Category: Uncategorized

I loved the anime. So, when I found out that the film was out, I decided to go watch it tonite. I didn’t expect too much because these game/anime/book migrations tend to suck. Well, this one didn’t suck that much. I have actually seen far worst films in the cinema. In fact, I actually found it fairly enjoyable overall. However, I do have a few tiffs with the film.

Firstly, they have successfully ruined the image of the lead actress, Jun Ji-Hyun (from My Sassy Girl). What’s up with the name “Gianna Jun” anyway? I guess that they were afriad that the English speaking crowd would have trouble saying her name. Plus, she’s always been famous for her strong (but quirky and emotionally damaged) characters on-screen. But this time, she plays a monster slaying vampire who just seems constantly pissed off at the world. Ruined!

Secondly, the language. They have lots of issues with accents. I found it very funny that Ji-Hyun (aka Gianna) spoke Japanese with a Korean accent. You can definitely tell that she doesn’t speak Japanese fluently. At one point in her dialogue, I had totally expected her to finish off the sentence with ham-ni-da. Then, they got the Japanese supporting-actress to speak in accented English instead, even while she was at an on-sen. Again, the dialogue did not flow smoothly for her either.

However, the biggest problem with the film is the local film censors. These days, they have upgraded their method of slicing off bits of the film that are controversial. They will vary the frame-rate around the point that needs to be cut-off. As a result, the audio still runs smoothly but the visuals seem to speed-up and slow-down randomly. You may actually think that this was an intended special effect. I doubt that it is though. There’s actually more blood in the trailer than in our Malaysian sliced up version of the film!

I wonder what other ideas are the western film-makers going to rip-off the Japanese. Another Production I.G. anime – Ghost in the Shell – would make an excellent story, as long as they don’t ruin it with bad acting and a horrible script.

I spent most of the last week, setting up and configuring a bunch of virtual servers using OpenVZ. I had a need to do some server maintenance at home and I thought it was a good time to experiment with a little virtualisation. Considering the fact that I only had low-powered VIA boards to work with, my virtualisation options were quite limited. I was not going to be able to run anything like KVM or even Xen. So, my only option was to go with either OpenVZ or VServer.

These virtualisation solutions are considered ‘light-weight’ ones. They are similar to BSD Jails and Solaris Containers. They are not the same as VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMWare or Xen. They run using one single OS kernel and share the machine resources and hardware in a more transparent manner. According to the websites, each solution only adds about a 1%-3% overhead to a regular server.

I finally went with OpenVZ and installed it on a server with only 256Mb of RAM and a 533MHz processor. This is more than enough to run OpenVZ (according to its minimum requirements). Everything proceeded quite smoothly except for a couple of things and I thought that I should note them down here because it was not easy getting the information from the Internet.

Firstly, I could not use the stock OpenVZ kernel that came with Debian Lenny. It was a 686 kernel but the VIA processor that I was using did not have the CMOV instruction. I tried compiling my own kernel several times but had problems. So, instead of wasting my time, I just downloaded an older 486 kernel for Debian Etch. This worked without any problems and is, by far, the easiest way of getting OpenVZ to run on older platforms.

Secondly, after getting things up and running, I wanted to tweak each server’s private resources. Unfortunately, the OpenVZ came with only two sample configuration files and had lots of arcane formulas that are needed to work out the parameters. So, I started tweaking around but never seemed to get things right. Looking on the Internet didn’t help and it seemed that there were few example config files available for OpenVZ.

Then, I finally read the documentation and found out that I could generate a custom configuration based on my own server using vzsplit, which is a utility that came with OpenVZ. So, I ended up generating a config suitable for running about 12 virtual servers on my low-powered VIA machine. That got things to work splendidly.

I managed to learn a few new things about Linux from setting up and observing these virtual servers run. I finally got to monitor the boot-up process in real-time.

The beauty of having this system set up is that I can now freely experiment with new software. All I needed to do is to create a new virtual server, test things out. Once done, I could just wipe out the virtual server. Furthermore, I could migrate these virtual servers from one host server onto another. This will mean that I would lose minimal down-time if I ever need to upgrade the server. All this will definitely come in handy in the future.

Virtualisation is the way to go if you need to administer stuff in a manageable way.

Another step closer to a Star Trek technology. The title of the paper says it all – “The interaction of a flowing plasma with a dipole magnetic field: measurements and modelling of a diamagnetic cavity relevant to spacecraft protection.”

From the website:

Here we describe a new experiment to test the shielding concept of a dipole-like magnetic field and plasma, surrounding a spacecraft forming a “mini magnetosphere”. Initial laboratory experiments have been conducted to determine the effectiveness of a magnetized plasma barrier to be able to expel an impacting, low beta, supersonic flowing energetic plasma representing the Solar Wind. Optical and Langmuir probe data of the plasma density, the plasma flow velocity, and the intensity of the dipole field clearly show the creation of a narrow transport barrier region and diamagnetic cavity virtually devoid of energetic plasma particles. This demonstrates the potential viability of being able to create a small “hole” in a Solar Wind plasma, of the order of the ion Larmor orbit width, in which an inhabited spacecraft could reside in relative safety. The experimental results have been quantitatively compared to a 3D particle-in-cell ‘hybrid’ code simulation that uses kinetic ions and fluid electrons, showing good qualitative agreement and excellent quantitative agreement. Together the results demonstrate the pivotal role of particle kinetics in determining generic plasma transport barriers.

I’m not quite sure if most Malaysians know about this, but you can actually have vernacular language classes in national schools (SK). I have a feeling that most people do not know how to go about having these POL classes (as they are called) run in their own schools. The actual requirements are actually fairly simple and most parents should actually get this done in the national schools if they wish to have the vernacular languages taught to their kids.

The most basic requirement is demand. There needs to be at least 14-15 children who wish to have the POL classes. This means that the parents could collect signatures or it would be far easier to raise this issue during the PTA meetings and have it officially voted on. The request can then be forwarded to the school principal and the district education department for action. What is usually done is that a teacher from a SJK would then be hired to teach these POL classes.

These POL classes are usually held on Fridays, between the hours of 12.30pm to 2.30pm. So, students from both morning and afternoon sessions would be able to attend. However, I believe that it is also possible to schedule these classes on Saturdays as well. Either way, the teacher from the SJK would come to the school and teach the lessons during these times.

This is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved.

The teachers get paid an additional allowance for teaching these POL classes. The students get to have an additional 2-hours per week of a third language. The school gets to provide an additional service for the community. The parents can have their children learn a third language. I don’t see how this could be a lose for anyone.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if this is being done in most schools. I have a feeling that most parents do not even know that they can get POL classes in national schools. Even if they do know that such things are possible, they may not know how to go about requesting for it either.

I know that my nephew has it in his school. Not sure about the rest though.

According to a recent article, Intel wishes to enter the smart-phone market, which has so far been a mainly ARM market. The article correctly points out that the Intel Atom currently consumes too much power (a few Watts) as compared to ARM processors (under 100mW). So, from a technical stand-point, there is still a significant barrier to cross.

However, Intel has always been a chip-fab in disguise as a microprocessor company. So, I won’t be surprised if they managed to use their fabrication prowess to come up with an Atom that approaches the power envelope of an ARM processor. According to the article, Intel is targeting to push down its Atom power envelope around 50 times by 2011. Assuming that the surrounding hardware of both platforms are the same, then Intel will be in the right power envelope to mount a competition.

However, I’m not quite sure if they will succeed.

You see, the strength of ARM isn’t that they are very power efficient. There are plenty of power efficient RISC processors out there and the newest Cortex ARMs do suck quite a bit of power. I believe that their strength lies in their licensing. You see, you cannot buy ARM processors from ARM simply because ARM does not make any ARM processors. ARM’s business model works by having them license out their processor designs to other companies for manufacture and sale.

You can buy ARM processors from a number of different companies, such as Motorola, TI, Samsung and even, once upon a time, Intel (before they sold off their ARM division to Marvel). Therefore, in order for Intel to penetrate the smart-phone market, it would have to out-sell a bunch of other major chip companies, who will very likely gang up of Intel to keep them out.

Hence, this no longer becomes a question of technology. It’s a question of cost.

While Intel may be able to produce a low-power Atom, it could only feasibly do so using very specialised and bleeding edge manufacturing processes. However, the rest of the chip companies can produce an equivalent ARM using yesterday’s technology. This means that it will always cost more to produce an Atom than an equivalent ARM.

Additionally, a mobile phone company would be able to buy an ARM processor from any number of ARM licensees. Hence, there is market competition for price. If one vendor doesn’t give you a part at a price-point that you are looking for, just call up another vendor. It will be nigh impossible for you to buy an Intel processor from anyone other than Intel. So, there is less choice and competition.

Moreover, since ARM merely licenses out its core, there is also more innovation in the System-on-chip market. Each vendor is free to throw in any number of components around the ARM in order to produce highly cost-efficient and compact chips. For example, TI produces the OMAP platform, which marries an ARM core with their own DSP cores provide a boost in multi-media processing.

So, I don’t see how this could translate into a win for Intel. I’m not Intel bashing here.

Ultimately, in the real-world of design and manufacturing, you will want whichever part is cheaper. In this sense, ARM has the numbers on its side. Furthermore, Intel would need to take on not just one company, but a whole armada of large chip companies if it wishes to push ARM out of the market. Unless it has some way of subverting enough of them, it is unlikely to succeed.

There is one possible way though – Intel licensing out the Atom core. That will open up a whole other can of worms for them, but that may be the only way for Intel to compete directly against ARM.

I was browsing at Digital Mall, Section 14, yesterday when I saw the Aspire Revo sitting quietly in the corner. I jumped when I saw it. I thought that it would’ve taken them longer to actually bring this new product to Malaysia. Wonderfully, it is now available in Malaysia for a cheap price of RM1399 (about $399). So, I managed to get my paws on it to admire its design.

It is obviously made for the HTPC market. In fact, it is advertised just as much. Also, it even comes with a TV-mount so that you can attach the Revo to the back of any VESA compatible screen-mount, which includes all wall-mountable televisions and monitors. It also comes with a set of wireless keyboard and mouse. The way that it was designed is obvious that even when mounted at the back, the important slots and ports are easily reached.

Unfortunately, it comes bundled with Windows, which is dumb. It didn’t even come with the Media-Centre Edition but came with the Home Edition instead. According to the Internet, there is a Linux version that comes with an 8Gb SSD instead for much much less (RM800). However, it seems that they would not be carrying that in Malaysia seeing that we’re a bunch of dumb jocks who do not know how to use anything other than Windows.

For its price, it comes pretty full featured. It is based on the NVIDIA ION platform, which as a 9400GM graphics chip paired with an Atom 230 processor. It comes with 2Gb of RAM and a 160Gb hard-disk. It also has 802.11b/g/n wireless for streaming movies off a network. It has a multi-card reader for reading all the digital photos from my DSLR. As mentioned, it comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Plus, it is low-power with only a 65W power supply.

As for the performance, I was not able to try it out exactly. However, I did manage to find this video on Youtube, of the Revo running XBMC Live and playing back a 1080p video. It is capable of HDMI audio and video. This baby rocks! It will most definitely be the platform for my HTPC. Now, I’ll need to shop around a bit for better prices in other stores.

PS: It is easy to take apart and infinitely hackable too. I intend to do just that when I get one. Dissect it and take out what I don’t need (such as the hard-disk) and adding some other things that I want (like an SSD).

Oh my goodness! Taking everything at face-value, Apple has just dropped the equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb into the mobile phone market. The Apple iPhone is now available at a very cheap price of just $99 (RM350). This will be so disruptive on so very many fronts.

Firstly, in the traditional mobile phone market. Most new entry level phones are priced at around RM300 or so. This is true of all brands from Nokia to LG. The only phones priced below this price-point are really basic phones for the cost conscious who do not really need any functions in their phones. However, at $99, the iPhone is set to disrupt this entire market segment.

Every other phone maker would need to respond. Otherwise, they risk losing all their market-share to Apple. Normal users would now be faced with the decision of getting a well-designed, sexy and cheap iPhone or a sadly-designed decidedly-stoic looking entry level phone from any other company. Power users would be faced with the decision of shelling out $500 for a power hungry smart-phone or $99 for an Apple device. I’m sure that the other handset makers are cursing Apple for doing this.

Seriously disruptive.

Secondly, this will open up the Apple phone for more than just uses as a mobile/smart-phone. I can now imagine the iPhone as the platform of choice for legions of developers. With the kind of features that the iPhone has at $99, you can imagine building all sorts of applications around the iPhone base platform. I can certainly imagine quite a number of non-phone related uses for a $99 phone.

I’m talking about opening up new markets. If apple moves to provide documentation and development kits based off the iPhone, we can expect to see a flood of new tools that are built on the iPhone – things that we have not even begun to imagine. It will move technology away from being PC centric to really being phone centric. We’ve talked about this for ages but this is the first time that we have the hand-set to base it on.

Seriously disruptive.

Finally, the only question that I have is – the catch. Obviously there is one, or more. Unless we’ve been scammed all this time, phones this good, do cost a bit to make. According to iSuppli, the iPhone 3G costs around $173 to build. Turns out that you will only get that price for new subscriptions of specific phone plan packages in the US.

So much for being seriously disruptive.

PS: So, don’t expect Maxis to be selling you RM350 iPhones anytime soon.