Category: Uncategorized

The first thing that happened to me when I reported for work was that I got slapped with transfer orders. I received a memo that told me that I was transferred to another department effective today. This is actually the first that I have been told of the transfer. Nobody told me anything about any transfer and the only inkling that I had that it was happening was that I had heard rumours from others. In fact, when I first returned from my hospitalisation, I was immediately asked why I was getting transferred. I seriously had no idea what was happening.

I was told by my colleagues that it should not have been handled this way. My manager should have spoken to me about this transfer, and the new manager should have come to speak to me about the transfer as well, prior to being transferred. Unfortunately, none of that happened. The only time that I had heard anything official about the transfer was the official memo that I got today from HR. HR finally summoned me to meet them and my former and new bosses after I had already moved my ass into the new department. They are truly screwed up with their procedures. There is no wonder that HR is officially fucked up in every organisation.

Regardless, I followed the orders and packed my stuff and immediately went to report to my new boss. To some other people, my transfer is seen as a good thing. I am still ambivalent about it as I had not requested it. You see, the department that I have been transferred to is the only department that is generating income for the organisation. This is evident the moment I stepped into the office. Each person had at least two monitor screens on their desks – nice big screens too. They also have pretty high end machines each. However, the change in environment is more than just about computers. In fact, I keep hearing people speaking in Mandarin and Cantonese all the time instead. I guess that I have to brush up on my speaking skills soon.

As for my new colleagues, I already knew them before this. In fact, I had already befriended all of them before joining the department. We always seemed to end up in the same team-building and training sessions. So, we have already developed a friendly rapport. In fact, the only person in the department whom I have never met before is my new boss, who is the only unknown quantity. According to most of my colleagues, my new boss is quite a good fellow, with lots of technical knowledge and can actually take criticism. So, we should hopefully have little problems working together.

Hands down the most interesting and entertaining film of the summer. District 9 makes a political statement like non other. I found it slightly disorienting at first but once the show gets under way, there is no holding it back. Although the actors are not common names in the industry, they nonetheless pulled off an impressive show and made the story so believable. District 9 is an alien story with a twist. It shows the dark side of man when it comes to dealing with first contact and extra terrestrials. Fortunately, this is Hollywood and it gives us a feel-good ending at the end. Well, sort of.

District 9 is based on Alive in Joburg, a 2005 short film directed by Blomkamp and produced by Sharlto Copley. Like the short film it’s based on, District 9 takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, and poses analogies to the events that occured during the apartheid system enforced by South African government between 1948 and 1994. The title of the movie is a reference to District Six, a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa, declared a “whites only” area by the apartheid government in 1966, with a population of 60,000 forcibly relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away.

Honestly, I find this film extremely difficult to describe because it is quite unlike your normal Hollywood alien block-buster. Just go watch it!

I recently came across this article on 7 bad signs that you should not work for a company, mainly applying to software companies.

1. No source control
2. No top tools or only home brewed ones
3. No business model or not enough money
4. They don’t let you talk to or see developers
5. High turnover
6. Hiring is mainly done by HR, not by developers/technical staff
7. No decent hardware

I do not know whether to laugh or cry. I think that I’ll just laugh it off then. Ha!

And the rumours are finally confirmed! The PS3 slim is coming out on Sept 1 for a cheap price of $299! Yeay! The reason that I am celebrating is because this price drop will finally put the PS3 in direct competition with the other best selling console, the Wii. It will also finally put the PS3 into a price-range that I can justify spending on without justifying my spending. Here’s me hoping that the price will translate directly into RM1049 or something in that range (currently retails for RM1599 everywhere).

I love it. This means that I will finally be able to play GTA4 and Fallout3 in all its glory. Plus, I already have my HDTV. So, I can safely go and buy myself a PS3 once it is out!

Found it, loved it! Sharing it…

There are some rumblings within cabinet walls on dropping the required ‘third field’ that every Malaysian has to fill on every form in the country, regardless of its use – the question of race. The rumblings say that the government will consider dropping the field from official forms except where the issue of bumiputra status comes into being. While I think that the question should be dropped entirely, this is at least a step in the right direction.

In the UK, they ask for ethnicity profiling on many forms as well. However, these are invariably disclaimed as merely for statistical purposes and can be filled or not by the applicant. Even if the applicant chooses to respond to the survey, they are free to submit it anonymously as well. In Malaysia, we do not have this choice as we have to pick a side when filling any sort of official form.

You see, the government has nothing to lose by dropping the question. On the public side, people will see a visible change in the forms and interpret this as a subtle shift in government policy. On the government side, nothing needs to change as people can continue to be profiled by race. You see, it is far to easy to sort out most Malaysians from the way we look and from our names itself.

I have been playing around with the issue of race on official forms since coming home. I have tried filling all kinds of things into the field and ultimately, the person who is entering my information from a form into a computer database, inevitably selects ‘Cina’ as the field. This has happened in banks and also at government offices. I am invariably listed as a ‘Chinese’ in all the official documentation regardless of what I chose to fill into the form.

So, the government truly has nothing to lose and can gain a little PR victory. They would be able to earn some brownie points with the rakyat and use this in whatever campaigning that they do.

Once in a while, I come across someone who wonders why I have such an interest in working with microprocessors. Often, these people would tell me that microprocessors are already a commodity and there is no value in working with microprocessors anymore. Whenever I hear this, I just smile and walk away. There is no reason to argue with people who do not understand microprocessors and what they actually do.

Microprocessors are definitely a commodity today, but only specific kinds of microprocessors with no applications – the venerable general purpose microprocessors. You can license, buy and get various architectures that will happily solve your problems until you actually try to solve some really cumbersome real-world problems and realise that your microprocessor lacks the computational power to do it.

There are still two diverging areas for microprocessors to evolve through.

One, microprocessors can evolve vertically to become more and more application specific. We already see that happening in the evolution of DSPs and other multi-media processors. However, these are basically specialised architectures of generic processors that turn them into much better number crunchers than commodity processors. In fact, most commodity processors have such ‘extensions’ built into them. Extrapolate this and you will see that as the market evolves, processors will also evolve to cater to more and more application specific uses.

Two, microprocessors can evolve horizontally to embrace more esoteric architectures in order to better model and solve real-world problems. In fact, commodity processors are very bad at solving a lot of real-world problems. Once you do anything more complicated than adding two numbers together, things start to fall apart. In fact, you can think of commodity processors as simple adding machines. Take the example of solving systems of partial differential equations, for example. Present day computer technology is particularly bad at solving these problems.

Furthermore, I am not even going into those computational realms of biological and quantum processors at all. Once those areas open up, things are going to get really hairy. So, anyone who thinks that microprocessors are dead, obviously do not know a thing about microprocessors. They are far from dead and there is still plenty of room to evolve and innovate.