Category: Uncategorized

Bless you America! I had a rather fitful night of worrying that you would end up picking the wrong guy for the job but I guess it was all for naught. I stayed glued to the online tallies on Google to try to see how things were going. When Obama started to build an early lead, I was still kind of worried because the mid-west and southern states had still not been counted.

But when Obama was the first past the post, I immediately tuned into his speech online. It finally occurred to me that a black man had just been handed the shittiest job in America. I hope that he will be able to find the strength and support he needs to do his job, which begins tomorrow. I wonder if the Bush administration will begin shredding or burning documents on their way out. I certainly hope not.

Anyway, in case anyone is wondering what the title of this blog really means, it is actually very easy to explain.

• Sybreon Wants Nothing – I don’t expect anything in return for sharing my mad ramblings.
• Sybreon Wants Naught – Naught is 0 or essentially nothing. Don’t argue with me on this!
• Sybreon Ones Naught – Phonetically similar but with a binary connotation. You will have to forgive me because I am a computer geek.

Yes, it’s just as simple as that. It just means that I want nothing in return.

I believe in giving credit where credit is due. Although I did not have an account with the Public Bank branch where I lived, I have always been impressed with the whole wall of awards that they have on display. The bank has always been famous for it’s excellent customer service and this branch has been winners of their internal customer service awards practically every year.

I have to give credit where credit is due.

I finally decided to open up a personal savings account with their bank today. So, I stepped into the bank and immediately proceeded to take my number at the machine. It is a common practice in Malaysia for people to take a number and wait to be called. We are notoriously bad at queues, constantly trying our best to jump them. So, this is the only way to enforce any sort of order to the chaos.

Normally, after taking a number, I would sit down and wait a few minutes before being served. However, in this instance, the moment that I pressed my number, I heard murmurs from behind the service counter of ‘customer waiting’ and before I even managed to collect the ticket, my number had already been called by the queue. I was very promptly attended to by a smiling employee at the counter and my transaction was quickly tended to.

Then, I went home to activate the internet banking facilities. I tried to log in using the secret password issued to me but without any success. So, I called up the internet banking helpline that was prominently displayed on the web page. Not many banks actually have this helpline number displayed on their web page, choosing instead to place it in some obscure ‘contact us’ page hidden under several clicks.

So, I called up the number and was greeted by the standard automated system asking me to ‘press 1 for English’ and so on and so forth. What typically happens with other banks once I have made all the appropriate menu choices, is that I get put on hold. With a good bank, I would normally need to stay on hold for a few seconds but with Public Bank, I did not even hear a single ringing tone as I was not put on hold at all.

This made me a happy puppy as I have never gotten this sort of immediate service from any bank before. In fact, I had just spent a half hour at a prominent foreign bank earlier in the day, trying to get some minor things done. I think that I will try to bank with Public Bank more, in the future. They obviously value my time.

I find this article from TheStar particularly funny. The article says that, “there is no need to conduct a physical evaluation test on the Eurocopter EC-725 Cougar helicopter prior to purchasing it because the Royal Malaysian Air Force has the helicopter’s technical data and documentation.”

As you all know, I have been going car shopping recently. I have already placed a booking fee for the car pictured above. Well, not exactly the car pictured above as I went for the brown silver instead. Also, I told them to get rid of some of the ah beng body work on it. Hopefully, I will be taking delivery of the car in a couple of weeks.

I had been holding on to the sales and specification brochures given to me by the sales people. I spent the last week studying it in detail and researching what the different things mentioned in the brochures actually mean. I have also been checking out online forums and reviews of the car to see if there were any major shortcomings for the car.

Then, after considering the quality/price, I made a preliminary decision to get this car. However, I still insisted on actually test driving it before making my final decision. So, I called up the nearest showroom and got them to send me a manual transmission (autos take the pleasure out of driving) model for testing. I took the car out for a little test drive around my housing area.

During the test drive, the sales person kept talking about the virtues of the car while I kept talking about the bad points (to try to drive the price down a little). In the end, I found the handling of the car to be a pleasure to drive and I could feel the latent power lying in the engine. I intend to do a further inspection in order to ensure that there are no defects before taking delivery.

So, I think that I did more due diligence into buying this car than our Ministry of Defence did for buying RM1.6billion worth of Eurocopters. I kind of shiver at the idea of placing our national security in the hands of these paper soldiers. Now, I truly wonder if we actually tested to see if the submarines we’ve purchased could sail through the Straights of Malacca.

I guess that the opposition government are finally getting on with their job of checking the government. I guess that they have given up on the notion of wresting control of power from the ruling government. They should just focus on doing a good job of being a strong opposition and take the next 4 years as an opportunity to learn about the intricacies of government.

This guy is the best kind of leader: Inspirational, Realistic, Logical, Pragmatic.

Man, I wish that he was my Prime Minister. Then, I would be able to sleep better at night knowing that the country is in the hands of someone who will work for the job, instead of someone who thinks that he deserves the job. Whomever made this ad deserves to win an award. This was an extremely well made ad that reaches out to peoples’ emotions.

Watch it and prepare to be inspired.

I have a personal beef against people who exhibit a ‘holier than thou’ attitude. This stems from my belief that there is no such thing as a universal moral code and that we are all sinful creatures. Therefore, there we should abstain from judging the actions of others simply because there is no benchmark or standard to judge someone against.

That is why I don’t get what is up with these MCA people. Chua Soi Lek is the ultimate political comeback story. Caught red-handed being adulterous, resigned from his cabinet and party positions, cast into the political wilderness, made a bid for the deputy president and won it. While raising the issue during campaigning is probably acceptable, I think that the rest of the MCA should just let it rest now.

I think that his conduct once he got caught, is commendable. Not many people in his position of power would willingly resign due to an affair. Personally, I think that this is a private matter between him and his family. If his family can forgive him and move on, I don’t think that it is the business of anyone else to pick on it. I guess that the rest of the grassroots believe in the same thing and decided to move on and pick him for deputy president.

However, some people will say that he is a morally flawed man. If he is able and willing to have an illicit affair and betray the trust of his family, he can definitely do something else that betrays the trust of the people. While this is also a valid argument, it is one that is cloaked in fear. I will now say that I do not put my trust in any politician and everyone else would be wise to do so. The key thing is to constantly keep and eye on him and to check his work.

Personally, I feel that there are not many people within MCA who are as capable as him. This was evident during the campaigning period where his strong track record never came into question. Nobody dared to challenge him on his capabilities. The only barb that they could pick on was the adultery. Since nobody is perfect, you just need to make a judgement call and put the right person into the job.

Chua Soi Lek has gotten a baptism by fire and this actually gives him more power than before. The rest of them at the top are probably equally as guilty, including the one who dared to campaign on a clean platform. They have just not been caught yet. Personally, I believe that all politicians are corrupt and I have yet to meet one who is not.

The one thing that saddens me when I look at the MCA is that it claims to represent the Malaysian Chinese people but honestly, it is irrelevant to a number of us – the ones who are English or Malay educated. The MCA fights on issues that we don’t really care about. I liked Chua Jui Meng’s idea of a more inclusive MCA but too bad he lost his bid for the presidency.

To those sore losers who think that they deserved to be deputy president, just get back to doing your work and if you have a good track record, your time will come.

I know that most of my readers are not technically inclined. So, I will try to explain things as simple as I can. I have just built a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) prototype at home. My purpose for doing so is to get some performance numbers so that I will know what resources I’ll need to design and build my final HTPC.

The prototype HTPC is using a small form factor and low powered computer that I used to sell. It uses a VIA 1GHz processor, which has the equivalent performance of a Celeron 600MHz or so. This is fairly underpowered and it shows. I have been testing the system for playing back films that were encoded with H264 and vorbis.

VCDs are encoded with MPEG1, DVDs with MPEG2 and Bluray uses H264. So, H264 is a superior method for encoding videos. It is able to compress the size of the video while maintaining a superior image quality. What this means is that I can store about 350 full length films on a 250Gb hard disk. However, the trade-off is that it requires more computing power to play the video as compared to other encoding methods.

The prototype HTPC will happily play back a DVD sized video encoded in H264. However, when I check the load consumption numbers, they are hovering at about 0.9, which means that 90% of the processor’s working time is being consumed during playback. This means that the processor cannot do anything else while playing the film. This is not very useful for the production HTPC that will probably have to stream the video files from somewhere off the network while playing it.

However, an Atom based system should be more than capable of doing it. The D945GCLF-2 board has a new dual-core Atom processor in it with HyperThreading capabilities running at 1.6GHz. This will effectively mean having about a 4.2GHz processor, which is more than sufficient. So, the new Atom board should be able to happily decode films and stream them off the network. They also come with S-Video/Composite ports at the back that can be connected directly to a TV set.

While most websites recommend running a HTPC with at least 512Mb of RAM, the prototype system has only got 128Mb of which 16Mb are used for shared video. So, this leaves the computer about 112Mb of memory. When a computer is low on memory, the operating system will use the harddisk to store parts of it, which will slow it down a lot. This shows as everything takes a long time to start and run. So, for the final HTPC, I will probably install 1Gb of RAM in it.

As for noise, the prototype system has a notebook harddisk and processor fan in it. However, the noise levels are such that I cannot hear them at all. There are so many other sources of noise in my living room that these things are not really a consideration at all. Once the film starts playing, I can no longer hear the computer anyway. However, for cost purposes, I would probably install a solid state storage in the final HTPC.

As for power, the Atom based system is fairly low on power. I believe that the total amount of heat dissipated is under 40W. So, that is like having a 40W light bulb sitting in the living room. While it will generate some heat and feel warm to the hand, it will unlikely start any fires in the TV cabinet.

And for the software, I am presently using the default build of Mythbuntu – a specialised version of Ubuntu Linux for media PCs. It works well enough for my purposes. I like the fact that it has a full OS installed, which allows me the freedom to download stuff onto the HTPC.

The one hardware thing that I was not able to test is surround sound because I do not have a suitable sound system. The board comes with SPDIF, which is often used to transmit 5.1 surround sound channels from a PC to audio equipment. However, I was able to test the playback of a 5.1 surround sound film and the 1GHz processor was unable to handle the job. As a result, the film stuttered a lot and the sound was horrible.

Another two things that I was not able to test is the remote control and IR transmitter functions. These will have to be bought and installed for a proper HTPC. It does not make sense to run a HTPC with a keyboard attached. The alternative is to connect a mini keyboard to the HTPC but even that seems rather bland.

So, all in all, it’s quite a successful prototype so far. I will try to assemble a final HTPC at some point in time. I’ve already identified all the components and will only need to pop down to LowYat (or order the parts online) at some point.

As far as geeks are concerned, I am possibly a very sociable one. Since I was young, I have never had problems talking to people of all ages. I could even get on a bus, have a conversation with the person sitting next to me, and then get off the bus without ever knowing his/her name. This being said, I am still a geek and am fairly socially inept. This is possibly a minor predicament for me because people tend to forget that I am a geek who would rather talk to computers than humans.

Even before I had a computer, I had plenty of other things to occupy myself with. As a child, I dreamed a lot. My grandmother used to say that it was real easy to keep me busy as all she had to do was give me a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. While I was growing up, there were so many books to read. I ended up spending a small fortune on books. I can still remember a time when paperbacks were sold for about RM8 but they often cost RM40 these days.

The books that occupied my time the most when I was in primary school were encyclopedias and such. I used to call them “knowledge books”. I would usually start by devouring the science and technology section followed by history and geography before hitting boring stuff like politics. At that time, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of random stuff and I was not shy to let people know that I know stuff. You cannot possibly get more socially inept than that.

When I was in secondary school, the reading habits changed considerably. I began reading fantasy fiction. Before this, I had no idea that books could make me cry. As a consequence of this fantasy pursuit, I ended up in the make belief world of Role-Playing Games (RPGs). These were games where we played characters and went about exploring, dungeon crawling and killing monsters on a piece of paper. You can hardly find a geekier social activity than that.

In the world of RPGs, all interactions were governed by rules. An element of chance is usually introduced by the throw of a die. All kinds of dice were used from 4 to 20 sided ones. However, everything was governed by rules. Since I liked to talk, I usually ended up being the Game Master (GM) whose job was to make sure the story flowed and the rules were followed. Children build their social skills through gaming and I just ended up with a different set of them.

Computers entered my life when I was very young. I started self learning programming at the age of 9 and by the time I was 12 I was writing viruses, network multi-player games, and graphical applications. Then, I got onto the Internet and that was the end of it. You couldn’t pry me away from my computer for any reason whatsoever. That was the beginning of the end. I ended up being a total geek and was absolutely proud of it.

As a result, I am a sociable socially inept geek. I can talk your ears off, but I am just as likely to offend you along the way.

Taking a line from a new book I just read: whatever my faults are, they are social, not moral.