question during a parliament assembly in July 2008 recently.



The root source and period of the statistics is not provided, and the number of households surveyed is also not available. It is believed that this information should be not before 2004 and not later than 2007.

Which group do you stand in the pie?

If the same piece of information is represented by bars, it will now look like this:




And according to another survey done by the Statistic Department for the Economic Planning Unit recently, the Malaysian average monthly household income is RM3686, which falls in the RM3-4k group.

57.8% of the families are below this group, and 29.3% are above it. This shows that the families fall on the average is actually have a higher position than the median in the distribution, as the median falls in the RM2-3k group.

This mean majority of the households are at the poorer side of the income group, forming a triangular distribution graph (if you break up the RM5-10k bar into intervals of RM1k as in other bars, you should see the triangle clearly), but the income of the richer side is so much that it is still able to pull up the average income figure.

Now, can you sense the "M"?

EIU published IT competitiveness benchmarking report 2008

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, a leading research and advisory firm under The Economist Group that publishes various famous business publications such as The Economist, CFO, etc.) has just published a white paper namely "How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industrycompetitiveness 2008" sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

To produce the report, they have performed in-depth studies and ranked 66 countries based on the following 6 categories with a number of indicators in each of them:

1. Business environment for the IT industry
2. IT infrastructure
3. Human capital
4. Legal environment
5. R&D environment
6. Government support for IT industry development

Compared with the same studies done last year, here are some of their findings:

• Taiwan has risen from 6th to 2nd in the overall index based primarily on its strong performance in the R&D environment category, and particularly in patents.


• Japan has suffered the steepest dropamong the index countries—from 2nd to12th—also largely due to changes in its R&Dand patents scores.


• South Korea also fell from 3rd to 8th affected by patents scores.


• Canada has risen from 9th to 6th placethanks mainly to improved performance inthe area of human capital development.


• Israel has advanced from 20th to 16ththis year thanks to stronger scores in IT infrastructure and in the area of governmentsupport for the IT industry.


• Germany has fallen from 16th to 19th place due primarily to the change in measuring patents, as well as toslower growth of R&D funding.

Three Asian economies have made it to the Top 10. They are Taiwan (no. 2, just trailing the champion US), South Korea (no. 8) and Singapore (no. 9). Malaysia ranked no. 36 overall (same position as in 2007), and ranked no.8 among the 17 economies in the Asia-Pacific region.


(Click image to enlarge...)

Click here to read the full report of "How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industrycompetitiveness 2008".

Intel launched 6-core Dunnington processors

Intel has just launched their 6-core Dunnington a.k.a. Xeon 7400 processor, which is designed to dramatically improve the performance of virtualization applications, and comes with Flex Migration and VTD technology.

This new processor is Intel's first to use a dedicated level-3 cache, and able to boost performance by 50 percent compared to the 4-core Tigerton a.k.a. Xeon 7300 processor. All its 6 processing cores are placed on the same piece of silicon, which is different from the older 4-core Xeon processors that were created by tying two 2-core silicon packages together.

The Dunnington is socket-compatible with the Tigerton, and both of them are designed to be used in machines with four or more processor sockets. In fact, you can plug the new Dunningtons into the same sockets for Tigerton, and use a BIOS patch to upgrade the system to support the new processors. There are also optionally scaled down 4-core version of Dunnington processor with a cheaper price tag.

If you are dealing with virtualization and high performance computing, this will be a very good news for you.

HP to chop off 7.5% workforce after merger with EDS

There is news that HP is going to lay off 7.5% of its existing workforce, which is equivalent to more than 24k headcounts, as part of its merger plan with EDS. So the concern that I blogged about exactly 4 months ago in the article of "HP to buy over EDS for about US$13B" has come to reality.

Employees from EDS are expected to bear the brunt of the cuts, and half of the jobs cuts will be in the US, with finance, human resources and legal departments expected to be affected. This mean that the "damage" will be minimal in their Asia-Pacific offices.

Hope that Mark Hurd is making a wiser move than Carly Fiorina this time.

Improve Windows Systray clock with the free LClock

LClock is a very lightweight Windows 2000/XP Systray clock replacement that consumes very minimal memory and system resources, ideal to make the clock in the Systray looks much better and with additional features such as nice calendar display with a single mouse click.

This free program is developed by Ying Han, originated from the idea of Thrawn's .NET systray clock program. It is a modified (stripped down) version of Kazuto Sato's TClock Light.

It not only displays the time in Systray in a configurable and much nicer way, and also will pop up a nice calendar with a just single mouse click on it. It also features a simple alarm system configurable by clicking on the calendar. The calendar reminders show up in a pop-up window when triggered and can be scheduled to be repeated at different intervals.

With LClock, you can have a much better clock and calendar application in your Windows 2000/XP.

The latest version of LClock is 1.62b released by September 2004.

Click here for more information about LClock.

UltraVNC 1.0.5 released

Glad to know that the long awaited UltraVNC 1.0.5 is finally released, 2 years from the last stable version of 1.0.2.

When I was managing the MIS department of my ex-company, where my technical support team needs to support multiple retail outlets in remote locations, UltraVNC is an excellent tool the team uses for remote support and troubleshooting from HQ without needed to travel for onsite support. It saves a lot of time, money and effort, and helps to solve the problem for the user within a short period of time after the issue was raised.

UltraVNC is a powerful client-server remote control software derived from the famous Virtual Network Computing (VNC) software. With UltraVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote computer as if you are sitting in front of it, and control it with your local mouse and keyboard via the computer network.

There are 3 remote control technologies popular in the market of remote control software:

• Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) designed by Citrix Systems is proprietary. Practical products conforming to ICA are Citrix’s WinFrame and Citrix Presentation Server, which usage is charged by license.
• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) designed by Microsoft is used in Terminal Services or Remote Desktop.
• Virtual Network Computing (VNC) designed by AT&T is released as open source and is platform independent. There are clients and servers for almost all GUI operating systems including Windows, Linux/BSD/Unix (X-Window), Mac OS, and also for Java. There are even clients that run in web browsers. Most free remote control software are based on this technology.

UltraVNC includes a number of advanced features, making it unique among the various flavors of VNC variants, including:

• Special graphics mirror driver to facilitate ultrafast remote controlling experience.
• Multiple authentication methods, including integration with Microsoft Windows Logon
• Data Stream Encryption Plugin to securely encrypt all data sent between the UltraVNC server and viewer.
• Possibility to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to the remote server, useful to logoff user, shutdown or restart remotely
• Text chat window for user between the server and client to communicate directly.
• Drag-and-drop style remote file transfer between client and server.
• Auto reconnection support
• Multiple monitors support
• Repeater to use UltraVNC viewer behind a NAT router.
• NAT to NAT connector for connections between UltraVNC viewer and server behind NAT routers without any router modification.
• UltraVNC SC (SingleClick), a customizable mini UltraVNC server that doesn't need any installation for on-the-fly usage.

UltraVNC is free and open sourced, released under the GNU General Public License.

Click here for more information and download of UltraVNC.

WD-40 can help in removing road tax sticker

Our road tax sticker is pretty sticky, with a layer of adhesive that glue it firmly onto the windscreen. When it is time to renew the road tax, many find it difficult to peel off the existing sticker without leaving stain of glue and/or small pieces of the sticker.

I found that WD-40 is pretty useful in helping us to peel off the existing road tax sticker from the windscreen cleanly, without leaving any stain or residue. Just gently peel off the sticker as usual, and don't worry about the adhesive and residue that is hard to remove. Then, spray some WD-40 onto a piece of dry cloth, and wipe them off from the windscreen. Now, you will have a clean space to put on your new road tax sticker.

Besides, I have V-Kool tinted on my windscreen, and I found that this WD-40 (sprayed on cloth) will not harm the tinted film, and hence this method is safe to use on tinted windscreen too.

IT & Handphone Price Crash @ Digital Mall (3 days only)

The Digital Mall in Petaling Jaya is having an IT & Handphone Price Crash promotion this weekend 5-7 September 2008.

Original Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung handphone sets with original warranty are selling at a few hundred ringgit cheaper than normal retail price, and many are packaged with free 1GB memory card. IT products on sale including Samsung colour laser printer, Garmin Nuvi, Playstation 3, etc.

In addition, a total of RM20k cash vouchers are given out daily during the event for purchases above RM100, RM500 and RM1,000.

For more detail and the promotion price list, click here.

hMailServer the decent free mail server for Windows

There are plenty of free and open source mail server solutions in the Linux and Unix world which based on Postfix, and there are also standalone suite such as Courier, Zimbra, etc.

However, most mail server solutions in Windows world are not free. Among those which are free also always lack in features. hMailServer, created by Martin Knafve, is a decent one in the Windows world, which is free to use and also provides all of the important functionality you need to run your own e-mail server. Initially it was open source and licensed under GPL, until recently its Version 5 is now closed source (source code no longer available) but is still provided free of charge to use.

hMailServer supports open email protocols such as IMAP, POP3 and SMTP, which makes it compatible with most email clients available, including webmail such as SquirrelMail. Among its features are:

• Multiple virtual domains
• Domain alias
  
• Multilingual
  
• Quotas
  
• Antispam
• Antivirus (with ClamAV)
• Auto-reply
  
• Rules and filtering
• Attachment blocking
• Retrieval of messages from external POP3 accounts
• Built-in backup
• Mirroring
• Multihoming
• Scripting
  
• .....
  

If you are from the SME/SMI sector, looking for an email server solution to be installed in a Windows platform, hMailServer is a solution that is worthwhile for you to seriously look into.

CakeFest the CakePHP conference

The 2nd CakeFest in 2008 will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina this coming 2-5 December 2008. The conference will feature both English and Spanish spoken talks.

Organized by the Cake Software Foundation, CakeFest is a programming conference with a strong focus on CakePHP. CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP scripting language that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying web applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, it reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Click here to pre-register for the CakeFest conference now.

If you experience slow Internet access, OpenDNS can be your remedy

Recently, I experienced slow Internet access both from my office and home. Even the Google search page also took a long time to load up. However, the "ping" and "traceroute" results to external sites seem to be normal, this made me suspect the DNS service of TMNet, the ISP.

Then I tried to change to use the free DNS service from OpenDNS. Woolah! My Internet access speed finally come back to normal.

If you are facing the same Internet access speed problem, you might also want to give OpenDNS a try. Just go to this website: https://www.opendns.com/start and click on Computer, select the operating system you are using, and there is step-by-step guide to help you make use of OpenDNS service. If you are connecting to Internet using ADSL, and your computer is configured to automatically get its IP address from the DHCP service in your ADSL router, then click on Router, select your ADSL router's brand and model, and follow the steps for the DNS configuration.

Hope that your slow Internet access problem can also be solved by OpenDNS too.

Now you can change service provider and retain existing mobile phone number

The Mobile Number Portability (MNP) service has been talked about in Malaysia since 2005, and finally it is materialized by today!

With the MNP in place, mobile phone users, be it prepaid or postpaid, and regardless consumer plan or corporate plan, can now port from one mobile service provider to another, for example from Maxis to Digi, or Digi to Celcom, or Celcom to Maxis, and so on... but retaining the same mobile phone number as before, including the prefix number.

This is a good news to all of us, because with this MNP service, we can freely change to the mobile service provider that provides the best service, the best price, and/or the most features & benefits, without worrying about the change in mobile phone number anymore. Our relatives , friends, colleagues, customers, ... can still use the same mobile number to contact us, and the same number being used for banking services, online services, etc. can still be used.

Prepaid consumer plan users in Klang Valley can start porting from today (29 August 2008) onwards, while postpaid consumer plan users in Klang Valley can start enjoying the MNP service from 15 September 2008 onwards. A Nationwide Launch to cover the whole country and including business plan users as well, is planned to commence in October 2008.

To perform the porting, you need to apply with the new service provider, a maximum service fee of RM25 will be charged, and your service with existing service provider will be automatically terminated upon successful porting. All supplementary lines must port together with the principal account. Supplementary line that doesn't intend to port to new service provider must detach and register as primary line with the old service provider.

During the porting process, you can still enjoy the same mobile services as before. Only the International Roaming Service will be affected as this service will be suspended upon your porting request.

Click here for the FAQ document about the MNP service.

FundSuperMart present in Malaysia

Good news to unit trust investors in Malaysia. FundSuperMart, the renoun and largest online unit trust distributor in Singapore has now come to the country.

The FundSuperMart in Malaysia is operated by iFAST-OSK Sdn Bhd, a joint venture between Malaysia’s OSK Investment Bank Bhd and Singapore's iFAST Corp. Investors are able to perform online unit trusts buy/sell transaction, as well as make use of their online tools to check portfolio and calculate return. There are also research articles and fund selection tools to help you select for suitable funds based on your investment strategy.

One of the attraction of FundSuperMart is that it has a comparatively low fund sales charges of 2% only. Currently, unit trusts of the following fund managers are available:

• Alliance Investment Management Bhd
• AmInvestment Services Berhad
• OSK-UOB Unit Trust Management Berhad
• Pheim Unit Trusts Bhd
• Prudential Fund Management Berhad
• RHB Investment Management Sdn Bhd
  

Meanwhile Tune Money, the online financial service portal of Dato' Tony Fernandes is also planned to sell unit trusts on their portal soon.

The mooncake economy

Mooncake (月饼) is a very special product. This round shape Chinese pastry only appears during the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节), which falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of every lunar year. It will appear in the market about 2 months before the Mid-Autumn Festival, and will disappear after that.

When the time arrives, you will see its advertisement and promotion all over the media, be it radio, television, newspaper, magazine, flyers, ... Special booths will be setup in shopping complex to sell this product. The market is dominated by restaurants and baker houses, with involvement of some other smaller players. Brand names such as Oversea Restaurant (海外天), Kam Lun Tai Restaurant (锦伦泰 ), Jade Pot Tea House (玉壶轩), Tong Kee Brothers Confectionery (棠记兄弟), The Baker’s Cottage (麦可思 ), Hei Yue Tong (喜月堂), Lavender (紫馨), Foh San Restaurant (富山), Six Happiness Restaurant (六福), Tai Thong Restaurant (大同)... are easily tied up with mooncake. Nowadays even Purple Cane (紫藤), Lo Hong Ka (老行家), Baskin Robbins, Haagen Dazs also joint in the mooncake market warfare, and yet to mention those high-class restaurant in hotels such as Shangri-La, Equatorial, Ritz-Calton, Concorde, Hilton, Dynasty, Park Royal, Renaissance, etc.

Mooncake has a very short shelf life and need to be consumed within 1-2 weeks. Frankly speaking, it is not a healthy food as well, as it comes with high sugar, high cholesterol and high calorie. You might wonder why there are so many players so keen in this festive product? It is simply because the profit margin is very high. They can easily make at least 400% profit by selling mooncake within that 1 month period, which the net profit figure is probably equivalent to their one year normal restaurant business.

Mooncake is expensive. The normal one can easily cost above RM10 per cake. Its price is determined by factors such as taste, ingredient, packaging, and brand name. Normally the Chinese people buy mooncake as gift to friends, co-workers, relatives, neighbours, business partners during this Mid-Autumn Festival, more than buying for own consumption. The product has been so closely related to the season until nowadays Mid-Autumn Festival is also known as Mooncake Festival too.

The mooncake economy is an interesting business model which shows high risk (short period, short shelf life), high return (more than 400% profit). Perhaps for the businessmen, this product is even better than the Chinese mandarin sold during Chinese New Year.

About car engine oil

Whenever we bring our car to workshop for periodic maintenance service, the engine oil will be changed. Here are some of the essential knowledge about car engine oil that is practical to be known by every car owner.

The main function of the engine oil is to lubricate the piston movement, reduce direct contact between moving parts in the engine, and hence decrease the friction, wear & tear and heat produced. Some of its other functions are to clean up the engine, prevent oxidation and corrosion, etc.

There are 3 types of car engine oil available in the market:

• Mineral oil: is the natural oil refined from petroleum. It needs to be changed every 5,000km.
  
• Full-synthetic oil: is artificially synthesized (man-made) and consist of chemical compounds which were not originally present in natural petroleum. It has higher viscosity index than mineral oil, more expensive to produce and hence has a higher price tag too. It provides good protection to engine, able to enhances engine performance and power, and can help in fuel economy savings. It needs to be changed every 10,000km.
  
• Semi-synthetic oil (synthetic formulation / synthetic blends): blends of mineral oil with no more than 30% of synthetic oil, to get some of the benefit from synthetic oil with a lower price tag. It provides better engine protection than mineral oil and performs better in reducing wear and tear. It needs to be changed every 7,500km.

The kinematic viscosity of car engine oil is graded with the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) gradings. The kinematic viscosity is measured at a reference temperature of 100°C. The higher the viscosity, the higher the SAE grade number is.

Nowadays a multi-grade SAE designation is normally used, which carries 2 numbers separated by a "W" in between. For example, here are the SAE gradings of engine oil used by the Toyota service centres in Malaysia:

• Full-synthetic: 5W-40
• Synthetic formulation: 10W-40
• Premium mineral: 15W-50

The letter "W" denotes "Winter". The number before "W" indicates its cold crank performance. Lower number indicates the oil can be pumped by your engine even at a lower temperature. A 0W oil is well tested at -35°C, a 5W at -30°C, a 10W is tested at -25°C and a 15W is tested at -15°C. The number after "W" is the kinematic viscosity of the oil at high temperature. Oil with lower viscosity number is thiner.

It is advisable that you use the engine oil with the SAE rating as recommended by the car manufacturer. You can find this information in the car manual.

Bear in mind that the SAE grading does not state the quality of the oil. The quality of oil is determined by its API (American Petroleum Institute) rating.

For petrol engine using spark-plug ignition, the API listings start with letter "S" (meaning Service category), and for diesel engine using compression ignition, the API listings start with letter "C" (meaning Commercial category). Higher alphabet position of the 2nd letter denotes a better quality. For example, the SM rating has a better quality than SL. CJ-4 is better than CI-4.

Currently Toyota service centres in Malaysia use SM grade full synthetic oil, and SL grade for both synthetic formulation and premium mineral oil. Their diesel engine oil is CF grade.

Bursa Malaysia to introduce new trading system soon

You might be awared from your remisier or securities firm about the news that Bursa Malaysia is going to deploy a new trading system called Bursa Trade Securities (BTS) soon, which is being developed with US-based Atos Euronext Market Solutions Ltd. This move is said to enhance the current equities and derivatives system to become a modern trading infrastructure.

The new system features a real-time matching compared to the current 10 second matching. It will has transparent pre-opening price, the best price limits info will be extended from the current 3 prices to 5. The closing price will also change from the current "last done price" to a "natural closing price".

This trading system upgrade will also initiate an upgrade to most of the online trading facilities provided by the securities firms, which require an upgrade to newer version of Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

You can click here to learn more about the new BTS system.

Petronas Win Free Petrol for 3 Years Contest

The Petronas "Win Free Petrol for 3 Years" Contest run from 18 August 2008 until 17 November 2008. It is opened to Malaysian citizen aged 18 and above who spend a minimum of RM30 in one transaction at any Petronas service stations with any Petronas affiliated Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card, ATM Bankcard, SmartPay or cash with Kad Mesra.

Cardholders who spend a minimum of RM30 in one transaction at any Petronas service stations during the Contest Period are automatically eligible for one entry. Any additional RM30 spent in a single receipt shall be treated as another entry. For example, a transaction of RM60 will entitle the Cardholder to two entries.

During each month of the Contest Period, 1 winner will be selected to win the Grand Prize and 799 winners will be selected to win the Consolation Prizes. In addition, for every month, an additional 88 lucky Petronas Maybankard Visa winners will be selected to win the special consolation prize.

The prizes are as follow:

• Grand Prize - Free fuel for 3 years for 1 winner per calendar month valued at RM28,800.
• Consolation Prizes - 3X refill of value purchased at Petronas Service Station for 799 winners per month. The maximum 3X refill of value purchased is RM600 only.
• Special Consolation Prizes - 8X refill of value purchased at Petronas Service Station for 88 Petronas Maybankard Visa winners per month. The maximum 8X refill of value purchased is RM1,600 only.

Potential winners will be notified via telephone calls for verification and the potential winners are required to answer one simple question to get the prize.

3% petrol rebate for Petronas CIMB Mastercard

Today when I pump petrol in the Petronas station, I noticed their advertisement of providing 3% rebate for Petronas CIMB Mastercard. Currently, petrol expenditure with Petronas CIMB Mastercard at Petronas stations will get 2% rebate only.

However, I noticed that this 3% rebate is a promotion, valid from 18 September 2008 until 17 November 2008 only. This will make Petronas CIMB Mastercard to be one of the credit cards providing the highest amount of petrol rebate, competitive to the Shell Citibank Gold Credit Card.

Beside that, the 5X TreatsPoints promotion of Petronas Maybankard Visa which just ended by 31 July 2008 is also extended from 1 August 2008 until 31 December 2008.

The Invalidity Pension Scheme of SOCSO

The Invalidity Pension Scheme of SOCSO provides a 24-hours coverage to employees against invalidity and death due to any cause not connected with employment before the age of 55 years.

"Invalidity" means a serious disease or disablement of a permanent nature that is either incurable or not likely to be cured, as a result of which an employee is unable to earn at least 1/3 of what a normally able person could earn. Heart attack, kidney failure, cancer, mental illness, chronic asthma and other similar conditions are chronic ailments or diseases that could be considered for invalidity.

The benefits provided include:

• Invalidity Pension - this is only eligible for SOCSO members who contributed for more than 24 months, subjected to additional terms and conditions.
• Invalidity Grant - this is an outright payment paid to worker or employee who does not qualify for the Invalidity Pension but has made at least 12 monthly contributions to SOCSO.
• Survivors Pension - where an employee dies while receiving Invalidity Pension irrespective of his age, or has not reached the age of 55 years and met the conditions for receiving Invalidity Pension, irrespective of the cause of death, the dependants will be paid Survivors Pension.
• Funeral Benefit - this benefit is paid to the eligible next-of-kind if an employee dies while receiving Invalidity Pension, or has not reached the age of 55 years and met the conditions for receiving Invalidity Pension.
• Rehabilitation Benefit - an employer who suffers invalidity is also entitled to receive Rehabilitation Benefit as provided under the Employment Insurance Injury Scheme.

The Employment Injury Insurance Scheme of SOCSO

The Employment Injury Insurance Scheme of SOCSO provides protection to employees who suffer from accidents arising from work.

Its coverage includes:

• Commuting accident while travelling to and from work, and while travelling to and from place for taking meals during work, and also during business journey related to work.
• Accident that happens while performing official duty.
• Occupational diseases due to hazards by the nature of work and those listed in the Fifth Schedule of the Employees' Social Security Act 1969.

The benefits provided include:

• Medical benefit - free treatment under the coverage at a SOCSO Panel Clinic or any government hospital or clinic. Reimbursement for medical expenditure incurred at a non SOCSO Panel Clinic may only be submitted for consideration.
• Temporary Disablement Benefit - employee who has been certified by a doctor to be unfit for work for not less than 4 days including the day of the accident is eligible for this benefit. This benefit will be paid for the period the employee is on medical leave.
• Permanent Disablement Benefit - employee who has been certified by a Medical Board or an Appellate Medical Board to be suffering from permanent disablement as a result of an employment injury is eligible for this benefit. The employee may continue to work while receiving this benefit.
• Constant Attendance Allowance - this allowance is paid to an employee who is suffering from permanent total disablement or 100% loss of earnings capacity, and is so severely incapacitated that he constantly requires the personal attendance of another person.
• Funeral Benefits - where an employee dies as a result of an employment injury or while receiving disablement benefit, an amount of RM1,500 will be paid to the eligible next-of-kin.
• Rehabilitation Benefit - SOCSO provides facilities for vocational and physical rehabilitation free of charge to employee who suffers from permanent disablement.
• Dependant's Benefit - Where an employee dies as a result of an employment injury, the dependants are entitled to this benefit.
• Education Benefit - this benefit comes in the form of a loan or scholarship given to dependant children of an insured employee who is in receipt of a monthly benefit, provided that the dependent children fulfil the eligibility conditions set by SOCSO.

About SOCSO a.k.a. PERKESO

Most of us as employee in Malaysia contribute to SOCSO (Social Security Organisation) a.k.a. PERKESO (Pertubuhan Keselamatan Social) every month. SOCSO contribution is deducted from our salary by our employer in a similar way to EPF a.k.a. KWSP contribution. Also similar to EPF, our employer is also required to contribute to our SOCSO account in addition to our own contribution, and the employer's portion is larger than the employee's.

In fact, under the current Employee’s Security Act, SOCSO contribution is compulsory for all Malaysian employee with monthly salary less than RM3,000. It is optional for those with starting salary above RM3,000. Under the "once in always in" principal, once we become a SOCSO member and contributed to SOCSO, we will continue to be member even though our salary increased to above RM3,000 later.

This salary ceiling of RM3,000 for SOCSO contribution was revised from the previous ceiling of RM2,000 on 10 September 2003 by the Malaysian Cabinet with amendments made to Act.

Foreign workers are not covered by SOCSO. They are protected under a separate Workmen's Compensation Act 1952 instead.

Currently, our MyKad identity number is also used as our SOCSO membership number.

So what are the benefits of being a SOCSO member?

There are 2 types of protection scheme for SOCSO members, namely the Employment Injury Insurance Scheme and the Invalidity Pension Scheme.

The Employment Injury Insurance Scheme provides protection to employees who are involved in accidents arising from out of employment, occupational diseases and also commuting accident, while the Invalidity Pension Scheme provides 24 hours coverage for workers from invalidity or dies irrespective of the cause of death.

Employees with age below 55 are covered under both the 2 schemes, and those above 55 are covered under the Employment Injury Insurance Scheme.

A SOCSO member or dependants will be entitled to the following benefits :

• Periodical payments in the case of invalidity.
• Periodical payments in the case of disablement suffered as a result of an employment injury.
• Periodical payments to the dependants of member who dies as a result of an employment injury.
• Payments for funeral benefit or expense on the death of member as a result of an employment injury.
• Periodical payments to member who is in receipt of invalidity pension or disablement benefit and is so severely incapacitated or disabled as to require the personal attendance of another person.
• Medical treatments for the attendance on member suffering from disablement.
• Periodical payments to dependants of member who dies while in receipt of invalidity pension.
  

PeaZip the powerful free and open source file archiver

Similar to 7-Zip which I introduced in the blog earlier, PeaZip is another free and open source file archiver licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It is developed in FreePascal.

PeaZip can deploy fast compression in ZIP and TAR.GZ formats, or very efficient speed / high compression ratio tradeoff in 7Z, BZ or ARC formats, or even highest levels of compression using PAQ family algorithms. It can handle many archive and compression formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream TAR and ZIP formats to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ, including:

• Full support: 7Z, 7Z-sfx, ARC/WRC, BZ2/TBZ2, GZ/TGZ, PAQ/LPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, split, TAR, UPX, ZIP;
• Open, browse, extract, test: ACE, ARJ, CAB, CHM, COMPOUND (MSI, DOC, XLS, PPT), CPIO, ISO, Java (JAR, EAR, WAR), Linux (DEB, PET/PUP, RPM, SLP), LHA/LZH, LZMA, NSIS, OOo, PAK/PK3/PK4, RAR, SMZIP, U3P, WIM, XPI, Z/TZ.
  

It also supports features such as robust file copy, split/join files, quick or secure file deletion, byte to byte file compare, checksum/hash files, system benchmark, generate random passwords and keyfiles.

The same features and look and feel is available to all Windows version and also on Linux. It is also available in standalone portable apps format which does not require installation to use.

PeaZip is focused on security and supports multiple encrypted archive formats:

• 7Z, with AES256 encryption;
• ARC, with AES256, Blowfish, Twofish256 and Serpent256 encryption;
• PEA, with AES256 authenticated encryption (EAX mode);
• ZIP with WinZip's AE encryption based on AES256.
  

PeaZip is powerful. You can click here to download and try it out.

The 51th independence day of Malaysia

On the 31 August of every year, Malaysia will commemorate the independence of the Federation of Malaya since 1957 from British colonial rule. This day is the Independence Day a.k.a. Merdeka Day of Malaysia.

The Merdeka Theme for year 2008 will be "Perpaduan Teras Kejayaan" (Unity Is The Pillar of Success), and the logo will be as below:

This logo was chosen from a contest which saw some 800 entries, with the winner Anuar Dan walking away with RM10,000 for his entry.

To recall, the Federation of Malaysia, comprising the States of Malaya, North Borneo (now Sabah), Sarawak and Singapore was also planned to be officially declared on the date of 31 August 1963, which is the 6th anniversary of Malayan independence. However, it was postponed to 16 September 1963 then, which was coincidently also the birthday of Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore. Singapore left the federation two years later. 16 September is Malaysia Day, which is not declared as public holiday.

Hacker Halted Malaysia 2008

The Hacker Halted event, being one of the most prestigious worldwide IT Security event organized by EC-Council is going to be held for the 11th time in Malaysia. This is the third time it will be held in Malaysia, after the pioneer event in 2004 which was officiated by the Deputy Prime Minister.

There will be 2 days pre-conference workshops session by USA master trainers and another 2 days conference session by renowned speakers. This event also has a special bundling with IT security program.

Among some of the top speakers in Hacker Halted Malaysia 2008 are James Aquilina (Executive Managing Director, Stroz Friedberg LLC), Tom Bowers (Independent Security Evangelist), Mike Murray (Director, Neohapsis), Professor Lech Janczewski (Associate Professor, University of Auckland), Paul Wright (Head of Cyber Crime, City of London Police), Jay Bavisi (President, EC-Council), Larry Detar (Vice President, EC-Council), Haja Mohideen (Co-Founder, EC-Council).

Date: 3-6 November 2008
Venue: Sunway Convention Centre, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Click here for more information about Hacker Halted Malaysia 2008 and download of registration form.

Touch n Go Auto-reload Zing Card

If you carry a credit card issued by certain bank in Malaysia, you might aware from the bank's promotion about this Touch 'n Go card named as Zing Card that will auto-reload by itself.

With the auto-reload feature, you no longer have to worry about not enough balance in your Touch 'n Go card when you use it, and you no longer need to take the hassle to reload its balance. Furthermore, you have earn some reward points or get some cash rebate from your credit card every time it is auto-reloaded.

In fact, the innovation of the card has won the “Most Innovative Prepaid Card Award” from The European Financial Management & Marketing Association (EFMA). Its concept is simple: every time the card balance falls below RM50, it will trigger the auto-reload mechanism to reload RM100 into the card. The reload is done automatically in the system and you don't need to do anything. A service fee of RM2 will be charged every time it auto-reloads, which is more expensive than reloading your normal Touch 'n Go card at ATM machine and charged for RM0.50, but you can save on your time and petrol required to reach the ATM machine. For security reason, the auto-reload is limited to one time per day only.

You need to be a member of VISA or Master credit card issued by a participating institution offering the Touch 'n Go Zing Card as companion card to their credit cards. Those credit card issuers include:

• Maybank
• Hong Leong Bank
• EON Bank
• Affin Bank
• MBf Card
• AEON Credit Service

This Zing Card has no annual fee, but normally a RM10 is charged when the card is issued to you. Currently some of the issuers offer the Zing Card for free and waive the RM10 charge during promotion period.

This Zing Card is also covered under the CPP Card Protection Plan, so if you are also a CPP member, you may include your Zing Card into your protected card listings with CPP.

I have been using my Zing Card for years and find it really convenient. It also works with Smart Tag too. If you are a Touch 'n Go user, you'd probably want to switch over to Zing Card too.

National Investors Symposium (NIS) 2008

The National Investors Symposium (NIS) is an annual event gathering stock analysts, traders and listed companies to exchange insights about the latest developments in the stock market.

This year’s NIS will be held on Sept 7 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, bearing the theme “Planting Your Seeds of Wealth”, because the symposium will provide investors with the information necessary to handpick the best stocks for investment and harvest their profits at the optimum time.

NIS 2008 will achieve this objective by showcasing Fundamental Analysis (FA) and Technical Analysis (TA) techniques to enable investors to make the best decisions for building a winning portfolio.

A special team of panellists consisting of industry insiders, fundamental and technical analysts has been assembled to generate a rich discussion with participants of NIS 2008. Among them are:

• Lim Chee Sing (Head of Research, RHB Research Institute)
• Justin Tan (Market Strategist, ChartNexus Malaysia)
• Ng Ee Hwa (Chief Trainer, ChartNexus Singapore)
• Jay Chia (Market Strategist, ChartNexus)
  

Click here for more information about the National Investors Symposium (NIS) 2008.

Handphone Carnival @ SACC Mall and Metro Point

There will be another handphone event coming soon, after the http://voyager8.blogspot.com/2008/06/handphone-fair-walk-on-park-menara-pgrm.html last June 2008. This time, the organizer promises to bring in more brand participant, more model, and much more goodies. Again there will be up to 70% discount offered during the event. It is hope that there will be improvement from the past event to bring more excitement and benefit to us.

This upcoming Handphone Carnival will take place in 2 different locations at 2 different time periods.

Location 1: Shah Alam City Center (SACC) Mall, Shah Alam
Date: 31 July - 3 August 2008
Time: 10am - 10pm

Location 2: Metro Point, Kajang
Date: 7 August - 10 August 2008
Time: 10am - 10pm

Click here for more information, including the location maps and a downloadable Bluetooth discount voucher.

How the OPR can affect the economic climate

As mentioned earlier, Bank Negara signals their monetary policy stance by changing the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR). How can this change affect the economic climate in the country?

Well, we are awared that the OPR serves as the primary reference rate in determining other market rates, such as the Overnight Interbank Rate (OIR), Base Lending Rate (BLR), deposit rate, etc.

If the OPR increases, so do the other rates. This will cause borrowing cost to increase as interest expenses become higher. Business and investment activities might become less aggressive, investment institutions might allocate more funds in the money market than in the stock market. People are more encouraged to deposit their money with bank and earn interest. Cost of ownership of house and car will increase as the interest rate increased.

Higher interest rate could also attract short term foreign fund (hot money) to flow in, as the multi-national institutions can earn more interest by putting their fund in countries with higher interest rate. This will in turn strengtern the currency exchange rate of the country. When the currency rate is strong, cost of imports goods will be lower.

Theoritically, all these chain reactions will eventually slow down the inflation rate in the country.

If the OPR decreases, the opposite will happen. As interest rate decreases, borrowing cost will be lower, and this encourages more aggressive business and investment activities by leveraging on liabilities. Banking instittutions need to be more aggressive and competitive in order to maintain their profit with the lowered interest rate, and this will cause getting loan from bank become easier. People are discouraged to leave their money with the bank as interest earned become too little, and they are more tending to use their money in buying properties, insurances, unit trusts, shares, etc. The automotive industry will also be benefited with the lower interest rate.

If the interest rate is comparatively lower than other countries, this could cause short term foreign fund to flow out, as the multi-national institutions can earn more interest by putting their fund in countries with higher interest rate. This will in turn weakening the currency exchange rate of the country. When the currency rate is weak, cost of imports goods will be higher.

Theoritically, all these chain reactions will eventually accelerate the inflation rate in the country.

Therefore, Bank Negara need to be extremely careful in changing the OPR, as a wrong move will be disasterous to the economy of the country, and a good move will be benefitial to the economy of the country.

About the Overnight Interbank Rate (OIR)

I mentioned about the Overnight Interbank Rate (OIR) in the article about the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR). Let's see what is actually meant by OIR.

Everyday, the banking institutions will transfer money to each other on behalf of their clients as well as on their own account. At the end of each working day, a bank may have a surplus or shortage of funds. Banks that have surplus funds may lend them to or deposit them with other banks, who borrow from them in the interbank market. The banks can also borrow this short term fund from Bank Negara as well.

The OIR is the overnight interest charged by the lending banks or Bank Negara to the borrowing banks.

About the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR)

Yesterday night, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM, central bank of Malaysia) has again decided to keep the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR) unchanged at 3.50%. This position has been maintained since 26 April 2006 after rising by 25 basis points from the previous 3.25%.

You might want to know exactly what is OPR? Why is it important? How does it affect us?

On 23 April 2004, BNM introduced a New Monetary Operating Procedures with a new interest rate framework. Under this New Monetary Operating Procedures, the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR) will be the indicator of the monetary policy stance of Bank Negara. The OPR will have a dual role:

• As a signalling device to indicate the monetary policy stance;
• As a target rate for the day-to-day liquidity operations of the Central Bank.

Any change in the monetary policy stance would be signalled by a change in the OPR. It will serve as the primary reference rate in determining other market rates, such as the Overnight Interbank Rate (OIR), Base Lending Rate (BLR), deposit rate, etc.

Liquidity management of Bank Negara will aim at ensuring the appropriate level of liquidity that would influence the OIR to move close to the OPR. Liquidity operations will also be conducted at other maturities but without targeting a specific interest rate level as well. Therefore, interbank interest rates at other maturities would be market determined, reflecting overall demand and supply conditions in the money market as well as interest rate expectations.

To minimize excessive volatility in the overnight rate, Bank Negara specifies a corridor around the OPR, which set at ± 25 basis points around the OPR. A standing facility is introduced to ensure that the overnight interbank rate fluctuates within this corridor by providing a lending facility at the upper limit of the operating band and a deposit facility at the lower limit of the operating band. The MPC will announce the OPR on a quarterly basis, unless there is emergency change in the monetary policy stance, whereby additional OPR statement will be issued.

With the OPR set at 3.50%, the upper limit will be 3.75% and lower limit will be 3.25%. Interestingly, you might have noticed that the BLR of banks is set 3% more than this upper limit, and short term fixed deposit rate is set close to the lower limit, while long term fixed deposit rate (1 year or above) is set close to the upper limit.

In fact, under the new framework, each banking institution can announce its own BLR based on its cost structure and business strategies. Banking institutions are also no longer be subject to the maximum spread of 2.5 percentage points above BLR. As a result, you might have noticed that the BLR of certain bank is a little bit different from the majority counterparties.

In summary, the OIR will move in accordance to the OPR. As a result, the banks' BLR and deposit rates are also expected to move accordingly.

When the OPR is low, more money is released to flow into the market, and expected to stimulate the economic activities. On the other hand, when the OPR is high, more money will flow back to Bank Negara, and expected to slow down the economic activities. This is seen as a way to control the inflation rate.