It's 12 midnight, and there I was lazing on the bed with Stella in one of the rooms on the 12th floor of the Theme Park Hotel, Genting Highlands.

We were just watching a documentary about Angels - individual experiences and the way the scientific world would explain it.

A little past 12 midnight and there was a commercial break. I started noticing a wobble from the bed. At first, I thought to myself, it could just be Stella. Seconds later, Stella asked me "why are you shaking the bed?". It was then that I realize this was not us but could be one of 2 things.

1. There's an earthquake which is later followed by a tsunami (similar to what I felt in Cameron Highlands)
2. Stella and I are experiencing a supernatural phenomenon

Stella stood up and immediately prepared herself for evacuation while I called up the Lobby and asked if it was an earthquake. The receptionist told me that I was the first person to call and they didn't feel anything at the lobby. Instead, she sent a hotel staff to our room to check if everything was alright...

Within minutes, everything was fine... there was no more wobbling. As I didn't have my notebook with me, to confirm if it was an earthquake, I decided to logon through WAP on my mobile and see if there was any news online. The result? Nothing.

We went to bed and the rest of the night was just peaceful. It's 10am and there it was, a fresh copy of the News Straits Times sent to my room. I quickly glanced through the pages and saw nothing of an earthquake.

I switched on the TV and there it was, reports of an earthquake near the Sumatra island.

Finally, it was confirmed, it was an earthquake and not a supernatural phenomenon... :)

It's pretty official. Network operators in Malaysia are literally undercutting each other from super low SMS charges to super low phone charges.

The original five TimeCel, Maxis, Celcom, Digi and TmTouch, now just Maxis, Celcom and Digi after the government requested for the merging of some operators are now at a neck to neck fight.

The operators used to charge 15 cents per SMS, 30 cents per minute charge for regional calls (approximately within a span of 3 states) or 80 cents per minute charge for adjacent states, then there's the RM 60 monthly access fee for postpaid lines and brand new prepaid startup packs at a peak of RM 238.

Today, some operators are offering 1 cent per SMS, 15 cents per minute charge for phone calls within the network peninsular wide, ZERO monthly access fee charges for postpaid lines, brand new prepaid startup packs for as low as RM 18 (inclusive of RM 10 talktime).

Believe it or not? The price is still dropping like CRAZY. These operators aren't gonna give up. So who's gonna win?

These operators are going to keep slashing their prices and lose revenue until a point where they can't take it no more. In my opinion, the end winner here is none of the operators but us! The consumers. We are the ones who will benefit greatly from the cut in charges. The lower the merrier! What do you say?

What do these names have in common?

Anuar Zain
Backstreet Boys
Black Eyed Peas
Boys II Men
Dayang Nurfaizah
Innuendo
Jackie Chan
Kimora Lee (founder of BabyPhat)
Sheila Majid
Lauryn Hill
N Sync
Nicholas Tse
Paula Abdul
Ruth Sahayana
Wyclef Jean
Yumiko Cheng

These people put up, in my opinion, one of the greatest concerts ever held in Malaysia and also the best I have attended! It's called the Force of Nature - a concert for tsunami aid.

The event began at around 7:45pm with Lauryn Hill performing the opening act, a group of our local artists later performed and was followed by the rest of the individual and group acts. The event ended 6 hours later at 2:30am!

I must salute bands and individuals who performed after 12 midnight namely, the Backstreet Boys and the Black Eyed Peas. Everyone was tired, including the audience especially after the adrenaline powered act performed by the infamous Wyclef Jean but the show went on proving once again, the greatest force of nature is the combined effort of all individuals.

It's a real pity I couldn't take pictures from the event. Cameras were not allowed in. If you were one of the fortunate few who got the camera in and took some pictures, please send it to me @ benjern@gmail.com and I'll gladly have it posted up here. If you have some thoughts or were at the event, do place a note here!

With the non-stop servings of ice-cream, my favourite tiramisu cakes, plenty Starbucks' Ice Blended Creme Frapuccino, very good food and little - perhaps no exercise :)

I think it is official. At first, it wasn't really noticeable. It was only realized when one of my uncle's commented "Ben, fei cho wo!" - Direct translation from Cantonese - "Ben, fat already lah!".

Then I was having dinner with a couple of friends recently and again "Ben, did you put on weight?"

So yeah, I think so. It's pretty official. You judge for yourself. Below, is a recent picture of Stella, myself and a friend of ours dining at the Itallianis Restaurant in One Utama - New Wing...



You see Stella, myself and a friend of ours finishing one of the most generous portioned Tiramisu cakes I have ever eaten... one serving serves three!

So, have I grown FAT or are these people imagining it? :P

Cristian Darie has done it again. The last book I had authored by him was Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce. It was a book which guided me from the introduction of three-tier programming all the way to the creation of a full-blown, feature packed e-commerce website using Microsoft's ASP.NET Technologies.

This book, Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce was written with the similar concept in mind.

Very often, programmers are faced with situation where once the web application is fully developed, modifying or extending it in the near future is nothing but a nightmare! The solution? Three-Tier architecture! They are the presentation tier, business tier and the data tier. In this book, Christian Darie and his co-author Mihai Bucica, first introduces the reader into the world of three-tier architecture programming.

From there, the reader is given preliminary information such as the various technologies available for dynamic page creation and the different tools which the reader would expect to use during the course of the book such as PHP for dynamic web page generation and MySQL as the database management system.

One fundamental aspect of the book which I found rather interesting was the way the authors blended the different tools and programming language used to develop the e-commerce website with the context of the three-tier architecture as mentioned earlier.

The presentation tier here was presented with the a mix of both HTML and PHP. Instead of the confusing spaghetti code style where PHP coding is seen interleaved with HTML coding, Bucica and Darie introduced the idea of using Smarty Templates which is similar to Microsoft's ASP.NET code-behind concept where the programming language is separated from the HTML code to improve code management and readability.

The online store's business logic is then coded in PHP classes which represents the business tier of the architecture.

Then comes the third tier, also known as the data tier where the store's data management resides. This tier is represented by MySQL. However in an effort to provide a systematic way in managing SQL coding, the authors followed the idea of using Stored Procedures which, at the time of writing was not a feature available with MySQL. As such, a plugin name PEAR DB was introduced to help facilitate the usage of stored procedures.

With such clear cut separation between HTML, PHP coding, business logic PHP classes, MySQL for data management and PEAR DB to manage SQL Queries (stored procedures) , managing, upgrading and maintaining the application from a coding perspective is simply a breeze.

When it comes to learning, there is nothing like practical, hands-on work and this is where this book excels in. After introducing readers to the concept of the three-tier architecture, readers are then brought through a step-by-step creation of a fictional online e-commerce store called the TShirtShop which comes complete with a shopping cart, web based administration system for the online store all the way to receiving online payments through various channels such PayPal and credit cards.

If these may scare you, fear not, the authors present coding in a clear, easy to understand manner with suggestion of best coding practices, code manageability alongside with self-explaining comments within each snippet of code.

Another advantage when using this book is the different stages in which the authors introduce various features to compliment to the site. After completing the first few chapters (chapters 1 through 9), you have a complete site which comes with shopping cart functionality, catalogue search and ability in receiving orders. Other functionalities which were also covered in the book such as implementing credit card transactions, customer product reviews, product recommendations and integration to various web services such as that of Amazon.com can be implemented on a needed basis.

As such, if you have preliminary knowledge on the PHP programming language and would like to have a feature packed e-commerce solution on an open source platform, this is certainly one of the best books I would recommend to anyone venturing into the world of e-commerce.