It ain’t no secret whom I am rooting for – the one with the guy-liner! Go Glambert!

Oh, I’m in love – with a Chinese restaurant. The name of the establishment is Kim Ma Restaurant. It is located at the Palace of the Golden Horses, Malaysia. I have to say that the food is not your regular food.

According to their Captain, they’ve got modern Chinese food. Essentially, they just do not have your traditional Chinese dishes. For example, their shark-fin soup is served with dumplings instead of your regular crab meat. The fried rice has fish-roe and mushroom gravy in it. Nice!

When my sister casually mentioned that I love the restaurant so much that I would like to ‘treat wine’ there, the Captain very quickly gave me his name card and explained to us that they are not part of the package and I will need to request for them separately.

I don’t really know how to illustrate the quality of the food. However, I hope that the photos will be able to do it some justice. All the food was served in individual portions. I forgot to mention but the service was excellent too. Yum!

This is one of my purple suits. This is the blue-ish purple one, which is why I wore it with a blue shirt. I have another one that is a red-ish purple one with a slightly different cutting and design. In my opinion, the red-purple one has better workmanship and design than this one. But all in all, I think that I like both purple suits.

I wore this the other day, to attend a formal evening function with a strict dress-code. I noticed a few guys staring at my suit. I wonder if they were staring because of the colour or because of the design. Unfortunately, the ladies did not take notice in my direction. Hehe.

The reason that my face has been cropped out of the photo is because I am totally not photogenic. There is a reason why I am usually behind the camera, rather than in front. This is actually the first time this suit and I appeared in a photo.

In real life, it is not quite as purple. This photo looks a little more purple because of the camera flash. That is also the reason why the shirt looks terribly shiny. Under diffused lighting, it looks darker and more subdued. It was never my intention to stand out in a crowd.

And yes, this is supposed to be worn without the tie, which was the reason why I chose this design in the first place! I hate ties!

Well, I’m never going to be able to live this down. My photo was broadcast to the entire company recently, during a company-wide gathering. Unfortunately, it was not the most complimentary photo. Honestly, I have never been very photogenic but this photo was down-right sad. This has been confirmed by all my co-workers.

One of my co-workers commented that I looked extremely depressed in the photo. Another one commented that I look extremely geeky. Overall, the consensus was that my saham jatuh (stock fell) in the company. Furthermore, I met a bunch of new people yesterday to discuss some stuff and one of the commented that he can visibly ‘see’ that I look very geeky.

So, I guess that the thing is that I just look very geeky. I’m pretty sure that it is not a bad thing. I look the way I feel, which is basically expressing myself truthfully. The pretenders will merely express ‘geek chic’ but would not actually be geeks. True geeks are very hard to find, particularly in a country like Malaysia. I hope to do something to change that at some point.

I have always been proud of being a geek. In fact, my master plan is to be the #1 geek in Malaysia. That is going to take a lot of hard work to achieve though. It is not very easy to be a true geek because a true geek isn’t about appearances. We can smell a fake one from a mile away. A true geek is about mastery of a specific area of serious study – in my case it is computers. The visual appearance is just an unintended side-effect.

Geeks are way cool!

E-Machines is not a brand name that is well known in Malaysia. After being bought by Gateway (which was subsequently bought by Acer) several years ago, they seem to have languished and been forgotten but I have recently spotted a unit at a local computer store. The EL1700 is destined to be a HTPC machine.

At a glance, it has:

• Intel E2200@2.2GHz processor
• 1GB RAM
• GeForce 7100 graphics
• nForce 630i chipset
• VGA and HDMI video outputs
• 5 Audio ports and S/PDIF audio outputs
• Multiple memory card readers

Its VGA and HDMI ports mean that it can be connected to any LCD-TV unit with ease. The 5.1 and S/PDIF audio outputs enable it to output sound to any low or high end sound system. The integrated memory card reader allows photos from digital cameras to be viewed. Most importantly, it has a built in PCI/E port for adding a suitable TV capture card.

Wow!

My main concern is power. I’m pretty sure that the ‘active’ power usage will be higher than an Atom based system. However, ‘passive’ power usage should not be too bad. I will definitely hibernate the machine when it is not in use, which will be most of the time. Until I actually measure the power consumption using a DMM, I won’t trust any power consumption numbers released by the manufacturers.

PS: It does not look half bad either. You can even lie it down flat.

Hell must have frozen over! Pigs must be flying in the sky! The dead must be walking in the streets! Chaos! Mayhem! Anarchy! Windows 7!

While I would normally not touch anything MS without a 10 yard pole, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Windows 7. Then today, a friend of mine who works for Microsoft (and shall remain nameless) asked me if I’d like to give Windows 7 a try. Being naturally curious about things like this, I thought that I’d give it a go to see what the fuss is all about.

Since I did not have any machine that met the minimum requirements for Windows 7 except for my main machine, I decided to install it inside a virtual machine instead. I ran a VM with 1Gb of RAM and 16Gb of hard disk space as the minimum requirements suggested. The installation took a very long time to finish but in the end, it only consumed about 6Gb of disk space.

My host machine is a dual-core AMD64 processor with 2Gb of memory. To make things run fast, I enabled hardware based virtualisation, which uses the VT extensions of the AMD processor to run things faster. What this means in layman terms is that I made the VM run as fast as I could, without purposely trying to degrade its performance in any way. During the install process, I took many screen shots of the virtual screen.

While I have yet to actually play with it fully, I think that it is safe to say that there are already visible pros and cons with the new OS. The main pro is that it does seem to boot fairly quickly and the interface feels responsive. The main con is that the user unfriendly-ness of Vista is still evident. As for the new look and feel of the OS, that is a very subjective thing to measure.

One thing that I do not understand about Windows is its inherent affinity towards rebooting the computer. During the installation process, it rebooted the VM several times. When it installed updates, it rebooted the VM again. Seriously, MS should think of a way to do these things without the unnecessary reboot. As other OSes have shown, it is perfectly possibly to do things without rebooting all the time.

It is good for me to know that Windows 7 will run on a lowly 2D graphics processor, which is what the VM emulates. Actually, with the VM, I was able test that it will happily boot up with only 128Mb of memory, although it uses a lot of disk space as swap and trashes the performance greatly. With only 64Mb, the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’ makes an appearance. It is good to see that some things do not change.

Okay, enough griping. Here are the screen shots.

Since I was in Bandar Utama yesterday, I decided to pop by 1U just for the heck of it. Since it’s just days before Chinese New Year, the whole place was decorated for the festive season and I was even lucky enough to be there for the lion dance performance. This actually brought back some memories of my days with the CULDT. I could actually identify about half of the music.

Before that, when I first arrived, I bumped into someone whom I’ve not seen in 6 years or so. She’s two years my senior at university and we were friends and group mates at one time. It took me a few moments before realising whom it was. So, I then went up to her and called, “CC!”. Turns out that she’s actually working around the area and hangs out in 1U quite a bit. Even so, it’s still quite lucky for me to bump into her like that.

Then, I went off to watch the lion dance performance by our national lion dance champions. I ran back to my car (in the parking lot) to get my camera to take some photos. So, I was watching most of the performance through my camera lens. It was a rather dramatic performance. At one point, one of the poles that the lion was jumping on was felled by the act. As a result, the lion was trapped at the highest end of the poles and was ‘trembling’ there from fear. Then, after contemplating the wide chasm, the lion jumped and landed on the poles on the other side. That brought a rousing applause from the audience.

After the show, I went off to see another show – of Honda Citys! They had a number of the new Honda cars on display at their 1U roadshow. I got into one just to see how spacious the new model was – it was surprisingly very spacious. I sometimes wonder how these Honda engineers did it – built a car that looks so small from the outside but is so spacious inside. Honda cars have always been engineered well and it shows.

Randomness@1U. I think that I will probably hang out there a bit more in the near future.

Oh my frakkin’ gods! The final episodes of Battlestar Galactica are finally here and they are starting tonight. I am so psyched up by this and I cannot wait to find out who the final Cylon is. I have some suspicions and I am also in denial. A friend and I did a quick run down on who was left and why they could or could not possibly be the final Cylon. Let’s start from the left of the photograph of the main cast (the ones whom are non-Cylons already).

1. President Roslin (extreme left)
   It is very unlikely that she’s The One as she was dying from cancer earlier and had to be saved by a treatment of Cylon blood. If she was already a Cylon, she wouldn’t have needed the Cylon blood transfusion. Therefore, it is unlikely that she’s The One unless the script writers can explain that discrepancy away.
2. Lee Adama (fourth from left)
   He is a dark horse in this race. There are no indicators that he is a Cylon and the script writers could just spring a surprise. However, they would have to explain his entire life away and show how a baby Cylon was sneaked into the Adama’s family in the past. This could tie in nicely with the launch of a new series “Caprica”, which revolves around the Adama family 50 years ago. So, I think that this would be a very likely commercial probability.
3. Kara Thrace(sixth from right)
   She is a possibility as there is the case of her “coming back from the dead” under mysterious circumstances. The script writers have yet to satisfactorily explain the situation away. Furthermore, she’s had Cylonic visions and can hear ‘the song’ too. However, she hates Cylons too much and would be devastated to be one. Furthermore, I love her and I would be devastated if she was a Cylon. Therefore, she cannot be one! (I’m in denial)
4. Karl Agathon(second from right)
   While he is not a confirmed Cylon, he is unlikely to be one. He was chosen to father a half human-Cylon baby precisely because Cylons cannot reproduce (they only replicate). So, if he turns out to be a Cylon, the script writers would have a hard time explaining two whole seasons away on his relationship with Sharon. But then again, Saul Tigh supposedly impregnated a #6 (though we’ve not seen the baby yet).
5. Bill Adama(extreme right)
   “If I’m a Cylon then you’re all screwed” – Bill. Bill is the leading contender for the final Cylon. However, he is too obvious a choice. I believe that most fans would be let down if he was the best that the script writers could come up with. Therefore, I do not believe that he is The One (even with the obvious scene of him being spaced in the trailer below).

Anyway, everything is pure conjecture at the moment. We will find out soon enough as there are only 10 episodes left to go. From the trailer below, things look extremely exciting and I am looking forward to watching them at some point (and so is my mom).

Just when I thought it was going to be safe to buy a budget laptop, here comes a luxury laptop that will knock your socks off! I will let the photos speak for themselves. There isn’t much to say about it except that it is designed to be an AirBook killer. Anything else is pure speculation at this point. Enjoy!

Photos are (CC) BrianSolis.

I passed by Harvey Norman today and decided to drop in to look at the new Compaq Nettop. Let me just say that I am quite taken in by the price of the thing. It is much cheaper than I had expected. Internet reports claim that the price of the high end model (2030) is about US$386 (RM1355) but they are only selling it for RM998 (US$285) here.

The high end model that they are selling here is dubbed the Compaq Presario 2035Q, which seems to be the branding that HP is trying to achieve with it’s compaq line of products. As the detailed specs seem rather hard to come by on the Internet, I decided to check out the specs using the software on the display unit. Here they are:

• CPU: Intel Atom 330
  This is the most powerful Atom processor to date. It is a dual-core HyperThreaded processor. What this means is that the software sees an effective 4-cores. This is sweet as the extra processing power can definitely be put to good use for high quality video playback.
• VGA: Intel GMA950
  Unfortunately, it comes with the same terrible 945GC chipset that every other Atom platform comes with. Although NVidia has released the 9400M for Atom processors, no vendors seem to be pushing out products with them yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed though.
• AUD: Realtek ALC662 HD Audio
  This information had to be gleaned from the vendor and device ID numbers. This bodes well though, since this device is capable of 5.1 surround sound. However, it seems to lack the actual ports that do the output.

Besides these important things, it also has 1Gb of DDR2 memory and a 160GB harddisk. It also comes with a LightScribe capable DVD burner. There is also a card reader on the front that can come in useful for displaying photos from digital cameras directly on screen. Also on the front are 2 USB ports and the earphone and mic ports. On the back are another 2 USB ports, ethernet port and modem port. It does not come with wifi but I am sure that there is a free internal USB port that I can jack one into.

While it is not a perfect HTPC, it does come awfully close to being one. The only thing it lacks are the higher end audio and video outputs. If this is the best thing available when the time comes to actually make the purchase, I might just get it. However, I will still continue to look for a nettop with a DVI or HDMI video output and a 5.1 surround sound output.

PS: Then again, it might be possible that the 5.1 surround sound output is multiplexed on the rear ports. Some devices do it this way. I’ll need to look up more info about this.