This is why I miss Top Gear!

I just read an article on Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, talking about his early days of computing. Turns out that he and I both started computing at a similar time – circa 1990. At the time, he was a starving Finnish university student in computing scienc and I was a easily excitable primary school boy who spent too much time reading and watching telly.

386, DX33, 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, 40 Megs hard disc

I had half the RAM but about double the hard disk. I still have that old machine at home with me, although it has been taken out of its shell. I can still remember hitting the old turbo button to give the machine a clock boost. Those were the days.

I also did some programming back then. The year after Linux was released, I had just finished writing my first graphical strategy game called Dinobots. It was a simple board game with a number of procedurally rendered dinosaurs moving on them. The rules are no longer something I remember but I distinctly remembered playing with it for a while. It was my crowning achievement in QBASIC because it had graphics, animation, sound and a computer opponent worth playing against. (There was only so much one could do with the limitations of QBASIC).

Ahhh, this brings back memories.

I then moved onto PASCAL for more programming power and wrote a number of useful applications and tools with it including my first virus-like TSR (terminate stay resident) programme. I can still remember what it was – a key-logger! It would quietly sit in the background reading the keys read and them randomly spitting them out to the screen when the opportunity presented itself. It had to play nice and hook onto the timer and keyboard interrupts.

All this and much more even before I completed high-school.

I sometimes find it interesting to read Malaysia Today because RPK has all kinds of juicy things to share with the rest of us. Most of us would still have wool pulled over our eyes if it wasn’t for the many exposés he has done (most of us still do). So, I came across this article saying that our police force will seek the assistance of Interpol and the British police to help extradite RPK to Malaysia because rumour has it that he is now enjoying some R&R in London.

After I read that, I felt that there was something wrong with the IGPs interpretation of extraditions. I am not a lawyer but even I know that you cannot just ask another government to extradite people to your country on whim and fancy. So, I looked it up on Wikipedia, the ever informative source. While the details may be different because a lot of it depends on the exact wording of our extradition agreements with the UK, I don’t think that it would be possible for the UK government to comply with the extradition request.

You see, one of the fundamental principles behind extraditions is that the person must have committed or at least be a suspect for a criminal offence in both nations. As I understand it writing articles bad-mouthing your Prime Minister and his family is not a criminal offence in the UK. According to the internets the UK has just recently decriminalised defamation and it is now a civil issue. Maybe that is why RPK has decided to holiday there this season. I hear that it will be a white Christmas this year. Nice!

In addition, the country must also be satisfied that the person who is being extradited would receive a fair trial, which is something that RPK claims that he will never receive. Since he has previously been detained without trial under the ISA, his claims are not without merit. The UK has refused to extradite many other people far more nefarious than RPK and who have done far worse things that bad-mouth other people because those people would receive a show-trial and a death sentence at home. That would not satisfy the UK on issues of human rights, due process and what nots.

So, I don’t think that our IGP will succeed in getting RPK extradited. However, if our government wishes to affect an extra-ordinary rendition, now that would be a whole different matter entirely.

PS: I still wonder how RPK gets to move in and out of Malaysia so easily. One would think that his name would be flagged at all entry and exit points in the country. That just totally beguiles me or maybe he is just really good at parkour.

PPS: I am a lawyer buruk.

I just watched Avatar with my sis’s family tonite. It frakkin’ blew my mind! Friends of mine know that I usually spend half my time dissecting a movie into its component parts to see how it was made and also to catch flaws in either the story-line or the acting. However, I spent most of Avatar just gawking at the visual effects and the rich world that is Pandora. By the end of the film, even I have fallen in love with the place and would gladly go native too.

Honestly, I have never seen visual effects that are this spectacular. You know what they say about CGI – it can mimic pretty much everything except human expression. Well, while they got away with a lot of things by making use of an alien race, the facial emotions and expressions were very human. And the sheer variety! Practically every Na’vi had its own characteristics and features – the avatars were even made to look like their human counterparts. It was odd seeing my favourite Alien lady in blue spotted skin but it was cool – makes me want to watch all the Alien films again.

Aside from the CGI, the world itself is pretty amazing. A lot of detail and attention had been put into the creation of the world. While it shamelessly borrows a lot of elements from Native American culture it is still unique in itself. I particularly liked the idea of a care-taker species who were conveniently born with organs that allow them to jack directly into nature. They can communicate with animals and plants by simply jacking in directly. Every living creature on the planet seemed to have a compatible organ for jacking into. As the Alien lady put it – the entire ecosystem of the planet is like a massive network and the Na’vi are capable of directly uploading and downloading information from it. Wonderful!

The film’s many messages were also clear. Any idiot can spot the obviously environmental messages being put across – about how important it is to find balance with the world. There is also a more subtle message about how we humans are a colonising force and tend to just take whatever we want as long as we can bully the natives and get away with it. Then, there is the one-line reference to fighting terrorism with more terrorism – that piece of dialogue was obviously forced into the film just for that one purpose.

I loved the film and will definitely get it on bluray when it comes out next year.

PS: I also liked the fact that the Na’vi language was subtitled in Malay with an alien script to boot. Shows attention to detail.

I have spent many years complaining about the lack of new games in this world since the 90s. Every possible game genre seems to have been developed then and there have been nothing but rehashes over the years. However, I can now see the beginnings of a new form of game – the open world game. The growth in computing capabilities over the last decade have given developers the opportunity to create endless games set in an open interactive world where anything is possible – almost.

The risk with these open world games is that they get repetitive after a while. The computer is a finite state machine and there are only so many combinations of actions that can be executed. Like in Assassin’s Creed, you will either eavesdrop, pick-pocket, interrogate, assassinate or something else. There are less than 10 game modes and this becomes clearly repetitive after a while. The same thing happens in every other game that lays claim to an ‘open world’ experience.

However, it is theoretically feasible to create a game world where the interaction between the game elements becomes virtually limitless, with the right amount of powerful hardware. The game does not actually need an infinite combination of game modes. All it needs is enough game modes to keep people happy throughout its lifetime of a few years. While some of the games today can lay claim to extensive hours of game-play, this is mainly controlled through the use of some sort of plot-based story line that moves things along.

It would be totally interesting to see how this ‘new’ genre of games develop.

I was just thinking about it this morning. I was wondering if we could solve our streamyx sucks problem through a purely private sector initiative. Instead of being forced to lease bandwidth from Telekom, might it be possible for the private sector to lay their own pipes to the Internet and then provide broadband services independent from Telekom.

Then, I read this article on BAI – Google is laying its own pipe to Southeast Asia and Japan. The pipe will connect Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Phillipines, and Japan. When finished the SJC will provide the fastest connection in the world.

Now, I wonder if someone here will lay a pipe and connect it to the Singaporean end of the SJC. That will provide Malaysia with access to the fastest Internet connection in the world and our dreams of having high speed broad band might actually come to being.

I have always had this problem with my looks. Everyone says that I look too young for my age – essentially I look a little too boyish. When I first went to Cambridge for my PhD, most people thought that I was a fresh undergraduate instead of a post-grad student.

This has always been a problem for me and I have tried to look a bit older. One way of doing that is by wearing my spectacles – without them I would look even younger. It is a problem when trying to convince others to use your system or buy your product. People tend to get the impression that I am a blur young kid with no experience at all when the opposite is actually more true. Hence, a lack of trust for whatever I say. Sigh…

But it seems like there is a silver lining in the cloud. According to this BBC article, “People who look young for their age live longer”. It has something to do with telomeres, which is known to control ageing and has recently shown signs of controlling how young we look as well. I guess that the caveat is: assuming that nothing else kills these people first, like car accidents, disease and what nots – people who look young could possibly age slower.

A colleague of mine asked me the other day about my career plans – on whether I had any concrete ideas about what I want to do. I have to say that it depends on what was meant by concrete because I definitely have an idea of what I want to do, but not any specific idea that I could work on as yet because nothing has yet to twixt my nethers (pardon my scifi parlance).

Like what a friend told me the other day – with me, it is not about the money. For me, my career plans are not predicated on the amount of money that I will make because that would just be pointless. If it was all about making money, I would not have accomplished the things that I have. That is not to say that I don’t care about the money. I am not idealistic enough to think that I can survive on mere fresh air and sunshine. Money is important but simply making money will never be enough to motivate me. I need something more than that to satiate my thirst.

Then, I came across point #18 from The Cathedral and The Bazaar: “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”.

While there are lots of important problems to solve in this world – particularly with our society at home, none of them twixt my nethers – not enough anyway. I am looking for something that will give me the semangat berkobar-kobar to work on. I hope that I will be able to bite onto something soon.

Well, I just had my first ever PS3 party today and I think that it was fun and I discovered why Little Big Planet is such an enjoyable game – especially in multi-player party mode. The game was actually designed to be played as multi-player – there are some areas of the map that can only be explored in multi-player mode. It is surprisingly addictive for a game of this genre.

It was basically an excuse to get a few friends together for a few hours. Some of my friends have not seen each other for more than a year. So, it was nice to get everyone to spend some quality time together. The PS3 is surprisingly good at being a party console, as long as the right game is used. Besides LBP, we also played Katamari Forever, which is basically a compilation of all past Katamari games with new moves and maps added. We also watch Star Trek on bluray, which was fun. Star Trek also turned out to be a very suitable film for a small party. It is mainstream enough to appeal to everyone and not just fans of the franchise.

All in all, I had a pretty wonderful day. I’ve not had a get together like this in a while.

I couldn’t concentrate on work today. So, I decided to do a little reading. Something in a forum that I subscribed to triggered me to look at The Cathedral and The Bazaar by ESR. Although slightly dated, I still liked what he had to say, especially since he had real life examples to quote. I have also experienced some of the things myself, through my own open source endeavours. So, this is a summary of his lessons:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.”
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.