Economy, Reliability and Quality

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Toyota took out a full-page ad on page 7 in The Star today:

“Economy, reliability and quality”

The ad is about the Avanza. The last time I saw ads for the Avanza was in 2004 or 2005. So why the splurge of advertising dollars on a model that’s about 6 years old? The huge emphasis on the “economy, reliability and quality” of the Avanza is no accident. All the Japanese carmakers produce vehicles that are generally economical, reliable and well-built, so I wouldn’t call it a very unique selling point. In Malaysia, which car manufacturer suffers from the perception of low quality? (No prizes for guessing). This is therefore a blatant challenge. It’s now up to the carmaker with the new MPV to ensure that the power windows work flawlessly, the door handles don’t come off and the dashboard doesn’t vibrate. The design of the new MPV is not too bad, and apparently it’s rather spacious. So let’s hope they’ve upgraded their manufacturing process and quality control from that of the eighties and nineties.

Why the Honda City is no longer ugly

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Previously I posted that the Honda City was deliberately made ugly in order for Honda to reap the higher profit margins of the Civic. My theory was that Honda wants people to go for the Civic if they could afford it and not be content with the City. What economists would call price differentiation, and what some might term milking people for all their worth …

Now that the latest Honda City looks quite good, what’s my explanation? I would say that Honda has a four-letter word for it: the Vios. It turned out that, instead of boosting the sales numbers of the Civic, the ugliness of the 2003 City boosted the sales numbers of it’s arch-rival from Toyota. And as all the major car manufacturers in the world know, you can never out-Toyota a Toyota for long, in that you just can’t compete with Toyota in terms of relatively high quality for relatively low cost. Underselling the Vios would mean making a straight loss, but positioning the City as a premium product wouldn’t cut it, either, due to its bad styling. Thus, out of the window with Honda’s ugly entry-level model price differentiation strategy.

And so, with the 2008 City, Honda is back to being Honda: slightly pricey, but with dynamic styling and performance that appeals to a certain segment of the motoring population; and better-looking than a Toyota, of course.

Plus, better to have people buy the City in lieu of the Civic, rather than the Vios in lieu of the City.

Extend Transmission Torrent with Scripts

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Transmission is one of my favourite bittorrent client. However, it’s lack the feature of running command(s) before or after you have finished downloading. Luckily we can improvise this with the help of transmission-remote, a command based client for transmission, and along with some Linux bash scripting.

Below I have created a simple bash script. What it does is, converting all of the finished avi’s to wmv. The conversion is via ffmpeg. The script below is easily modified to suit your needs, such as:
i – Copying the finished torrent to another location.
ii – Doing any conversion to your media.
iii – Send you mail notifying the torrent have finished downloading.
iv – etc, etc.

So, let’s get started.
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How To Share Media Between Xbox 360 and Linux

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I’ve got a little project going on in the past few days. I have a reasonable amount of media; movies, mp3’s and family pictures in my Linux desktop, Ubuntu 8.10. Would it be nice if I could stream all the movies and music directly from the Linux machine to my Xbox 360? This is a very easy feat in Windows, where we could simply use the Windows Media Share option in Windows Media Player 11. But, what about Linux?

Xbox-Linux box media sharing could be achieved by using GeeXbox uShare. GeeXboX uShare is a free UPnP A/V & DLNA Media Server for Linux. Installation and configuration explained after the jump below:

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Solve Operation Timed Out Error When Upgrading WordPress

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WordPress 2.7 comes with a built-in automatic upgrade utilities, inside the control panel. Recently, WordPress has just released version 2.7.1. I would like to upgrade it automatically, to save me the hassle of downloading, ftp-ing or installing it manually.
However, many times have I experienced “Operation Timed Out” followed by “Installation Failed” when doing so. Below are the error I’m talking about (or something similar):

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 30000 milliseconds with 351500 bytes received

Installation Failed

Below is what I did to resolve the error:

1. Go to your WordPress installation directory on your website.
2. Go to /wp-admin/includes/ folder.
3. Open/edit the file.php . Or you can download the file to your local computer for editing.
4. Look for the line;
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 30));
and replace it with;
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 120));

5. Save the file, or upload back the file. Be sure to backup the original file.
6. Try the “Automatic Upgrade” once again.

Your upgrade should be working fine now, without the “Operation Timed Out” error. You didn’t hear this from me, it’s from a reference Download failed.: Operation timed out after 30 seconds.

– WordPress: Code is Poetry