Category: Uncategorized

According to Jeri Ryan:

It’s not a game trailer. Actually was made for the director to sell WB on his vision for a reimagined MK film.

Friggin’ hilarious!

And our annual post-SPM drama continues. A dejected parent wrote a letter to Malaysia-Today to complain about how his/her son was denied a JPA scholarship even with excellent results. I do not want to be a bastard and I know that every parent honestly believes that their child is the greatest. However, after reading the child’s achievement and knowing many JPA scholars in my life, I have to say that I find the child wanting.

Disclaimer: I do not know the actual person and all I know is gleaned from the letter.

The parent should understand that every person who applies for JPA scholarship already has excellent academic results – that is a given. This is primarily due to the fact that there are many thousands of students with top results in our country while there are only about two thousand JPA scholarships distributed across all disciplines and countries. So, something like dentistry would probably not account for very many scholarships.

Therefore, in order for scholarship applications to stand out there has to be something extra about the applicant, other than their excellent academic results. The letter claims that the child won a “VIJAYA SHANKAR PARAMSOTHY” Trophy, which seems to be an internal school award (as opposed to the Fulbright scholarship of the same name). While I do not want to underplay the child’s achievements, I am not certain if this would be something that immediately jumps out at the person reviewing the application.

I do not want to sound condescending but I have had this same conversation with other top scholars before. If you are fighting for a scarce resource, you really need to have something extra to help push you to the top of the pile.

That said, the JPA scholarship is not the be all end all of the child’s life.

Never was much of a fan of Harry Potter – but certainly one of Emma Watson!

Came across this yesterday and I have to say – it’s quite good!

Pada permulaannya, kita tinggal di sebuah negara yang kaya dan aman

Akan tetapi, segelintir orang telah menyalahgunakan sumber alam tanahair ini dan merampas tanah anda

Semua sumber alam telah dirampas oleh kroni-kroni mereka

Ini telah menyebabkan kehidupan anda menjadi semakin susah

Rasuah, penyalahgunaan kuasa, persubahatan kerajaan dan ahli perniagaan

Mereka tidak akan berasa simpati terhadap anda, mereka tidak akan mendengar rayuan anda

Bila menjelang pilihan raya, mereka akan memberi anda sedikit faedah

Bila telah dapat sokongan anda, mereka akan bertindak seperti dahulu dan tidak akan mengenang jasa

Akhirnya, mereka mahu anda menampung kehidupan mewah mereka

Kita boleh membawa perubahan.

Sibu, Jom Ubah!

For the first time in my life – I got to see fireflies. They were quite a sight to behold. Blinking in synchrony, they light up the mangrove like Christmas lights. I was quite impressed. Being an electrical engineer, I like the whole concept of bio-luminescence. One problem that we face today is that electricity needs to be supplied. It would be great if electricity could be autonomously generated by our bodies and used to power devices.

Our civilisation is tethered down to sources of energy. Without electricity, life as we know it in most of the developed world would stall to a halt. While we have made some progress in the realm of wireless power transmission, it is still not easy to accomplish. Furthermore, radiation losses would make wireless power transmission a lossy power source.

While the bunch of us were at Kuala Selangor, we went up to visit the lighthouse as well. I cannot remember if we ever learned it in school, but even if we did, I did not know that we had a lighthouse there. It was interesting to see a tower with lights rotating and signaling the ships to stay away. It was on top of Bukit Melawati, just by the coast.

We also went for some cheap and tasty sea food of course. Over dinner, we were entertained with speeches by various local representatives of the Selangor government. They had organised a dinner at the same restaurant for senior citizens from a number of nearby villages. It was my first time at these dinners and I was quite surprised with the kinds of rhetoric being spouted.

Anyway, yesterday was a really beneficial evening for me. I learned a number of new and interesting things.

Wow!

(I couldn’t sleep and it is almost 3am)

While randomly surfing the Internet and vainly googling my name, I came across some random Chinese sites. Since I don’t have a Chinese presence, I wondered what it was all about. Clicking on it turned out to be an interesting surprise. It seems that some diligent Chinese students decided to build a System-on-Chip (SoC) using my processor and ported a popular Real-Time-Operating-System (RTOS) to it! They even published an academic paper early this year to prove it. It was even reported in the local Chinese media.

So, now instead of just having the capability to boot Linux, my littlest processor that could is also capable of booting uC/OS-II (a popular commercial RTOS). I’m seriously proud of its accomplishments. Honestly, I don’t think that there is any reason that it won’t boot any other operating system as long as someone bothers to port it.

It’s just too bad that my Chinese is a little rusty. I can sort of make out what it says but I will try to get someone to do a proper translation of it for me instead. I can roughly understand that they chose my processor because it is Open Source and useful for research. There are other popular Open Source microprocessors out there and I wonder what made them choose mine. I wonder if it was because of the good real-time characteristics of my processor. I actually designed that as a feature – to provide good real-time support.

So, what have I learned from this paper – that the AEMB is now in China in addition to the US and EU; that the AEMB is capable of running an RTOS – uC/OS-II easily; that the AEMB has been implemented on Altera FPGA.

PS: I wonder if this counts as a citation. They did list me in the references section of their paper. I doubt that my present employer would care.