Sybreon Ones Nought

I had this minor little incident while driving yesterday, I lost control of my car at one point. My car is a really feisty car and it shows. I was turning at a corner when one of the front wheels went over a puddle of water. That was when I lost the back of the car and it swung wildly to one side.

Luckily I did not depress my brakes. If I did, I would probably have totally lost control of the car. Instead, I released the accelerator and fought with the car to get back in control. It was an ‘interesting’ experience having your car go in one way while your steering wheel is pointed in another. My rear end swung wildly to the left and right for a few seconds and finally settled back into order.

That was quite an experience. It was kind of like – drifting – is what I would say.

Since this is an annual thing, I thought that I should just put a few words down to tell the kids who got rejected by JPA – Don’t Give Up!

Dear JPA Reject,

I shall use the words that I had once heard, from a good professor of mine: “Although you may feel dejected, do not feel depressed.” The reason is really simple. The JPA scholarship is not the be-all-end-all of your dreams. Your dreams are yours to keep. So, keep them alive!

I have been fortunate enough to get multiple education scholarship offers in my life and I had turned down a few of them. I have also made many friends who are both government scholars and non-government scholars alike. So, I would like to share some of these experiences.

First and foremost, the JPA scholarship scheme is just one of the many scholarships available, both local and overseas. You should realise that there are many scholarship awarding bodies in Malaysia. For those who will be facing their SPM examinations in the future, please remember to apply for multiple scholarships, if only to increase your chances of actually getting one.

You see, everyone has a different set of criteria. You may not agree with the JPA selection criteria and you may not fit in with it. However, there are also other scholarship bodies who do not agree with the JPA selection criteria and apply their own criteria in scholar selection. So, while you may not fit into the JPA mould, you may actually fit into some other mould.

There are also many overseas scholarship schemes available. In fact, many foreign universities are able to provide some sort of financial aid for their students. You should check to see if you qualify for these. There are also various international foundations and bodies who offer scholarships. This is particularly true if you are able to secure a place in a top university.

This brings me to my second point. This is not the end of the road. You can still try again at the post-STPM (and equivalent) level. There is nothing to stop you from continuing your education to a pre-university level and trying again. There are plenty of Malaysians who have done exactly that – do their pre-university education themselves and re-apply for scholarships again.

If you cannot afford to study your A-Levels/IB at a private institution, you can always do your STPM. You may not realise this but the STPM is actually a very well recognised pre-university level qualification. You will still be able to apply for various foreign universities with the STPM. Do not always believe what the private colleges tell you about the STPM.

However, some of you may be turned-off by the lengthy duration of the STPM exam. For this, I have only one advice – a single year is nothing, in the larger scheme of things. Think about this for a minute. What is a single year difference when compared with an entirely lifetime. In fact, it is a common practice to take a ‘gap-year’ to go explore various avenues in life. This can even help you figure out what it is that you actually want in life instead of blindly going with the flow.

This brings me to my next point. Not everyone is made out to be a doctor. In fact, you are probably not made out to be a doctor. The medicine path is a long and arduous one and if you are not made out to be a doctor, studying medicine is going to be hell. I have seen this happen to many friends. So, you should really ask yourself if you really love medicine or if you’re doing it just for the heck of it.

You can be a success, if you do something that you truly like – be it something as dull as accounting or something as exciting as engineering (alright, I’m biased!). But seriously, you need to think carefully of your career choice. It is something that you will be living with daily for the rest of your life. If you find that you hate medicine after so many years of study, you will lose more than just a couple of years.

And finally, do not let this little hurdle stop you from pursuing your dreams. There are many paths that can lead to your dream. Sometimes, it may actually be better to take the path less tread. So, do not think that your world has ended as a result of this rejection. Learn to handle rejection and to use it positively to improve yourself so that you will ultimately, still achieve your dreams.

PS: Do not stop dreaming!

with metta,
Shawn Tan.
(Still trying to achieve my dreams!)

The new XBMC is out and it comes with a host of new features. The most interesting feature is the native support for VDPAU, which is a hardware acceleration technology for NVIDIA graphics chips. This will change the balance in the selection of hardware for my future HTPC.

You see, I have always been partial towards using a pure AMD/ATi hardware combo. However, with better hardware support for NVIDIA, playback of high-def videos would be smoother. Therefore, it brings new boards into the picture. There are entry-level NVIDIA based motherboards with the NF8200 chipset and then there is the new and exciting ION platform form NVIDIA.

I am likely to go for the regular NF8200 based chipset as that is the lowest possible chipset that supports VDPAU technology. It is far cheaper than the ION platform and it us more readily available in the market. I can get an ECS black motherboard with this chipset and HDMI for RM 265 (EUR 55). It can be cheaply coupled with a low-power AMD Sempron processor for another RM115 (EUR 25).

This combination, along with a decent amount of memory, should be able to produce stellar graphics performance for playing back almost any sort of video content. Of course, the features of the new XBMC do not end here. It also comes with a bunch of new codecs and other improvements. The full list is detailed here.

PS: Now, if only the prices for the 32LG53 TV would come down a notch. I’m all ready to jump onto the high-def band wagon!

I had just read a response to my comment on the Education Malaysia blog. In it, the author claimed that I was “out of sync”. So, this got me thinking if I am truly out-of-sync with our education issues. Granted, I have left school for more than a decade and I do not have any school going children. However, the issue of Chinese schools being better than National schools have been ongoing since before I went to school. So, while the players may have changed, the arguments have not changed much.

Sigh. Ad nauseum

The reason that I had pointed out John Lee’s statement is because I doubt that either Kian Ming or Tony Pua would have made sweeping statements like he did without the numbers to back them up. In fact, that is all I was asking for – the necessary facts to back up his statement. As evident in some of my previous posts, I’m biased because I personally think that all vernacular schools in Malaysia should be shut down.

But the question here is whether or not I am in-sync or out-of-sync.

Anyone who reads Coltz’s reply to my statement can immediately see that he does not have any numbers to back up his statement either. He has to infer that that Chinese schools are better from a bunch of disconnected ‘facts’. Or are they? Correlation does not imply causation.

Firstly, he pointed out crime rates in schools. While I am not sure if the police actually publish statistics down to that level of granularity, I do have a simple answer to his assertion. There are more delinquents in national schools simply because the national school delinquents still bother to go to school. The Chinese school delinquents would have dropped out of school by then and are busy peddling VCDs in the market or earning some other form of work. That takes care of your bottom 30%.

Secondly, he posited that based on the National Math Olympiad results, there are a disproportionate number of top Chinese schools as opposed to National schools. So, I just quickly browsed through the list and this got me wondering, where were all the top National schools. Then, I suddenly recalled something from my past. My school never joined any National Math Olympiad. Instead, we joine the International Math Olympiad. I did okay enough. Granted, I do not know if this was still the practice today, but it is a possibility.

Thirdly, his assertion that Chinese schools have the ability to fire incompetent teachers, which may result in better teachers. Well, I would like to point out the fact that many of the Chinese schools do not even have teachers whom were qualified to be trained as teachers in the first place. Many of them enter teaching by first becoming a volunteer/substitute teacher at schools and then use that experience to then have the schools forward them for teacher training before being assigned as permanent teachers. This does not happen in national schools, which largely get teachers straight out of teacher training colleges. However, which is better is open to debate.

So, I’m not quite sure if I am in-sync or out-of-sync. Personally, I would like to think that my personal background does give me some insight into the system that I would otherwise not have.

Well, you’ve probably heard of the D-DoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. It is a cyber attack where a number of computers are used to attack a single machine by overwhelming it with requests so that it is unable to service legitimate requests. It is the easiest way to take down any single web site.

Now, the Swedish pirates behind The Pirate Bay (TPB) have come up with the money equivalent. In case you have not been following the spec-trial recently, this is a quick summary. Swedish law has maintained that there was nothing illegal with downloading content, just illegal in distributing it. TPB is a BitTorrent site that doesn’t host any files but provides links to where you can download them.

So, they were recently sued and found guilty. As part of their punishment, they were fined heavily. So, in order to pay their fine, the TPB have come up with an ingenious system of doing it. They have dubbed it the Distributed Denial of Dollars (D-Do$) attack. It basically works this way.

They are encouraging everyone to help them pay their fine by donating a small (1 SEK) amount to a specific account. This account is owned by the law firm that prosecuted them. They intend to pay their fine via the law firm. The catch is that this account has a small (2 SEK) processing fee connected to it. So, the law firm would have to fork out money in order to receive money!

Of course, the legality of the whole thing is in question. IANAL. So, I’m not sure if the law firm is obliged to accept the funds. If they don’t this D-Do$ attack wouldn’t work. But if they are legally bound to accept the funds – goodness – they would have to fork out more than they received!

Hence, this is just so typical TPB.

Guess what arrived in my mailbox today – Jaunty Jackalope! I had pre-ordered it before it was officially released. It is extremely good for them to have hardly a fortnight for it to get to me. I am quite excited about playing around with it. However, I will hold-off actually tinkering around with it for a while – at least until the weekend!

There are a bunch of things that I am looking forward to. A friend of mine mentioned the other day that operating systems were no longer exciting. I beg to differ. Linux is still very exciting, even on a non-geek level. In Jaunty, I am dying to try out the new digiKam and Amarok. These are the best media management apps, IMHO. They have plenty of advanced features.

Jaunty spouts many under-the-hood improvements. For a long time, Ubuntu has been suffering from performance degradation. The developers have been working hard and they are now able to boast a significant speed increase. I have been suffering for a few months because of this degradation too. I hope to be able to run fast again!

Unfortunately, there are some known issues with using the open source ATi graphics drivers. So, I may have to resort to using the proprietary drivers from ATi themselves until this issue gets sorted out, which it will. The open source drivers are improving by leaps and bounds ever since ATi released its hardware documentation.

There are of course, a whole lot of other minor usability and speed improvements. It has been branded – “Speed, Beauty and Innovation”. I sure hope so!

I have a few peeves with this entire episode of the Silver Fiasco.

For one, the decision by the courts has just further muddled the situation. The trouble is that, I agree that the way in which BN handled the take-over was amateurish. They should have learned how to do a proper take-over from their predecessors. In fact, I think that Anwar actually successfully did one before in Sabah. Too bad for them that he was not on their side this time around.

I think that the political sandiwara is far from over. There will not be any peace in the silver state until someone gives in. I really pity the people living there.

However, another peeve that I have is with the opposition. They are either fanning the flames or joining in with whomever it is who is fanning the flames, of fear – using May 13 as an instrument to instill fear. For goodness sakes, it’s time to leave that legacy behind us. The history has been so distorted by so many parties that I dare not even comment on what is true or false history.

For now, I hope that everyone would just calm down a notch and let those involved, sort things out.

If Nizar is the legitimate MB, it brings the whole fiasco of the state assembly sitting last week to question. There are reasons why there were procedures in place to appoint the MB and speaker. There are also procedures to follow in dismissing them. BN tried to bulldoze it’s way through the procedures to score a few cheap PR points.

I think that it is still possible for the BN to come up tops at the end. Particularly, if they get the cooperation of the royal palace. However, I don’t know how well that will sit with the rakyat of the state.