Category: Uncategorized

I can now talk about the incident that happened at the beginning of the month, to make me think that people are essentially selfish beings. I was involved in an automobile accident. As a result, I had to go through the hassle of making a police report, assisting in the investigation and making insurance claims. Therefore, I got to experience the process.

Due to the constant interaction that I had with the traffic police, it brought some random thoughts into my head. One question that I asked was – how could we reduce corruption in the police force. Then, the idea that came into my head was to separate the money from the authority. People with authority should not deal with the money and people who deal with money should not have any authority.

You see, when we commit a traffic offense in Malaysia, the police are the ones who will issue the fine and we pay the fine at the police station. We can choose to pay the fine at any other police station in the country. However, if we pay at the station that issued the fine, we may be able to talk to the officer in charge to reduce the fine.

This is just a recipe for disaster. We have just given the people with authority, the power to deal with the money.

It would be better if we had a system where the police issued the fine, but payment was made to a totally separate body like the banks or post-office or some thing else. The whole idea is to have some sort of power separation. So, there will be no incentive for us to bargain for a reduction. There is also no room for the people collecting the payment to give us any discount.

We should not just stop at the police. In fact, the principle of power separation is something that is supposed to be practiced. However, things are not always the case with us in Malaysia. Anyway, I’m presently trying to draft up a rather long article about technological steps to reduce corruption. It’s taken a while to put things down. So, I’ll only publish it when I am satisfied with it.

I have recently found out that in order to register a new born child with our National Registration Department (JPN), a number of documents need to be submitted, including a marriage certificate. I was told, on authority, that without a marriage cert, it may not be possible for the father to have his name listed as the father of the child. I was also told that this policy is something recent and things were not like this in the past.

Mater semper certa; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.
Mother is always certain; the father is whom the marriage shows

To me, that just does not quite make sense. It may have been true in the past, when proof of biological parentage was difficult to obtain. However, DNA tests have changed all that. It is fairly simple to prove that someone is a biological father of a child. Therefore, it does not make sense to me, that such a policy is now in place when it was not in the past.

So, the fact that a man is the biological father of a child is less important than he being married to the mother of the child. It does not matter if the child is carrying your genes or otherwise, as long as you are legally bound to the mother. If any sort of statistics are to be trusted, many men are not biological fathers of their own children anyway.

If our government denies the biological father the right to list himself down as the legal father of the child on the birth cert, is our government denying him some form of fundamental right? I’m too naive on issues of human rights and such. Therefore, I don’t really know so much about these things. But somehow, I just think that something does not smell quite right.

I can imagine one very sad scenario, where a new born child of a single mother who died at childbirth is considered an orphan because the father was not married to the mother. It doesn’t matter if the father was present and loves him very much. But because the father failed to get himself legally married, the child is now considered an orphan. This just sounds a bit screwy to me.

Anyway, I was just ranting off. I have a feeling that this is a bubble waiting to burst. As far as I understand it, there are many people who are not ‘legally’ married in Malaysia. Of course, everyone should get their marriages registered. However, this does not stop them from happily procreating. There may be some problems, particularly if the mother was a foreigner, with citizenship issues.

And if this is not something that is written in Law, and turns out to be the workings of some little Napolean in the government, then it is even worse. If JPN wants to insist on some sort of proof of being the father, I suggest that they insist on giving everyone a DNA check. Unfortunately, that opens up a whole other can of worms.

If some of you have been experiencing problems connecting to this blog at one point or another, in recent weeks, I have to apologise. It is a known problem and I have been in discussion with my hosting provider about it.

Their recommendation is that I re-install my server software. This is a fairly drastic measure, but something that would probably need to be done at some point anyway. However, it is not something trivial as a million things could possibly go wrong. Therefore, I will not be doing it until I have a whole afternoon free to actually perform the delicate procedure.

Good thing is that I have regular backups. So, the content will not go missing. I have also organised things in such a way that it would be fairly trivial to set things up again. However, I’m just worried of the “one in ten thousand” thing that could potentially go wrong.

Anyway, I would like to apologise again for this known problem. You’ll just need to be patient for a little while. Your regular programming should return after this ‘brief’ interruption.

The tech industry has been buzzing with this corporate takeover merger for the last few days. In case the rest of you have not yet heard, or do not yet care, the Sun has been bought up by the Oracle. Sun used to give us the ‘dot’ in dot-com but they have always been a company with great products, but bad management. The new entity will give us another giant in the computing industry.

Let us start with Sun. Sun has an amazing array of technical products. Their UltraSPARC processors are the fastest and lowest power machines operating in the server space. Imagine having a processor that can execute 64 parallel threads in hardware. Now, we are talking some serious computing power. No serious business can do without having Sun machines as their backbone. This is particularly true in the telecommunications industry.

Then, right on top of all that hardware, Sun has Solaris – a mature Unix operating system. Hence, Oracle would be able to optimise and deploy their software on top of their own OS, without depending on either Linux or Windows. Who is to say that Oracle would not actually build new instructions and hardware capabilities into the next-gen UltraSPARC processors to give them an edge over the rest in hardware database acceleration. (hint: If anyone from Oracle is reading this, my PhD thesis is on hardware search acceleration!!)

Next, on top of this operating system layer, Oracle can now host their ever powerful database application. Their databases are universally recognised as the de-facto standard in corporate relational database management systems. There are many other products that compete with them, including from IBM, Microsoft and even some open source offerings. However, Oracle has always stayed ahead of the rest, due to effective marketing and management.

That is where the difference in their culture lies. Oracle has never actually had any technically superior products. However, they had good management. So, if they carefully crafted a path to integrate the best of Sun products with their management practices, they would create a new behemoth that can rival IBM, Microsoft and every other major name in IT.

All hail our new Oracle-Sun overlords!

Someone asked me the other day, why it seemed like I was blogging less, particularly about politics. It has entirely got to do with the fact that I am back home. Part of it is because I have to be careful about what I say, while the rest of it has to do with the sandiwara saturation that I am experiencing back home. After being saturated with all the antics on both sides of the political fence, I just feel like saying: “I give up!”

Seriously.

Just look at the way that things are going. Not a day goes by without political news making the front page. Not a week goes by without some new scandal getting uncovered. Hardly any month goes by without another bye-election. You know what? I am sick of it all. When the hell are the political parties going to get down to the actual work of governance.

Reading my blog post here on the day of GE12, I am reminded by the fact that none of the promises have been delivered. It has been more than a year since then and the opposition has proven itself to be no better a mess than the present government. I still do not understand why they are such retards. They can just ignore everything jibe that the government throws at them and just get down to doing the actual work.

Where are my local council elections? When some local assemblymen in Perak wanted to trial some sort of village leader elections and got shut down by the MB. I just don’t understand the logic behind it. At the very least, they can try to run some basic trials, to identify potential problems and to get things moving in the right direction. But no, they decided to continue ‘awarding’ leadership positions like the BN.

Where is my shadow cabinet? Our opposition leader has promised, time and again, that they are going to come up with a shadow cabinet. At first, after the GE and then after Najib announces his new cabinet. Dear sir, it has been ages since then and I have yet to even smell the slightest hint of a shadow cabinet. Regardless of what the DPM has to say about it, a shadow cabinet is a good thing to have. Get your act together old man!

Where are my concrete proposals? In this respect, we require a functioning shadow cabinet to be able to push things through. At the moment, efforts are scattered and things are not moving anywhere beyond bitching and calling names. I don’t really see many people doing anything besides maybe one or two politicians in the Klang Valley. The rest of your losers should just go ahead and resign from your post as MPs and force a new General Election!

You know what, just writing up to here has already saturated my stress meter. I just feel like kicking some of our politicians ass and cekik their necks. However, I’m just a little nobody and whatever I think doesn’t really matter. This is my own little personal rant space after all. Piss off.

Predicament.

I wonder if I should let someone I know, to go get a proper medical checkup. This person is showing physical signs of having some heart problems. Of course, I am not a doctor and could be wildly wrong. However, it is also possible that I am right. I’m not sure if I should just barge in and say it, or if I should just not say anything. This is the first time I’ve had to deal with such an issue. So, I’ll need to learn how to handle it.

Anyway, this entry is about a film that I had just watched this evening: Pantas dan Marah 4 (Fast and Furious 4)!!! I laughed when I read the translated title, which could just as easily have been for “Quick and Angry 4”. The film was fairly light on the story and acting. The script seemed to be con-fused in such a way as to link the other three films together. However, the driving scenes – oooh my gooooodness!!

Like the previous films, this one is filled with fast cars and gorgeous women. I loved the way that they brought everything into the high-tech arena by expertly exploiting some really advance car GPS systems. I wish that I could buy one of those systems off the market. I am fairly certain that I could build one myself, if only I could get my hands on some map data. Google Maps…. hmmmm….

But the coup de grace has to be the underground racing scene. Literally driving cars at speed through narrow underground passages. Honestly, I felt that there was a massive plot hole here because they could have just hidden underground instead of trying to race through it. But I’m not complaining. Like the first film, it started with a trailer jacking (but with a much larger trailer).

Regardless, I liked the whole franchise. Even though the story and acting is not that good, the cars are excellent. That is the trademark of the franchise anyway. Nobody else does car races like them.

PS: Oops, forgot to mention my disclaimer: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Yesterday, I had a chat with another co-worker and found out that I have another uber-geek person to talk to now, which is wonderful. This co-worker of mine has a lot of geeky toys to play with at home.

I am actually planning on setting up my own little geek-lab at home too. So, I asked this geek person to recommend me places to buy some of the stuff. Most of these things are usually purchased at Jalan Pasar in KL. However, the last time that I had been there, it was only mainly filled with AV stuff. But according to my co-worker, things have changed a lot. Now, we can get almost everything there and can forget about Farnell et al. Wonderful!

My co-worker also recommended some shops in the area that I should visit. I guess that I will go pay the place a visit some time, maybe later this month or next month. While I don’t really have anything specific on my mind to buy yet (or maybe I do), I should still get reacquainted with some of my past haunts.

I am currently implementing some virtual peripherals for my processor. The next step, which I plan to do over the weekend, is to test them out in hardware to see if they work. If they do, then I can proceed with implementing even more virtual peripherals.

Once that is done, I may need to purchase some toys to make