New electricity tariff from 1 July 2008

As part of the restructuring exercise of fuel subsidy scheme in Malaysia, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) has announced the new electricity tariff rate.

TNB has also setup a Bill Calculator webpage on their website for you to calculate the new electricity bill amount and the difference to the old tariff rate (the additional amount you need to fork out).

For domestic electricity, here are the differences:

Consumption (KWh)	Old Bill (RM)	New Bill (RM)	Difference
200	43.60	43.60	0.00
250	58.05	60.85	2.80
300	72.50	78.10	5.60
350	86.95	95.35	8.40
400	101.40	112.60	11.20
450	115.85	135.00	19.15
500	130.30	150.00	19.70
550	144.75	169.50	24.75
600	159.20	189.00	29.80
650	173.65	209.00	35.35
700	188.10	229.00	40.90
750	202.55	249.50	46.95
800	217.00	270.00	53.00

Therefore, if your average monthly electricity consumption is above 300 KWh, it is wise for you to plug in a Power Saver to an electric socket in your house, which can effectively help you to save on electricity bill as well as stabilize the voltage in your house.

Click here to download the TNB's booklet on new tariff for all categories - domestic, commercial, industrial, agricultural, mining, etc.

DKSH 2-days only warehouse sale is back again!

The DKSH Warehouse Sale is back again!

Date: 7-8 June 2008
Time: 10am - 5pm
Location: DKSH Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Jalan Universiti, Petaling Jaya, Selangor.

Look out for great savings on the following items:

• Casio cameras & musical keyboards
• Morgan electrical appliances
• Rubbermaid household products
• Timex watches
• Citizen clocks
• Ellgy personal and healthcare products
  
• Rosken skin care products
  
• Colgate-Palmolive household and toiletry products
  
• ... and many more!
  

Yahoo! releases Address Book API following Google & Microsoft

When Google pushed out their Contacts API in March 2008, it was called "the most in-demand API on the web that hadn't yet existed". Those APIs are important because they allow socially aware applications to offer users the ability to import information from their address books without having to worry about giving up their password to a third-party site. The application seeking the information also no longer needs to employ any screen scraping to gather information.

Soon after that, Microsoft also released the beta version of their Windows Live Contacts API in March 2008. In addition to a full contact management interface for a Windows Live user's address book, the Windows Live Contacts API provides a view to a subset of the Contact data for the purposes of sending Invitations.

Now, Yahoo! has also joint the bandwagon to launch their Address Book API in June 2008. Similar to Google and Microsoft, Yahoo! opted to employ their own authentication technology in the API, namely BBAuth. They intend to supports OAuth in the future, though, which will make it easier for developers to use the API.

The Yahoo! Address Book API is a JSON/XML interface for accessing and updating the Yahoo! Address Book using a web service. It can be used to look up addresses for auto-completion of emails, to add addresses for future shipping information, to obtain unique identifiers for network invites, or to sync with another address book.

Click here to go to the webpage of the Yahoo! Address Book API.