Sybreon Ones Nought

It is curious that there are many Malaysians who are not registered voters in Malaysia. Today, I volunteered to help man a voter registration booth to help my fellow Malaysians get registered as voters. I consider this a civic duty in helping some people fulfill their obligation to vote.

I have often wondered why it is so difficult to get people registered as voters. We have a national ID record system that keeps track of everyone’s personal details. It should be a simple matter of automagically converting everyone who is above the age of 21 as voters. That should be fairly trivial and easy. Unfortunately, things do not work like that in Malaysia.

At home, everyone has to actually register themselves as voters by filling up a paper form. We are not even able to do it online. It has been ages since I filled up my voter registration form. So, just before I manned the booth, I was given a short briefing on how to actually fill it up. I was quite surprised that the form was a fairly difficult one to fill. I have never seen a more badly designed form than this voter registration form.

I have never actually seen the nomination papers but if these voter registration forms are anything to go by, I can begin to understand how some politicians can have problems filling up the nomination forms resulting in their automatic disqualification. The voter registration form could have had a better user-interface in so very many ways.

Anyway, after many hours of manning the booth, we ultimately hit our quota by the end. So, it was a worthwhile pursuit. I got to meet a few interesting people. I will probably try to do it again next week. I’ll probably help a few more weeks just for the heck of it – until I find some other thing to occupy my weekends with.

Due to my rational personality, I tend to justify my purchases in a logical and rational way. Since the price of the PS3 will drop next week with the release of the PS3-slim, I found myself in the position to consider the purchase. I fully plan to use the PS3 as my HTPC and also as an entertainment platform. So, in order to test the cost of the PS3, I compared it against that of a standard PC configured in a similar fashion.

To do this, I picked out the recommended system requirements for Fallout 3, which is a nice game available for both the PS3 and PC. From that, I worked out the estimated cost of the machine to be:


CPU = 200
RAM = 100
GFX = 200
PSU = 250
MBD = 250
HDD = 150
KBM = 50
WFI = 100


The total comes up to about RM1,300 and that is perfectly within the range of a PS3. The present PS3 sells for RM1,600 and the new PS3 could possibly come in at around RM1,100 if we convert directly from the US price. Therefore, the purchase of a PS3 is perfectly justified from the point-of-view of a HTPC and gaming rig. Things are starting to make some sense. So, I will probably buy the new PS3 once the prices drop in Malaysia.

Man, I am falling in love with virtual machines, more and more. I have had the opportunity to work with virtual machines at work recently. Unfortunately, the project is already a little late. Otherwise, I would have taken the opportunity to experiment with different virtualisation solutions. So, I stuck with what I knew and managed to get the systems up and running in record time. Virtualisation is really a life-saver.

I have been having trouble getting Tomcat running on a virtual machine after trying for half a day. Finally, I gave up and decided to start over. It took me a few seconds to wipe out the old virtual machine and create a new one. Then, it took me a matter of minutes to get Tomcat running on the new virtual machine. I am still not quite sure what went wrong with the first install but since it was my first time working in a CentOS environment, there was a lot of experimenting going on and I might have done something wrong.

Oh yes, having a virtualisation environment allows me to play around with different flavours of Linux as well. It has been ages since I played around with a RedHat related system such as CentOS. So, I got to play around with yum in the last couple of days. I have to say that I prefer the debian apt system better. It resolves and retrieves packages much faster than the yum system. I am not trying to open a can of worms here but that is what I had observed.

I think that once I have a little more free time, I may actually experiment with some other distros. The project that I have been working on is currently late by several months. So, I have to stick with what I know and use my past experiences and existing knowledge to get things up to speed first.

PS: I am right to hate Java. It is impossible to run Tomcat with a limited amount of RAM. Java just drops out with an OOM exception.

I have this feeling that the old megahertz (MHz) wars are back – slimmer, sexier and bolder than ever before. A new battle-ground has been chosen and the players and all starting to make their move. There is plenty at stake and companies have realised that if consumers were dumb before, they should still be dumb now. I hope that it is not so, but it is unlikely to be any different.

The new field of battle is in the world of mobile phones – particularly smart-phones. There are a number of behemoths playing in this field and everyone is starting to tout the speed of their all ‘powerful’ processors sitting inside their smart-phones. Consider this blurb from the new Nokia Maemo N900 and Samsung Jet smart-phones:

At the heart of this mobile computer is its powerful 600 MHz processor and up to 1GB of application memory. The superscalar ARM processor delivers exceptional power and enables you to run all your applications quickly, smoothly, and simultaneously.

The Samsung JET, with AMOLED technology and an 800MHz Application Processor, is smarter than a Smartphone.

The reason that the MHz wars of the computer industry was dumb is mainly because of the MHz myth – that is the belief that a faster clock speed translates into a faster processor. This is simply not true as the true speed of a processor is a complicated thing that needs to be measured with a number of different parameters including the clock speed and a number of architectural parameters.

While most of these phones all sport ARM Cortex processors, even these come in different shapes and sizes. The ARM Cortex is just the core of the more complex System-on-Chip that contains the processor with a number of different hardware peripherals and accelerators. Therefore, it is pretty difficult to claim that one machine is more powerful than the other just because it has a faster clock speed.

This is silly.

I find that it is quite difficult trying to maintain a race-neutral stance after coming back to Malaysia. It was far easier to maintain such a stance back in Cambridge when one is confronted with a population that is truly mixed beyond recognition – from many national, religious and ethnic backgrounds. However, back home, everything seems to be constantly clouded in the race issue. It is far easier to have racist tendencies than to maintain a race-neutral one.

I started feeling this way the moment I returned back home. I was bombarded with all sorts of queries about race issues. Then, at work, I am constantly confronted by race issues as well. In fact, you see it everywhere – particularly within the established power structure. When I had a traffic accident recently, I was also confronted by the race issue. I have tried my best to maintain a race-neutral stance but in doing so, I think that I may have ended up offending some people. This is a kind of situation where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If everyone is a closet racist, the race-neutral stance would not work with them.

The path of least resistance is often the racist one – just blame everything on race.

It is kind of sad that things have come to this stage in Malaysia. While I still hold some hope for the future, I do see that it is going to be a seriously up-hill battle. We have all been boxed and brain-washed for far too long already.

The first thing that happened to me when I reported for work was that I got slapped with transfer orders. I received a memo that told me that I was transferred to another department effective today. This is actually the first that I have been told of the transfer. Nobody told me anything about any transfer and the only inkling that I had that it was happening was that I had heard rumours from others. In fact, when I first returned from my hospitalisation, I was immediately asked why I was getting transferred. I seriously had no idea what was happening.

I was told by my colleagues that it should not have been handled this way. My manager should have spoken to me about this transfer, and the new manager should have come to speak to me about the transfer as well, prior to being transferred. Unfortunately, none of that happened. The only time that I had heard anything official about the transfer was the official memo that I got today from HR. HR finally summoned me to meet them and my former and new bosses after I had already moved my ass into the new department. They are truly screwed up with their procedures. There is no wonder that HR is officially fucked up in every organisation.

Regardless, I followed the orders and packed my stuff and immediately went to report to my new boss. To some other people, my transfer is seen as a good thing. I am still ambivalent about it as I had not requested it. You see, the department that I have been transferred to is the only department that is generating income for the organisation. This is evident the moment I stepped into the office. Each person had at least two monitor screens on their desks – nice big screens too. They also have pretty high end machines each. However, the change in environment is more than just about computers. In fact, I keep hearing people speaking in Mandarin and Cantonese all the time instead. I guess that I have to brush up on my speaking skills soon.

As for my new colleagues, I already knew them before this. In fact, I had already befriended all of them before joining the department. We always seemed to end up in the same team-building and training sessions. So, we have already developed a friendly rapport. In fact, the only person in the department whom I have never met before is my new boss, who is the only unknown quantity. According to most of my colleagues, my new boss is quite a good fellow, with lots of technical knowledge and can actually take criticism. So, we should hopefully have little problems working together.

Hands down the most interesting and entertaining film of the summer. District 9 makes a political statement like non other. I found it slightly disorienting at first but once the show gets under way, there is no holding it back. Although the actors are not common names in the industry, they nonetheless pulled off an impressive show and made the story so believable. District 9 is an alien story with a twist. It shows the dark side of man when it comes to dealing with first contact and extra terrestrials. Fortunately, this is Hollywood and it gives us a feel-good ending at the end. Well, sort of.

District 9 is based on Alive in Joburg, a 2005 short film directed by Blomkamp and produced by Sharlto Copley. Like the short film it’s based on, District 9 takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, and poses analogies to the events that occured during the apartheid system enforced by South African government between 1948 and 1994. The title of the movie is a reference to District Six, a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa, declared a “whites only” area by the apartheid government in 1966, with a population of 60,000 forcibly relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away.

Honestly, I find this film extremely difficult to describe because it is quite unlike your normal Hollywood alien block-buster. Just go watch it!