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There has been a lot said about Anwar Ibrahim. In 1998, the rumour mill was busy grinding out allegations that he is a puppet of the United States. Some people believed it, some people did not. Although I understood the accuracy of rumours in KL, I also knew that he was being politically ousted at the time. Personally, I gave him the benefit of the doubt as anything can and does happen in politics.

But recent developments have just made it very clear that Anwar Ibrahim is very plausibly, a puppet of the United States. Even if he wasn’t a puppet, he is pretty darn close to one. The moment the recent allegations of sodomy started surfacing, the US has been sending out pretty strongly worded messages (as strongly worded as diplomatic messages can ever be) to our government. To me, this obviously shows that it is in the best interest of the United States to see Anwar out of jail.

But why?

As Anwar is a potential candidate for the position of Prime Minister of Malaysia, this is a more serious issue than his sexual habits. I don’t care whom he screws as long as it is not me. I am not certain if being a vassal state of the US is a good idea or not. It actually depends on what the US actually wants from us if Anwar is put in power. So, I have to put on my thinking cap to see what the US could possibly want with us.

The most obvious answer is oil. Malaysia as a nation, is a very small oil exporter, too small to be part of the OPEC. In fact, we are soon going to be a net importer if current consumption rates continue. However, as a state controlled entity, PETRONAS is another matter entirely. These are the Top 10 of the Top 500 profit making companies in the world:

1. Exxon Mobil
2. Royal Dutch Shell
3. General Electric
4. BP
5. Gazprom
6. HSBC Holdings
7. Chevron
8. Petronas
9. Total
10. J.P Morgan Chase

As you can see from the list, 8 of the top 10 companies are oil & gas, which has seen benefit from the rising global oil prices, which means that the dominant profit will come from the sale and export of oil & gas. But of the 8, only 2 are state controlled companies. So, if the US is able to set up a puppet PM in Malaysia, they would effectively have control of the world’s second largest state run oil & gas company.

The second possible answer is for trade and investment. For obvious reasons, our government has not been able to seal a Free Trade Agreement with the US for the last few years. I would think that such an agreement should largely benefit us more than the US, but from the way that the game seems to be panning out, it seems that the benefits flow both ways. Anwar has claimed that he will restructure the NEP based protectionists policies, which is a major sticking point in any form of “free” trade. So, installing him as a puppet, will also smooth that process through.

Please remember that I do not have all the facts and am probably talking straight out of my behind.

So, If Anwar comes to power, will it be a good thing or bad thing for Malaysia to be a vassal state of the US? This is the only important question to answer.

There are potential advantages to being a vassal state of the US in the short to medium term. It can potentially help improve our economy and smooth some other problems. It’s just like having a “taiko” to look after us, but in return, a tithe would have to be paid. However, for the longer term, being under the thumb of another nation is certainly a bad thing, especially for a nation state that may have ambitions of it’s own. So, we may have to sell some of our shares to an external investor in order to gain some positive cash flow before we go under. But we will need to have some sort of plan to buy back those shares again, at a later date, lest we get bought out altogether.

Anyway, this was just some random idea that floated in my head today. I thought that I’d put it out there for you to think about.

I’ve just recently read an article in TheStar about something that is usually bandied about as meritocracy. Then, there has been a recent blog entry that showed the results of the “meritocracy” based university entry system that was imposed several years ago.

meritocracy
n 1: a form of social system in which power goes to those with superior intellects
2: the belief that rulers should be chosen for their superior abilities and not because of their wealth or birth

From the second definition of the word above, the real problems with meritocracy are evident. A person’s intellect/abilities can never be disconnected from the circumstances of their birth or wealth. If one argues that nature (i.e. genes) determines our intellect/abilities, then birth circumstance plays a role. If one argues that nurture (i.e. upbringing) determines it, then wealth will certainly play a role. Therefore, I present that true meritocracy can never exist.

Once we accept the fact that meritocracy does not exist, then we can get that out of the way and think about the real problems in Malaysia. With regards to the Malaysian education context, this term is usually applied to the inequality in scholarship disbursement and university admissions. Our problem is the perceived inequalities that seem to be endemic in the system, due to racial profiling. This has nothing to do with meritocracy at all. It has to do with the concept of fairness, which is an interesting study to economists.

Most people come up with a very simplistic (whilst unfair) solution to the problems. They often call for scholarship disbursements to be given based solely on academic performance and university entrance to be based on only one standardised exam. Both these solutions are thoroughly flawed as it depends on one single thing – an accurate examination system.

Anyone who knows standardised examination systems will see this problem. Every standardised exam is prepared by a team of humans, all of whom are fallible. They are in turn, taken by a large number of fallible humans and marked by a number of equally fallible humans under impossible time constraints. So, if the exam questions, examination and examiners are all fallible, then so are the results.

As the root problem is perceived unfairness, I suggest using technology to solve the problem. None of you should be surprised with this by now!

I suggest that the clearing houses for scholarships and university admissions, set up websites for people to make applications. Provide an interface that will allow the applicants to quickly sort and filter the data by different criteria so that they themselves can see where they stand, as compared to the rest of their cohort. The criteria should not include things like race/gender/religion or any such personal matters. Obviously, any identifiable things should be removed as well, like IC numbers and such.

Then, on one final day/week, allow each applicant to vote for which ranking criteria they think should be used as a measure. The idea of this exercise is to let the students themselves decide on what is “fair” and “meritocratic”. If someone thinks that academic results should be used, then let them vote on that. If someone thinks that some other criteria should be used, then let them vote on that instead. At the end of the day, the computer will tabulate the results and make offers based on the available places and who has “won” the vote.

This is just a rough idea and of course, if it is to be implemented, people with the relevant expertise should design the specific criteria and voting system. I would certainly be interested to see the results of this peer-reviewed scholarship award and admissions process. I wonder if it would change anything at all. In the end, the people who get offers will be the ones deemed to deserve them, by their own peers. There is full transparency involved and everyone should be happy (or not).

PS: We may just discover that the fairest method to use when deciding on making offers, is the venerable Monte Carlo method.

In case nobody got it. I wanted to point out that there is no such thing as meritocracy nor fairness in this world.

If I am to drive a car, I should drive a fuel efficient and low maintenance car. Therefore, I should learn from the examples of some of our state executive members who ended up trading in their Protons for Mercedes E200. According to this article, there are many advantages of the Mercedes:

• In the long run, Mercedes cars are cheaper to maintain and could also save us fuel costs.
• The cars could also fetch a high market price when sold as second-hand cars.

It could be true that the older model Protons may be less well engineered and may cost quite a lot in long term maintenance. The Perdana models were design prior to the purchase of Lotus. The article cited the example of the Proton Perdana of state Commerce, Industry and Environment committee chairman Toh Chin Yaw, which has twice undergone expensive repairs to the tune of RM50,000 in the last 36 months.

They ended up paying only RM 245,000 for each Mercedes, which is very cheap. I guess they must be able to buy it without any import duties, for official use. Assuming that it costs RM 50k to maintain a Proton every 3 years, these babies would pay for themselves after 15 years of continuous use, without any maintenance. Add in another 5 years if we factor in maintenance.

But I already drive a low maintenance, highly fuel efficient car suitable for long distance drives. In the short 5 years that I had use the car, I had already driven it more than 100,000 km. A single tank of fuel, which costs about RM50 (RM75 now), can bring me from KL to Penang. I challenge the Mercedes to beat that!

In terms of maintenance, I spent about RM150 every 5,000 km for regular service and about RM500 for replacing some parts, after about 20,000 km. This comes to about RM5,500 in total maintenance for 5 years. The car is a Proton and the parts and service centres are easily found throughout the country.

In case anyone is wondering, my car used to be a Proton Iswara 1.3L. At the time that it was bought, it cost about RM30,000 or so. Oh, and you should not look down on the crash-ability of the Proton. My car had so many bumps and scratches on it, as a testament to its survivability.

PS: When I go home, I plan to “upgrade” my car to something that’s more fuel efficient. I wonder if they will sell the Tesla Roadster in Malaysia. It is the one pictured above and is partly designed by Lotus anyway. Otherwise, I’ll just go for a Perodua.

I find this image a symbolic representation of a boring life, put in a beautiful context. We awake, eat, work, sleep. Rinse and repeat. Life rarely gets more exciting than this.

I’m just not in a very good mood today. So, I don’t think that I’ll be getting any more work done. So, I thought that I’d just rant about random things. Help get rid of some steam.

I hate phone spammers. For some reason, I always get phone calls that try to sell me stuff. I guess that the previous tenant who lived in my room must have given out his phone number at some point. So, I hate phone spammers. I’ll categorise them into 3 categories:

1. Automated Calls.
   These are the dumbest of all. When I pick up the phone, a pre-recorded message starts to play that sells me something that I don’t want. My reply? I just hang up immediately.
2. Fake Human Calls.
   These calls are made by a person. But, they play some sort of background sound, which makes them sound like they are in a very busy call centre, and part of a large organisation. Again, they try to sell me something that I don’t want. My reply? I say, no thank you and hang up immediately.
3. Stubborn Calls.
   With these calls, the operator insists that he/she is not trying to sell you anything. Then, they start rambling on about their product or service. I gently remind them that they’re trying to sell me something, even if it’s just advice. Then, they switch on to asking questions from a questionnaire. My reply? I hang up immediately.

I know that these people are just trying to make a living. Trying to earn a buck in this world is not easy. However, when I say that I am not interested, it means that I am not interested. If that does not get into their head, I just hang up.

I hate phone spammers.

I think that I lack the ability to “toot my own tuba”, so to speak. I have just gotten back a feedback for my interview. I’m glad that they sent it to me as it highlights my primary weakness. Of the many things mentioned in the feedback, a couple of them were accurate, but mostly weren’t. It wasn’t that I lacked those skills but I didn’t present myself well enough, that’s all.

One of the things that they mentioned that I lacked was, no obvious knowledge of Linux. They didn’t even ask me anything about Linux during the interview. But maybe I should have rambled on and found some way to insert that tidbit into some other reply. You can say that I have little knowledge of Windows, since I’ve not touched it for almost a decade and will not touch it with a 10′ pole, but Linux?

No exposure to system level design? Again, I only have myself to blame there. I tried to play down my contribution in the different projects that I was involved in. So, instead of saying that I pretty much pulled the whole team through from start to finish, I made myself sound more like a team player. It’s only natural for me to switch on a modicum of modesty, when dealing with people superior to me. Maybe it’s an Asian mentality thing. I don’t know. This is probably a major mistake on my part.

No understanding of microprocessor architectures? Sigh. What can I say. Other people would not be using my microprocessor designs for commercial projects if I did not understand microprocessors. But I don’t blame them either here. There was one question that they did ask about microprocessors. However, I answered it quite badly as I did not order my answer properly and probably sounded like I was rambling away. I should really learn to just answer questions from the very beginning.

So, the good thing is that I am glad that I have finally received some feedback from an interview. And this feedback has taught me that my biggest problem is communication. I need to learn how to answer questions better. Otherwise, the interviewers would get a mistaken impression about me.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, there is a high chance that I’ll use the Atom based mini-ITX board from Intel as my HTPC platform. It seems that the board is actually capable of 1080HD playback as evidenced in the following video.

This system uses the D945GCLF board with an Intel Atom 230 1,6GHz HT and 256MB 533MHz DDR2 memory only! It claims to use passive cooling and would be very quiet if so. The movie is a 1080p film encoded in WMV9 or VC1 format. This is not as computationally intensive as H264 but is a good indicator. So, the board is definitely powerful enough to watch HD video encoded in MPEG4 and equivalent codecs.

I smell disaster for Intel here. If people catch on that this is all that they need for a regular computer, who is going to fork out 3 times as much for a dual core or even more for a quad core machine. And once people clue into this fact, what’s to stop system builders from building non-Intel low end machines like ARM or MIPS based systems.

Interesting.