Category: Uncategorized

I just read this article in TheStar today, where our DPM (and soon to be PM) openly questioned the quality of the Malaysian education system. Quoting the article, our DPM said that: “Our education system must change. Our children are just not curious enough. They must be curious about the world. They must ask questions.”

This brought back memories of the time when I was training to be a lecturer. The professor that I was under, was telling about how we need to challenge our students to think. As my task at the time was to design a series of experiments for the students, I had to make sure that the experiments had a purpose and that the questions raised during the experiment would force the students to think and constantly question the theory that they were taught in class.

In the end, I ended up designing experiments that seemed to show that the theory was consistently wrong (didn’t matter how many times you repeated it). Instead of getting the result that they expect, they would consistently obtain results that were significantly different and cannot be attributed to simple experimental error. Then, I would ask the students to suggest reasons why the results were the way that they were.

At the meeting where I presented the draft copy of the experiments to the professor, even he had some trouble figuring out the reasons until I pointed out the trick to him. The trick that I used was to move the problem from the theory, to the underlying assumptions. So, the student would not only have to question the theory involved, but work their way back to the basic assumptions.

University education should never be about rote learning but this brings back another memory. During one of my tests for a humanities subject, I actually wrote down, “I know that you expect the answer to be XXX but I disagree and think that it is YYY because of …”. In the end, the lecturer gave me the mark but told me under no uncertain terms, that I should refrain from doing such things during exams and stick to the answer script.

I do agree with our DPM that our education system stresses too much on rote learning, and needs changing. Students need to be challenged to think and the easiest way to do it is to ask them difficult questions. However, the problem would be with the teachers who will have to evaluate the students’ answers. If the teachers themselves are only capable of rote evaluation based on a specific scheme, they would need to adapt to an entirely new style of teaching, which isn’t always easy.

A teacher must be fully versed in his/her subject area in order to be able to handle anything that the students are able to dish out. Otherwise, the teacher will often end up looking foolish in the eyes of the students. This challenges the established power structure and may make a lot of teachers uncomfortable. Considering that our teaching profession is staffed by many people who generally took up teaching because they had no other choice, this doesn’t bode well.

We need to do what Obama promised to do in the US. We need to hire new teachers, pay them better wages, and demand for higher standards and accountability from them in return. However, this raises a big budget problem for the government. The teaching union is the largest work force organisation in the civil service with about 150,000 members. So, I don’t see this happening anytime soon, particularly in the present global economic climate.

A religious issue, when it applies to online mailing lists and discussions, does not necessarily mean anything related to religion per se. I had recently commented on a mailing list and suggested that the mailing list be kept free of issues related to politics and religion. Anything else should be fair game. However, I think that a lot of people misunderstood what I meant when I mentioned religious issues. So, it flared up resulting in someone leaving the list, which he didn’t have to actually.

So, I’m thinking of taking some time out to explain to the readers of my blog, and maybe educate everyone a little on some online etiquette. You may not know this but a religious issue when it relates to online discussions and such, is defined as:

religious issues n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off holy wars, such as “What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?”, “What about that Heinlein guy, eh?”, “What should we add to the new Jargon File?” See holy wars; see also theology, bigot.

This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave — unless, of course, one’s _own_ unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed.

As you can see from the definition, a religious issue is essentially anything where irrational personal beliefs and unjustifiable personal opinions rule. Of course, this includes religions themselves but also include things like “climate change” and even “George Bush”. The whole idea of keeping religious issues out of online lists is to ensure that discussions stay exactly that, discussions.

However, I think that I probably committed another social faux pas by assuming that people understood what I meant when I said that politics and religion should be kept off the list. Well, as I said in an earlier post, my faults are social, not moral. I have since, sent a personal apology to the person who felt slighted by my comments as I think that the person might have taken it personally.

It’s really not easy to fit into society, especially one where I have always been considered a misfit.

The current sedition trial of RPK is a fairly interesting. I think that it is the first high profile case that involves a serious crime and computers. I find it interesting because computer forensics is being introduced as evidence. However, things did not turn out quite as the prosecution expected as the prosecution witness seems to have testified that no evidence was found in the RPK’s computers.

According to this article from TheStar: ” A computer forensics investigator told the Sessions Court here that data on a notebook computer seized from Malaysia Today editor Raja Petra Raja Kamarudin had been deleted. ASP Wa’ie Isqal Kria Abdullah, 38, said this was why there were no records of the computer accessing the Malaysia Today website between April 11 and April 26 this year.”

The reason that I find this interesting is because it reveals a great deal about the procedures employed and the capabilities of our computer forensic investigators. It is quite common for bloggers to compose and publish their blog entries directly using a web interface. As a result, there should not be any documents held in their harddisk except potentially in a browser cache, which is wiped over periodically.

So, the typical procedure when investigating any crime that involves an online website is to actually seize the servers that hold the website content. Granted, this will be a little more difficult to do if the servers are located in an overseas jurisdiction. Although all their servers are now located overseas, I do seem to recall that Malaysia-Today had some servers located in Malaysia in the recent past.

Now, assuming that RPK is an old man and actually likes to use an offline word processing tool to compose his entries before actually uploading them onto the server, there may be some files stored on his computer. As a precaution, RPK may have deleted these files after he was done with them. However, even Hollywood knows (one of the rare times that they are actually right) that files that are deleted, can still be recovered, unless of course the files never existed in the first place.

Another interesting thing to note about the investigation was that the investigating officer had limited his search of the computer to only specific folders, in accordance to the terms of reference for his investigation. One would think that files can be hidden anywhere on a computer and not necessarily in the “My Documents” folder. So, that is why the DPP has requested that the search be expanded to the rest of the harddisk.

Personally, I think that it was a good thing that the investigation officer did not go on any fishing expedition. This reflects a sense of professionalism on the part of the investigating officer to follow the rules when looking for evidence and not to just blindly toss things about. However, it also reveals to me the lack of technical knowledge on the parts of the investigators, which does not bode well.

If the police can be stopped by a simple file deletion, I shudder to think how they would actually go about extracting evidence from encrypted volumes. Any technology inclined person worth his salt would have his harddisks encrypted even just for privacy reasons. So, I seriously wonder about the police’s ability to investigate really serious commercial crimes.

My sister is Suki crazy. Well, I was not around to watch the One in a Million singing competition. So, I did not even know who this person “Suki” was. Since my sister is one of her many fans, my sister introduced her songs to me. After listening to her debut album, I would have to agree with my sister that Suki is quite good and probably has a bright future ahead of her, assuming that she does not screw it up along the way.

One of the very first things that struck me when I first heard her album was that, this girl can really sing Malay songs (like Jaclyn Victor, not like the other Malaysian Idol winner). She has a good way of enunciating the Malay words. I have always found Malay a very lyrical language and it suits her very well in this case. According to my sister, who watched the competition each week, the judges actually said that Suki’s Malay pronunciation was better than the rest of the participants in the competition.

I can also tell that this girl has definitely got some Japanese influence. Her name is Low Soke Yee but she chose to use the name “Suki”, which is a dead giveaway. However, the Japanese influence goes much deeper and is evident on “Hidup Ini”, which was a song that she composed, wrote and sang herself. Listening to it immediately evoked a lot of J-pop images in my head. There’s nothing wrong with it of course, as it just shows her influences.

However, her English pronunciation is quite another matter totally. While not entirely bad, there is still a lot of room for improvement. She was recently awarded Malaysia’s most promising new artist and I can clearly understand why. This girl is barely out of high school and is already a rising star in the local scene.

Another thing that struck me was her image. The producers have decided that for her to sell, they have got to get rid of the innocent Chinese girl look and replace it with something much sexier and bolder. Not quite sure if that is a good or bad thing but I certainly understand the motivation behind it. It would probably help her reach a wider audience.

Anyway, here is her song “Usah”, which I think is one of her better songs in the entire album. Both Malay and English versions are found on her album and I think that the Malay one sounds better as the song was probably written for Malay lyrics – the English one sounds a little forced and padded.

http://media.imeem.com/m/NSErg7BsiT/aus=false/

This is originally a song by Stephanie Sun (another singer I like) but they wrote some new Malay lyrics for it instead.

http://media.imeem.com/m/8K8yOCCRgE/aus=false/

Yeay! The three boxes of stuff that I sent home has finally arrived today. It took a little more than 2 months but all three boxes have arrived safely intact. I am a little excited that my stuff is all back, including my collection of hundreds of original DVDs. However, I am kind of in a bind now because I do not really have any place to store them. So, everything will stay in their boxes for a while.

I am presently living in the home that my parents have lived in for the last few years. Unfortunately, I have not really lived in this house for a decade. So, I don’t really have any storage space to call my own. At the moment, I am sleeping on the living room couch and treating the living room as my own little space. For now, the arrangement is fine as long as we do not have any guests over, which we don’t.

At some point in the future, I will probably go shop around for a residential property to buy. I will probably wait till the housing market drops further, and the interest rates lowered. I am fully expecting a lower interest rate to be announced to help encourage spending. Once that happens, I may start shopping around for a place to live. I have been diligently reading the classified ads for a while now.

For the last few weeks, I have actually been looking at the prices for a piano and also odd pieces of furniture. Some of the prices are actually quite cheap. There was a place selling a brand new Weinstein grand piano for only RM17,000! That is so very cheap for a grand piano. If I had my own little place, I would probably have gotten the piano for myself.

I have been playing my old upright but it just doesn’t quite feel the same once you have gotten used to the touch of a grand. Actually, I have been quite surprised that I can still play some of the higher level pieces relatively well (relative because I can still make it sound okay). I guess that my muscle memory is in better shape than I had thought.

I am kind of in an odd position because I have the interest in buying stuff and filling up my own home but I do not really have a home per se. I can’t possibly fill up my parents’ home, which is already filled to the brim with stuff that we have collected over the last few decades. I also cannot fill up my sisters’ home because it is her own place and we have different tastes.

As usual, I had already been warned about the different tricks that a car sales person will always use to try to con you out of more money. Well, I don’t blame them one bit considering the kind of working environment that they are under. However, I am definitely adamant that I will not be paying a single sen extra than had already been agreed upon last week.

I got a call from the Hyundai showroom today to go and sign some documents and pay my down payment for the car. I told the sales person that I will be paying my down payment by cheque and asked what the figure should be and was told a figure that was several thousand ringgit higher than my own calculation. This shocked me.

So, I asked the sales person why the price had suddenly gone up by several thousand and the person gave me some sort of lame excuse. I scolded the person on the phone and warned the person to not play sales games with me. A deal is a deal. Once the terms have been agreed upon, I do not expect the terms to be modified after money had already changed hands. By law, that is already a contract.

The sales person told me to come down to the showroom to have a chat and explain the whole situation to me. So, I went down and listened. The sales person said that they had to charge me extra for some bodywork and I told them not to be silly. The sales person then tried to see if they could come to a compromise and have us split the difference. I was up to no such nonsense. Either sell me the car at the agreed upon price, or return me my booking fee and lose my custom.

The fact is that I know that they are still going to make a handsome profit off my purchase. The difference is just a matter of making a few thousand extra or not. Plus, I had already cleared all the necessary hurdles with the credit check at the bank. So, the moment I put my signature down on the hire purchase agreement, they can bring the money to the bank.

So, the sales person agree to ask the boss if it was possible to do me the sale at the agreed upon price. I made it clear that if it was not possible, I will be walking away from the deal and they can try to sell the car to the next unwitting fool that comes along. They would be stupid to throw away a ready sale just for that little bit of money. The sales person kept trying all kinds of excuses to make me pay more but I was not going to budge.

Anyway, I hope to hear positively from them tomorrow. According to the sales person, if all goes well, I can sign the documents tomorrow and pay by cheque. They will deposit the cheque on Monday and it will clear by Wednesday. They will then register my car for me a day or two after that. So, I should be able to pick up my new car by the end of next week, assuming all goes well.

I just read this article in TheStar today that UniTAR (a local private university) graduates will soon be certified as anti-hacker. According to the article, “Information technology students at University Tun Abdul Razak (Unitar) can soon be certified to counter hackers.Those taking the Bachelor of Information Systems (Hons) and Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons) at Unitar may graduate with the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification from the E-Commerce Consultants (EC) International Council after completing their course.”

My impression is that they are selling snake oil. There is no way that you can certify someone as having the necessary skills to counter hackers, unless you consider unplugging your computer from the network and powering it off as such a skill (actually, there are even ways to hack a computer that is turned off and unplugged from the network). Even with my mad geek skills in computers, I would not dare make such claims.

Don’t believe anything that you think you know about hacking. Hacking is neither as exciting nor as glamourous as the movies make them to be. Most kids have no idea what it actually takes to be a hacker and think it’s all cool. Hacking is a lonely journey with a lot of hard, tedious and rigourous work. There is a lot of heartbreak and failure involved but when you do succeed, the high can be extremely intoxicating.

Anyway, if it is something that can help the graduates sell themselves better and find a job in these tough times, I am all for it. However, it would be silly for the graduates to think that potential employers will believe for a single second that you can counter hackers effectively, except maybe doctors who have been overdosing on a little too much Hollywood.