Gold investment with passbook account

Gold is a kind of precious metal that is internationally recognised and accepted to be always interchangeable with cash based on the exchange rate in its own market. It is well-known to be hedge or safe haven against any economic, political, social, or currency-based crises.

Besides keeping the physical gold (in forms of coin, wafer, ornament, etc.), Malaysian can also invest in gold with passbook account in the way similar to passbook savings account with Maybank and Public Bank. The gold price offered by these 2 banks are pegged to international gold commodity prices in the market.

The benefit of investing gold with passbook account is that you don't have to keep the physical gold. This will save you from the hassle or risk of:

• storage cost (eg. keeping in a safe box)
• lost, theft, etc.

I have made a comparison between the Gold Savings Passbook Account (GSPA) of Maybank and Gold Investment Account (GIA) of Public Bank as below.



Generally, Public Bank trades with you in a smaller gap between the selling and buying price of the gold. This also mean that Public Bank sells to you at a lower price than Maybank, and buys from you at a higher price than Maybank, which is more beneficial to the investor.

However, Maybank also has some other advantages, such as:

• They have more branches nationwide available for you to make the gold transaction with them.
  
• They allow you to withdraw your gold in physical gold wafer or gold certificate format.
• They don't impose annual service fee even though your balance is below 10 grams.
• The minimum initial deposit and balance required is lesser.
  

The gold price has been in the rising momentum since 2001 until today. There is a nice website (http://goldprice.org) for you to check for current and historical gold price with charts.

Is now a good time to buy gold? What I can tell you is that now the price is at the historical high end of a long term bull. How long can this bull go further? You have to do your own homework.

Click here to check the gold rate of Maybank GSPA.

Click here to check for the gold rate of Public Bank GIA.

What can you do if your Ubuntu display screwed up

When I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux in my laptop from 8.10 (Intrepid) to 9.04 (Jaunty) using the "Upgrade to 9.04" option in Synaptic Package Manager, it didn't go smoothly.

After the packages download, upgrade, cleanup and restart, the login screen can't show up, and it jammed up in a distorted screen. My first tought was that the display driver or setting was not working well with the display hardware of the laptop.

Luckily, I managed to fix the problem within half an hour. And here is my solution:

• Press the Esc key during Grub bootup to bring up the kernel menu.
• Select the 2nd option "Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)" to go to recovery mode.
• When the Recovery Menu show up, you can try to select "xfix - Try to auto repair graphic problems". However this didn't work for me.
• Therefore, I had to try another way and selected "netroot - Drop to root shell prompt with networking". I think you can also select "root - Drop to root shell prompt" as well.
• Key-in the root password, and you will enter to the root's shell command prompt.
• Key-in this command to manually configure the Xorg-server settings: "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg".
• You will need to configure for the input devices (eg. keyboard) as well as the output devices (eg. display and monitor).
• When you get back to the command prompt, key-in "exit" to end the shell session and go back to Recovery Menu.
• Now, select "resume - Resume normal boot".
• If the display problem is fixed, you will see a beautiful reddish login screen with a stylish 3D Ubuntu logo on the bottom right.
• Welcome to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

Cloud computing with Ubuntu Server Edition 9.x

One of the excitement from Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) which just released on 23 April 2009 is new features in cloud computing.

Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 provides 2 flavours of cloud, namely:

• Ubuntu on Amazon EC2 which uses the publicly available Amazon's Elastic Computing (EC2) cloud computing service.
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud for enterprises to build their own private cloud environment on their servers, which is powered by the Amazon EC2-like open source Eucalyptus system. Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is a cloud system with an EC2-compatible API, elastic block storage (EBS) equivalent and an S3 compatible storage manager.

Cloud computing transforms traditional server infrastructure into a dynamic environment that expands and reduces capacity depending on requirements.

A cloud computing environment combines the resources of a group of servers together over a network. This group of servers is the cloud that provides access to resources on demand.



Adopting a cloud-computing strategy helps businesses conduct their core business activities with greater efficiency and flexibility. It enables greater utilisation of existing hardware while also providing the ability to handle peaks in usage. Thousands of virtual machines and applications can be managed more easily using a cloud-like environment.

Canonical has announced that the next version of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is planned to be very cloud oriented. As such, we can expect more in the cloud to come.

Click here to learn more about cloud computing from Eucalyptus' presentations and publications.

Click here for technical instructions to setup Eucalyptus in Ubuntu Server 9.04.

You might also be interested to read my article about cloud computing written in July 2008.