Category: Uncategorized

It has been a while since I watched my last anime so I decided to get something to watch last weekend. I went to the store and as there were sales, I decided to get something that looked faintly interesting – with a nice animation and interesting storyline. In the end, I picked up “Vexille” and it turned out to be a fairly interesting film.

By the 2060s, robotics technology has advanced to the point that cybernetics have become plausible. World opinion begins to turn against robotics, leading to the U.N. declaring a unilateral ban on further research and development in 2067. Japan, being home to robotics pioneer Daiwa Heavy Industries, strongly protests this ban, but is unable to prevent its passage.

In protest, Japan withdraws from international politics. All foreigners are deported, and further immigration is prohibited. In addition, the R.A.C.E. network is constructed – a series of 270 off-shore installations that cover Japan with an energy field that distorts the entire electromagnetic spectrum, nullifying all communication between Japan and the outside world and making even satellite surveillance impossible. Trade continues, but for all intents and purposes, Japan vanishes from the world scene.

2077: A series of bizarre incidents lead the American technology police agency “SWORD” to believe that Japan has used the R.A.C.E network to conceal extensive development of banned technologies. They thus embark on an unapproved scheme to infiltrate Japan and determine the distortion frequency of the R.A.C.E. network, enabling SWORD to gather intelligence on the country . Among those chosen to make the attempt is a veteran agent named Vexille.

Personally, I am starting to grow enamoured by the cell-shading type of computer generated anime that has started to become affordable and popular out of Japan. The only draw back are their human articulation models. Sometimes, the movements just do not seem ‘right’ for some reason. However, this will only improve. Of course, the emotional element needs to be worked on as well but since this is an anime, the cell-shading works to its advantage.

I decided to go watch Tale-n-Time by Yasmin Ahmad, today. Since the cinemas were showing a limited re-screening of the film due to her recent passing, I thought that I should take the opportunity to catch it on the big screen. I fully intend to purchase the DVD at some point to complete my collection. So, I walked up to the box-office and got a ticket for the film. I was rather surprised that there were very few people actually catching the film. I pretty much got to sit wherever I wanted to.

Anyway, Yasmin outdid herself this time. Her films have always been decidedly multi-lingual – because that is just the way things are in Malaysia. In this particular film, there was English, Malay, Tamil, Cantonese, Mandarin and Sign. Yes, that’s right, she even got some of her actors to sign in this one as one of the main characters was ‘speech and hearing impaired’ and did not speak a single line in the entire film.

The message this time has always been the same as the message last time – addressing very key issues pertaining to race relations in Malaysia. Again, there was one pretty pointless scene, which solely existed in order to highlight the issue of race in educational scholarships in Malaysia. Again, cross race and religion love played an important role in the film again. However, she always addresses these issues in a very artistic manner, but it hits you in the face nonetheless.

By the end of the film, I was brought to tears again. Although I found her film very entertaining and funny at times – it whispers to my heart of all the things that most of us Malaysians would have gone through growing up – it still managed to tug at the heart-strings. For that, I have to salute her. She had a clear vision of what it is to be Malaysian and was daring and bold enough to put it on screen. I hope that the people who watch it won’t just dismiss it as a pipe-dream as it is something that we can all truly benefit from.

I should just mention that I loved the way she started and ended the film. I just laughed so loud in the first minute of the film, when I saw them taking an exam. It was so typical of things in school. In fact, her choice of school – Anderson, Ipoh – brought back a lot of memories for me too. I did not attend Anderson but I was in another colonial school as well. These schools were all designed and built in the same way – the windows, doors, hallways, stair-cases and courtyards all brought back sweet memories. Of course, her choice of location – Ipoh – brought back a lot of memories too.

PS: There are some nice tunes in it too! The OST should be good.

There are plenty of rumours circulating around the Internet on how Apple is getting ready to launch a new product – a tablet PC. There are plenty of other companies that have tried and failed to push other tablet products over the years. However, I have this strange feeling that Apple will succeed where others have failed for one simple reason – the user interface. You see, the trouble with tablets in the past have always been its user interface, or rather the lack thereof.

If one has used a tablet in the past, one would be familiar with the difficulty in using it. most computers are designed to be used with a combination of keyboard and mouse. Hence, trying to translate the interface over to a device with neither a keyboard nor mouse was rather difficult. Some tablets made do with a virtual keyboard on screen, with the finger taps approximating mouse clicks. However, this was still deficient. Some tablets made do with some form of hand-writing recognition but this was always slow and regularly inaccurate.

Apple has always been at the fore-front of user interfaces. I have always had a soft-spot for the Apple UI (though there are many peopel who actually hate it). If you have used an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you will know what I mean about slick and smooth touch interfaces. It is for this reason that I think, an Apple tablet makes sense. An Apple tablet with a slick touch interface would be able to do wonders. Think of it as being an iPhone with a larger screen real-estate.

The only issue may be with typing text but I am sure that Apple would be able to figure that one out, given time.

As I have mentioned in an earlier entry, I have been attending this workshop on patents. The main objective of the workshop is to learn strategies and techniques on writing strong patents. Of course, the things that we learned were very interesting, since I have a vested interest in patents – not to write strong ones, but to learn how to break them. The entire course ran for 3.5 days and we were taught many things about patents.

First and foremost, we were taught how to analyse patents. Unsurprisingly, patents are extremely wordy and twisty so that anyone other than lawyers would immediately give up when reading them. Personally, I gave up trying to parse the sentences at first – they seemed to go on forever. However, we were broken into small groups and there were several others around. So, we worked together in trying to decipher what some of these patents actually meant. Once we managed to analyse the patent, it was far easier to understand what something actually did, or claims that it can do.

Then, we learned how to break them, defeat them and design around them. There is a very methodical process in doing this. Once we figured out how to identify the sections that needed breaking and working around, we would be able to come up with thoroughly new ideas and improve upon the existing patent. As a result, we would technically be able to patent this new solution if one did not exist already.

Finally, we learned how to predict the future. There is a very important reason for learning to do this – we wanted to make our patents more difficult to break. In order to do that, one would need to be able to predict trends and then to move our innovation up that line so that we would be able to take on any other future technologies coming our way. As a result, we should theoretically be able to write up a final patent that is strong enough to withstand attacks.

It was during this training that I realised that the only way to break a patent is through the use of FLOSS. Being free, libre and open source alone is insufficient to break a patent. One would also need to out-innovate the competition in order to stay ahead. As long as FLOSS software is one step ahead of the game, it would break the patent’s grip successfully. At one point, one of the participants actually asked the trainer what he thought about an ‘open’ society versus an ‘ip oriented’ one and his reply was pretty interesting.

He basically showed us his last slide, which said that for the next 5-10 years, patents would still play an important role. However, he is seeing a slow but steady decline in the effectiveness of the present patent system. Basically, the present patent system has been thoroughly raped and plundered. Hence, he does not think that the present patent system would survive for much longer. I found this surprising because our trainer was a guy with 400+ patents to his name and making a living off patents. One would think that he would be in support of patents.

He basically said that it was a game that needed to be played for now. But the game is almost up anyway.

PS: He is a fan of William Gibson as well. So, I like him too.

This thought just occurred to me the other day – both my parents are Linux users! My father is mainly an office user. He uses the computer for checking emails, typing documents and preparing spreadsheets. My mother mainly uses the computer for playing games. Regardless, both of them have no complaints with using Linux as the OS simply because it does the job that it is supposed to do, which is more than I can say for some others.

That got me thinking that if grandpa/grandma are capable of doing this, what is stopping anyone else? My parents had no real legacy tied to Windows. While both started using computers with Windows, the things that they were trying to do had absolutely nothing to do with Windows. Of course, having me as their son is useful too.

However, I have to say that I did not have to teach them much. All I taught them to do was where to find the applications that they needed, and how to shut down the machine. That was literally it. I did not have to teach my mother how to play the multitude of games that came with KDE built in. Neither did I have to teach my father how to use OpenOffice. He was already used to using Microsoft Office before this and found the switch pretty simple. I did not even need to set up the printer for them.

All hail the grandma/grandpa OS, the geriatric OS, Linux!

I thought that this was a rather elegant piece of code. So, I thought that I should share this here, lest I forget it later. It exploits a weakness in the language definition in order to produce a piece of code that is somewhat more efficient.


send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
register n=(count+7)/8;
switch(count%8){
case 0: do{ *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
}while(--n>0);
}
}


Once you read it, and understand how it gets translated into assembly, you will soon realise the ingenuity of it all.

I am starting to think that I will definitely need to port a C/C++ compiler over to my own processor. The reason is one of freedom. Constantly relying on other people to write the compilers mean that I am constantly constrained by the existing architectures. I think that I am done learning through copying. I have just started to improve existing architectures. My next step should be to create my own architecture from scratch.

I have been attending a training this week, learning how to attack patents and to develop new IP. It has been an eye-opening experience for me and I really have learned a lot. Some of you may be confused as to why an anti-patent person would be attending such a training. Sun Tzu said, “know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.”

So, after knowing how to design and build the various sub-systems of a processor, and also learning on the various theoretical architectures out there, it is now time for me to build a processor based on my own architecture to fix my own problems. I have some ideas on what features these processors might have. However, I do not know where it will ultimately lead me.

Being in control of the entire stack from hardware, compiler through to operating system and application software would be very useful indeed. It would allow me to explore further than before.