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Just days after everyone in the world called the opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics, the most spectacular show ever put up, it is being taken down one notch at a time each and every day. So, as much as I was impressed by the opening ceremony, I am no longer impressed with it anymore. Personally, I think that the director missed the memo that told him that he was directing a live show, and not a hollywood blockbuster.

1. It has emerged that the cute little girl who sang the song at the beginning of the ceremony, merely lip synced. I noticed this during the ceremony itself, but I didn’t think too much of it because lip-syncing was a pretty normal practice for grand events. But in this case, I did not find it acceptable that she lip-synced to the song sung by another little girl, who was apparently dropped because she wasn’t cute enough, even though her voice was golden.
2. It has also been discovered that part of the out door fireworks display was computer graphics. The decision was made to render the sequence in advance because they realised that it would be impossible to capture the entire sequence live. While this would be perfectly acceptable in a movie, doing it for a live show is very wrong.

On another note, it has also appeared that some of the computers used to project images for the opening ceremony, crashed during the ceremony. Many people had captured the classic Blue Screen of Death appearing in the stadium towards the end of the ceremony, when the flame was about to be lit. I wonder what Bill Gates did when that appeared. He was present for the opening ceremony, afterall.

Personally, I think that the Olympics show was still good, just not great and certainly not as spectacular anymore. If we are going to turn a live show like this into a hollywood movie, then it should be benchmarked against other movies. It certainly cannot compare with LOTR for example. Furthermore, if we continue along this line of show fakery, we will be hiring Pixar to do the opening ceremony by 2020. Where is the fun in that?

Most of you must have visited my blog and noticed the new look and feel it has. Some of you would have noticed the four little photographs on the right. I thought that I should describe the process behind turning my blog into this new look. It might be good if others are interested in adapting the process to modify their own blogs. I changed the theme, colours and customisations.

First, I looked up some good themes on the Internet. I wanted a theme that was simple and classy. A very quick search brought me to the grid focus theme. I liked the style and the fact that most of it was accomplished without many graphics. However, the theme was a little old and did not cater to WordPress widgets. Another quick google and I found this site, which explained how to widgetise the theme. I modified the steps slightly as the sidebar_widget class does not exist.

Next, came the time to customise the colours. To do this, I created a new custom.css file to override the original styles. I like to use this website to choose colour schemes. In my many years of web design work, this is the best website that I have found for colour scheming. So, I just browsed through some random colour schemes until I found one that I liked. I looked for a dour single colour scheme as I tend to like them. Then, it was just a matter of substituting the styles into the custom style sheet.

Finally, came the decor. I realised that as nice as the design was, it would be better if it was garnished with some photographs. So, I perused my collection of photographs and picked out four nice ones. As there was little space to place a photo anywhere else, I decided to composite them into a montage and put it in the sidebar. The result is the “vanes” image on the right. From left to right, they represent the time of day from morning to night, and the four seasons from winter to autumn. The dimensions of the image are close to the golden ratio. Then of course, the final flourish was the signature brush that I have described earlier.

Throughout the process, I relied solely on open source tools. For making the custom style sheet, I recommend using Firefox with its web developer add-on to display the names of the page elements, which can then be accurately styled. For the images, I used the Gimp, of course. No animals or children were hurt during the production of this theme.

PS: Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this new look by voting in the polls to the right.

Having seen a digitised signature on a friend’s blog, I decided to make one of my own. The result is the signature image that you see on the right part of this blog. Instead of using the method that he suggested, I decided to do it using a different method. This was primarily because most of the tutorials used tools that were not at my disposal. So, this is my technique for creating a signature brush using only Gimp and Inkscape.

1. We need the raw signature, which can be obtained through a variety of means. I used a sharpie and scribbled my John Hancock on a piece of white paper. Then, I used my digital camera to take a photo of the raw signature. This raw photo will need to be processed.
2. The photo needs to be cleaned up first. This can be done in Gimp using the Colour-Threshold settings to clearly define the paper and writing. The resultant image will be a largely black and white image.
3. The signature now needs to be cropped. Once again, using Gimp, the signature is selected using the selection tool. Then, using Image-Crop to Selection the signature is cropped and everything outside the signature is removed.
4. Being now cleaned and cropped, the signature can be imported into Inkscape using File-Import. Then, using Path-Trace Bitmap and setting it to Brightness Cutoff mode, the signature is converted from a bitmap into a vector image.
5. As a vector image, the signature can be made a little artsy by using the Path-Simplify command in Inkscape. This reduces the number of points in the vector image and smooths the stroke edges. This can be repeated a number of times for artistic effect. The resultant image looks like it is painted.
6. Using File-Export Bitmap from Inkscape, the vector image is saved as a raster PNG file. This PNG file should be sufficiently large in size in order to allow the signature to be resized without too much distortion.
7. This PNG can be imported into Gimp for final post processing. The image is flattened using Image-Flatten Image and converted into grayscale using Image-Mode-Grayscale. This is an important step to ensure that the brush works correctly.
8. Finally, the resultant black signature on white background, is exported as a Gimp brush. Use the File-Save As command to save the image as a Gimp brush (*.gbr) format image. This image should be saved in the ~/.gimp-2.4/brushes subdirectory. Then, refresh the brushes and it is ready for use.

And the result is the signature brush as seen in the image above. I can use this brush to insert a signature into any of my future photographs, like how artists of old used to scrawl their names into the corner of their paintings. My signature brush is 900 pixels across, which should be good for use in any decent sized image.

I watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics yesterday. What immediately struck me was the order of the languages: French, English and Mandarin. I tried my best to figure out what they were saying in French, and then double checked it in English and Mandarin. What can I say, my French is about as good as my Chinese.

Needless to say, I was very impressed from the very beginning. When the BBC commentators mentioned that Zhang YiMou was the director of the opening ceremony, I knew to expect a breathtaking display of lights and colours, which is characteristic of his style.

The opening, with the drums that lit up when struck, was extremely impressive. Drumming in such a large group is already grand enough, but using it as a light display is extremely creative. I liked the way that they counted down to the start using the drums as pixels on a large display.

The next act that impressed me was the caligraphic painting done by people dancing with brushes for hands. It was very artistically done. The rest of the acts did not quite impress me until the final act, the lighting of the torch. Although the pace of the flying runner was not right at times, it was an extremely impressive way of lighting up the torch. I don’t know how London could possibly top that, in 4 years time.

My friend and I were also busily watching the different cute Chinese girls that were involved in the ceremony. We were commenting that after this opening ceremony showcase, Chinese girls will experience <em>saham naik</em> worldwide. Overall, I think that China managed to put on a dazzlingly spectacular show of an opening, which will set the benchmark for all future Olympic openings.

Then the parade of athletes started. When they mentioned that they were being arranged according to the stroke count of the Chinese characters, we realised that Malaysia would come in quite quickly, as “ma” had only 3 strokes in it. Then, when the contingent came in, we lamented on the small size of the contingent. As usual, politics would come into the picture.

In the past, our country had many good athletes in various different events. However, these days, we are hardly competitive in anything outside a handful of events. Our only hope for an Olympic medal is in badminton (unfortunately, squash is not an Olympic event, otherwise, we’ll get the gold there for sure). But outside that, we’re kind of hopeless.

Then about halfway through the parade, they mentioned that Brunei was left out of the parade because the officials forgot to register the team. That was such a fiasco and I think that someone’s head might actually roll for it. We quickly messaged our Brunei friends to tease them about it. Funny!

I think that my photography skills have reached a medium level. At the very least, it is enough for me to understand what my limitations are and to give me enough insight into appreciating the photographs of others. So, I have recently been thinking about focusing on a specific skill to further develop it. After some consideration, I think that I will try to do some black and white photography.

I have always had an interest in black and white photographs. For some reason, I have always found black and white photographs to be very strong, emotionally. After some consideration, it becomes obvious why. Due to the lack of colour, there is nothing that can carry the photo through except the emotion that it captures.

So, I’ve been doing a little reading on black and white photography. And surprisingly, it seems that the best way to shoot black and white, is to actually shoot in RAW colour. The different sites all distinctly recommend against shooting in JPEGs. With the added colour space available in the RAW format, a more dynamic black and white photograph can be obtained from it. This was good to know because my camera does not have a black and white mode.

So, it wouldn’t make much difference for me when taking the actual photograph. I will just need to take them in colour RAW and do the post processing on my PC. The main difference will come from composition and lighting. But seeing that I have always made composition an integral part of my photography, it should not be a problem for me to compose subjects. But the issue that I will need to look at is lighting. Lighting plays the most important role in black and white photography.

Well, I won’t have anything to show for the moment as I am not going anywhere interesting. I will probably play around with it, and my new lens, after I go home.

I guess that I have been digressing from my blog posting in the past. On my previous blog, everyone voted overwhelmingly for me to write more personal posts and less technology and political posts. But on this new blog, I have not been sticking to this regime. So, I thought that now is a good time to start sticking to this regime. So, I will try to stick to the schedule of writing only political and technology entries on weekends only.

So, what better time to start than now. Since it’s not a weekend, I will write a personal entry today.

For several months now, I have been experiencing a lack of motivation and drive. Things have been diminishing gradually and now I’m truly feeling quite low. I don’t quite know why this is the case but I can feel the effects on my work. My number of productive days has been dropping and this is proving to be a hindrance to my writing up. Some days, I spend my whole day working in front of the computer only to write two paragraphs. On other days, I end up writing nothing.

I have tried altering my work environment to stimulate things a little. I have tried working in the department, and I have also tried working, out on the grass when the sun was out in July. But in all cases, the drop in productivity continued. I honestly don’t quite know what else I can do to increase it. As a result, I am beginning to hate my thesis and my writing. Maybe that’s the problem.

A friend of mine has asked me to come along on a holiday next week. However, seeing the lack of progress that I am making in my work, I am unlikely to do so. I really want to finish up with everything so that I can move on with my life. I feel like I am stuck in a limbo now and I hate the feeling.

PS: Sorry for the negative blog, but that’s how I feel now.

PPS: Just spent the last few hours changing the look and feel of this blog. Tada!

There has been some smoke being blown with regards to the Universities & University Colleges Act 1971 (UUCA). This act has generally been treated as an evil monstrosity by many political activists and civil rights people in Malaysia. Seeing that the government is planning to push through some ammendments to the Act, I decided to see what the big problem was.

Since I dread reading through legal documents, I googled around for some summary information and found that the various university websites only listed extracts of the Act. Unsatisfied, I decided to download a copy of the Act and skimmed through it.

It seems that most of the problems that people have with it are related to Section 15 of the Act, which has broad provisions that curtail the freedom of members of a university. In particular, the political parties are generally in disagreement with Section 15(3) of this section: (3) No person, while he is a student of the University, shall express or do anything which may be construed as expressing support, sympathy or opposition to any political party or trade union or as expressing support or sympathy with any unlawful organization, body or group of persons.

However, I am a little confused with what is stated in Section 5A(1) of the Act: 5A. (1) The provisions of this Act shall not apply to any higher educational institution with the status of a University which is authorized to be established by an order made by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong under subsection (2) and any private higher educational institution conferred with the status of a University or University College under any written law.

If this paragraph means what I think it means, the UUCA isn’t a very big problem. It does not apply to any of the private institutions, which is about 50% of the national student body. As for public institutions, the UUCA may not apply to all of them either. According to wikipedia, UPM was established with the Incorporation Order signed by His Majesty The Yang Di-Pertuan Agong as provided for under the Universities and University Colleges Act, 1971, and published in the Government Gazette as P.U.(A) 387 dated 29 October, 1971.

If the paragraph means what I think it means, it means that our government has been using the UUCA as a FUD weapon. While this is not right, it is the standard procedure used by all governments to keep people in line. So, I don’t blame them for using if it was there. I just think that the big amount of smoke being blown about by all parties is a bit too much.

If the paragraph means what I think it means, changing the Act would only benefit a small fraction of the student population. It would be better for us to focus our attention on fixing the deep problems at our universities, many which are not directly tied to the UUCA.