the fickle minded

Lifting of ABET- Humanity Requirement for CS students matriculating on AY2008-9 and after.

Currently, these CS students are required to take Breadth Modules and Unrestricted Electives from outside the Faculty of Science, Faculty of Engineering and School of Computing for their degree requirements. With this relaxation, students can now use Science, Engineering and Computing to meet their Unrestricted electives.

Alright now I'm the one who is going to become fickle minded.

the little delights of life + (almost) a deja vu + beetle refuge

December,
My favorite month,
Breeze and rain.

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My father bought home a random laptop cooler today, and it looks damn cool on my laptop with its three blue-LED-fans :D



While its only a cheap $8 cooler with the fans each spinning at a miserable 2800RPM, it is doing a decent job I should say. Well the elevation of my laptop off the table has as much, if not more, impact as compared to the fans.


I don't think anyone read them anyway ha.

********************

With my camera now I have no need for the scanner!




Hmm.

********************

I suspect the rainy season is turning my house into a refuge for the poor beetles. Right now one is dead in the dustbin, a second is dead on the floor, a third mysteriously found its way into the 油灯 on the altar and is probably dead from all the oil, and a fourth is banging his/her head against the walls and ceilings all over my house.

It baffles me, however, as to why the beetles, in their seemingly random head-on attacks at my walls and ceilings, can't seem to hit the bull's eye of my house windows when they are open so wide that entire humans can jump out of them.

home (not so) sweet home

Something I don't quite like about travelling is the 'after', not just because the trip is over and I'm back to normal life, but also because I have to:

1) hop into a taxi at the airport to tell the driver to go to Tampines. Haha.

2) read one week's worth of newspapers to be back in sync with the rest of the world.

3) sort out all the photos.

Blog entries will come in after (3) is done, kind of lazy now ha.

I want to buy a bicycle, but I have no idea how to go about choosing one. Hmm.

of cameras, batteries, shopping and being a singaporean male

After posting quite a few photos I realised I have not introduced my camera at all haha.



I bought the Panasonic LZ-10. It is actually quite an old camera, so old that Panasonic has already taken this down from its website and production has stopped. Whatever's left on the market are been cleared at less than $200.

It does not produce the best image qualities, but the main reason why I chose this, besides being cheap haha, is because of its higher levels of manual freedom compared to other compact cameras in this price range. While most cheap compact cameras have shutter priority and aperture priority modes where one can change either the shutter or the aperture, separately, this camera comes with an additional manual mode where I can set both shutter and aperture at the same time, together with ISO and other settings.

Its a chore actually; sometimes I feel like giving up and falling back to the preset modes haha.

Since the camera runs on AA batteries instead of proprietary lithium batteries from Panasonic, there comes a second thing which I need to look into: rechargeable batteries.



From Sanyo, Eneloop batteries can apparently hold their charge much much longer then conventional rechargeable batteries, ideal for people who keep batteries more than use them. Since so many people recommend these batteries I reckon I give them a try, buying four batteries and a charger that fills them up in two hours.

The problem here is that because they are not as common as normal rechargeable batteries, finding them proved to be a difficult task. Best Denki at Century Square doesn't carry them at all, Courts at Tampines Mall doesn't sell standalone Eneloop AA batteries, while Challenger at Tampines 1 doesn't sell the two-hour quick charger [the six-hour standard charger is too long for me]. After running around many different places I finally found the full range of Eneloop products at Self-Fix, tucked in a corner at the basement of Century Square.

Thinking back, that should had been the first place to visit. Haha.

Last but not least, what does being a Singaporean male means?

It means..



Be back in a week, hopefully with some decent photos!

higher order abstraction

I gave up; not too sure if it is on exams, or on Scheme, or on programming, or on computing, or on studying, or on thinking, or on learning, or on life. Haha.

technological marvels + [new!] fake lomo fun

Because I don't want to waste blog posts haha.

From photos

Doesn't seem very special hmm..maybe because there is no subject. So..

Flowers~~ taken at Central Queensland University while I was at Ex Wallaby 2008:

Before..

From photos

After!

From photos

Nice hor? I like this very much hehe.

I need a faster computer! All these rendering take awfully long times on my desktop >:(

Its back!


Its up!


From here

panorama II and gimp II

From photos

From photos

Not that bad la hor? Haha.

[I realise that photos uploaded to Picasa via Blogger will get resized, which is not really what I want. So I uploaded to Picasa straight, then pasted the links here. But clicking on the photos does not return the full size of the photos, but brings one to the Picasa album where one has to use their in-house magnifying tool, which is not what I really want too. Hmm I will just stick to that for now.]

Had a little fun with GIMP too.


Didn't really get what I wanted, but I like this too hehe.

On a sidenote..

what $179 + $45.90 got me...

Ok la if admire from far, doesn't look too bad right? Just don't zoom in....

too many to consider

Camera,
Don't know which to buy,
A headache.

gek1506

Exam on Monday,
I have only just started,
Oh how dead I am.

Haha.

I found something interesting:



And to Mininova, rest in peace! =( Hope a new you will spring up soon! =(

the november breeze

First of all, a very happy [belated] birthday to my blog! You are six years old! Omg that's like a little boy!

Ok to be frank I had forgetten about it until last night haha, but allow me to defend myself that I have been studying [or rather, trying to lol]. On the other hand I must apologise for having neglected this blog a little, firstly there's nothing really interesting going on in my life, and secondly Facebook is a better place to get attention :p.

But no, I'm not abandoning this yet, so here I'm typing out this entry before this month becomes the first ever month to not show up on the archives list.

This semester marks the first time since the A Levels that I hit the books again, and it has been difficult hahaha. Distractions are common, and after not using my brains for so long suddenly I have trouble understanding the simplest things. I should say I am fortunate this has not been a very taxing semester, because of the General Education module and a 3MC Computing and Society. Try that again next semester and I will definitely die badly, going by the modules that I am going to take.

********************************

While everyone else is excited over the launch of Windows 7 and wasting their afternoons upgrading their OSes :p, I decided to hold mine till after the exams and meanwhile, try something simpler :D



Google Chrome OS was launched a week back. The idea behind Chrome OS is that it serves as a base for people to access the Internet, where everything else is done on the Internet and in the 'cloud'.

See la, my web-based OS idea got stolen =(. Haha ok la the smart people there probably got this idea earlier than me.

The very helpful hackers compiled the source code into a neat VMware virtual hard disk, so I managed to get it up and running in two hours including all the downloading.

Login is done via one's Gmail account username and password, which means an Internet connection must be available, although there should be an offline mode as well. Upon logging in, below is all one will see: a Chrome-like web browser with Gmail and Calendar pinned by default [which of course you can customise in any way you want], and a Panels tab where various web applications can be accessed.






Don't be mistaken; This is not just a web browser; this is an operating system!


Hotmail! How thoughtful.


Chess game. Don't know why the Calculator didn't work =(.


Maybe there can be a 好听 tab too!


Great idea but please sort this out =(


02 x great idea but please sort this out =(

Below the surface...



...Ctrl+Alt+T throws up the terminal window, where a decent linux kernel resides. And yes either I do a proper shutdown from the terminal, or I click the Power Off button on VMware, the equivalent of flipping the power switch.

I didn't explore much else, because it was lagging so badly that it puts me off, despite having allocated 1GB of RAM to it. A problem with all virtual machines.

Chrome OS is designed probably for netbooks and for people who only use their computers for Internet purposes. Still I think this is just the beginning; The Panels tab has already given us a very good idea of what we can do, and the so-called gamers who complain that they still need the hard disk for their games have obviously not heard of OnLive yet haha. I should say the critics did make a good point though: if the Internet is down Chrome OS might be as good as useless. Haha.

Who knows, the day might just come where everything a person will need is just a netbook and cloud computing.

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What makes me boil?

Background story: I'm still pretty undecided about how much Maths to take, given that I have not done "ordinary" :/ Maths this semester. While the Maths department offers a standard calculus module, Computing students take a calculus module catered specially for them, and the Maths website does not list this particular module as a approved module to offer a second major in Maths. So I decided to ask whether I can use this module to replace that standard calculus module, because of time clashes.

And the replies I got:


Ok fair, different faculty.


@#$%!@#$%!

********************************

Playgrounds are usually where children have fun, but now I realise, playgrounds are also where the old and lonely gather to find company in each other. At least for the one just behind my house.

Whenever I walk home from the MRT station in the evenings, I will pass by this lovely playground; its surrounded by two blocks of flats that shields it from the setting sun, huge majestic trees, and a covered walkway that actually serves moderately heavy human traffic. Together with the benches that line the skirts of the playground, this little corner is perfect for social interaction.

Twice in two weeks I ran into my aunt, who lives three blocks away from me, sitting on the benches. She told me that she felt warm in her house, so sitting at the playground she could get some breeze. Asked her why she didn't want to watch TV, and her reason was that she would get into a fight with her husband, my uncle, over which program to watch, so she'd rather not watch at all. Sitting at the playground she could chat with other elderly people.

I'm not sure whether I should feel happy or sad. I really like the tranquility [funny for a place like a playground haha] and the whole social interaction, but I think my aunt deserves better than sitting at a playground.

What's next for me? Slowly get myself back into studying mode again lol, and hunting for a camera!

the halloween scares

After three weekends of Scheme problem sets I finally have time to take a very, very short breather before I continue on with work from my other modules. Still its not a Scheme-less weekend, for the Practical Exam will be held next week, and truth be told, I'm not confident.

Yes I know that language should not be a problem when learning programming, but to this day, Scheme still impairs me quite abit.

1101S has finally moved on to Java, and I'm on (very) slightly familiar ground now that its back to imperative programming, although many things still look obscure because, well my Java was self-learned two years back, and I have been doing one semester of functional programming.

Third week into Java and we were learning dynamic programming, which my seniors had tried to taught me back in JC and I failed to understand.

You..?..me?

finally over

To be fair, it was fun. But it was too time-consuming.

Now that the fifth problem set on this robot is over, its time to start on the sixth problem set: to write a OOP based game.

zzz

I stayed in school till late today, and reached home with a still recovering stomach, and hence with little appetite for food, thanks to the stupid diarrhea over the weekend. Since I did not tell my mother that I would eat out, I expected food to be kept for me.

And yea, my mother did kept food aside for me, and left it on the dining table. But apparently, my father, who ate last, did not know that the food on the dining table was for me, and so left me with even more food, and as a result I had 02 x food to clear.

Why did all these happened? Because they never communicated.

If the day comes where scientists realise character is a genetic trait, I shall stay single forever.

of markets

Before the wet market opposite my house moved into the present building, it was situated beside its current location. I used to follow my mother to the market early in the morning, and I liked the place.

The wet market was, literally, wet. To keep the raw food fresh ice was needed, so ice water was everywhere, and people's feet carried the water all around the floors of the market. Then there was also the little pails of water to wash your hands after you have picked out the fish you wanted.

The market was a very friendly place; the 酿豆腐 auntie, the fishmonger, and the vegetable seller were the ones I had the most impressions on. And the many neighbours too. In short, every corner my mother turned into she was bound to run into someone she knew, resulting in the large number of 'uncles' and 'aunties' I had to call each time.

The whole morning shopping experience did not just end at the wet market. After buying the raw food for the day's cooking, there would be the buying of the breakfast at the various kopitiams. Which meant a whole new round of 'uncles' and 'aunties' to call.

I had only been to the 'new' wet market once after it moved into the new building, and it was a long time ago. From what I remembered, the cosy feeling was missing a little, perhaps because the place was bigger, but at least, the sellers were the same, and the friendliness was still there.

Can supermarkets fit into this 'morning shopping experience'? I'm not quite sure. At the very least, I don't think I can find the same hustle and bustle in wet markets, in supermarkets. Supermarkets are far too quiet. Wet markets make you feel out of the world because they are so darn noisy and crowded at 7am in the morning.

Well the wet market does have its shortcomings. Most are open only in the morning, while supermarkets are there the whole day, but I think supermarkets and wet markets can do well on their own without eating into each other. My personal opinion is that supermarkets, wet markets and the coffee shops are all essential components in the 'heartlands' model.

While on the topic of markets, I thought of another type of market, now that one is ongoing opposite my house as well - the night market, or the pasar malam.

Back when I was a kid, pasar malams were major events. They were there only for three nights, and each night was a 'PC Show', with loud music, loud noises, and huge crowds.

Now? A pasar malam can run for one entire week without anyone noticing if he doesn't look out of the window.

Very soon Singapore will become a lifeless state.

the rich poor divide

People who are poor, and don't open their mouths, loses all the time.

All the time.

In the past, when we were all young and shielded from the outside world by school, one would naively think that he was good, and had put in alot of effort into doing things, when compared with the local school population.

As we grow up, we are increasingly being exposed to more and more people from outside our circles, and the population grows. With the increase in population comes the increase in competition. And after seeing the things they do, one realises that he has actually done nothing at all, and he is just a damn loser. I can't live up to the expectations.

Its 5am in the morning. I think I'm not conveying what I want to say, without saying too much.

like poles repel

My father switched off the television and lights in his room, walked out to the kitchen, wanting to have his dinner. He saw that my mother was still in the kitchen, so he went back to his room, switched on the lights and television, and sat down again.

When my mother wakes up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, her habit is to use the toilet in the kitchen instead of the bathroom in her room. The first thing she does each time when she steps out of her room is to first look into my father's room. If there's nobody inside, she concludes that my father is still in the kitchen, so turns back into her room and use the bathroom. Otherwise, she will proceed on to the kitchen.

On a sidenote, my house has a new rice cooker, and its so new, my rice gets overcooked every night. Haha.





I didn't know the new version of Chrome came with themes until my friend pointed it out to me haha.

The problem with themes is that they slow down startup noticeably, probably because the theme have to be applied first before the browser shows up.

the tomb of love

A friend of mine got married over the weekend, at the age of 22.

The story went something like this: This friend and the girl met and became friends back in school. The girl had a boyfriend, and they broke up last year. My friend and her became a couple at the end of last year, and by January this year, they were already talking about getting married.

A few months ago when a group of them went to Batam for a leisure trip, the girl flared up, apparently over some very trivial matters, and stormed off. The rest of the group spent the rest of the day looking for her.

Less than a week ago, the wedding almost got cancelled, because the couple quarreled.

In the end everything went well; the wedding proceeded as usual. Not that I want to say anything bad for such a nice event, but honestly I have my doubts about whether their marriage is going to work out. Hope I'm wrong though.

Will never understand how people can fall in love so easily these days.

sanity check

The recess week cannot come at a better time now that I'm starting to have difficulty catching up with the modules. The recess week is like telling the faster runners to pause, so that the slower runners can catch up. Once all the runners are [hopefully] next to each other again, the run resumes. Which means the slow runners don't get a chance to rest at all.

I have a couple more problems to go for my programming module's third problem set on RSA encryption, and the fourth problem set on complex numbers has just been released. I had just submitted my second assignment for my Life Science module last week, have not started on my third assignment, and the fourth one just came out.

Its Singapore Grand Prix next weekend! At least there's something to look forward to, although its already mathematically impossible for McLaren to get the world championship, thanks to some stupid driving at the last race.

Need for Speed: Shift is out! Had not [and I don't think] have the chance to play the PC version yet, but tried out the PSP version, which I feel is just Undercover without the police. Somehow I feel most game companies don't really put in effort into PSP games.

累。

I thought that movies like Suicide Club would stay where they were supposed to be: in cinemas, until eight students tried to commit suicide together, and of all places, in Singapore!

What in the world were they thinking of? Where have their past 10+ years of education gone to? Demon slayers? Save mankind? Revive back to life?

Oh man.

After a short breather last weekend after submitting CSOneOneZeroOneS' Problem Set 02, its back to rushing tutorials and lectures again this week. The good news is that the deadline for Problem Set 03 has been extended by four more days to include one more weekend into the recess week. Still there are a few deadlines to meet next week.

I received a rather amusing email recently:



Haha.

tutorials

Stepped into Wednesday's OneOneZeroOneS' tutorial to be surprised with a 'micro-quiz'. After the quiz while going through the tutorial I realised I made a mistake in one of the three questions, and although the 'micro-quiz' would not be graded, I still felt rather upset that I got such a simple question wrong.

First OneTwoThreeOne tutorial was demoralising. Stepped into a room of mostly non-Singaporeans fully confident of their answers, while I sat in one corner praying throughout the entire duration that the tutor would not call me up to present my answers.

Argh.

to keep her flag unfurled

I was reading through the hordes of Facebook comments on VJC's move to establish its own 6-year Integrated Programme, which was perceived by students and ex-students of Victoria School as an act of 'breaking away from her roots', when I saw this comment:



-.-|||

I don't blame them actually; I myself still feel more attached to AHS than VJC, what's more VS has some hundred and (sorry how many?) years of history, so its understandable that they are not happy about VJC becoming a direct 'competitor' to VS. It does feels weird when the day comes where VJC faces VS in some competition, and both schools sport similar school logos and anthems.

I think the close relationship between VS and VJC contributes to the overwhelming school spirit that VJC has come to be famous for, among other things. However it is the same affiliation, coupled with VS being a boys' school, that is limiting VJC's ability to provide a good through-train programme that can compete with those offered by the top schools. I thought a good solution is for VJC to set up a secondary school section for girls, while VS provides the guys for VJC's six-year programme, but I have no idea why they will not implement it.

Interesting how schools today operate more like commercial companies that have to constantly come up with ideas to attract 'customers', even if they meant stripping all their past heritages and traditions.

Maybe all these will not be happening if the founders of Victoria had set up a girls' school a hundred years back haha, but whatever it is, no Marine Parade Junior College please. I like the name Victoria.

the simplicity of complexity

I was stuck at this particular problem on recursion for a very long time, and when I finally got it, the code was so simple and elegant, I wanted to kill myself because I felt so stupid why I could not think of it earlier.

Recursion has the powerful ability to make one feel like a complete idiot when the answer is revealed.

I need to spend less time to derive answers, for the luxury of time will be gone once the tutorials start.

first day

First day in school went quite well for me; GEK1506 lecturer was interesting, though I think we have to form groups soon and the only friend I know already has enough friends to form their own group. Haix.

Ran into many familiar faces during my entire duration in school from Science to Computing to Central Library to home.
1) Orientation mate at Science canteen.
2) This guy whom I think had crossed paths with me many times back in National Service whenever his team was attached to my unit.
3) Senior at Computing.
4) JC friend, although this was a pre-arranged meeting rather than a coincidence.
5) National Service friend A at Computing.
6) National Service friend B first at Central Forum, then at Central Library.
7) National Service friend C at Central Library.
8) National Service friend D at Central Library.
9) JC friend at Clementi MRT Station.

Lol.

Today was also the day technology went wrong for me.

The first incident occurred when my school account was rejected when I tried to log to the school's unsecured wireless network, while two friends tried theirs and worked. I approached the School's technical service, where the personnel tried to smoke by saying that I was rejected because the IP addresses available had all been leased out!

She guided me to configure my laptop to log on to the secured network instead, which worked [which was what I ultimately wanted to do as well], but it did not solve my problem of me being rejected on the unsecured network!

Finally I made a guess that it might be because my password was too...secured haha; I thought my password combination of letters, numbers and symbols was an overkill, so I changed my password to a more ordinary one, which worked! Well I don't know if the problem really lies with the password, because it doesn't make any sense, but at least its solved now and it doesn't bug me anymore. Haha.

The second incident occurred when my ATM card was repeatedly rejected by Transitlink's Add Value Machine, without any reasons given. When it finally worked later, I came to the conclusion that the previous attempts failed because my ATM card was bent. Haha.

Its lessons again tomorrow; being still rather new to the environment I still feel quite lost; hope I can get used soon.

While googling the word 'coincidence' just to make sure I had spelled it correctly :p I came across this interesting article: 20 Most Amazing Coincidences. Very unbelievable in my opinion.

开学了!

Now that orientation is over, this week marks the start of lessons. After two years of National Service its time to hit the books again. Not sure how I am going to fare after two years of brainless activities; hopefully I can get into the mood quickly.

Module bidding went well for me; three modules have already been pre-allocated, leaving space for two modules which I got at 1 point each. 5 modules at 5 points, good start! =D

The bad thing about pre-allocation is that to avoid all the bidding wars I have to accept whatever they give, and so I could not get the four-day school week that I had hoped for. In fact my timetable is screwed up pretty badly haha.

CS1101S Programming Methodology: My first gamble, instead of the more ordinary CS1101. I thought that instead of going through all that I have already learned in JC, perhaps I should go for something that I have not learned before. Scheme promises to be tough, and at first glance I did not understand most of the technical terms in the lesson plan. Haha. Hope my gamble will turn out well.

CS1105 Computing and Society: From the module title, it sounds very much like all the essays that I have written back in junior college. Haha.

CS1231 Discrete Structures: The third module I was pre-allocated, instead of MA1521 Calculus for Computing which I had hoped for. CS1231 is taught by the School in the first semester, and the Maths department in the second semester, and apparently the Maths department teaches the module better.

On the other hand its a good thing that I take my maths module in another semester, because right now I am still undecided on whether I should take a minor in Mathematics, from which I can choose to take MA1102R Calculus instead of MA1521. Now I can gauge where my intelligence level stands first before I make my decision. Haha.

Initially I intended to take two General Education/Singapore Studies modules, but I was afraid I could not outbid the returning students, so I bidded for LSM1302 Genes and Society in the protected Round 1C. I made the correct choice to do so, but I have not mentally prepared myself to take a biology related course in the first semester. Lol.

GEK1506 Heavenly Mathematics: Cultural Astronomy is the last module I bidded for. Taking it out of interest, although as time went by this module became one of the very few that I could bid at 1 point as the bids for other modules started escalating skywards. This module is also the reason why my Tuesdays and Fridays start at 8am haha. The price to pay to conserve my points now.

Finally after days of procrastination I dragged myself to the bookshop opposite my house to buy stationery that has mysteriously gone missing. It had been more than two years since I last stepped into a bookshop! I have always loved shopping in the bookshop, because of the wide variety of things offered, low population density due to the large shop space, the lack of aggressive salespersons, and the nice smell of books haha.

First lecture kicks off tomorrow at 8am! I wish myself good luck!

le kua simi

Its National Day!

National Days were much more happier days for me in the past. No lessons, just going to school for celebrations, watching the National Day Parades on television, while waiting for RSAF's fighter jets to roar across my window, and seeing the distant skies light up at night as the fireworks were let off.

Then the studio apartments came up opposite my house, and blocked the view to the fireworks. Not long after the NDPs are shifted to Marina Bay, and the fighter jets no longer fly across my window.

Before 9/11 and the SARS outbreak, I'm quite sure security and temperature checks weren't top priorities then. Now, not just at NDPs, X-ray and temperature scanners are common sightings at all major events.

Maybe I'm older now, I'm more aware of what is happening around me, and I find that things are not as good as they should be, people are not as happy as they should be, I am not as happy as I should be, and I'm not exactly in the mood to celebrate anymore.

So now National Day becomes another ordinary day for me, just that the broadcast of the parade and the news bulletin that comes on earlier at 5.45pm instead of the usual 6.30pm adds a little difference to the usual programming.

This year's parade is surprisingly refreshing however; perhaps because there's more singing and music than dancing. Would have hoped for more fireworks though.

Whatever it is, I still wish her a happy 44th birthday and 国泰民安.

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The movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra reminded me of the Command and Conquer universe, with all the soldier suits and advanced weaponry, while the story itself reminded me of Ironman and the controversies around the weapons industry. They made the major battle scene between the underwater marine crafts looked more like a dogfight in the air instead, and I found it interesting how the Japanese ninjas fits nicely in the movie where it was set in the future with all the weapons and technologies.

Overall I liked the movie; gave some space for imagination.

my ultimate social experiment

After hearing many horror stories about how one would end up lonely and all in university if one never attended orientation, I decided to sign up, albeit with utmost reluctance, with the hope that I find at least one person to go to lectures and tutorials with, look after each other's things during lunch and dinner, and do projects together.

Unfortunately by the end of orientation, I haven't found any.

Different people are taking different majors; those taking the same majors are taking different modules; and those taking the same modules are taking different lecture groups and tutorials. Therefore I conclude that the chances of us seeing each other again will be rather low.

On the other hand, maybe I never try hard enough. Ha.

Not to say that there was no use attending orientation. In every sense of the word, I did get myself rather 'oriented'. At least I now have a slight sense of direction when navigating around the different places.

The games planned by the School were indeed mild by the university's standards, especially after I saw and heard about orientations by other faculties.

The orientation ended with Rag Day today. My first Rag Day experience was not from the grandstands but from the tent that housed the participants' belongings; for some reason I somehow became involved in the School's float. I would have liked to watch from the grandstands, but staying at the tent had allowed me to catch up with my sleep.

[Reminded me of how my Army Half Marathon experiences were not of those as participants but as organisers. Interesting why I always seem to get the short end of the stick lol.]

Having being involved in computing since secondary school, I have met plenty of like-minded people at different stages of my life. After some time, our paths diverged, and it never occurred to me that we would ever meet again. Even better, it never occurred to me that these different people that I have met, and the different people that these different people have met, would all converge and become friends with each other one day.

Below as follows:

1) A friend, not a close one though, from my CCA in secondary school. Never in same class, went to different junior colleges, and now met again studying in the same School.

2) I have a friend, A, whom I met in my active unit during my National Service. He has a friend B, whom he met during his Basic Military Training days. A, B and I are now in the same School. In addition, B and I have four common friends, C, D, E and F, where C and D were my classmates in secondary school, and E is a good friend of my friend F. B, C, D and E met in their unit during National Service. During orientation, B was in the orientation group where F was the group leader.

3) One of my group leaders who is a friend of A in secondary school.

4) Three seniors, one from my CCA in secondary school and two from two different CCAs in junior college, are now all studying in the School. Now they are friends with each other.

5) This guy in my orientation group who is in the Computing class as my three gay friends in their junior college.

6) This girl in my orientation group who is a friend of the sister of F.

Some statistics should be drawn up next time!

All in all, I consider it a feat that I managed to attend so many days of orientation; felt rather guilty to have skipped two of the days, but I'm not ready for everything yet.

backtracking

I recall Seagate once said Singapore was an excellent place for their hard disk business, because of its strategic location, high education levels among her citizens blah blah, and manufacturing costs constituted only a small portion of their total costs, so Singapore, despite being an expensive place to work in, was no problem to them.

HAHA.

Perhaps National Day is coming; or perhaps 2000 seems too big a number to be comfortable with; the media decided to carry in the same news bulletin, the new Integrated Resort at Sentosa will hire 8000 people by the end of this year. Good move.

Please continue to love Singapore!



Genuinely a good video.

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Not too long ago our dearest Government published the criteria to be selected as a scholarship holder under their prestigious Public Service Commission, and one point they stressed on is to say the truth, not throw out all the politically correct answers.

I wonder what if I say, "I have no interest in working for the Government. All I want is your money to sponsor my studies so that I can study for free!"

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And so China just experienced a once-in-a-lifetime full solar eclipse. Ironic how China was the place where the old stories of 天狗食日 came from, and now the entire country got all hyped up over the Moon covering the Sun and throwing entire cities into darkness in minutes.

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Google's way of explaining recursion. Short, sweet and brilliant!

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The singer. Not bad a song I feel.

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My All-in-One printer which I had won from a quiz back in JC days has a funny problem which I hate: Regardless of the operation, as long as any of the four colours [black, cyan, magenta, yellow] is empty, the printer will refuse to do anything. Not even scanning. -.-

So when my printer refused to print my black-and-white forms which I needed for registration because my colours were empty even though I had a full black cartridge, I turned to the Internet for help.



Apparently light sensors are used to detect the ink cartridge levels; so when I pasted black tape over the translucent portion of the cartridges, the printer was tricked into believing that the cartridges was full!

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I'm getting very drained out from orientation. I need rest very, very badly.

ever changing

Unavoidable
Cloudy, sunny or windy
Unpredictable.



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Tried out Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" Live CD on my laptop today, and it works like a charm! So most likely the old Ubuntu I have, 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", has old Nvidia drivers that does not support my graphics card. Probably I can bypass the Graphical User Interface and install the operating system, thereafter update the Nvidia drivers, but I'm lazy haha.

Say, with a new release every six months, its a waste of my CD-Rs. Maybe I should try installing via thumbdrives someday.

Next up is to try it on my desktop after I have backed everything up.

School is starting, and I'm getting scared.

laptop

Strong gusts of wind blow
I left my windows open
Cooling but dusty.

After weeks of using my laptop, I learnt some interesting things.

1) The laptop's LCD which is only 14.1 inches big is too small. After prolonged use of the laptop and switching back to my desktop with my lovely 19 inch LCD monitor, my eyes feel so refreshed. Each time I got 'refreshed' I will wonder why the hell people need 24 inch LCDs when my 19 inch looks so big and nice. Haha.

I also wonder how I survived my primary school days when my 80486 came with a 14 inch CRT. Haha.

2) I don't like wireless connections. Maybe because of dropped packets or the authentications, I find myself running into time-outs more often on my laptop than on my desktop while surfing the net. RJ45 for the win!

3) Back in the days of Starhub, things were simple. Starhub gave a modem; we bought a cheap router-cum-switch, and we were happily connected. Now with S1ngnet, a stupid 'Mi0b0x' was given to us, which is essentially a modem, router, switch, wireless access point, and hardware firewall all in one.

Due to gaming and *ahem* torrenting, the firewall is obviously an obstacle, but we are not allowed to switch it off. The only way is to set the computer to an 'elevated' mode, where the computer will 'share' the same IP address as the 'Mi0b0x', so all packets will now route to the computer, 'bypassing' the firewall.

So I set my desktop to this 'elevated' mode then.

The problem is only one computer can be set to this stupid 'elevated' mode, so now I have a laptop, the laptop only gets an internal IP address, aka 'normal' mode.

Since my desktop and laptop have IP addresses that are in different families, I can't get them to see each other, even though they are connected to the same 'Mi0b0x', which makes sense logically but not physically.

Worst of all, the 'Mi0b0x' comes with S1ngnet's custom firmware, which is rather restricted. I am guessing static routing might work, but am lazy to find out how.

I understand they are trying to make things user-friendly, but sometimes things get too simple, they become too difficult to use instead.

street fighter IV benchmark

I wonder why a benchmark program for Street Fighter IV was developed when its not expected to be a resource-demanding game[unlike all the hype created around Crysis]. Nevertheless I still tried it out of curiosity. Haha.


Not that bad for my two-and-a-half year old desktop.

Tried it out on my new laptop too:


Haha so much for the dedicated graphics card. Of course I'm not expecting much from the G105M; its a low end card after all, but still find it interesting that my desktop's X1950 Pro thrashed it flat despite it being a three-year-old card.

While at it I decided to monitor the laptop's temperatures as well.


It was a ridiculously hot Tuesday afternoon and the GPU temperatures especially, shot up as soon as I fired up the SFIV benchmark; I quickly blasted my house fan at it.


More 'normal' temperatures.

A little upset I cannot control the fan[or fans, I don't know] residing inside the laptop; nothing shows up in SpeedFan. Overall I'm quite okay with the temperatures, but the area where I rest my palm on gets considerably warm after a while due to the hard disk drive, and it bugs me. Haha.

I decided to get my laptop from the recently concluded PC Show, after a long dilemma on whether to get a cheap laptop or to wait out for Windows 7. So far so good, hopefully it will last long and prosper.

Firefox 3.5 is out! A little tempted to try it now that Google Chrome seems to be a little buggy to me.

OpenNet

Sian still so far away.

Given that my current Singtel contract ends end-2010, I will be in a dilemma then whether to subscribe to a copper line based network or to wait out for a fibre optic based network.

Check here.

Home

In conjunction with World Environment Day a documentary titled Home was released worldwide, with Youtube as one of its platforms.

And gosh was it gorgeous!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

Unlike ordinary videos where they are subjected to 100MB size and 10min time limits, the one-and-a-half-hour documentary was uploaded in a single video and weighs in a heavy 1.4GB. With no loss of quality, there was a occasional lag when playing it on my Pentium D.

I found myself losing concentration to the background narration at times because I was engrossed in the stunning and flawless images of our Mother Earth. Too bad I had no High Definition equipment to enjoy them.

I find that Dubai is strikingly similar to Singapore, especially after listening to the commentary.

"Dubai is a sort of culmination of the Western model, a country where the impossible becomes possible. Building artificial islands in the sea, for example. Dubai has few natural resources, but with the money from oil it can bring in millions of tons of material and workers from all over the planet. Dubai has no farmland, but it can import food. Dubai has no water, but it can afford to expend immense amounts of energy to desalinate seawater and build the world's highest skyscrapers in the world. Dubai has endless Sun, but no solar panels. It is the totem to total modernity that never fails to amaze the world."

The difference is that we did not depend on oil to be where we are today, otherwise we might be the subject of controversy in this documentary now instead of Dubai.

Just like many other documentaries, Home gave some numbers to drive the message furthur. One particular number that got my attention was:

"The world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries."

Ha! Try telling that to our country!

Then again, I guess most people will just watch and forget.

Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009

I can't help but laugh whenever I see the cover image for the sequel to the popular Left 4 Dead.

Ok the game is not supposed to be funny; its about killing zombies. The first game came out last year and had a striking, easy-to-remember cover image:



A disgusting hand with the thumb gone; simple yet told us alot about the game. I thought it was pretty well done.

Now at the gaming exhibition that is ongoing in USA, Left 4 Dead 2 was announced. And the game cover?



Haha I just find it amusing. ^^v

There are plenty of announcements in this year's E3, and many companies use this platform to showcase new games in development. Game trailers are getting more and more movie-like from my observation; besides the Modern Warfare 2 a couple of posts below, there's also:


Assassin's Creed 2,


Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Conviction,


Star Wars Old Republic,

and last but not least, the oh-so-funny Left 4 Dead 2 ^^v [gore alert for the innocent minds!]


Soon we can whack zombies with frying pans! ^^v

As I am typing this Sony is holding their press conference, and they just finished showcasing some Playstation 3 game which I have no interest in. Now they are announcing some new developments on the Playstation Portable.

Allow me to give some live updates! Haha.

0235 Singapore Time:
Pink PSP Hannah Montana package! Lol. And some new PSP games.

CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment announces PSP Go! A new PSP device! Me: With 'new' features that don't sound new at all.

Will be launched in October in North America and November in Japan.

Ahahaha new PSP games will be released on UMD discs and digital downloads! Me: Maybe they realise nobody buys the discs? :x

0244 Singapore Time:
Playstation Video Store will be available natively on the PSP.

Some Japanese boss announces Gran Turismo, a Sony flagship racing game on the PSP.

"This is not a shrunken down subset of the series," says the nervous translator. Me: LOL.

Me: Gran Turismo looks interesting enough, but otherwise the PSP Go and its new features don't really attract me.

0250 Singapore Time:
Some other Japanese boss announces a true sequel to the Metal Gear Solid franchise for the PSP, coming out in 2010. Me: Looks like yet another typical game.

0300 Singapore Time:
Resident Evil game for PSP! Designed from ground up.

Me: As I read the posts of the live blog, apparently they will be launching 100 new titles on the Playstation 2. Looks like they haven't given up on their old system.

0305 Singapore Time:
Talking about their Playstation Network. Me: Doesn't really affect me since I don't own a PS3.

0315 Singapore Time:
Now they are talking about games coming on Playstation 3, showing off gameplay of Assassin's Creed 2, and trailers of Final Fantasy XIII and XIV.

0330 Singapore Time:
Some motion control technology which looks like Sony's answer to Nintendo's Wii Remote is introduced. Me: Pretty interesting. Microsoft announced a 'Project Natal' during its own press conference, something similar which was rather awesome. I think these real-time interactions will be the future of gaming.

0345 Singapore Time:
I shall stop here. Haha.

row row row your boat

You know Dragon Boat Festival is here when you have to eat rice dumplings for breakfast and lunch! Not that I'm complaining though; they are actually quite nice.

I remember back when I was very young, my aunt used to make rice dumplings for selling, and she would 'recruit' my mother to help remove the non-糯米s from bags of 糯米, and I would help out too, because I found it fun then. Haha. At my aunt's house she would set up big pots outside her house along the corridor to steam the packed dumplings.

Now that my aunt is getting on in years she doesn't sell anything anymore, so our dumplings are all bought from outside, and Dragon Boat Festival becomes yet another normal day.

Kinda sad.

My 大伯公 and 地主公 has a new home! Still in the mood for makeovers, my mother decided that the current altar was old, so she bought a newer and smaller sized one. I like the new one. It has a glass top and the wood looks and feels good.

The only bad point is that because of the smaller size it cannot accommodate as many things as the old one.

With this, what's left now are new curtains, the moving away of the two bulky cupboards from the living room to either the rubbish chute or my father's room, the old fridge, 'new' furniture after my cousin sells off her house in August[they are still newer than those in my house now], and hopefully, my little project to set up a very mini sub standard home theater in my father's room. Hehe.

happy 端午节!

modern warfare 2

Woohoo can't wait!

As I start to lose interest in gaming these days, the sixth game to the Call of Duty series is one of the few games I still look forward to. So far they have not disappointed me, except for the short length of the single player campaign which many have complained since their first game.

That being said, I wonder if my computer will be able to run it when it comes out. The struggle was already a little obvious in the fifth game. Haha.

As an update, my Indian neighbour appeared today! One Indian man returned to the house, along with a man who painted over the loanshark wordings on the common wall. I still have no idea who the borrower was.

who's my neighbour

We were rather close with our next-door neighbours years ago, until one fine day the wife found out that her husband, in the words of my mother, '养了个小龙女', and subsequently moved out and went their separate ways.

The house then changed owners twice; first a Chinese family which moved out about a year later, then an Indian family, but also moved out a few months later, not too long ago. During their respective stays we did not utter a single word to either of the families.

Nobody had an issue with anything, until today we realised paint was splashed onto the next door, with typical loanshark wordings on the lift landing asking for money to be repaid. On the door too, were some papers, apparently addressed to the Chinese family regarding unpaid utility bills.

We have no idea who the loansharks are after, whether is it the Chinese family or the Indian family, given our zero interaction with them. We don't really care too, but going by recent reports on how loansharks go around harrassing neighbours after the original people whom they lent money to disappeared, I hope they leave us alone. We just repainted our house door!

Interesting how there's a recent campaign to help new immigrants get along with their neighbours.

People were much warmer when I was much younger. When the original neighbours were still living next door, we not only knew the family, but also knew the wife's sister and her family; I recalled talking to the wife's sister's daughter before haha.

My aunt, who lives a couple of blocks from us, visited us rather frequently so the original neighbours knew her too. Vice versa, my aunt's next-door neighbours at her block knew who we were as well, so back then, Chinese New Year visits to my aunt's house would definitely include her neighbour's house as well.

Things have changed.

makeover

Mini makeover of my house is complete!

Took one day to change the windows in the living room, three bedrooms and two toilets, and two days to give all the rooms a new coat of paint.

My parents were initially deciding if there was a need to install windows grilles, given that we had already grown up, but in the end they were talked into installing them, so that there would be 'no need to close the window panes when friends and relatives bring their kids over'.

I wanted to say we don't receive many visitors anyway, but never mind.

My mother opted for horizontal grilles, so that we could hang clothes and stuff on them, but didn't want the squarish grilles [with both horizontal and vertical, which I think is the norm now] because they would be a bitch to clean.

The end result looked a little bit like a prison window, and I think the windows would have looked great without any grilles at all, just the panes. But maybe thats just because I have never seen horizontal grilles before.

On the plus side, the grilles in the living room are made up of six separate pieces, each being one 'window unit', while the original grilles were three pieces of two 'window units' each. Also, the new window panes come fixed on three rails instead of the original two. Simply said, we can now push all the window panes and grilles to both ends, creating a very big open space of four 'window units' in between, enough for four people to jump off the building hand in hand next to each other.

The windows panes in the living room are dark enough to block out plenty of sunlight, which is especially important for my house given that it faces the South-West direction, but the downside is that I can never use the heavily patterned panes to look at solar eclipses anymore.

Instead of pure white, which had been the colour of our walls for the past twenty over years, a slight hint of green was chosen this time. The walls ended up nice; the colour gives a slight sense of comfort, but the green is so pale that the walls look totally white under sunlight and strong lighting.

While still in the mood of makeovers I decided to give my beloved desktop a makeover as well. I took out every single key on my keyboard and washed the plastic board, dismantled my mouse and cleaned the gaps, and wiped every single cable that ran in and out of it. Did some cable management too when I assembled everything back today so it looks neater. Occupational hazard from my vocation in National Service haha. It still looks messy to the untrained eye, but its really neater now. Haha.

I'm more worried about the heat issues. The computer table has its back against a wall, and I have the CPU, external hard disk, modem and monitor giving off heat all at the same time, with the living room fan and Mother Nature as the only sources of wind. Hope they won't break down so early.

Spent the rest of the time cleaning up the entire house from the outrageous amounts of dust and dried paint. Swept, thrown, mopped, wiped, vacuumed, washed. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

There's still plenty of things yet to be thrown away; like an old fridge, an old washing machine, and old curtains. I have a feeling they are going to stay with us at least for the time being.



Looks like they haven't lost their sense of fun!

no idea what to put as title

The man who caused me to waste one month of my life away had been caught!

So, a person did something wrong. Then someone came along and fixed the wrong thing right again. And the person who did wrong now said that he helped this someone fixed the wrong thing right, and claimed credit for it.

And then, there was also this teen who got arrested after he whacked a door with a chair; reason why the owner of the door and the chair called the police was because she thought the chair could kill somebody.

You know, when I was much younger, I was always very excited whenever 9th August came. Now as I grow older, I'm not so sure anymore.

Lately I have been watching the 9pm drama on Channel 8, since the television and my computer are both in the living room. The theme revolves around our local education system, and watching it reminds me of my school days. I like the way they portray tuition as a commercial business. It makes me wonder whether there are still people out there who teaches because he wants to help, rather than because he wants to earn money.

I guess teaching a friend is considered helping, whereas teaching a stranger is considered tuition.

In one of the scenes in the drama, the mother refused to let her son join the school badminton team, preferring him to study so he could become the doctor or the lawyer she wanted him to be. She said she would rather her son blame her now for not letting him play, then blame her when he grows up for not achieving good results.

Well personally I am regretting not playing more during my school years. Haha. Somehow there aren't many memorable things I can recall of my school years now. I should have played more soccer, and I should not have appealed into triple science haha. I think I had missed out plenty of fun when I was in the converted library while everyone else were in the container classrooms, and later, when I was on the fourth floor and everyone else, the fifth.



Haha I have the cassette! I was very, very young then when my brother bought this set done by Jack Neo and his team. There were two cassettes, one on National Service, another on various Comedy Night characters. In the cassette tapes were plenty of songs with edited lyrics [like the one above], and alot of jokes and dialogs. Not sure whether they can still be played now haha.

Anyway for those unfamiliar:
CMPB: Central Manpower Base
ITD: Infantry Training Depot, last time's Tekong.
CSM: Company Sergeant Major, some high rank.
No.3: Office attire
No.4: Camouflage uniform.
SOC: Standard Obstacle Course

I didn't understand anything back then. Now I find them so funny. And true. Haha.

Attended a birthday party where I saw a huge close-knitted family. How nice to see a extended family where there's so much noise, so much laughter, so much warmth.

My extended family, on the other hand, was about how a cousin's wife called another cousin's children stupid, which ended up with demands for apologies and tea serving ceremonies, or fighting over the use of television, the use of maids, among others.

I think I have terrible handwriting. Capable of screwing up otherwise beautiful looking things. Ha.

Starting tomorrow my house will be having a mini makeover! Besides the kitchen windows which we changed years ago, the rest of the windows in the house are still the original ones from twenty years back. So they will all be changed to new ones. After that the entire house will also be given a new coat of paint, and some old stuff will be thrown away.

Reason my parents gave was that if we were to sell our house next time we will have to do some makeover anyway, so might as well do it now. Whatever.

In order to keep the dust and the paint out, we kept plenty of things into boxes, or covered them in newspapers. That will include my modem. Unless I'm not lazy to take it out of the box, I will be back three days later.

sit down and shut up!

My initial opinion about the recent events was that in other parts of the world, people are avoiding crowded places to reduce the spread of the H1N1 flu [cannot use the term 'swine flu' because its not found in pigs. Using the term 'swine flu' will affect the entire pig industry.], while in our lovely island of Singapore, we are squeezing ourselves as much as possible into a tiny room fighting over the running of some organisation.

Then again, after following the entire incident closely today, I have decided that it was not a childish act after all; we have shown everyone that we are neither oppressed nor politically apathetic people. We don't keep quiet when something goes wrong; we do fight back when we need to.

Hurray!

The power of new media was also felt today. Traditional media like television news channels and photographers were not allowed into the meeting today, but those outside were kept updated by Twitter feeds from those inside. The foreigners unaware [pun unintended] of what was happening were wondering why the topic was, all of a sudden, more popular than the flu pandemic and the Wolverine movie.

02 x Hurray!

As for myself, all I want to say is, one, Singapore is a secular society, two, homosexuality is a personal choice, and three, one cannot turn into a homosexual or a lesbian simply by attending sexuality programmes.

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I recently finished this book about mathematics: Letters to a young mathematician by Ian Stewart. Its a general book that talks about mathematics, not one that teaches. The book itself isn't that bad, but occasionally I find the English a little too complicated for me to understand; other times the book, especially in the early chapters, was pointing out rather obvious facts. Like why and how we should study maths. Hmm.

In an attempt to reach a wide audience some chapters were irrelevant to me. Like how as a graduate student one should not get too close to his advisor, or how one should teach Maths as a PhD lecturer in a university. =S

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So many people are going overseas. What a great difference.

Earth Day

Its a day that was supposed to remind us to take care of our lovely Mother Earth, and this year's Earth Day seemed to have done its job pretty well, going by the extreme weathers that occurred in a short twenty-four hour period.

It was an extremely warm day today [and the previous few days too], and as the Sun sets, the 6.30pm news on television reported a heatwave in India. At night, there came a spectacular lightning show, after which, all of a sudden, a very, very strong gust of wind hit almost the entire Singapore.

While I closed all the windows I left a gap big enough for me to stick my head out and feel the gust of wind, which immediately blew dust particles into my eyes @#$%!. For a moment I wondered whether my living room windows were going to hold haha; of course they did, but one of the flowerpots outside my house was blown onto the floor by the wind. Luckily it didn't break.

I recall there were very strong winds at the start of the year too, but I don't remember one capable of bringing down my flowerpot. This gust of wind was epic, and very mysterious. It left a barrage of threads in the forums immediately, many forummers surprised by the occurrence.

Recently there were news reports about possible solar flares hitting Earth in 2012, which could potentially damage all our electrical and electronic equipment, throwing all of us back into Ice Age if we are not already dead.

True or not I don't know, although the year does tally with a whole range of prophecies and predictions that 2012 will be end of the world. One thing for sure is that we need to stop destroying our lovely Earth before its too late.

I quite like the wind though; cooling and smells good haha.

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Lately the food poisoning case that resulted in a hundred over people in hospitals threw food stalls and the cleanliness rating system into the limelight. So now there is the talk that food stalls should all aim to get A or B for their ratings, with a hint that customers should only buy food from those with As or Bs, and not from those with Cs or Ds. One letter to the local newspapers suggests converting all kopitiams to air-conditioned food courts, and the Health Minister says he doesn't mind paying abit more for the security [which I do].

You know, I have always loved the whole commercial area just opposite my house; the five kopitiams and one food court mean there is a large variety of food I can choose from.

But I, for one, have never bothered finding out what ratings those food stalls have. While I agree that basic hygiene and cleanliness are important, the ratings are not in my considerations when I buy my food. Trust in the stallholders, my own visual judgment, the cost, the quantity, and most importantly, what I want to eat, are what go through my mind when I decide which stall to buy from.

All these news came at a time where the Education Ministry decides to scrap examinations at Primary One and Primary Two levels so students will stop being obsessed with grades and results.

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I seriously wonder what the Thais want. Stability of the country by making a big mess out of it?