Category: Uncategorized

According to Wikipedia:

Wayang Kulit is a very unique form of theatre employing the principle of light and shadow. The puppets are crafted from buffalo hide and mounted on bamboo sticks. When held up behind a piece of white cloth, with an electric bulb or an oil lamp as the light source, shadows are cast on the screen.

Wayang Kulit plays are invariably based on romantic tales, especially adaptations of the classic Indian epics, “The Mahabarata” and “The Ramayana”. Some of the plays are also based on local happenings (current issues) or other local secular stories. It is up to the conductor or “Tok Dalang” to decide his direction.

The Dalang is the genius behind the entire performance. It is he who sits behind the screen and narrates the story. With a traditional orchestra in the background to provide a resonant melody and its conventional rhythm, the Dalang modulates his voice to create suspense thus heightening the drama. Invariably, the play climaxes with the triumph of good over evil.

The modern wayang kulit is actually quite elaborate, but it still sticks to its historical roots. It is still a form of theatre and a platform for story-telling. The electric bulb or oil lamp has been replaced with the technology of rear-projection screens like that used in the Smart Board 3000i. Instead of having a shadow play, we now have Powerpoint slides and Flash animation. Instead of having puppets made of skin, we now have life-sized skin puppets on a string.

However, the Dalang is still the genius behind the entire performance and his job is to sell vapourware hopes and dreams.

A submarine that cannot dive. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Only in Malaysia, does our navy end up buying a submarine that cannot dive. This problem developed due to some broken parts but there is a much deeper issue at hand. If such a new submarine is built with such shoddy workmanship that it is unable to perform its primary function, which is to manoeuvre under-water, one must wonder what other problems it may be hiding.

Maybe, once we try to actually fire something, we will discover that the torpedo bays do not flood, nor do the torpedoes actually work. Maybe if we try to use the periscope, we will find it short-sighted and unable to see anything beyond its bow. This seems to be endemic of a lot of things that we do in Malaysia, which is sort of a wayang kulit that looks and sounds extremely nice but lacks any real substance.

The crowning jewel of our Royal Malaysian Navy and carrying the proud name of our founding father, has trouble diving.

Here’s me guessing that our neighbour’s submarine will be able to dive.

I recently bought a bunch of bluray films, including Speed Racer. I decided to buy that film on bluray because I thought that it would be a perfect show case for high-definition. The film was nothing but colours and special effects. I started watching it and then I got a shock. There was a lot of detail in the film. Not only were the nasal hairs of Royalton rendered clearly, I could even see the bits of boogers stuck to them!

Now, I can understand why the porn industry has been generally staying away from high-definition videos. There is just so much detail in them, more than the normal eye can see. So, someone needs to be really careful and meticulous about their looks in order to look good in them. I can see future make-up artists being sent for special hi-def make-up classes to learn how to cover-up more of their clients’ flaws.

If anyone is curious, the list of blurays that I had recently bought – Moon, District 9, Terminator Salvation, Ironman, 300, Pan’s Labyrinth, Speed Racer, Matrix Trilogy, Wall-E, Final Fantasy Advent Children, District B13/Ultimate and Planet Earth. So, I have now a small collection of bluray films on top of my PS3 games.

I find it interesting that companies have race too in Malaysia. While there is officially a classification of bumiputra contractors by the government, this is the first time that I found out that there are such things as ‘Malay’ contractors. According to TheStar, Penang’s Chief Minister, Lim Guan Eng, said that, “of 66 state government projects in the past two years, 44 projects worth RM68mil were given to Malay contractors.”.

I’m not trying to be pedantic here but, I wonder if he used the accurate term for it. If they are actually bumiputra contractors classified by the government, he should just use the appropriate term. I have never heard of a ‘Malay’ contractor. Of course, I could very well be wrong about this since I am not directly involved with such things. I wonder if we will ever get Chinese contractors or Indian contractors too. Actually, I think we do and they are all foreign companies!

Google’s Super Bowl ad. Sweet.

I’m writing this blog entry to let others know what to do if they are ever annoyed by the red-tinted address bar that you get in IE8 when you try to visit a secure SSL website using a self-signed certificate. This is quite common in development environments. The straightforward thing to do, that every developer knows, is to import the certificate into a trusted store, but for some unfathomable reason this is not so simple with IE8. Maybe it is not so unfathomable – Windows sucks as a development environment and assumes that all its users are idiots.

The catch in IE8 is that you cannot let IE8 decide where to store the certificate. You need to manually tell IE8, during the certificate import process, to put the certificate into the Trusted Root Certificate Authority Store. Once you do this, you will be able to see the certificate in the correct store – the annoying red-tinted address bar will disappear and a nice lock will appear instead.

But the most important thing is to never develop a browser specific application that cannot run in any other browser other than IE. If you do that your application is already broken even before it is ever used. There is no reason to stick with IE only because that just demonstrates your lack of insight into web development.

Frak it – idiocy is indiscriminate.

PS: I do not understand why I need to make infrastructural changes in order to support a wayang kulit – changes that will end up breaking a lot of things and require a lot of time to verify and then more time to undo.

Okay, I will say this. While Battlestar Galactica was a dreary, dark and damning examination of our times, its prequel – Caprica – is consciously and consistently creepy. They have started screening it recently and I have had the fortune of catching some of the early episodes. Let’s just say that I am totally looking forward to buying the blu-ray set when it comes out in the future. The acting is much better than that on Galactica and the story is creepy. Even the opening title is creepy. Creepy.

Alright, I won’t give too much away but I think that the makers of Caprica will score another big hit with this one. It is not just the story writing but even the way that the scenes are framed just gives me the chills. I am sure that as the series unfolds, they will find even more ways to creep me out. And don’t even get me started on the music. It makes copious use of the traditional drumbeats that we had on Galactica, but in a far creepier way. I think that it is trying to tell us that the beautiful life on the 12 colonies is coming to a tragic end.

This already ensures that I will be looking forward to new episodes whenever chance presents itself. I’ve been really busy recently.