List of Banned Publications in Malaysia

Just in time for Merdeka - here’s a list of banned publications in Malaysia which I culled from the Kementerian Dalam Negeri (Ministry of Home Affairs) website. This includes books, magazines, letters and even music. You can check it out for yourself at this link. KDN calls it the “Ileagal Publisher List”; note that they have misspelled “illegal”. Quite ironic.

Anyway, their website is very unuser-friendly, so I wrote a little program to scrape all the pages and dump them all into one neat Excel file. Plus, I’ve translated some of the terms from B.M., fixed the inconsistent date formats, and fixed most of the ALL-CAPS words.

This list is current as of Aug 31, 2009 and you can view the complete banlist here at the Zoho Viewer website; no special program is needed. You can also download the Excel file from there, if you want to slice-and-dice it in your favourite spreadsheet program or database program.

Thanks to Erna for reminding me about this list.

Malaysia's next top politician

In light of recent developments in Permatang Pauh, I'd like to propose a new reality TV show:
Not bad for about 5 minutes of Photoshopping. Though I still need to track down the exact font, and tweak the tracking and kerning. The font I used for the top line is just Arial (stretched out), while the font for the bottom line is Bauer Bodoni.