Category: Uncategorized

Seriously. I must congratulate our dearest government for a job well done. I am so impressed that our PM has personally come out in his shock and horror garb to congratulate the Anti Corruption Agency (ACA) for a job well done. From an article:

The detention of two top Immigration officers by the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) in investigations into allegations of bribery in the issuance of visas to foreign workers showed that even big fish would not be let off the hook, said the Prime Minister.

I am curious as to how much does one need to steal in order to pass the benchmark to be a big fish. It’s nice to know, in case anyone wants to show off and be called a big fish, to make up for other lesser attributes.

According to this article:

The sources said syndicate members collected between RM1,500 and RM6,000 to extend each social visit pass for between one and six months. The sources said senior officers get between RM500 and RM700 per passport for a single extension while top officers get between RM10,000 and RM20,000 per agent per month.

Let’s do some quickie math.

Assuming that the agents pay a spread of fees depending on the size of their clientele and it averages RM 15,000 per month, this means that the DG has collected RM 180,000 per agent each year. As another 11 people had been arrested, we can assume that these were agents, which brings our grand total to just under RM 2 million per year. Now, we have arrived at what is considered a benchmark big fish in Malaysia.

A paltry RM 2 million is all it takes! That’s not really very much, when considered against the backdrop of 300 billion or more that have been siphoned out as estimated by Morgan Stanley. It is less than 0.0006% and is hardly even a drop in the ocean and we’re expected to swallow this as a big meal. What kind of cheap people does our PM think we are anyway.

RM 2 million is small fry lar, not big fish. Any statistician can tell you that 0.0006% is insignificant. To enter the realms of significance (0.5%), the DG would have to do it for more than 800 years. I doubt that he has been sitting in his position since before the great Malacca Sultanate or even the earlier Kedah Sultanate were existent in the country.

And the funniest thing is what we end up doing with these people. They end up being transferred to the Public Service Department! So, the PSD is the retirement agency for corrupt civil servants. Now I’m beginning to understand why there are so many problems in the PSD.

PS: As the poster shows: Coming Soon! I am still waiting for the big fish to swim into the net.

I wonder.

I had just attended another potential job interview recently. I submitted my application, and I got an email from them a week later, scheduling a 30 minute phone interview. Instead of that, I got a call from them the very next day, and got called in for a 2 hour face-to-face. This shocked me a bit as I had never ever gotten past the first round of any interview before, much less skipped it.

So, I travelled down for that interview. It all happened quite fast, so I wasn’t 100% prepared for it but I did whatever I could. I studied about the company and their products as well as prepared answers for every bit of information that I wrote in my CV. I also discovered one useful thing about interviews – remember to read the annual reports provided at the reception, because they contain useful information about the company not easily available publicly.

I think that I fielded the questions well, although I’m not sure if I gave the best possible answers or if they were totally happy with me. The interviewers did do their homework though. They had copies of my CV printed, with hand written notes all over it in red pen. They had also looked up the various web references that I provided in my CV, with regards to my work. So, they had quite a lot of questions to shoot me with. I had to go out for 3 cups of water, as I kept talking and talking.

However, there was one question that I simply didn’t have an answer for. I didn’t think that they’d ask me this question so soon. I had thought that I would get at least another round of interview. The question just came out of the blue: how much I’d like to be paid. I was stunned and I gave a really lame ass answer. I hope that they don’t take that as an indication that I’m not seriously interested. It’s just that, I didn’t expect to be asked that question today. Nevermind, lesson learned. I now know, the exact figure to give. I’ve just worked it out with my calculator.

Anyway, I was told to wait a few weeks for a reply. They said that they would have to consider a few other people. What, no more interviews? Damn, it was a stealth final round! But after a few more days, they emailed me to tell me that I failed to get the job. I asked them for some feedback but have yet to hear from them in reply. So, I’m not quite sure where I went wrong, yet again.

I think that it should only be fair for the companies who reject me to tell me where I went wrong. If I don’t get any feedback from job interviews, how am I supposed to improve at them? All I can do is make random assumptions and that doesn’t do me any good.

But at least, I got further than I have ever gotten before, this time around. The difference is that I left out some bits about my previous experience and I did not apply for an entry level position, but a position meant for experienced people. I guess that I’ll need to try things differently again, for the next job.

For the first time ever, we had a live political debate on television, between an opposition leader and a government minister. Although this is something that happens quite often in many civilised democracies, who are we trying to kid anyway. I have only watched bits of it on YouTube but I kind of like the idea. Regardless of who won the debate, I think that it is healthy to have more of it.

We could feasibly have a fortnightly debate on some important topic of the day. Then, we pick a politician from the opposition and government and let them lose on each other on live TV. It is a win-win-win situation for everyone. The television channel wins by having more viewers tune into the show. It can always rent out advertising space at the bottom of the screen. The people win by having the opportunity to actually listen to the drivel spouted out by politicians from both sides. The politicians win by scoring points and getting their precious TV time in front of a captive audience.

However, the politicians selected should not be random. This is where a shadow cabinet comes in useful. For any important topic, we could just pit the minister or deputy minister, against the shadow minister. At the very least, we can be see whom is better suited for the job, the actual minister or the shadow one. However, I am still waiting on the opposition to form a shadow cabinet.

They can’t really say that they lack the numbers anymore. So, I am wondering what excuse will the opposition come up next. They’re probably bickering over who will form the real cabinet come September 16, assuming that they manage to overthrow the government.

There are just so many important topics that we can debate on.

What is a doorknob?

According to the Wordnet dictionary:

doorknob
n : a knob used to release the catch when opening a door (often called `doorhandle’ in Great Britain) [syn: doorhandle]

I was quite confused when my friend told me that I was a doorknob. So, knowing that it was some term used to describe people, and not a doorhandle, I looked up the urban dictionary:

a term for an easy girl who sleeps around. called a door knob because everyone gets a turn.

This obviously didn’t apply to me either. Then, my friend further confused me by saying that I’m a chatty doorknob, as opposed to different kinds of doorknobs. I would like to figure out what it all means because my friend says that it is exactly the position that I want to be in. A doorknob with a personality.

What is a doorknob?

The ecosystem surrounding one of my microprocessor designs is growing slowly, but surely. In addition to the world’s leading software defined radio project, already using my processor core, I have just been notified today, that another group intends to use my processor as the core processor for their hardware platform. If their platform takes off, it could potentially be the world’s leading router platform.

So, now I have to think about throwing additional resources into my hobby project to grow it into something more significant. All this time, it has been pretty much a project that I took up as a learning opportunity. If there was something interesting that I’d like to learn about microprocessors, I would try it out on my processor design to see how it works. I’ve always learned by doing, rather than reading.

Presently, all that I have is the processor core. I have not written any software for it nor have I built any hardware applications around it. The people who used it had to build everything around it from scratch. All I did was provide the core along with some support for it. When they faced problems, they would contact me for help. In return, if they fixed any problems, they would send patches to me.

All is well so far.

However, with more and more professional projects taking up an interest and using my core, I have to think of a long term support infrastructure and ecosystem around the core. It might actually be prudent to consider porting Linux to my core and making a basic demo platform that others can then build on. I should probably consider further developing the software capabilities to add value to the core.

But all these things take time and effort. While it’s been mainly a hobby project, I could choose to do things whenever I was free to do so. However, with more and more commercial projects sellling devices built around my core, it might be prudent for me to charge some sort of ad-hoc maintenance fee. I think that I will have a discussion with the different projects who use my cores, to work out some sort of payment schedule.

I don’t expect this thing to make me rich. I only think that it’s fair to compensate me for any time and effort in supporting their commercial projects.

Waste Allocation Load Litter Earth-Class (WALL-E) is the name of the main character of Pixar’s latest classic. And it is a beautiful story. The entire movie had very little dialogue but the emotions came through crystal clear. The love story that focuses around WALL-E and EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is so touching and emotional, again, told with practically no dialogue other than each others’ names.

I think that it’s the best movie that I’ve seen this year, up till now. The only possible movie that can unseat it is probably Batman, coming out in a fortnight. I plan to catch that movie as soon as it comes out. I’ve been reading previews and it’s all good. I love the kinds of dark movies that screw around with my head and it seems that the dark knight might just do it.

Go watch WALL-E when it comes out. It is a wonderful family film. And remember to watch the closing credits. It’s practically part of the movie itself!

The letter from an anonymous student who had to sit through a BTN camp lecture seems to be making the rounds today. Actually, I seemed to have been unfortunate enough, to have missed out on BTN camps. They sound like really exciting stuff.

From the second hand stories that filter out of the camps, it seems that there are lots of interesting lectures in these camps. It would be really interesting to be able to capture a recording of these and let the greater public share in their grand ideas. According to some other blogs, it seems that they would confiscate all recording equipment, in order to protect the intellectual property of the lectures. These lectures must have some really classy stuff in it.

However, I was just wondering, if the cinemas are unable to stop people from bringing in video cameras into a film, a truly concerted effort at recording the lecture series to educate the public, should be technically feasible. Let us assume that there are people checking the bags and pockets of participants for electronic snooping devices. So, let me put on my black hat and hack this problem.

The most obvious way to hack it is to place the recording equipment in the lecture halls before the lecture is held. Goodness knows, if students can smuggle answers into an exam hall, under the watchful eye of multiple invigilators, I’m sure that the students can figure out a way to bring some recording equipment in.

An MP3 voice recorder, is so small that it would snugly fit under almost any chair or table, with a nicely applied piece of gum. A 4Gb device configured to record a mono audio channel at 64kbps rate, can record continuously for almost 6 days before running out of storage space. The battery probably would not last half as long. So, a backup battery will be needed. Adding it is a 5 minute surgery.

A wireless webcam or something similar can be used for video. These webcams are rather small in size and can be tucked away in a corner and configured to only record when it detects movement. The bulk of the recording equipment would be kept in a laptop, that I assume, would be kept safely in a bag outside the hall. Again, a small battery may be needed.

But now for the really classic coup de grace. The lecturers themselves use off-the-shelf laptops to conduct the lectures.

Ever heard of Van Eck phreaking? Probably not. Anyway, it is a well documented method of capturing the video signals of any display, off the air, as all electronic devices emit electromagnetic radiation. So, it can be used to capture the videos and slides that the lecturer shows, without actually having to steal the machine or hacking into it, which is incidentally a crime!

Copying the lectures off the air can at most, be classified as a copyright infringement, which is not a criminal offence. Unless of course, the course materials are classified as official secrets. However, in such a case, the attendees must agree to keeping it a secret first, by signing some sort of NDA or similar piece of contract. Otherwise, it is definitely not a secret.

So, it’s actually technically feasible. It’s only a question of preparation and will.