Trip to Singapore

I went to Singapore over the weekend (April 21-25) for Red Dot Ruby Conf. It was my first time to Singapore. I didn't travel around too much, as I was in a conference for two full days (Friday and Saturday).

Some things I noticed about Singapore:

• No mosquitoes
• Hot and humid like Bangkok, but more pleasant
• Plenty of jay-walkers
• Seems the major things to do are shop and eat
• 3G is everywhere, generally very good
• Singlish takes some getting used to
• Singapore is full of folks from everywhere
• Super clean everywhere
• No traffic-- seems well managed

I ate out often at hawker centers.


Checked out Orchard Road.


Also had the chance to visit Hackerspace.


Full album here.

APN Info for Singtel's 3G in Singapore

I wanted to write a quick post on my experience with getting a SIM card in Singapore.
When I arrived to Changi Airport, I immediately went to get a SIM card from a money exchange booth. They seemed to only offer prepaid SIM cards in $50, $100, and $150 SGD if I'm not mistaken. Since I was only staying for 4 days, I chose the smallest one: $50 SGD.

After following the instructions, I was able to dial out. But most important to me was to get data. All they told me was to dial *363 to get 3G going. This was true, but they left out a vital piece of information. The APN info! 

I went back to ask what else was needed. After 5 minutes, I was able to convince the lady at the counter that it was probably the APN info that was missing. She took out a booklet and looked up that information, wrote it down on a scrap paper, and gave it to me. 



APN information:

APN: hicard 
user: 65ideas 
password: ideas 

After doing this, I was able to get 3G going on my Google Nexus One (N1). 
Don't you think this information should be given to EVERYONE when they get a Singtel card with a data plan?? I shouldn't have to ask for it!
Other notes:

• 3G is pretty good in Singapore, it's most everywhere
• I had little problem tethering on my N1 with my Macbook Pro

Hopefully this post will help others out there.

Red Dot Ruby Conf 2011

\As part of my trip back to the US, I attended Red Dot Ruby Conf 2011 on April 22-23, 2011. This event takes place in Singapore, at the Singapore Management University (SMU).

I had an awesome time. I enjoy going to these social technology events. Got a chance to talk and hang out with a lot of smart folks. I really enjoy the Ruby/Rails community

Quick summary of the talks from the two days:

Day 1
Pivotal Labs is awesome. So is Agile. Everyone uses Pivotal Tracker. Everyone is hiring. (Note this is meant in good fun)

Day 2
A more technical day with code examples, MongoDB, etc ending with a coding competition. Everyone is hiring.

Here are some of my favorite pictures I took:



The two day schedule:


I woke up a bit late and arrived a bit tardy to the conference. This is what I heard when I was registering:

P1: "And who are you?"
P2: "I'm Matz."
... (laughter ensues)

(see picture below)

Matz was also late


The Matz (@yukihiro_matz) presenting on the future of Ruby:


I'd say about ~250 people in attendance.


We got Robin, Superman, and Batman!


Dave Thomas (@pragdave) presenting on day two on how Singlish is similar to Ruby. Easily my favorite talk of the conference.


Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo) presenting on Github and Advanced Git techniques:

Andy Croll (@andycroll) closing the event:


The coding competition (used SingPath):






The winner of the coding competition walked out with a Macbook Air! Donated by Viki.

The after party was at Uluru, sponsored by Github.




You can visit the full Picasa album here. Sorry, I really prefer Picasa over Flickr.

Sponsors of the event: HP Labs, Pivotal Labs, Github, Viki, and Rubify.

Stack Overflow Meetup in Bangkok

On the Stackoverflow blog, it was announced that April 6, 2011 would be Worldwide Stack Overflow Meetup. They created a meetup page at: Stackoverflow Meetup.

BKK Web Meetup also hosted a meetup on IDEs and other dev tools. Presentations were given on Eclipse  (by @nadam9) and Vim (by @ches). Our gracious host was, as always, Web Courses Bangkok. Afterwards, we had the usual beer/food meetup at Singha Beer Park not too far away.

I posted pictures on twitter and the chat-room right away too. Please check out Stackoverflow World-Wide Meetups-- Success! blog post. Two pictures from our meetup was posted!

Here are some pictures, full album here.