Month: May 2009

I’m copying ad-verbatim from Zubedy’s blog. I certainly think that it makes plenty of sense.

We want a Social Contract that …
1. Sees wrong as wrong and right as right, no matter who did it.
2. No individual or community is left behind regardless of race or geography.
3. We work towards zero poverty – it’s superfluous to have skyscrapers and state of the art structures when there are Malaysians who do not have a place to call home.
4. Recognizes the Malay and indigenous customs form the core culture while the Chinese, Indian and other cultures play strong supportive roles to make our nation a unique and exciting brand.
5. All Malaysian children receive a first rate education, every child is supported and encouraged to achieve his or her maximum potential.
6. Encourages us to practice sustainable development without corruption.
7. Allows us learn and appreciate our own religion while at the same time encourages us to understand the religions practiced by our fellow Malaysians.
8. We help each other in business and transfer knowledge and skills from one community to another.
9. Treats non-Malaysians serving in our nation, Bangladeshis or Europeans; with equality, respect and dignity.
10. Does not introduce racism and division to our children at school or at home.
11. We provide adequate health care for all.
12. We look at our constitution as a whole and not pick and choose out of context to suit an argument.
13. Do unto your Malaysian brothers and sisters as you would like them do unto you.
14. Acknowledges that we are Many Colors, but One Race, Bangsa Malaysia

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!

After spending the last month working on a Windows machine, I have decided to go back to using Linux in the office. If I have to use it under virtualisation, so be it. I have come to understand why trying to do development work on a Windows machine is a joke. Seriously, you won’t understand it until you have actually used Linux for real-world embedded development.

Let us just talk about this from an embedded developer perspective.

One word – Emacs. There are few integrated development environments that are as featured as Emacs. It has everything under the hood and more in its back pocket. Just like a woman, it takes a while to learn all the right moves but once that’s mastered, life will be good. Try comparing Eclipse or the piece-of-shit CodeWarrior that I have to use at work is laughable. While notepad++ shows some promise, it is but an infant compared to Emacs.

Two words – Code management. Windows does not come with any sort of code management system. Therefore, developers have developed a lot of bad habits over the years when it comes to working with code revisions such as the multiple-folder technique. Instead, Linux comes with a host of code management tools from the venerable RCS to the most modern Git. Once you have experienced the beauty that is distributed code management, it is difficult to go back to anything inferior.

Three words – Support Tools and Utilities. When you experience some trouble with some piece of code, you need to have a lot of support to solve it. Windows does not come with anything. For example, when you have some really cryptic C code that you need to understand, there’s always cdecl on Linux and nothing equivalent on Windows. Doxygen is truly a life-saver when it comes to the tedious work of generating mundane documentation, which every engineer hates to do.

Obviously, this just applies to a specific area. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Microsoft’s own developer tools. Unfortunately, those are not universal and are not suitable for use in embedded development. Maybe this is an area that Microsoft should take care of. However, they seem to have little incentive to do so as few embedded systems are bloated enough to run Windows.