Posts on Thong Kuah's blog

Artemis II

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It was amazing to see humanity go back to the moon. My favourite must be the Earth photo.

See the larger version of this image at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55185633398/.

Look at that thin slice of air around the earth. Our atmosphere looks so thin !

Check out all the pictures taken during the mission: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii-multimedia/.

Shell tools

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 20:18:40 +1300

I have embraced the Unix philosophy of small tools done well. It started when I resolved to use Bash to solve weekly challenges at work (another neat idea, more on that another time!). Here’s some neat little tricks I have learned over time :

sort -n : sort numerically

sort -k 1 : sort by a field

sort -t "/" -k 3 : sort by the third field, split by “/”

Beyond Code

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:47:34 +1200

A developer came to me with a great piece of code to automate something. Clearly they have put a good amount of thought about the amount of times this thing has been done manually and has done the important work of codifying it enough such that it can be run by a computer.

We both asked the question “What’s next ?”

Write to NTFS with MacOS

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 20:32:50 +1200

I’m always surprised when I plug in the family’s external HD and find that my Mac refuses to write to it. Hopefully one day, it will be fixed. So what do I do ?

7 years at Powershop

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 22:36:42 +1300

On the 15th of March, 2017, I marked 7 years with Powershop ! 🎉

Non-secure sites in Chrome

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 08:28:57 +1300

Sometime in the future, possibly in 2017, Chrome is seeking to mark all non-secure sites with a bold and loud warning. For website administrators and server operators, this is one to watch out for.

Code Review talk

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 22:43:30 +1300

It was a great pleasure and honour to give a talk at RubyConf Australia 2016 in Gold Coast, in the month of February 2016.

Convert array to hash of hashes...

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to convert a array of [item1, item2, item3] to {item1 => {item2 => item3}}. Here is the quick and dirty code I came up with…

Reboot with Hugo

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the magic of static site generators, I’ve now moved from Blogger to Hugo.

All static site generators are much for muchness, but Hugo appealed to me with the chance of at least hacking in Go. The main benefit though would be archive all my writing in git - which can now be found at https://github.com/kuahyeow/kuahyeow-blog

The code to generate my blog is kept in a separate repository. Besides the folders to drive Hugo, I have included a home-made Blogger to Hugo importer. See https://github.com/kuahyeow/kuahyeow-hugo/blob/master/importedFromBlogger/blogger2markdown.rb for full gory details.

Land and Waste New Zealand - #mixandmashnz

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +1300

Here’s a behind the scenes write-up for my Mix and Mash NZ mashup.

Check it out here :

http://www.landandwaste.co.nz

This mashup attempts to show land and waste data as it changes, and hopefully illuminates any improvements of our environmental impact as well as regressions.

The journey

It started out as an idea to gather all kerb recycling data from all 75 odd local councils in New Zealand. That meant scraping the data off the websites of various local and unitary councils. I quickly backed away once I found that lots of councils forbade any re-use, and the data that’s available is too inconsistent for me to compare and visualize.

Fix home/end keybindings in Terminal.app on OS X

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:07:00 +1200

http://www.yaroze.org/?p=79

Go all the way to the end of the less buffer! Drove me crazy the way end behaves exactly like page down instead. This tip fixed that for me.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/abkv

Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:56:00 +1200

URL: http://uxmovement.com/design-articles/faster-with-top-a...

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/9kjp

Untitled

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:35:00 +1200

Amplify’d from martinfowler.com

Identity Map

Ensures that each object gets loaded only once by keeping
every loaded object in a map. Looks up objects using the map when
referring to them.

Facebook - greedy defaults and jarring configs

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:29:00 +1200

Commited Facebook Suicide for the second time. Where do I start? …

The first thing that jarred me was that my full birthday is published. This in combination with search engine visibility means that it’s spammer time.

Next thing that happened is that the privacy settings had “Everyone”, “Friends of Friends”, and “Friends”. Nice and simple, I thought. But no, I have to exclude my full birthday again from everyone. (I know about how your friend’s applications can just mine everyone’s data through friends).

Bash hackery to get around old rspec

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:07:00 +1200

I have a problem where a project is using an older version of RSpec (currently the lastest version is RSpec 1.3.0). Therefore running

spec spec/model/some_model_spec.rb

gives me an error

/spec/models/../spec_helper.rb:23: undefined method `use_transactional_fixtures=’

The solution would be to use the older, vendored spec. Now, the spec binary that is installed as part of the gem installation should do this (some gems do checked for vendor’ed binaries) and my rspec is installed under vendor/plugins, not vendor/gems. Therefore, I use some bash trickery to dynamically redefine the “spec” command. Put the code below in .bashrc :


vendored_or_path_spec() {
  if [ -x vendor/plugins/rspec/bin/spec ];
  then 
    echo ‘vendor/plugins/rspec/bin/spec’;
  else
    echo ‘*spec’;
  fi
}
alias spec=’$(vendored_or_path_spec) $@’

Some explanations. The hardest thing to figure out was how to dynamically alias something. After such scrumbling and asking on vark.com, I managed to find command substitutions, which is the $(command) part. Combining that with $@ for all arguments meant that I can run any command in the alias.

Because I’m aliasing spec, I use *spec to refer to the original un-aliased spec.

That’s it!

How to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 for Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) - firefox-stable

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:09:00 +1200

There are a plethora of install instructions out there for Firefox 3.6 Karmic (which uses Firefox 3.5 by default), however it mostly suggests the mozilla-daily build.

By chance, I found the firefox-stable ppa (https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-stable/)

Here’s how (enter each in turn):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Here’s what it looks like:

~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

The following packages have been kept back:

firefox firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-branding firefox-gnome-support

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.

~ $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done

Calculating upgrade… Done

The following NEW packages will be installed:

firefox-branding

The following packages will be upgraded:

firefox firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-branding firefox-gnome-support

4 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 12.5MB of archives.

After this operation, 32.4MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

You will now get /usr/binfirefox as Firefox 3.6

Rails 3 presentation

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:02:00 +1300

At the January WellRailed (Wellington Rails User group), I gave a presentation on the upcoming Rails 3.0, with special emphasis on cool new things.

You can view the slides after the jump. There are a huge number of changes, but it should be all good fun :)

Rails 3 : Cool New Things by Thong Kuah

View more presentations from Y. Thong Kuah.

Note: Rails 3.0pre was released after the presentation

Nuggets of inspiration

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:33:00 +1300

Some good Software Engineering pearls of wisdom :

Coding Horror: The Xanadu Dream

The bottom line is that a lot of the time it’s OK to create a solution that solves 80% of the problem. Always remember that shipping is a feature.

Agile development, startups and government policy

My recommendation to just about anyone with an idea is to just build the thing, iterate until you have some user traction, then pitch angel investors based on that traction. This is very much in line with the old IETF motto of “rough consensus, running code."

And from the startup side of things:

Finding Your Co-Founders

It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. …The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar.

This matches well to what the Black Swan book says - maximise your serendipity, you increase your chances of success this way

Wellington Hazard Map

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:42:00 +1300

Reading this article about Wellington Hazards just makes me want to plot it on a map. It took a while, but here is a map of Wellington Hazards / Contamination. Below is a screenshots of the hazards on Google Earth and Google Maps (Google Earth shot nicely prepared by Cameron). Let me know what do you think?

Read on after the jump for hyper-technical explanation of how I made the map.

Here’s the lowdown on the technical wizardry. The data is based on http://static.stuff.co.nz/files/WCC-slur.pdf. I had to extract the data out from the pdf, obtaining a spreadsheet that looks like this:

No & STREET & City           HAIL & CLASSIFICATION& CONTAMINANTS
50 BUCKLE ST EASTERN         Service Stations Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry
75 DARLINGTON RD EASTERN     Landfill Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry
501 EVANS BAY PDE EASTERN    Service Stations Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry
9 -11 KENT TCE EASTERN       Storage Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry

The address leaves a lot to be desired. Having data like ‘Eastern’ for the city column makes no sense to anyone or a program. Cleaning that up and adding “Wellington NZ” would make it easier for geocoding. We now have this:

HAIL & CLASSIFICATION& CONTAMINANTS                           Full Cleaned Address
Service Stations Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry 50 BUCKLE ST Wellington New Zealand
Landfill Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry           75 DARLINGTON RD Wellington New Zealand
Service Stations Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry 501 EVANS BAY PDE Wellington New Zealand
Storage Verified History of Hazardous Activity or Industry            9 -11 KENT TCE Wellington New Zealand

We can now geocode, using the helpful spreadsheet geocoder (instructions here). The only limitation was that only 100 addresses can be geo-coded at one time. But that’s fine as I only have 592 addresses.

Now here is the tricky bit, there is no good way to get items from a spreadsheet onto a map. The best way I could was use KML. I used the Spreadsheet Mapper v2.0, but it was far too painful with the browser locking with just 600 rows. Here is the resultant spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tXlYA3d_eh42qOboocs8zug&output=html. I will most likely use PostGis and the asKML function next time.

Data spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t_4WKBgw34UvW_zQMChuVKw&gid=0

Google Maps (my maps): http://maps.google.co.nz/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=105368590499327803003.000475dc20f9a8d9d5142&t=h&z=11

KML file (.kml): http://maps.google.co.nz/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&msa=0&output=nl&msid=105368590499327803003.000475dc20f9a8d9d5142

Rands In Repose: Your People

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:41:00 +1300

Came upon this really good post about people you should cherish:

Rands In Repose: Your People

Really good insight - “As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. This is why you need to identify and nurture Your People."

What are Your People?

“You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.”

You need someone to keep you honest. Read the post for a clear definition of Your People.

Strengths, weaknesses and games

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:52:00 +1200

StrengthsFinder is an amazing book, and an assessment tool that helps you discover your strengths. Its central concept is that you should focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses. I was introduced to it at the Summer of Code (NZ) program several years ago. The concept of focusing on strengths was just brilliant.

This really reminded me of my game playing style, especially in RPGs, where you have to increase the levels and skills of your character(s) in order to be able to fight enemies that pop up with increasing difficulty and toughness.

Ruby and Rails links, Best of

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:13:00 +1200

Monthly collection of Ruby links that I’ll regret forgetting about:

find_each bites

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:11:00 +1200

ActiveRecord::Base#find_each is an awesome idiom for batch processing large sets of data. It combines the neat DSL of ActiveRecord and allows you to operate at the level of the individual item.

So, imagine my surprise when I debugged my code and discovered that find_each introduces a scope into ActiveRecord calls within the block. Demonstrating by example:

Slam.find_each(:conditions => {:value => nil}) do |slam|

#….

Slam.find_by_key(slam.key) #Find related key

#However, in effect becomes Slam.find_by_key(:key => slam.key, :value => nil)

end

Looking at the SQL in the logs, I expected to see:

select * from slams where key = ‘abcde’;

Instead I saw:

select * from slams where key = ‘abcde’ and value is null;

It took me fifteen minutes to check and verify there is no code that should be generating that SQL, so the next candidate was find_each. Lo and behold, it was. Turns out find_each is using with_scope.

Looking around, there are already some bug reports for this behaviour:

Question: Is this intended or this a bug? I think, given the “side-effect” feel of it, it’s a bug

Update: I have reviewed one promising patch to fix this. Needs one more person to review and approve this patch!

Fear the singularity

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:17:00 +1200

I found several interesting things this month.

Super fast SSD hard disks
21GB pirate bay index
Singularity in thirty years

Ok, the last one is really out there, but it points the way. Imagine the whole sum of human creative endeavor (at least the popular ones) indexed in just 21GB. All we need is just some sort of instant hash expansion for that 21GB (and 20 more years of PC power advancement). And so on and so forth. Value of data or content would be worth next to nothing.

Will that happen? Probably, after flying cars.

Trying to do the impossible

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:01:00 +1200

Someone always asks this question - how do you check types in Ruby? (*Hint: Ruby use dynamic typing) This typical newbie question would ask this and be answered with various levels of helpfulness - typically none - sadly.

However this thread is just beautiful in its helpfulness. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/msg/eb4b49a511e44be6?hl=en

What happended snarkiness, or Slashdot / Youtube style comments? All this helpfulness must come from somewhere. I blame Twitter.

Hackfest at the OpenGovtDataNZ

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:47:00 +1200

Hacking for the greater good : the good being helping to free up important government information. A Barcamp and Hackfest was held just this weekend, in the last days of August. I participated in the Hackfest, which was held at the amazing Southern Cross Bar. Great food and nice private room made for a good environment for coding.

The Hackfest was a bit more structured than previous events I have been to, but I’ll say this had a positive effect of helping people choose what and who they wanted to work with. There were some suggested ideas from the Barcamp, but people were free to work on their ideas too. Here are some projects that was worked on at this event :

And many more, which is listed at:

http://wiki.open.org.nz/Hackfest

It was great collaborating and working with great people and programmers. Hope to do this again very soon!

Solr, and Sunspot

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:35:00 +1200

Update: I have found a nicer way of doing autocomplete. Basically, use the string type with the “starting_with” method. See this ticket comment.

Solr is really nice search engine which has the added advantage of being able to return items that you put into the search engine, unlike say, sphinx (which is really fast but only returns the document id).

However, Solr is very complex.

Thankfully, there is a very neat ruby abstraction for Solr, called Sunspot. Given I needed to do autocomplete on it, i.e. “query*” type stuff, I had to fork Sunspot. Here is the relevant change I made to enable wildcard searches with Sunspot:

http://pastie.org/592897

For those interested in how this works, it uses the q.alt parameter as Sunspot uses the rather “user-friendly” DisMaxRequestHandler, which ignores “*” characters.

Throw away code

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:39:00 +1200

Let’s start simple. Here is a situation I have encountered more than once. We have this big long class or method, and embedded in it are several blocks of code, all commented out.

def some_method(a)
do_something(a)
calc_another

# wow
# do_do
# calc_calc
# zcalc(z)
end

What should I do? Given the code is version controlled, I would happily throw it away.

The code is commented out and will have no effect whatsoever on any program or user. Another programmer may be affected by it, though. So, make a note in the commit message :

“removed commented-out code in such-and-such method. haven’t been used in a while”

Caveats apply for very large blocks of commented-out code, or it has warnings not to remove. But these can be easily solved with some programmer-to-programmer communication.

There are other things that can be theoretically thrown away, such as:

Once off experiments / prototype
Quick and dirty functions
Generally ugly code in the project

However, each of this has it’s own set of code, teamwork and business-related problems. Yes, there is the urge to reduce mental strain - working what does piece of code do - which leads to “let’s rewrite” moments. I would love to know what a programmer or a team can do in each of this instances. I have some ideas, but these will be topics for later discussions.

* I have always wanted to write down some of my experiences as I embark on a programming life. This is my starting contribution.

Riding Rails: Community Highlights: IronRuby

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:23:00 +1200

Consider this question from Riding Rails: Community Highlights: IronRuby (emphasis mine).

Matt: Are there any limitations that our readers should be aware of before starting to develop on IronRuby?

Jimmy: The main limitation is that IronRuby does not support any of the C-based Ruby libraries, and only after 1.0 will we consider building an interop layer between the Ruby C API and IronRuby. In the meantime, people have been porting their favorite C-based Ruby libraries over to C# so it can be used from IronRuby, like Hpricot. While this seems like a large limitation, most of the C-based libraries Ruby code depends on have an equivalent API in the .NET framework, which IronRuby has direct integration with, making either using directly or porting really easy. For example, the Rails app I showed at RailsConf did image resizing directly with the System.Windows.Drawing APIs rather than ImageMagick. If your code does not depend on anything outside of the Ruby standard library that is C-based, you should have no problems. Take a look at the documentation for running Rails on IronRuby to make sure things go smoothly: http://ironruby.net/Documentation/Rails.

Sure reminds me of Embrace, extend, extinguish. I’m sure the interop layer is being considered, but the absence of it will tie IronRuby to .NET and away from Ruby. I hope the interop layer will be done soon.

Git Workshop

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:21:00 +1200

I did a Git workshop for Summer of Code NZ students. Here it is:

Code Management

View more documents from kuahyeow.

Full details at the Summer of Code blog:

http://blog.summerofcode.co.nz/2009/07/31/code-management-git-workshop/

Rails 3 updates

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:16:00 +1200

(Cross-posted from http://blog.projectxtech.com/2009/08/06/rails-3-updates/)

Rails 3 is a rewrite / merger with Merb, and includes Yehuda Katz, Merb lead developer working on it full-time. Here are some posts which were published recently:

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/7/30/community-highlights-yehuda-katz

http://yehudakatz.com/2009/03/06/alias_method_chain-in-models/

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/6-steps-to-refactoring-rails-for-mere-mortals/

There are lots of lessons and techniques in ruby, rails and general programming to be learnt from these posts. Enjoy!

Jaunty, Twitter and 'Growl' type notifications (notify-osd)

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:51:00 +1200

It’s been a long, two-stepped journey to get to Jaunty from Hardy, all so that I can experience notify-osd with Twitter updates.

The upgrade has been long and slow (NZ internet!) but I found the end result strangely unsatisfying. Yes, notifications work, and there’s a new “Computer Janitor”, but that’s it. A bit let down.

Then I found out about Gwibber, the new twitter client on Ubuntu. It is by far superior to other clients on Linux. Previously, pidgin-twitter had to suffice, but no longer. However, Gwibber does not seem to do notifications on my Jaunty laptop. In my Intrepid desktop, notification bubbles do pop up, though in non-NotifyOSD style at the bottom.

In other news, I’ve hit a bug / issue with my Intrepid desktop where I can’t open any folder in the File Manager. :( Gnome or Nautilus experts that can help would be much appreciated

'View as single page'

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:42:00 +1200

Just wanted to rant about how news websites have the annoying feature of splitting up articles into ‘pages’ - of just two or so paragraphs. There’ll be three or four of these ‘pages’. But once you click on the ‘view as single page’, you realise how ridiculously short the article is, to even split to any page. I wish there’s a magic unpage! bookmarklet out there.

Google Talk for your domains - Pidgin

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:19:00 +1200

Just found out that Pidgin now has Google Talk. That means my GAFYD GTalk now works. Awesome!

selected problems in rails?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:57:00 +1200

One thing I found out that about rails is that the select_tag is a pain. Why? Because this would not work:

<%= select_tag ‘industry’, options_from_collection_for_select(@industry_list, “id”, “name”, @industry) %>

But this would work:

<%= select_tag ‘industry’, options_from_collection_for_select(@industry_list, “id”, “name”, @industry.to_i) %>

Well, that’s for forgetting that HTTP query parameters are strings!

Enter Key (II)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:33:00 +1200

My previous post about the enter key and the bug report that resulted from it has yielded a cause. Turns out that Delicious bookmarks (version 2.0.72) add-on seems to be causing the issue. There are already a number of Yahoo! group posts about the problem, but no one managed to crack that so far… till now. :)

Ubuntu Zebra

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:30:00 +1200

Just upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Again it broke my graphics driver. Envy (now EnvyNG) to the rescue again.

As it was a Dell Vostro 200, there was some problem with IDE modes and such like, causing Ubuntu to fail booting! A change in the boot settings helped. See this bug report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/153702)

So, I have been through Edgy, Feisty, Gutsy, and now Heron. Just a thought, what happens after Ubuntu Zesty Zebra ? ;)

Stupid Enter Key

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:55:00 +1200

Why doesn't the enter key work?

That would be one of the occasional pain points that I have experienced in Firefox. I could never figure out why, only that restarting Firefox is the only way to cure it. Annoying.

Besides the memory issue, this would be the next biggest problem with Firefox. Hence, imagine my delight when I stumbled onto a reproducible way to trigger the issue. Just open two new Firefox windows in quick succession, then close one. The remaining one will have the enter key disabled. I still don't know why (there's no errors in the error console). Therefore I have opened a bug about this enter key bug in bugzilla. Hopefully, the powers that be in mozilla, et all can help fix this!

UP - A Tale of Four Cities

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:29:00 +1200

Attended an UP and Wellies event - A Tale of Four Cities, on Tuesday. It was a good venue, Syn Bar where people can unwind, compared with the old place. The free tab certainly helped. :)

So the event was a panel discussion about how Wellington is and can be a ‘hub’ for innovation, IT and IT professionals. Among the topics that were discussed were how Wellington is a good place to live in, broadband, (venture) capital, immigration, and education. Among some good gems of the evening:

Broadband should be a utility, like power. (from this link - “Sweden has chosen an infrastructure road to the broadband society – another choice could have been to stimulate demand for broadband services. In a country where half of the surface area is covered by forests, where very few people live, a demand stimulation policy can be a lengthy route to take. An infrastructure build-up was regarded as a quicker way.”)
“Well, [broadband] compared to Fiji or Tonga, we’ve got it good."
Immigration and visas - employers need to realize work visas can be obtained easily once a job offer is made, for IT professionals.
Education - I raised the point of falling enrolments in IT departments, and that Massey Wellington has moved their Software deparment to Palmerson North, hence reducing the number of students / creative / innovation in Wellington.

There was a lot of ideas and exchanging of views after the panel discussion while we mingled. This was my first UP event for a while, and it was a good one.

A weak government is a weak government

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:06:00 +1200

Dr Mahathir Mohamad: A Weak Government is not good for Multi-racial Malaysia

Here is my comment on the above:

welcome to the blogosphere. I have admired your consistent statements and vision. In the process of a maturing democracy, a strong government is needed, agreed. However, I must question how is the Opposition able to perform its duties of check and balance, if the government has two-thirds majority? Yes, the opposition can be considered a political enemy. To what extent? Governments around the world will eventually have to cooperate with other parties in passing legislation. Why burn bridges?

I must disagree that the current government is weak because it does not have two-thirds majority. It is weak because of it’s leaders, and hence it has lost the two-thirds majority. Not having two-thirds for most competent governments would not be a sign of weakness and not engender defections, usually, hence the equation of weakness with two-thirds is not correct. This government is weak because it is weak, and has lost the support of the people. A competent government could even govern on a 1 seat majority, or even as a minority government. For Malaysia, a country with 50 years of democracy and 12 elections, 63.5% is ample.

Categories of fiction

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:45:00 +1200

Just noticed in my head that the Death Gate cycle, Wheel of Time, and Dune share some things in common. Namely, Earth existed in the distant past, and a future where magic seems like like some really advanced physics on a subatomic level, practiced by humans with innate talent for it.

Well, just wanted to jot down my thoughts…

Duplicates and deadlocks

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:38:00 +1200

I have been using autotest soon after I discovered Rails. It’s awesome. One thing to note is that if you are getting duplicates and/or deadlock errors, it may just be because you have two autotests running at the same time.

Just too freaky!

Firefox 3 Beta 4 out

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:15:00 +1300

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is out! Nice to see some visual integration with the OS.

I just realised https://gmail.com fails in Firefox 3. Google should really get a proper SSL certificate…

Firefox 3 Beta 3 has thumbnails in uploads

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:50:00 +1300

Finally….

Random gnome-settings-daemon error

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:47:00 +1300

One random time (on the 5th of February), X crashed on me. Nothing special. But then the error message that came up after I logged back in was. The errror was something like:

** (gnome-settings-daemon:5559): WARNING **: Unable to connect to dbus: Failed
to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-zlCjJ68lrb: Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:5559): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Unable to
connect to dbus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-zlCjJ68lrb:
Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:5559): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Not connected to
dbus, will not register the object
xrdb:  “*Label.background” on line 220 overrides entry on line 150
xrdb:  “*Text.background” on line 226 overrides entry on line 191
xrdb:  “*Label.foreground” on line 232 overrides entry on line 151
xrdb:  “*Text.foreground” on line 238 overrides entry on line 19

With the nice side-effect of GNOME looking like gray crap, instead my nice looking Ubuntu theme. Looking around found me this bug report (http://www.mail-archive.com/desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com/msg139625.html), which had the solution:

sudo apt-get install dbus-x11

For some reason the dependencies may have been messed up? (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dbus/+bug/120089). or may not….

Ubuntu Gutsy Upgrade

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:58:00 +1300

Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon - has arrived. Since I can’t refuse the temptation of an upgrade, I took the plunge and downloaded the upgrade. Some one mentioned the torrent download, which will be faster than the server download. Spot on.

Upgrading was a breeze. There was a slight problem with X not starting not, a little sleuthing revealed that my installation was not complete (namely, my kernel was still stuck on “generic”. Finishing the upgrade solved my problems.

Some nice new things. No more beryl (Long live beryl!). Compiz Fusion is now in the official repositories, and for people like me, who are used the control beryl-manager gave, there’s Compiz Config Settings Manager. This post nicely tells how to install Compiz Config, and recommends some good settings for it.

I totally grok the new expo feature. Rotate cube now comes with more than 4 cubes, thanks to the new integration with GNOME default with XGL. Beautiful! This video has all the cool configs to use.

Now, problems. I have a beef with trackerd. It just hogs all memory for some reason. Ubuntu could do better to explain this. Looking around, I found that killing the current trackerd, and then restarting trackerd to reindex everything with ’trackerd -R’ worked. The memory and swap usage dropped, and what has been running for four days is now completed in two hours! To check, use ’tracker-status’. After trackerd has finished indexing, it should state:

Tracker daemon’s status is Idle.

Other good stuff includes the ability to finally write into NTFS, but I haven’t tried that out yet. More on others later…

CSS overflow

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:18:00 +1200

In the past, I would have problems with container divs not displaying properly, having zero size. So my container div would be displayed as a line, and the rest of my content would overflow out …. Urrgh..

So I would usually put <div style=“clear: both; height: 1%;"></div>

But now, thanks to http://www.quirksmode.org/css/clearing.html, I have discovered the wonders of overflow: auto. :)

The wonders of GAIM

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:37:00 +1200

Have three (or more) different IMs but don’t want to login separately to all three? Friends swear by Yahoo Messenger, but refuse to use Google Talk. No fear, use GAIM (Pidgin)! It can combine all you IM accounts into one! :)

Personality Type

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:31:00 +1200

Thanks to John for pointing this test out.

Quite accurate, though it does not take into account the magnitude?

Your answers suggest you are a Realist

The four aspects that make up this personality type are:

Summary of Realists

Loyal and steady workers who meet deadlines
Believe in established rules and respect facts
Think of themselves as mature, stable and conscientious
May appear too logical or tough-minded and forget their impact on other people

More about Realists

Realists are loyal to the people around them and work hard to keep their promises. They are honest and straightforward with others and expect the same in return. Realists believe in standard procedures and will only support change when there is a demonstrable benefit.

Watch what you are testing

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:52:00 +1200

uninitialized constant ApplicationController (NameError) may mean a lot of things, as a Google search for the term might attest.

However, for me, it’s usually because I am trying the run the controller as a test! (I blame the ‘run’ button in Eclipse, too easy).

Moral of the story? Might pay to check what you are running, and try Alt-X-U to start the test run manually.

More Events

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:50:00 +1200

Walking to work today, went past Westpac Lifeflight day - Coffee and donuts was given out instead of a sausage sizzle. Coffee and donuts?! I don’t what Westpac was thinking. Maybe it’s just me and my broken knee (I injured my knee).

Noon came rise to futsal in the Civic Square. Turns out it was Brazillian National Day today, and one must celebrate with samba and football! Very nice, with sunshine and all. Too bad I don’t have a camera in my phone.

In other news, Fortress Sydney has been breached. Yes, breached, by some comedians! Why bother when a bunch of TV actors can just waltz in. What really rankles me is the hypocrisy of the world leaders. What kind of leader shuts down peoples’ daily lives by blocking every major road in the city? Is there an emergency? No. If they have to meet, go meet out in the desert. Plenty of space, and no-one will be able to find you there. Safe.

Update: Will you look at the comments by the Aussies at the news site! (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/06/2026199.htm) They roundly support the comedians. Quite light-hearted but sensible comments. It actually made me laugh.

Work

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:24:00 +1200

Short update. I have started working at ProjectX, more well known for Smaps and ZoomIn.

They use Ruby on Rails. No more Java!

Events today

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:53:00 +1200

Hmm…Today is Merdeka. In fact, it is the 50th anniversary since Malaysia became independent. Half a century, it deserves some celebration, but definitely not in this way.

I wonder. By all means, shout Merdeka, but don’t do it in such a way that it rings hollow! I guess the opposition was caught, they should have expected something like this. However, such political savvy is hard to come by, from a party that does not seem to want to form the next government. Then again, the political environment and the electoral system is against anyone but the incumbent.

Some news from Malaysia (may not be online long), and Malaysia (ala BBC). Some blog postings, and one from the source of all good.

On a more local note, I like the way today’s Daffodil Day was organised. National Bank even organized a sausage sizzle outside their branches. Nice. People were giving most generously, many in 10 dollar notes.

I’ll end with this problem, how does society move forward without sorting out its core problems (i.e constitution) ?

Ubuntu swap partition - unresponsive system

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:12:00 +1200

I have been having problems with my Feisty for some time now. Since I started using it for work, I have found that even running just Firefox and Eclipse will sometimes cause my computer to lockup and hang.

I have hunted high and low until I noticed that … I have 0 swap memory! Indeed, I have created a swap partition but top and free now both report 0 swap memory.

Once the problem is found, a solution is always found in Google’s index. This bug report and this one too has helped me solve the problem (we’ll see).

Basically (taken verbatim from Nick,


Fiesty Swap/hibernate fix:

- Check swap: $ free | grep Swap

If you see the follow then your Swap file is broken:

Swap: 0 0 0

- Find the device name of swap: $ sudo fdisk -l

UUID support appears to be broken as far as the Swap is concerned.

- Edit fstab with correct non-UUID information: $ sudo gedit /etc/fstab

- Edit resume with correct non-UUID information: $ sudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

Example: RESUME=/dev/sda6

- sudo update-initramfs -u

- Reboot

- Check swap if you want: $ free | grep Swap

- Open some apps

- Test hibernate

And now I can run Eclipse, Firefox, top, rake test all at once! Will have to try out the hibernate though.

update: This page here describes how to fix the problem of the laptop failing to resume after suspend, for fglrx users. Now my laptop is working as it should be!

Google WiFi -- Just a wish

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:53:00 +1200

Official Google Blog: First year of Google WiFi

Ah, to have free wifi, Wellington. It will be like the Wish project, I’m afraid. :P

2006 BITT papers published on MCS

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:44:00 +1200

The School of Mathematical, Statistics and Computer Sciences (SMSCS) of Victoria has released last years Honours papers (well at least for the BIT ones). One of the papers is the report of yours truly.

Have fun reading them all! [http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/graduates/archives/bitt/2006]

ps. I am pleasantly surprised at how relevant my paper was to this rails plugin site.

Blogging

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:50:00 +1200

It’s been a while since I blogged but I always find that I get my ideas for blogging when I am walking. That makes it pretty inconvenient, isn’t it? Wish I had a thought recorder ;) Anyone want to suggest one?

Wow! Yi Wen was featured in RedBubble.

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:25:00 +1200

My dearest was featured in RedBubble in their latest newsletter (Bubblewrap).

Scroll down to ‘The couch’ section :)

Short update [Graduation]

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:59:00 +1200

Well, Graduation came and went. Should post some graduation pics. See here!

http://kuahyeow.blogspot.com/2007/08/graduation.html

Tale of the White Lion

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:16:00 +1300

Well, there’s been two episodes of the Tale of the White Lion. (Episode 1, Episode 2).

Head on over to have a look!

Ubuntu Troubles (Harikiri commands)

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:18:00 +1300

If like me, after a long week at work, you find yourself typing in a ubuntu terminal:

sudo chown mail /

[I’ll explain why later]

Then you are in for a whole heap of trouble, because, inexplicably, sudo now does not work, instead, it complains about /var/run/sudo not owned by uid 0 (root), but by uid 8, which I presume to be the user mail.

By the way, all contents of folder ‘var’ is now under the dominion of the unholy ‘mail’ user.

Worst, you can’t use sudo to magically set our good friend root where it belongs.

I racked my brains for ways to make sudo work, from using a different file other than /var/run/sudo, to making sudo run as a different user other than root. None of them worked. I can’t run as root either…. or could I?

Then I realised, I can go into Ubuntu Recovery mode and it will give me terminal access as root.

chown -R root:root var/

And my problem is solved!
ps. you want to know why i did that kamikaze command. There was a ‘mail’ folder that was locked, and i was trying to chown it to my user. Bad move!

First day at work!

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:22:00 +1300

Well, first day at work today, starting at MSD. Today was mostly spent getting to know everyone and setting up and installing my development environment.

OK, one nice pic of Muffin to end this post:

Melbourne

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 14:13:00 +1200

It has been a nice trip over to Melbourne. Yi Wen and I spent six days there, mainly sightseeing and enjoying the free rides on Melbourne’s tourist shuttles and trams ;).

A bunch of pictures are now available on my photoblog.

Enjoy!

Simple Mass Virtual Hosting

Mon, 29 May 2006 18:17:00 +1200

Using CPanel, WHM, shell Access (or plesk), DNS

Prerequisites:

Shell Access (or ability to edit the httpd.conf)
DNS editing access
Wildcard DNS ability
PHP!

* We use www.domain.tld as an example. Modify to suit.
First, make sure that your www.domain.tld works as normal

Second, enable wildcard DNS by (various means, depending on your interface). But you should see something like

* 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your NS ip address (should be the same as the one in the www A record)

Third, change/add the ServerAlias directive in your httpd.conf file to something like

ServerAlias *.domain.tld

You should see now that all addresses, *.domain.tld will be redirected internally to www.domain.tld

Last, use Php’s $HTTP_HOST command and explode and you’re done!

Tale of singers, chanters

Fri, 26 May 2006 14:16:00 +1200

ONCE upon a time, there was a small Kingdom in the South Seas. It was a peaceful place where many peoples of many different colours lived together.

By and large, they were happy. There was plenty to eat in this Kingdom and there were lots to do. Some of the people liked to dance, some liked to sing, some liked to tell stories. A few even did all three. And of course there were many who liked to watch those singing, dancing and telling stories.

Caret Browsing

Sun, 21 May 2006 01:11:00 +1200

Wow, I accidentally hit F7 and Firefox turned into an annoying monster that has its own mind. Yes, press F7 and your up or down keyboard buttons behave differently when you are scrolling! It scrolls line by line, with a cursor (much like Word) instead of scrolling smoothly like a normal web page….

Tip, it’s called ‘Caret Browsing’ ….So blo*** obscure

Some new developments

Mon, 08 May 2006 02:26:00 +1200

Well, I have been involved in some new ventures and restarting some old ones. Check it out:

www.edoodle.co.nz - an old hobby of mine, which will soon launch a website for artists soon.

http://www.elvis.ac.nz/brain?ThongKuah

www.wen.co.nz A new website for my gf’s art gallery

littlearty.blogspot.com Surprise!

Gosh, life is busy!

Well, some analysis then

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:06:00 +1200

I’ve always hated the way Malaysian bloggers write about this concept of race: So, given that I accidentally have this treasure trove of data, I might as well perform some analysis on it.

Methodology: open up pdf file (Acrobat reader: and search (whole word only)
Limitations: Ignores context of the word being counted

Note: the pdf file refers to the “surprise comments” made on my blog, all about politics, ~~which I will post it up when I find a file server to upload it to.~~

Number of comments: 12

Word - Number of occurrences
Neutral words:
Race(s) - 15

Words I hate being used:
Indian(s) - 8
Chinese - 12
Malay(s) - 65
Subtotal - 85

Words I much prefer:
Malaysian - 21

Well, looks like the hated words still win! Mind you, the discussion wasn’t uncivilized at all, at first glance. It seems that we are so ingrained with this mentality. I wonder who else cringes when they hear the hated words being said?

Wow. who are all these people?

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:56:00 +1200

I have any comments on my blog sent to my gmail.

This fine morning, I woke up and saw this bunch of comments! Imagine my surprise? Where did all this traffic come from….

Then I realised the comments did not really make sense. They were talking about politics instead of about wises.co.nz. But they were from Malaysia and Australia and NZ. Blogger comment mixup?

ok, another rant

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 16:28:00 +1200

Is it the weather or something? I’m not normally so pissed off (pardon the expression), but when did posting something become so difficult all of a sudden?

The ol’ Books and More down at Lambton Quay was a good friend of ours, with extended opening hours and nice staff, who helped YOU out.

My first step was greeted by this wall that stopped me from entering the Post shop from the streetside. So I had to go to the side alley to enter. Alright, something’s changed….Not just that, the staff seems to have changed as well.

So, I wanted to send something to the South Island, which I remembered as costing about $18. But hey, the staff weighs my package and says that it is $25.00?! I do a double-take.

“Are you sure? I remember it was 18 dollars."

“When was that?"

“About two months ago."

“Well, I’ve been here two years and I’ve never heard of that,” intoned the staff member. She then proceeds to offer me a choice. Either this ($25) or normal post with no tracking. No resolution of the customer’s concerns.

What insolence, I thought. What happended to the customer is always right. But that’s alright. What happended next is makes that pale in comparison - absolutely unforgivable!

So, I beat a retreat and went to grab a NZ Post brochure, and aha! I found the price list:

“Wait a minute, it says here $15.40. Can I have my parcel sent now, please?"

“Err, what is this Economy parcel?"

Gosh, they don’t even realise about this Economy price, when the previous Books and More staff knew about it. What followed was a mess of staff not knowing about prices and products that the company has. That price seems to need a sticker and cannot be processed using the computer but they have run out of the Economy stickers!

In the end, I had to walk to another branch where they had the stickers. The other branch was way more helpful. I don’t think I am going to visit the Lambton Quay Post Shop anymore, sorry. They are just too stuck-up.

Later on, I took the same brochure from another branch, but it had different prices, and it has no Economy category no longer.

The prices must have changed and the categories too, our two year old staff couldn’t remember it?

Staff should be updated about new prices and products, not rely on what the computer system says. So, now I see how price is important to good marketing. You need to have logical prices and staff needs to be able to communicate that properly, otherwise, customers just get angry about sudden price changes. Staff also needs to be able to suggest alternatives if they do not know and help the customer out, not offer ultimatums.

Lost Directions

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:28:00 +1200

Today, wises decided to give a ticket to hell. They gave a map and directions to nowhere! If you notice the picture, Broomhill Road is a dead end. (complete with fallen log, jungle track, non-tarred road, and being one-lane-so-turning-around-is-oh-so-hard). It doesn't lead to Highbury Road or Highbury Crescent or whatever.

Note to self: Mt Pleasant Rd is not so pleasant after all. How do those ppl live and drive there? It's a horror to drive there.....

So I sent an email to Wises.

My letter to wises.co.nz

Hi,

If you kindly click at the link at the bottom of this email, you will find a most horrendous mistake! I had to make it to Highbury in Wellington having never been there, but the directions are wrong!

In particular: there is no connection between Broomhill Road to Highbury Crescent! I drove to three dead ends without ever coming near my destination. Please kindly correct the map and directions ASAP.

Dissatisfied,
Thong

=======================================================
Click on or cut-n-paste the entire link below in your browser address window to view a map

Click here for map

Powered By Wises Maps
=======================================================

So beware of map directions or you shall plunge down jungles and cliffs!

Another session (II)

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 04:54:00 +1300

Okay, Drupal works wonders…There u have it, the search is done :)

Sorry, forgot to put rambling warning on… ;)

Anyway, the cable car ride today was excellent. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. When I graduate, I’ll be sure to take a picture with Mr Sulky Graduate of 1990……..And take my family along in the cable car ride…

I should really do this blogging thing properly…Now, couple of post to do, but always slips my mind….

Oh, the McDonald’s at Lambton Quay is one to go to. Nice service, big and spacious tables. Best fast-food restaurant I’ve been to so far :)

I’m off,
zzzzzzzzz

Another session

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 03:33:00 +1300

Warning: This is going to be a rambling post.

So, today we had another Drupal session where we tied up loose ends that we have started with profile search thing. Turns out that creating a search form is not that hard. All we need is just two additional functions, one to create the search form; and the other to display the results.

Did I tell u that Drupal is great! The search form is not the only way we can do this though. People also can browse through user profiles and-> if they see some type they like, say, “Never Married”, they can always click on “Never Married” and poof, every member who is “Never Married” comes up. Its a fantastic system which handles members and structured communities quite well indeed.

Well, communities remind me of Friendster. Friendster, is pretty nifty, however, there are several stupid bugs that really bug me. One, 10% of the time I get a white screen instead of the content I expect. The groups interface is also really alphaish, and it doesn’t allow you invite members properly! The list of friends to invite from doesn’t display the complete list of friends to invite! It really leaves me the overall impression that it is still Betaish. Bad for a website that existed for a couple of years already….

….rambles on… but Friendster has allowed me to get into contact with my ye old friends again….sigh, if now the only thing is to connect them to this blog :)

Christmas

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 02:58:00 +1300

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!!

I guess it’s time to start planning for a new 2006 year. (Aside: Anyone besides me still wondering how the hell humanity managed to get back the year 2000? I mean, we are in 2006! 6 years after and I still can’t get my head around the weirdness of a ‘2’ in front of years….There must be a word for this)

But first, some updates on what happended this Christmas. First off, the Grinch did NOT steal Christmas….Sorry couldn’t resist it. Instead, the everlasting turkey made its debut in flat 39, of Everton Hall. (Merry thanks to David, our assistant-in-chef).

It's time to let loose

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 22:46:00 +1300

My problem was I never let loose. Wonder what will happen if I wasn’t so considered?

Hmmm…Well, for one thing, I’ll probably blog more often. I’ll be back with more.

Ghost ship

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:44:00 +1300

Second update: My dearest has received it! I must say, this episode has resolved itself at last, after some really unnessecary nonsensical customer service from the folks at teddybearland.com.

Update: I have just received an email from the sales staff apologising for missing my order! I replied back and now it’s back to ‘ghost mode’ again (meaning, no reply!)

Sir Ellwood
Russ Vintage Edition
Teddy Bear Extraordinaire

Boy, oh, boy, have you ever heard of the ghost website? Not about ghosts, no, it’s about the website. A website that is:

"…Operating fine and seems to be valid and current, but in actual fact has been abandoned by its operators and owners"

And hell, yeah! I was suckered into one such website. An e-commerce website, specifically. I thought that special teddy bears might be a nice change for a birthday gift. So I did the following (it’s amazing that everything still works!):

Went to www.teddybearland.com (beware!)
Browsed through the shopping list, which was all intact.
Show an individual teddy that was just gorgeous (Sir Ellwood).
Registered as a member.
Logged in as a member.
Put the teddy in my shopping cart.
Logged out. Decided to shop in other places for maybe better gifts.
Logged back in. Put the teddy in my cart again.
Checked out my shopping cart.
Entered my delivery and credit card details
Submitted my order.
Received a confirmation email from the “sales” email a day later.
…………………………………..Then the fun began……………………………..

So far, so good. I just casually sent an email back to ask for a delivery date as the automated email did not say and I HAD to make sure it will arrive before my dearest’s Birthday :)

Next day, no reply. Sent another email, this time sending it not just to sales, but the person in charge of sales, the person in charge of Customer relations and even the person in charge of the website! Just had to make sure, you see.

Next day, still no reply…That’s weird. Tomorrow is D-Day, but still no reply? My card is still not charged. Plus the website promised next day delivery. Panic?! Hell, no. They have a phone number listed, so let’s call them.

(30 minutes later….)

Help! I’m confusing myself with this international call. Is this the correct number? 603-9058 8503. Yup. Or have they mixed fax and phone. Nope. I’m still getting the “This number does not exist” nonsense. Have I flipped 8 and 5. Doesn’t work either. Aargh! I must be tired from work. Give it a break….

(15 minutes break….)

Now, let’s try again. {Super clarity phone dialing} Aargh! Still doesn’t work. Sleuthing mode. Malaysia yellow pages, maybe they have changed their phone number? Nope, no sign in the yellow pages. How about a WHOIS search? Yup, found the owner of the website, Cornerstone Consulting Sdn Bhd and a Zach Ho. Googled Cornerstone and found a non-working website with a telephone number. hurray! Nope, same “do not exist” number. Google owner’s name “Annie Lim”, found news from 2000. Aaargh! It was then, it hit me:

The website is a shell, with no human behind it! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!

So yeah, no news still either from my email or from the website’s order tracking thing.

Mastermind

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 01:38:00 +1300

“Rationals, are the problem solving temperament, particularly if the problem has to do with the many complex systems that make up the world around us. Rationals might tackle problems in organic systems such as plants and animals, or in mechanical systems such as railroads and computers, or in social systems such as families and companies and governments. But whatever systems fire their curiosity, Rationals will analyze them to understand how they work, so they can figure out how to make them work better.

In working with problems, Rationals try to find solutions that have application in the real world, but they are even more interested in the abstract concepts involved, the fundamental principles or natural laws that underlie the particular case. And they are completely pragmatic about their ways and means of achieving their ends. Rationals don’t care about being politically correct. They are interested in the most efficient solutions possible, and will listen to anyone who has something useful to teach them, while disregarding any authority or customary procedure that wastes time and resources.

3 month plan

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:57:00 +1300

Sometimes, writing things down will make things happen. (As long as you refer back and remember ;)

So here goes:

Get a weighing machine
Play some upper body sport, like basketball :)
Weigh every week?
Find out how to raise upper body strength
Not to forget, push-ups.
Drink milk. Sleep well.
Finish 2 projects for e-doodle.

I wonder how to make this post sticky?

The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 23:13:00 +1300

The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster

Can you believe this? Althought his nick is cheesy, his writing is just superb. I quote:

"…And yet, there is my son with Shmi in his eyes – a product of love, before the storm. He is no Jedi, for his passion blows too hot, but perhaps he is not Sith, either. He is an instrument of change. He is the catalyst at the centre, the fulcrum on which pivot fates. To see him is to be blinded by the glory of the Force that orbits him like living netting."

No Jedi, but not Sith either….Absolutely stunning.

The return of the blog!

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:21:00 +1300

:)

After 6 months, I’m back, for a while

Briefly...

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:15:00 +1200

Ok, I’ll try to squeeze as much out as I can within a couple of minutes, seeing that I’m out of time for work and study and assignments and rest.

First, Blackie died. Dropsy. Thought it was a tumour which shrunk, and then poof, …

There has been plenty of worthy current events worth mentioning, but I don’t have the rigour to carry out a rational analysis. I’ll be content reading what bloggers and reporters have to say about this.

Study. Excellent. Encountered my first read-ahead course, previously all the courses I had never required me to really touch the text book for study purposes.

Work. I have now implemented Apache, James and Domain and EMail Server forwarding. Fantastic experience :)

Java 1.5 has a lousy foreach implementation. Too cryptic.

Ski trip :) I’ll post some pictures up soon….

Rest. now beckons…zzzzz

Is scoring straight As all that matters?

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 01:52:00 +1200

Just one case, interesting though, in light of my other post about As.

"Then we spent a year in England. The first two months in public school were
tough, but the teachers tried their best to win her over.
After five months, she was a changed person — creative, inquisitive, expressive. Most of all, she had fun learning.
It is different here. There is too much emphasis on homework,
little art and craft, teachers threaten to pukul if the hair is not tied, keluar
kelas if books are forgotten, and, worst of all, there is no attempt to make
children feel at ease in the classroom.

On the use of application languages

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:32:00 +1200

There seems to be quite an explosion of demand in more powerful websites equipped with server capabilities using scripts like JavaScript, PHP, and Perl, having been involved with a couple of PHP companies. However, I have always viewed this as “lightweight” languages, compared to Java or C++ which can be used for files and system programming as well. Of course, the lines are becoming blur as web languages introduce more “heavyweight” features like classes (e.g. PHP 5).

Now, what’s lightweight and what’s heavyweight? In my view, these terms are more linked towards how long the language or feature will endure and be popular in some form. For example, JavaScript went for the stars soon after its launch, then languished as compatibility issues set in across different browsers, then now with it’s on the rise again. Heavyweight stuff, like C++, has always been used in systems programming all these decades.

So, how does one decide whether to specialise in lightweight stuff, which could slide in popularity and in turn demand, or heavyweight stuff? It could be that this surge in demand for server-powered websites may be alas, temporary.

[Note to self: this might be for ./?] [Post-note: I’ll probably get ./// for my definitions of lightweight and heavyweight]

I, blog

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:43:00 +1200

I, blog shall not call out to my master,
Not especially when he’s in a fluster!
For when one is in between,
three exams and an interview,
then one should get out of her, nothing to view!

Rejected top SPM scorers finally get PSD scholarships

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 17:37:00 +1200

Rejected top SPM scorers finally get PSD scholarships

Then again, all this media attention might do some good in making contructive changes to Malaysia’s education system :) It may be wishful thinking but that will be the day when students realise the exam-oriented, extreme-tuition syndrome being practised, is not too useful after all.

See TV Smith’s Scholarship Test for a satiral definition of scholarship

EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA: Pak Lah Promises Scholarship for Top Students

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:50:00 +1200

EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA: Pak Lah Promises Scholarship for Top Students

Just a comment in Tony P’s blog (on a small aspect of this story):

Beneath all this is the very question of the definition of a “top student”. It would seem that having all A1s would assure scholarships will fall your way. What I would like to point out is that scholarships should be allocated based on whether the applicant is able to succeed at university and further in their professional career(as well). At the SPM stage, how would you be able to distinguish between a person with perfect grades and one with slightly less quality grades? How can we be sure if we can pick the one who can better in their proffesion of choice?

We should STOP this obsession with As! Sure it is an important deteminer but it is not the catch-all. And yeah, there are way more other careers in life other then doctors and accountants. Choose your passion (including medical and accountancy)!

Evolving with our stomachs - Future of Evolution - MSNBC.com

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:00:00 +1200

Evolving with our stomachs - Future of Evolution - MSNBC.com

This is an update to my previous Cavemen and Savages post.

It seems like the good doctor may have read this before my visit….

Second upper, and unemployed

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 21:54:00 +1200

Second upper, and unemployed

Here unfortunately, is an example of misplaced priorities, at least from first glance. He has some good points but I feel that the worst mistake one can make(while studying) is to copy from another. You always lose as first, you gain nothing. Neither knowledge nor useful experience is gained. Second, you devalue your institution’s and hence your cohort’s degrees. Philosophically, it goes against the widely known economic theory of ’no free lunches’. I wish I could delve deeper but I have exams looming. So, adios!

MUSINGS by Marina Mahathir

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 23:43:00 +1200

A Must Read!

Musings by Marina Mahathir

This is an excellent piece of opinion from Marina on Malaysia and where would YOU like it to go to. Refreshingly honest. What do you think? ;)

Cavemen and Savages

Sat, 28 May 2005 23:31:00 +1200

You'll have to bear with me, as I'm blogging while cleaning my room :P

I went to the doctor yesterday about a sore on my lip. Turns out it was a cold sore. That first sentence from the doctor was okay. Next come a whole sermon about what cavemen ate hundreds of thousands of years ago. "Milk is bad. Grains, pooh pah." At this point I'm thinking err, then what does one eat? The Doc then continued, "Men hasn't changed since they were cavemen, even though our food has." So, essentially we're putting in foods that are useless to our body. Here are some gems from the following 10 minutes...

Since the agricultural revolution, humans has shrunk by 6 inches.
Soybean oil? Junk! Non-cholesterol?! You need foods like butter, coconut oil, lach.
People need sunlight. Gives Vitamin D, also the sun striking the back of our eyes activates the brain.
Raw! Think quality. Nuts are good. Seeds too. Try sesame seeds...
2 minute noodles last you only 2 minutes!
Just fruits for breakfast!
Oh, and drink water as well...

So, as you can see, he gets more sensible towards the end. Makes me wonder if those in the beginning are true?

Trademe

Sat, 28 May 2005 17:53:00 +1200

We have an online auction site, similar to eBay, which is called Trademe. It has been a roaring success since it’s start sometime ago. However, recently, it was in the news as there is a so-called artist who has been kicked out of Trademe for copying directly from other people’s photographs. You may ask, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, you will have to know as well, that his paintings does not seem to real paintings(more printed) and his sceneries are from anywhere other than New Zealand(which he claims-he even states a specific spot). It may be just photoshop work as well.

**Advert break :P My photoblog about this.
My auction! for a newspaper about this story. Fun reading!

A common scenario is that this “Artist” puts up an auction for one of his “paintings” of a sunset over say, Wellington Bay. It gets eagerly snapped up as people like realistic paintings(including me). The auction gets to like thousands of dollars. When people ask him what type of media is the painting, he bans them from his auction. When people start doubting him more(because of his strange behaviour) he then accuses everyone as an “jealous artist” but half of them are not! You think this is bad? A month after the auction, someone finds a photograph on the internet exactly the same as the painting(for examples go to Scambusters - see how similar the images are!) Even worse, some of his auctions have their pictures flipped right-to-left compared to the original photo. When his buyers receive the physical painting, they find that it is the right way instead.

You wonder why an honest person would do such dubious things? Oh, and he’s left the country for Holland. Read his website. Buyer beware! Just remember, do not believe everything you read, especially online, where people have no identity.

Men chat and women text - research

Thu, 12 May 2005 01:31:00 +1200

Men chat and women text - research

Hehe, this is pretty true. :P Considering I prefer talking on the phone while Yi Wen texts.

But 30 percent is not what I would call conclusive…

Jail for poor NS dodger who could not pay fine

Wed, 11 May 2005 16:53:00 +1200

Jail for poor NS dodger who could not pay fine

Looks like the Government, instead of making an example of dodgers, has made a very good example of itself, instead. This serves to highlight how the programme has been fraught with problems, from transportation problems, security and of course, rushing the bill through Parliament. We need to have a credible opposition. Where is it?

Good for the Perlis Umno Youth to offer to help pay the fine.

Caveat: This depends on the truth of the chap’s story though.

Yippee! ??? Why am I still thinking about Study?

Sun, 08 May 2005 20:25:00 +1200

That’s all of my assignments all done. Now to start blogging. :)

First thing to do is to hit self on head for not discovering the new features of JAVA 1.5 [new window] earlier! {whack}. A friend just mentioned that foreach is now implemented in Java. Imagine how simple would that be:

foreach (Bean in Sack) do something

instead of

for(bean =1; bean <= beans in sack; next bean)

As well as generics(from C/C++), which is a very powerful feature. These two are the most useful for me….Better remember..:)

Three down, one more to go...

Wed, 04 May 2005 19:05:00 +1200

Some update about the sharks. The ever mighty Surfer(yours truly) has managed (barely) to outswim three of the four DeadLine sharks. One more to go…

Until then, when I can start to blog properly!

Bday update: My sweetie did a party for me! Complete with cake! and one more nice dinner! Yum, yum… Thanks, sweetie! :)

A bit on the side: Here’s something I hope to complete. The Malaysian club here is refurbishing its website and i’m coordinating it. Have a look now at http://www.wmso.tk and check back after June :)

Happy BIrThDay!!!

Sun, 01 May 2005 19:05:00 +1200

Aye! Aye! my 21st Birthday! Yi Wen and me had a nice dinner courtesy of Visa Inc. who of course sends the bill to my dad. Thanks! Unfortunately that was the only time we had, there was not much time to organise a party as I’m pretty deep in the sea of assignments, swimming as fast as I can with four DEADline sharks at my tail…:P Actually it’s now three, one down, 3 to go.

I got sent a very short email from BirthdayAlarm who has a link to a “Name your star” site. Pretty harmless, as long as you don’t buy anything. Check this out!

The Hobbit...First Class

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 02:27:00 +1200

Yay! Tonight was fun! We(my gf and me) went to a live stage acting of the Hobbit. I’m afraid to say this, but this is kind of the first time I’ve ever been to a live theatre with live actors and voice! So far, my experiences of the arts has been dance and ballet…

So, for those who don’t know the story…it all starts with this,

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

We then follow our main character, Bilbo, into a great adventure…

The various creatures in the show were done by having humans put on costumes. There was the wacky(?) trolls with boxing gloves and head gear; flying ’eagles’ who ‘swooped’ in with long wings; and a rather impressive Gollum. However, the wolfs were horrible (wolfheads with bones?) and also the goblins! Eww..they just look like Bowser from Super Mario….

Oh, the highlight, which was Smaug, the dragon! Excellent use of light and lasers(?) to depict the eyes of the dragon. Well, of course they used a life-sized puppet dragon head as well. The dragon’s eye were kind of hypnotic (in a sense) which reflects Tolkien’s view of dragons. Beware of dragons! They can twist your mind and deceive your eyes!

The show’s lighting, music and set was excellent. In the eagle scene, the lights were manipulated to depict blue sky and clouds, which is a really cool effect. Makes you feel you are up in the air. And they did all this with just a rotatable disc, a bridge and some various backgrounds. We realised also that they had to have the actors move the set around! The narrator, besides narrating, also played a role as postman, passing letters and messages to the characters(the invisible postman?). Plus, one actor has more than one role. Gandalf is also Smaug. Gollum is also Bard and also acts as a Dwarf.

It was a really enjoyable show. :) I give 4.5/5. Well worth it!

10 minutes late...and my email post never arrives!

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 00:07:00 +1200

Coincidence? All the clocks at uni today were all 10 minutes late. From the clock in the main lecture hall to the lab clock to the other lecture hall clock. Must be a prank. Then I went for squash and guess what? 10 minutes late as well! Now I’m thinking it might be the earthquake two days ago(can’t remember). Was sitting at home eating dinner when the ground shook a little. But big enough to stop us in the act of eating… Boy, it was fun experiencing an earthquake that was undisputable. (more than 4 seconds). :P

Oh! Where’s my missing blog post. Tried to post one using email(yeah, cool feature) but no show…Anyway just a test post :P

Issues...

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 02:12:00 +1200

One of my courses in uni this year is Ethical and Legal Issues for IT. This paper, I consider to be one of the few papers, which is totally out of sync with all my other courses(try comparing with Programming Languages, or even Database Systems. Still it is a very good place to discuss the many issues plaguing the IT field at the moment. Things such as privacy(supremely important in developed countries, but not so in say, Malaysia) or piracy, which is made easier by the digital format and the development of various new tools. Speaking of piracy, it seems to be the biggest thing these days. Well, more specifally file sharing. There are now two legistation news items, one is MGM vs Grokster [Mark Cuban, EFF] and the latest where the RIAA [Slashdot] has filed lawsuits against hundreds of individual students across America. The music industry there seems to be fighting back with lawsuits. What about in Malaysia? Last I heard, they were still posting losses, though it seems it not so bad now. I’ll have to find out soon about that. I wonder how do people think about piracy these days, especially with whole copies of movies being downloaded. (Imagine a $300 million film like LOTR being bought down the way of Malaysian music, more likely in the future, not now…)

It's (almost) the end...

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 23:43:00 +1200

Strange to start a blog at the end :P But yeah, should have started a blog at the start of holidays, not the end. It’s amazing how two weeks can just fly by. Sleep, wake, sleep….

Now I think it’s time to finish up my assignments! Third year assignments are definitely more worthwhile in the sense that I learn something from it. The past two years was not really challenging as they were just stuff that can be treated as simple facts. Just a bit of thinking to make sense and to link them together in a web of knowledge (probably) ensures good grades. No wonder, the British universities just go on straight into the second year of the CS curriculum? (It’s something I’ve heard from somewhere..)

So, what do I have here…Haskell assignment, database project(interesting, about robbers..hey there’s Al Capone here!), sequence diagrams, and the monster programming project which I should have started but barely started. I’m (hopefully) aiming to fully understand it before going into coding. But ah! all my friends have started! Peer pressure…sigh….

Wait, my gf just came in with pigtails :) Bye! Ok, now she’s gone back. Now, back to my assignments :(