Here's a plug for a good friend and fellow blogger, Olivia Choong (aka Greenie). She's organizing the inaugural Green Drinks Singapore. Green drinks is an international movement where people who care about conversation and the environment gather to talk and drive for positive action/change. Event Details Who: You! What: Green Drinks Singapore Where: Food#03, a new vegetarian restaurant on 109 Rowell Road. See map. When: 7pm onwards, November 28, 2007 Why: Because you want to engage in a greater conversation about the environment, and steer it towards positive action/change in Singaporeans, for Singapore and the world. How to get there: By bus - 21,23,64,65,66,67,,131,139,147,857,NR6. MRT: Farrer Park (NE8). For those who must drive, there are two carparks offering free parking nearby, and also a multi-storey carpark. Etc.: There will be a special and relevant menu (expect green-coloured drinks!) on the day, and individuals are responsible for their own orders. Check out their blog, Facebook group, and if you're going for the above session make yourself known on the Facebook event of the same name. Cheers.

Today I got a private beta invite to Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp that places a bet on us watching TV online on our computers as opposed to the big screen TV.

Oops, did I say us? I meant them. Those folks who can actually watch it. All I get is a message that goes "Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your country or region. We apologise for the inconvenience."

This is perplexing. After Thomas L. Friedman tells everyone that the world is flat, media companies still fail to realise that content to the guy in Kentucky is just as well appreciated by his friend in Kuala Lumpur.

All too often because I connect to the world from a Singapore IP address, I get shut out from content that I'd love to consume or even pay for. What happened with Hulu disappointed me, but I wasn't at all surprised. It's the policy of many media companies from Joost to Discovery Channel.

But not all content providers have taken the myopic stance. CNN, CNET TV, and Comedy Central, among others, love their international audiences.

I understand the size of a market like Singapore isn't very compelling and it's probably more profitable to sell the content to cable TV operators in this part of the world, but that in itself creates other problems such as the inability to meet the pent up demand which then leads to piracy (ok, that's another blog post altogether).

All I'm saying is take a step back big media and realise that your bets on your target consumers watching shows on the PC are spot on. But by shutting many parts of the "lesser" world out is only going to drive more folks to Pirate Bay or even get a friend in the US to hook up a Sling Box. None of which benefit you or your cable partners.

Welcome to the Internet generation.

Here's a plug for my buddies at the National Heritage Board. I think I'll join the competition and see if I can win me a camera that's better than the one built into my phone.

There's some truth to this ad. My colleague Voal keeps reminding us Apple users how when Windows Vista came out we were saying it was "bloated", too resource hungry, needs new graphics card, can't run on VMware, etc. Everything that was bad about it was said. But when Apple released Leopard, it was the most fantastic operating system to date. 300+ new features and did you see the 3D dock! Robert Scoble calls this "The brand promise of Apple". Where Apple fans instinctively form a cult that is pro-Apple to the extreme. When something goes wrong with the Mac, it's always your fault. Am I an Apple fan boi who only has good things to say about the brand? I'd like to think I'm objective when it comes to technology, but I just got myself a new iPod Nano! And it's amazing! OK, one fault though, the switch for putting it on hold is rather uncomfortable to reach for. But other than that, I love it! Hahahah!

gOS 1.01, the unofficial Google OS launched last week, is Ubuntu 7.10 with an idealistic twist. This lightweight ready-to-go operating system was built to be a desktop for the masses--something you could load onto an old machine for grandma and grandpa to surf the web and send email. According to the guys who assembled the distro, the purpose of their creation is to be a "simple, user friendly, beautiful desktop for normal people".

Unlike the complete distribution of its base OS, gOS doesn't come with many of the pre-loaded applications such as OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, or even Mozilla Thunderbird. Why? Because gOS's creators have gone in favour of web-based apps. Google apps to be precise. Which is obviously where its (unofficial) name comes from.

Downloading gOS
Like Ubuntu, the OS is distributed as an ISO disk image that fits on a 700MB writable CD. The ISO is available via bit torrent and mine was a quick download with over 50 peers and 7 seeds. You can grab yourself a copy here.

Installing gOS
I didn’t burn mine onto a disc, instead I loaded the ISO onto a new virtual machine I made with VMware Fusion for the purpose of this review. Since the OS was suppose to be lightweight, all I gave this VM was access to 1 processor, 2GB of storage, and 256MB of memory. It worked quite well for a Linux Kernel 2.6.

I have to say that installing gOS was one of the easiest Linux installations ever. I didn’t do a count, but I felt it had less steps than installing Ubuntu and the only days of driver compatibility seem to be over.

The OS doesn’t allow you to install from the boot screen, rather it loads up the OS as a live CD and let’s you muck around with it first. If you like what you see, all you have to do is double click the “install” icon on the desktop and it begins writing files to storage.

You can see a screen capture video of my installation here (42MB SWF).

First impressions
As you can see from the screen shot above, this OS is really pretty and very Mac-like. Although gOS was built on Ubuntu, they’ve swapped out Gnome for Enlightenment. A good move if you ask me as it is more intuitive. My favourite usability feature is the “click anywhere” menu. You just left-click the desktop and the main menu pops up where your cursor is. Right-click and you get a list of applications. How much easier could that be?

Ethernet was automatically detected from my NAT virtual network connection, and every application from Firefox to Skype worked as it should except the Xine Movie player which crashed, but then again, I did only give the poor machine 256MB of memory.

It’s good that the network worked flawlessly because the OS would be rendered useless without a connection to the internet. Most of the “applications” on the dock exist only as web pages. It is a little unnerving for long-time computer users like myself to click on icons in the dock that launch nothing but a new tab in Firefox.

But I do get the gist of the project and appreciate the effort to integrate web apps into the desktop. The placing of Google search right on the desktop where Mac users normally find Spotlight is a really good strategic move towards the convergence.

The problems
But not all things work right out of the box as they claim. For example, the direct link to YouTube from the dock is a bit silly as the distribution of Firefox doesn’t come with a Flash player plugin. Not sure if Adobe has let up, but there were no official Flash plugins the last I played with Linux. And no third-party hacks were in this distribution either.

It could be my virtual machine, although I see no reason why, but the filesystem crashed on me twice while trying to access the home folder. But I liked the recovery, it wasn’t a crash and die situation, but a quick and painless restart of the desktop. No apps were harmed in the process.

Does gOS hold potential?
After playing with the OS for about two days, I have a couple of conclusions and questions on the future of such an OS. However much I love its ease of use, beautiful glossy interface, and lightweight distribution, I think it takes a lot more than just a face lift to make a desktop for the masses.

The biggest problem I see is web apps are not ready for the prime time. Think about this scenario: You pass grandma an Excel spreadsheet of the expenses table you worked out with her on a flash drive, she has to figure out how to upload that file into Google Spreadsheets before she can see what you’ve done. That compared to the Ubuntu 7.10 which comes ready with OpenOffice.org where a double click of the file is all it takes.

But the time is coming when Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and other web-to-desktop technologies take over these critical apps. But until then, this OS could easily exist as Firefox with a well stocked bookmarks bar.

Of all that is amazing in Leopard, I can't have to say I'm rather disappointed with the OS's default design.

Changing the wallpaper is easy enough, but if you're less than happy with the new 3D dock, here's how to change it to something better.

The dock is made up of five different PNG files:

• frontline.png
• scurve-l.png
• scurve-m.png
• scurve-sm.png
• scurve-xl.png

These files are found in:

Macintosh HD / System / Library / CoreServices / Dock

Once you're on the dock icon, right click it and select "Show Package Contents." Navigate to

/ Contents / Resources

and you will find the five files mentioned above among a whole host of others.

Copy those files on to your desktop and begin your mods in Photoshop. Once you're happy with your new dock files, delete the originals from the Resources folder and replace them with your new ones.

You will be prompted for your password when you trash the files, but your system won't crash.

If you're not into image manipulation yourself, here's a great dock replacement you can start out with.