Month: March 2010

Malaysia’s largest ISP – TMNet – has just launched the much awaited High-speed Broadband (HSBB) services in Malaysia. These include things like fibre-to-the-home technology that allows one to have a very high speed connection to the Internet. The initial packages have been announced to be 5Mbps@RM149, 10Mbps@RM199 and 20Mbps@RM249.

But wait, there is a catch – a really big one.

One might think that having such a high speed is excellent for streaming videos off the Internet. I can certainly imagine myself watching more YouTube and TED videos. It would also be excellent for downloading games such as from the PlayStation Network and other online stores. However, it’s all wishful thinking on our parts.

Our national ISP has decided to screw its HSBB customers in the behind by imposing a cap.

The whole idea of having a high-speed broadband service is to bring information into the home. I’m sure that it was the main thrust of the programme drafted out by our government. By bringing the Internet into more households in Malaysia (50% penetration target), we would be able to bring knowledge right into the door-steps and our kids would be able to get the best exposure to all kinds of information around the world.

But our dreams have been crushed.

With a 60GB cap a month for the 5Mbps line, it essentially works out to be 2GB per day. Now, if we were truly utilising the 5Mbps bandwidth, we would hit the cap with just 53 minutes of downloading a day. Think about that for a minute. You may think that this is actually quite fair but you are assuming that there is only one person using the internet per household.

Let us think of a typical scenario, of a unit family with two parents and two kids. The boy wants to download and play the latest games, the girl wants to watch her favourite series on YouTube, the parents want to use the Internet to shop, work and for business. Consider also for a moment that YouTube videos are already in the process of being streamed in high-definition. The games played online already incorporate voice and some video team-play. Our online applications are becoming ever more flash-based which sucks up bandwidth.

This means that the caps are useless.

We may have a big pipe coming into the houses, but our water is being rationed. One wonders, what is the point of having the big pipes and what did the taxpayers actually pay for. I am so not excited about this development.

PS: You get more download with a 1Mbps ADSL subscription. If you saturate your ADSL, you can actually download 10GB of data per day, with no cap.

Wow, they actually bothered to give us a letter of appreciation! Nice! I’ll definitely volunteer again next year!

I learned something interesting today – if you have to choose between transferring files between two machines via a flash drive or a gigabit network, choose the latter. The transfer speeds are blazingly fast on a gigabit network. I managed to move a bunch of DVD isos across the network at speeds of about 250Mbps. Flash drives generally transfer at a tenth of the speed.

Oh yes, I’m playing with a bunch of servers at work these days – ones that cost the price of a car and sound like jet planes taking off whenever they are powered up. Vrroooom!

Honestly, does anyone really care anymore? I was having lunch over the weekend with a bunch of elder men, one of whom actually works for an MCA owned organisation. Obviously, the topic of the MCA ‘crisis’ came up and I think that the general consensus is that MCA is going to be wiped out in the next election.

On my part, I realised that I had stopped caring about what happened to the MCA a long time ago.

The current political sandiwara within the MCA just goes to show how dead they have become to the needs of the people. They are so caught up with their internal in-fighting that they have lost sight of the larger picture. The window of opportunity is gone, where the MCA could have used their status as the ‘sole representative’ of the Chinese community within BN to do more after Gerakan got wiped out. Strong leadership was needed but none was forthcoming.

I ask myself about what would happen at the end of the month – after their new elections. Personally, I feel that regardless of whom gets elected as President, the sandiwara will continue as people jostle for power. The thing is, the pie has gotten smaller but instead of fighting for a larger slice, the MCA is killing each other for scraps. I really have to respect the one who thought up this stratagem. I am sure that there are people watching the fires burning across the river even as we speak.

I think that the Chinese community has largely abandoned the MCA, particularly the young. We all see that a multi-ethnic solution is the only answer to our problems in Malaysia. The only ones who remain glued to the MCA are likely the ones whose livelihoods depend on the gravy train from the MCA. However, when the gravy flow begins to slow, these people will quickly drown.

Personally, I think that the MCA needs to be put to an end. They have done their part in the past and contributed to the growth and stability of our nation. However, they have been unable to adapt to the changing ways and are stuck in the past. They need to go away for a while, and make room for others. If they manage to sort out their problems, they can still be a force to reckon with in the future. But that is just wishful thinking.

As I mentioned earlier, I got appointed as a judge for the Malaysia FLL Open Championship. It is a LEGO robotics competition for kids between ages 9-16 and it is an open championship, meaning that there is only one category of competition and everyone competes for that one category. The overall champions will earn the privilege of representing Malaysia at the international championships in Atlanta as well as KaoHsiung.

The competition was judged in four different areas – presentation, robot design, teamwork and mission. I volunteered for the technical robot design judging and it turned out to be very interesting. I did not see the presentation judging but was told that it was less interesting. However, the mission judging was a blast and I managed to capture a lot of photos of that.

One thing that I observed during the judging was that there is a definite gap between the good schools and the normal schools in our country. Some of the schools that joined the FLL competition were well known to me while others were just regular schools. For the out-standing schools, you could see that they came very well prepared, even for the technical judging. They were clearly presented their robot designs, highlighting the rational behind every design decision and demoed their robots successfully like clockwork.

There was also a marked difference between the presentation styles of national schools versus chinese schools. While they both came well prepared, the national school presentations tended to be a bit more professional and personal while the chinese school presentations were more rigid and drill like. Regardless, I was very impressed with them as it was clear that the students had all put in a lot of effort into preparing for the competition, down to the clothes that they would wear – one team was dressed in Death Note t-shirts!

Although the students worked in groups, the division of labour was largely gender specific. The boys largely worked on the LEGO robots while the girls took care of the presentations. Moreover, the ones in charge of the programming were visibly geeks – they all had that look to them. I think that this was a bit of a shame as I think that the girls have some really good robot designs too, especially those from some of our best girl schools like TKC. I would have liked to see more female participation in the engineering aspects but I guess that the boys would just bully the girls away.

Unfortunately for most of the primary schools, the students were largely out of their league. This was reflected in the overall results with a large number of primary schools in the lower half. Most of the time, the students just stood there unsure of what to do and it was up to us as judges to prod and probe them in order to wean the answers out of them. We tried our best to help them as it was all about good clean fun. As long as the kids had some fun playing with the LEGO robots, it was all good.

That said, I should mention that our overall champion is a primary school – SRJKC Jalan Davidson. They also had the largest number of supporters present including a mascot dressed up as a Knight, a drummer and a bugler in addition to a couple of dozen kids and parents. In addition, the gutsiest school was also another primary school – one from Sri Petaling. They were the only ones to attempt a bridge crossing and they managed to successfully park their robot at the end of the bridge each time. SMKDJ brought along some of their cheer-leaders who danced, did cart-wheels and climbed on top of each other to entertain the crowd.

I was very impressed with the team from SMK Bintulu as their robot exhibited some fairly industrial practices. I asked them who their sponsors were and it turned out that they were sponsored by some mechanical engineering company – which was pretty evident from their robot. They did well too, and became overall runners-up. At least it their trip here was worth it. Personally, I think that I will like to sponsor a team myself, if I ever have the funds to do it. It is good clean fun and it inculcates an interest for engineering in the kids.

In the end, I had a lot of fun and will definitely support the FLL thing again next year. In the mean-time, I have our National Robotics Championships to look forward too.

I was recently asked to talk about my project at work to a bunch of guys who were going to use it. During part of this presentation, I mentioned that we can use a temporary unique identifier to identify something. I suggested using a UUID. Only one of the audience, a certain Dr from a certain national body of higher education, asked me for an example of UUIDs. So, I told him that they are random numbers, usually 128-bits in length.

Then, he asked me for an example of a 128-bit random number…

I think that I must have given him ‘the look’ as another member of the audience, a certain contractor who works with us, stepped in and mentioned that they need not use UUIDs but can use anything they want including any sort of random number. I looked at him, smiled and said that he was correct.

Seriously, this certain Dr has been giving me a lot of doubts about his credentials recently. However, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt as I did not know his background. He could be a PhD in English Literature for all I know. Even if he was a PhD in IT, it could still be something random like e-commerce instead of something technical like security.

As a result, I decided to check him out using my dear friend, Google. Turns out that he was doing a PhD in computer graphics and such, more than a decade ago. So, this person should have easily understood the meaning of a 128-bit random number and not ask me for examples of what UUIDs are.

So, it makes me wonder what this person is trying to do. He asked me not to be so negative the other day and I corrected him. I am not the one who is negative. I am absolutely positive even if I may be on a short fuse. He can ask me to relax a bit and not so stressed up but I am most certainly not negative.

I guess that he is not an English major after all.

I came out of a 2-hour meeting today, thoroughly exhausted. The reason being that I was doing the talking for most of the two hours non-stop. I was told to give a short half-hour presentation thing, the same one that I have been giving to a number of other groups. It usually involves me talking for about 5-15 minutes and then a short discussion for about 15-30 minutes or so. I have done this a number of times and it is not an issue.

However, I have also done this talk with this group of people for a number of times – each round dragging on longer than the last.This 2-hour meeting must be a record somewhere. Even our CTO commented that their budget meetings dealing with billions, do not take as long as our little problem. The problem is that some people are either too dumb or too lazy to do their work. I sincerely hope that it is the latter.

After about 90 minutes, I was seriously exhausted. So, I told everyone in the room and apologised because I may start blabbering away since my brains were already mush. But the meeting wasn’t a whole waste. I ended up drawing three fairly nice diagrams. I really liked one of them.

I have spent more than 12 years of my life teaching. I have taught all kinds of students including some really bad apples. Many hundreds of students have passed through my hands. However, this is the first time that I have had to face this brand of stupidity.

I have always said – I do not suffer fools.