Category: Uncategorized

I was invited to be a judge for the zone competition today. I really like doing these things. I won’t reveal the results of the competition as it is still on-going. However, of all the teams that I judged, I was extremely impressed by a certain individual. He stood barely to my shoulders, was about 12/13 and seemed to be very capable in delivering a cogent presentation of a technically elegant use of the Lego Mindstorm kit.

When we threw questions at him, he would answer it intelligently and with analytical thought. It was just unfortunate to me that he was still too young to be employed. If he was older, I would have given him my card and hired him on the spot. This pre-teen who was still a budak hingus could code better and solve problems harder than some of the people I work with.

I even tried to apply my skills and break his design and programme. I have to say that I can usually break the stuff written by my apprentice in under 15 seconds. I can even break stuff written by public listed companies in a matter of minutes. I couldn’t break this young man’s programme though. Then he showed us his little programme and I was suitably impressed at its simplicity and elegance.

Anyone who knows me will know that it is ‘difficult’ to impress me, especially technically. This boy is good, really good – might even be better than me.

I truly feel that this Lego robotics competition needs to be supported at all levels. If and when my company grows to a decent size, I will fully invest into supporting this competition. I cannot think of a better way to encourage engineering and problem solving in our kids than through the spirit of an engineering competition accessible to all.

Unfortunately, of all the teams I judged today, only one had girls in it. I would like to see more young girls take to the field – otherwise we run the risk of turning into a mono-culture.

It’s US-centric but there are lots of lessons to be learned for us too:

Women often complain about objectification – where men reduce them into nothing but sexual objects. In recent weeks, whenever there has been debate on sex-education in schools or censorship of Internet pornography, this whole notion of objectifying women keeps cropping up. So, I asked myself if this was a phenomenon unique to men turning women into objects of our sexual desires.

The answer is unsurprisingly – no. Women objectify men all the time as well. Think about it for a minute.

Disclaimer: Gross generalisation ahead.

Women turn men into tools – a hammer when they need to hang a picture on the wall; a trolley when they have too much shopping to carry; a screw driver when they need to assemble furniture; a vehicle when they need to get from place to place; a compost when they have too much on their plate; a punching bag when they are in need of stress relief. Heck, some women even treat their men as ATMs – cash on-demand.

In this way, men are just tools that women use to get what they want accomplished in life.

Now, the question of whether being a tool is better than being a sexual object is not really a question. One can’t really gain any sort of pleasure from being a pair of pliers. However, it is definitely true that women objectify men as well.

After reading this article and having gone through the process myself, I have to agree with all the points raised. I also end up giving similar advice to my friends, if they ever tell me that they want to do a PhD and I have complained similarly on my old blog about it. Read this thread on a lot of similar advice.

I’d like to just quote one section of the entire piece:

To escape with a Ph.D., you must meaningfully extend the boundary of human knowledge. More exactly, you must convince a panel of experts guarding the boundary that you have done so.

You can take classes and read papers to figure out where the boundary lies.

That’s easy.

But, when it comes time to actually extend that boundary, you have to bunker down and figure out how. A lot of Ph.D. students get depressed when they reach the boundary, because there’s no longer a test to cram for or a procedure to follow. This is the point (2-3 years in) where attrition peaks.

[The classic 2nd year slump. Ouch! – Shawn]

Finding a problem to solve is rarely a problem itself. Every field is brimming with open problems. If finding a problem is hard, you’re in the wrong field. The real hard part, of course, is solving an open problem. After all, if someone could tell you how to solve it, it wouldn’t be open.

To survive this period, you have to be willing to fail from the moment you wake to the moment your head hits the pillow. You must be willing to fail for days on end, for months on end and maybe even for years on end. The skill you accrete during this trauma is the ability to imagine plausible solutions, and to estimate the likelihood that an approach will work.

[Finding the door in an infinitely dark room with no walls! – Shawn]

If you persevere to the end of this phase, your mind will intuit solutions to problems in ways that it didn’t and couldn’t before. You won’t know how your mind does this. (I don’t know how mine does it.) It just will.

[Bashing your head against the wall until the wall breaks! – Shawn]

As you acquire this skill, you’ll be launching fledgling papers at peer reviewers, checking to see if others think what you’re doing qualifies as research yet. Since acceptance rates at good venues range between 8% and 25%, most or all of your papers will be rejected. You just have to hope that you’ll eventually figure out how to get your work published. If you stick with it long enough and work at it hard enough, you will.

For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant barrage of rejection and failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem, Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance. (Some egos seem to recover afterward.)

[Not quite sure, but I hope that mine has. – Shawn]

This phase of the Ph.D. demands perseverance–in the face of uncertainty, in the face of rejection and in the face of frustration.

That is the reason why Google hires PhDs and that is the same reason why I am going to do the same. The PhD is not a stamp on how smart a person is – there are plenty of idiots who finish a PhD. It is merely a stamp on how disciplined and determined a person is to completing a goal.

The topic of online voter-registration came up during my regular voter-registration drive last night. Since it was highlighted in today’s news, I thought that I should share some of my opinions on this matter. The EC is right in saying that online voter-registration is open to abuse.

The key issue is that of authentication. It is not easy to do identity authentication online unless we have that infrastructure set-up. However, it is not entirely impossible to do so. There are alternatives

We could insist on photo identification. So, someone who registers online would need to use a high resolution camera to take the photo of him/her holding the MyKAD. That would allow an authorised registrar to approve or reject the application and authenticate the identity manually. In this scenario, the Internet merely serves as a medium of communication between the registrar and registrant.

In fact, this method is already in use by certain OpenID service providers.

However, the better solution to the problem of voter registration would be automatic voter registration. There is no conceivable reason why this is not already the case. The National Registration Department has everyone’s information in a database. They can just easily extract out the new registrants each month and send that information to the Elections Commission.

Alternatively, we can harmonise the two systems by reducing the voting age to 18. This allows anyone who goes to renew their MyKAD to immediately fill in the voter registration form alongside. In fact, this should already be automatically done for those who change addresses. The NRD should be authorised by the EC as a registering body.

Why none of this is happening, is anybody’s guess.

Now, the idea of online voting is another whole can of worms that I do not want to discuss until adequate measures are in place. It is quite difficult to both ensure identity authentication while making a vote anonymous. You really need to trust the programmer who wrote the lines of code controlling the elections.

To those lazy asses who are brainless enough to suggest these things, sticking the word “on-line” in front of everything doesn’t solve all your problems. Just get off the couch, and go register at a post-office and vote at the designated school.

Who’d ever guess that I was directly affected by the MTV World Stage Live in Malaysia concert. I organised a dinner last night at Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre and I was obviously too old to know that they were having an MTV concert right next door at Sunway Lagoon. Murphy’s Law – everything that could have gone wrong, did. However, we managed to recover gracefully.

First of all, the traffic was horrendous. As every tween was trying to get into Sunway for the concert, we were also directly affected by it. Everyone got stuck in the massive jam leading towards Sunway. Parking was a nightmare with people circling around for more than an hour to find one. Some of our guests did not turn up and even one VIP called to say that he was going home after failing to find any parking in the area for more than an hour.

So, we delayed the start of the event by about 30 mins.

We had solicited the help of several student members to help with the event, namely to help give out awards and to control the slide projection. However, due to the traffic congestion, they were late and I had to brief a number of substitutes at the last minute. I explained to the girls what they needed to do and in order to reduce the confusion, we would collect all the medals and certificates back so that we can sort out any last minute problems. As for the slides, I made them fool proof by simply numbering them in sequence, without any contextual knowledge required.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools.

As the event started, the computer that we used to control slide projection on the left side of the room – died. I had to rush to the front to get things fixed. The speaker’s slides were in that computer and he was coming on in 5 minutes. After fixing that problem, and beginning to breathe better, the computer on the other side of the room, died too. So, I quickly dashed across the hall to fix that problem too.

Thankfully, no other computers died after that. It was my fault for not having a backup on standby.

Then, as the speeches went off without a hitch, and the food came out, I got down to eating something because I had a feeling that things would still go wrong during the dinner. As the courses were served, we had a good time with the food. Everyone commented that the food was quite good – I selected the menu blindly and was just hoping for the best!

Then, came the time for the awards.

Although mostly uneventful, the emcee had a slight cock-up towards the end and I had to sort of predict and improvise things on the spot. Thankfully, I was able to be at two places at once – at the VIP table and at the awards table. Aside from that small problem, everything else proceeded smoothly. We could’ve done with a little drum-roll but that was about it.

I could’ve done well with a few other helpers to usher the award receipients, but no biggie.

All in all, the event went on pretty well. I had to say that it was quite a feat to have pulled it off. We had an organising committee of about 3 main people and we pulled off a 200 person dinner event in 5-weeks from start to finish. That’s not too shabby at all.

You can never go wrong with the formula – bunch of good looking young people singing songs on screen. Add in a splash of teenage angst, love triangles and sexual spice. You have the formula for a guaranteed success.

My favourite song starts at 4:20. I like the simplicity of the songs in Glee.

I just hope that FOX does not ruin it!