Category: Uncategorized

Guess what arrived in my mailbox today – Jaunty Jackalope! I had pre-ordered it before it was officially released. It is extremely good for them to have hardly a fortnight for it to get to me. I am quite excited about playing around with it. However, I will hold-off actually tinkering around with it for a while – at least until the weekend!

There are a bunch of things that I am looking forward to. A friend of mine mentioned the other day that operating systems were no longer exciting. I beg to differ. Linux is still very exciting, even on a non-geek level. In Jaunty, I am dying to try out the new digiKam and Amarok. These are the best media management apps, IMHO. They have plenty of advanced features.

Jaunty spouts many under-the-hood improvements. For a long time, Ubuntu has been suffering from performance degradation. The developers have been working hard and they are now able to boast a significant speed increase. I have been suffering for a few months because of this degradation too. I hope to be able to run fast again!

Unfortunately, there are some known issues with using the open source ATi graphics drivers. So, I may have to resort to using the proprietary drivers from ATi themselves until this issue gets sorted out, which it will. The open source drivers are improving by leaps and bounds ever since ATi released its hardware documentation.

There are of course, a whole lot of other minor usability and speed improvements. It has been branded – “Speed, Beauty and Innovation”. I sure hope so!

I have a few peeves with this entire episode of the Silver Fiasco.

For one, the decision by the courts has just further muddled the situation. The trouble is that, I agree that the way in which BN handled the take-over was amateurish. They should have learned how to do a proper take-over from their predecessors. In fact, I think that Anwar actually successfully did one before in Sabah. Too bad for them that he was not on their side this time around.

I think that the political sandiwara is far from over. There will not be any peace in the silver state until someone gives in. I really pity the people living there.

However, another peeve that I have is with the opposition. They are either fanning the flames or joining in with whomever it is who is fanning the flames, of fear – using May 13 as an instrument to instill fear. For goodness sakes, it’s time to leave that legacy behind us. The history has been so distorted by so many parties that I dare not even comment on what is true or false history.

For now, I hope that everyone would just calm down a notch and let those involved, sort things out.

If Nizar is the legitimate MB, it brings the whole fiasco of the state assembly sitting last week to question. There are reasons why there were procedures in place to appoint the MB and speaker. There are also procedures to follow in dismissing them. BN tried to bulldoze it’s way through the procedures to score a few cheap PR points.

I think that it is still possible for the BN to come up tops at the end. Particularly, if they get the cooperation of the royal palace. However, I don’t know how well that will sit with the rakyat of the state.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Oh, I’m in love – with a Chinese restaurant. The name of the establishment is Kim Ma Restaurant. It is located at the Palace of the Golden Horses, Malaysia. I have to say that the food is not your regular food.

According to their Captain, they’ve got modern Chinese food. Essentially, they just do not have your traditional Chinese dishes. For example, their shark-fin soup is served with dumplings instead of your regular crab meat. The fried rice has fish-roe and mushroom gravy in it. Nice!

When my sister casually mentioned that I love the restaurant so much that I would like to ‘treat wine’ there, the Captain very quickly gave me his name card and explained to us that they are not part of the package and I will need to request for them separately.

I don’t really know how to illustrate the quality of the food. However, I hope that the photos will be able to do it some justice. All the food was served in individual portions. I forgot to mention but the service was excellent too. Yum!

Well, this is my other purple suit. Like I had mentioned earlier, it is a form of really dark-red. This is my favourite suit. In actual truth, I only have two suits now and they are both purple. I will probably need to get a regular suit for work purposes in the future.

Today is Wesak Day. I would normally go to the temple and do my thing annually. However, I was not able to do my thing today. Instead, I ended up just doing some dana and then had a look around the old place. It has been years since I had stepped into the place. Not much has changed at all.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

Gajah sama gajah berlawan, Pelanduk mati di tengah.

At first, I had a lot of things to write about today. However, after seeing what has happened in Perak today, I’m quite sad that such a thing has happened. You see, while this picture does not tell the whole story, it certainly shows a lot.

Personally, I would have to agree with Tun Dr M that BN truly screwed up the take-over of Perak. They really should learn from how our government engineered the take-over of Sime Darby on the London Stock Exchange. When you want to do a take-over, it has to be planned in advance and executed flawlessly. Otherwise, you risk a lot of back lash from revealing your hand.

The matter between the two Menteri Besar is still being deliberated at the Federal Court. That situation is a little murky because the Sultan is involved and the constitution is not very clear on the matter. That is why it is being referred to the courts for a decision.

However, the situation with the Assembly Speaker was never in question. By law, he was the lawful speaker of the assembly. His appointment had nothing to do with ‘confidence’ nor does it have anything to do with the Sultan. This is where the BN botched up the job.

They should have shown a little patience and restraint. They should have waited till the sitting of the assembly before springing their trap. In one fell swoop, they could have voted out the speaker and tossed out the Menteri Besar unquestionably. Unfortunately, the acted prematurely.

As a result, neither party is satisfied. One side is trying desperately to bull-doze its way through while the other side is trying to be as stubborn as a rock. Obviously, something has got to give. I just hope that the rakyat does not end up dying in between.

There are reasons why procedures are in place. Even the triads and gangsters follow procedures. We can argue about the right or wrong of these procedures, but they still need to be followed. Let’s try to stick to the procedures, yar!

I encountered an case in the office today where a co-worker recommended that we do not check code into our source code management system because it is accessible company wide. Obviously, this is a legal, ethical and moral issue.

However, this highlighted a problem with closed-source development. With open-source development, this would be a non-issue. The code is supposed to be publicly available anyway. So, the only ACL practices are there to control who can clobber the code if they wish to.

Personally, I think that even implementing ACL on our code repository would not fix the issue. Instead of anyone company-wide being able to steal the code, anyone in our team can do so. So, the ethical, legal and moral issues are still an issue. The whole idea of using a code repository is so that others can share the code. So, at some point, other people can ‘steal’ the code if they wish to.

The only true solution to this problem is to open-source the code. However, working in a closed-source company means that I would not be able to push this through. Everyone would just look at me in an odd way if I ever suggested it.

The trouble is that with this issue, some people may be hesitant on checking in their code. This would just screw up our development process.

While I think that there are valid reasons for not liking what Wong Chin Huat did, I think that our police needs to learn some lessons in public relations. The police have been so heavy handed for so long that they don’t seem to know how to act with an even hand.

I would think that on the governments’ side, they would argue that he was the ‘ring leader’ and tried to stir things up by getting everyone to wear black on Thursday. Incidentally, I would be wearing black, if only because I have only black shirts left in my clean pile.

I think that this is quite different from getting people to wear yellow, like for Bersih. With yellow, it is easy for the police to catch the people who are involved. Not many people wear a bright yellow shirt. But for black, things are a little more dicey. Lots of people wear black, if only to blend in.

Moreover, they have probably learned that it is difficult to catch the masses. Instead, they should focus on the ‘leaders’. However, what the police and the government may have failed to understand is the nature of the present fight. There are no ‘leaders’ per se.

What the Internet allows is the flattening of hierarchies. Anyone with a connection and some perseverance can be a ‘leader’. Anyone with a blog can shout his mouth off. It’s kind of difficult to identify ‘leaders’ in the traditional sense anymore.

So, maybe the cops should bear this in mind for the future. Denying him an audience with opposition politicians is fine. But denying him an audience with his lawyers is definitely illegal in some book. They should have at least given him a chance to speak to the lawyers. That would have been good public relations.

In fact, the police could have even issued a public statement to the press, to explain the motivations behind their actions and what they plan to do. At the very least, that would neutralise the FUD that the opposition politicians try to create with this situation. The police are trying to create their own FUD too, but it does not work anymore. The people have gotten tired of it. Plus, the opposition politicians are much better spinners than the government.

So, I’ll be wearing black tomorrow, if only because I only have black shirts left in my clean pile and I do not want to wear some stinky shirt.