The dude can really give a speech.

You have got to watch the video to believe it. A night-time city-scape generated procedurally. If you don’t understand what that means, it means that the whole city is created using mathematical formulae. In typical games, environments like these would be laid out by hand. That is why, games look boring after a while because it is the same old thing ad nauseum. But if everything was generated with algorithms, merely tweaking some of the parameters and throwing some randomness into the mix will result in entirely different results. Granted, the present proof of concept is rather limited but it’s the concept that counts!

As for applications – both the XBOX360 and PS3 are fans of procedurally generated content. The PS3 certainly has enough computing power to create an entire city from scratch. So, it makes sense that gaming companies might want to take it up and create their own virtual cities on the fly. It would make the games interesting to even the developers themselves.

Kudos, Shamus!

Top Gun has always been on my Top 10 list of greatest films of all time. Even with all the special effects in films today, very few are able to beat this movie. It was also one of the two quintessential films that cemented the career of Tom Cruise.

There are a few things that I like about the film – the dog-fight scenes and the music. The dog-fight scenes were so well shot that nothing even came close to being as adrenaline inducing as this film was, until Pearl Harbour came along.

As for the music, the soundtrack gave birth to many classic songs that are still popular even today. Many of the songs are just as adrenaline pumped as the film itself but there were also a few mellow romantic tunes as well.

I have always been partial towards the F-14 Tomcat. I have had a love affair with it from the very first time I laid eyes on it. I consider its swept wing design an engineering marvel and beauty.

Why the sudden nostalgia with old films, you may ask? Well, I watched it several times last week and I thought that it was still as good today as it was 20 years ago. Top Gun made a distinct impression on an entire generation, mine included.

Oh my goodness. Megan did not get voted into the final 12, yet! Even Kris was shocked when Ryan announced his name instead of hers. I think that a lot of people were thinking that she would’ve gone through. The judges liked her. So, her only hope now lies with the wild-card show.

The thing about her performance yesterday, that stood out, was her dancing. If she makes it as a performing artiste, she would probably invent a new dance fad – the epileptic fit dance. I just found it oddly endearing. I’m weird like that.

Jesse Langseth did not make it through either. While I don’t think that she’s actually all that good a singer, I do like her spirit. She’s got some spunk – must come from having an 8 year old kid. It takes a lot of wit to deal with one.

Mishavonna Henson should have made it though, I think. I like her stubbornness in not giving up. She made it to Hollywood in Season 7 and managed to make it into the Top 36 in Season 8. If you listen to her performance, it may be apparent why.

These were 3 people whom I would have wanted to see go through but they all didn’t. Hopefully, some of them will get through on a wild-card.

I saw GINA on the TV for the first time last week and I immediately fell in love. There is nothing else quite like her and when she winks, it is like a stab through the heart. Her curves are like none other and her skin is as smooth as silk.

Seriously, GINA is a great concept car. The fundamental question that it tries to answer is what happens when the traditional skin is removed. The safety and stability aspects of a car is taken care of with the main frame. So, BMW replaced the skin with a rubberised fabric.

As a result, the car takes on the shape of the frame. By making parts of the frame movable, the car is able to morph its shape and adjust its size for different applications. It can raise a rear spoiler for those high speed runs on the freeway, or broaden its luggage compartment when extra space is needed.

In addition, light is able to feed through the fabric. Therefore, the lights can shine through even when they are hidden under the fabric. This diffuses the light and produces a soft glow, which is suitable for the brake lights and indicators. The headlamps light the way through an opening in the fabric – the eyes.

This got me thinking that, the same concept can also be applied to other things. If it can be used on a car, it can most certainly be used on consumer electronics. I would love to see someone like Apple, maybe take this up and make things with fabric skins instead of plastics. That would be truly fashionable.

What can I say about this film. It has far exceeded my expectations. I had only bought it because there wasn’t much else left for me to buy. I have purchased a large number of Korean films from the local inventory. Since this film was relatively cheap, I thought that I would give it a try.

This is a seriously good film. It kept me at the edge of my seat, made me cry, and caused me to scream at one point. Instead of writing my own, I thought that I’d just quote one from the Internet:

Ex-cop pimp Jung-ho is irritated because his girls keep disappearing without clearing their debts. One night, he gets a call from a customer and sends Mi-jin. Jung-ho realizes the phone number of the customer matches that of the calls the missing girls got last. As something smells fishy, he searches for her. During his search, Jung-ho dents a car in the alley. When Jung-ho spots blood splattered on the driver’s shirt, he senses the man, Young-min, is the suspect. After an intense chase, Jung-ho catches Young-min. But because of Jung-ho’s pretense as a cop, they are both taken to the police station. At the station, the man bluntly confesses he has killed the missing women, and the last girl, Mi-jin, may still be alive. As the whole police force is obsessed with a random search for corpses, Jung-ho is the only one who believes Mi-jin is still alive. With only 12 hours left to detain the serial killer without a warrant, Jung-ho’s hunt begins, searching for Mi-jin entrapped in a place nobody knows.

All I can say is that this is one hell of a show. After watching so many Korean films, I’m starting to get a sense of their style of cinematography and story telling. This film is classic Korean with one heck of a story. I’d watch it again just to be able to scream out loud again.

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).

It has happened to me again. I went to my local Steven’s Corner to have dinner today and was greeted by the person at the counter: “Yes uncle, sudah order?” (Yes uncle, have you ordered?). Uncle??!! My oh my, I must’ve looked damn terrible today to have been called ‘uncle’ by someone who was obviously older than me. Fortunately, since I like Steven’s Corner, I will forgive this particular slight on their part.

Right outside Steven’s Corner, there were a bunch of really young pups who were doing a roadshow for P1WiMAX, a new wireless broadband provider in Malaysia. It is a subsidiary of Green Packet Bhd, which is one of the 4 companies to get a WiMAX license from our government. It is good to see that there is more competition in Malaysia for the broadband business but it is very sad to see that Telekom Malaysia is still entrenched as the fixed line monopoly.

Pretty much every phone line in Malaysia is installed and run by Telekom Malaysia. As such, they have practically been the sole provider of broadband services to homes in Malaysia. Since it is a giant government linked monopoly, it does not need to worry about competition much. Therefore, service has been terrible and the ‘broadband’ speeds that we get are technically defined as ‘narrowband’.

On the wireless side, we have our mobile service providers selling 3G/HSDPA wireless broadband access. However, from my own tests and reports from others, they are no better. Both Maxis and Celcom ‘broadband’ also fail the definition easily. It is extremely difficult to achieve high speed connections on these services. Furthermore, there is something wrong with the Maxis network implementation that I am unable to access GMail (I have figured out what it is and have come up with a work around but that’s the subject of another blog entry).

Now, there is a new WiMAX service provider. The touts were happily showing us YouTube streaming on the wireless modem. While I do believe that WiMAX technology is far superior to the rest, I am not jumping for joy and I will tell you why. It will suffer the same problem that we have with Telekom Malaysia – lack of competition. With only 3 WiMAX licensees in peninsular Malaysia, it is trivial for them to cut things up between themselves (northern, central and southern regions).

That is why I do not believe that they are going to be any better than any other monopoly. While their speeds may be extremely impressive at the moment, once their network bandwidth is saturated with subscribers, things will get bad and there is nothing that any consumer can do. WiMAX has about a 10Mbps bandwidth at 2km. That is not much bandwidth once the slots are fully utilised.

So, as much as I hate the ADSL service provided by Telekom Malaysia, I loath switching to some other provider who will ultimately turn into another monopoly. Now, if only our government would open things up thoroughly.

One of the films that I picked up yesterday, was a surprisingly good film. The title of the Korean film is ‘Open City‘ and the female lead is Son Ye Jin. For some reason, I have bought quite a few of her films. I think that it’s probably because I have been influenced by the film ‘Classic Romance’.

She normally plays the sweet-innocent kind of character but I’m not interested in those acts (one can only stomach so much glucose). However, she has been trying out some different roles and I’ve bought some of those. In this particular film, she plays the role of a criminal ring-leader of pickpockets. While her acting could do with a little improvement (I’m not entirely convinced that she’s a criminal ring-leader), the same cannot be said of her wardrobe.

I lost count of the number of outfits (after 20) that she actually wore in the whole film. She appeared on screen with a different one for every scene and there were a lot of scenes. In many of the scenes, she was dressed to kill. According to the story, she was supposed to use her sultry charms to her advantage. I noticed the clothes because it was like watching a fashion runway, with a bunch of other things happening in between.

The story itself was rather well written. At the beginning, I thought that this would be another perfectly predictable film from beginning to end. However, it turned out to be less predictable than I had imagined. Furthermore, the film was well edited and presented using flashbacks as a tool to link the storyline. In the end, I think that it was a rather enjoyable film. I’d watch it again if only to see all the outfits once more.

PS: Pics are not mine!!

According to MalaysiaKini, Wee Meng Chee (aka NameWee) is once again embroiled in another stupid saga. However, I personally think that he is acting like an idiot now. I think that his touch with fame has gone to his head and he is now attention hungry. It speaks volumes of his musical talents if he has to resort to constant controversy in order to sell his music.

According to the article, “The video featured a school teacher teaching English in a class, using vulgar words. The clip also included several semi-naked scenes. The first part of the video was four minutes and 54 seconds long, the second was four minutes and 47 seconds and the third clip was three minutes and 3 seconds long. Wee had shown the name of the school in the third clipping.”

Personally, I have not seen the video myself as it has been flagged as inappropriate on YouTube. However, I can already draw some conclusions from the news article. They quoted him as saying that, “I think the school wanting to take action against me is a good thing because this will allow more people to get a chance to see the video and understand the issues.”

He claims that the education system in Malaysia is all screwed up for Chinese schools. The example given was for mathematics. The students learn it in Mandarin in primary school, switch over to Malay in secondary school and then switch over to English again at the tertiery level. While I totally agree with his observation, he should not blame the government entirely for the predicament.

At present, Mathematics is taught in English at all levels but there are certain quarters who want to revert the teaching of it back to Mandarin. These quarters claim that it is easier to switch the students over to English at the secondary level while maintaining Mandarin as the language in primary. To these people, I say “hogwash”. If the foundations were built with Mandarin, they would have to play catch up with the rest when they get to secondary school, which isn’t all that easy.

However, I think that NameWee is an idiot. While I think that he is free to comment on a pertinent issue, I vehemently disagree with him using the footage of his school in the video. There is absolutely no reason for him to do so. He can still raise awareness on the issue without naming any specific school. Afterall, this is a national issue, not a specific issue with the teachers in a specific school. This smacks of idiocy to me. I thought that after his Negarakuku saga, he would have learned to put a little more effort into his work.

Not only do I think that it is stupid, I also think that it borders on illegal. Schools are not public grounds where one can freely enter or exit. Moreover, his school is not a public school and I am sure that he has no grounds to use footage of his school in his video. Any person with half a brain should know that you will need to apply for permission from a school before you can shoot footage on their ground. I know because I had done it before in the past.

So, I think that NameWee is an idiot. He hungers for publicity, has to sell his songs through controversy, and has no respect for the law at all. I personally hope that the school sues him for every last sen that he has.