Sybreon Ones Nought

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Oh, I’m in love – with a Chinese restaurant. The name of the establishment is Kim Ma Restaurant. It is located at the Palace of the Golden Horses, Malaysia. I have to say that the food is not your regular food.

According to their Captain, they’ve got modern Chinese food. Essentially, they just do not have your traditional Chinese dishes. For example, their shark-fin soup is served with dumplings instead of your regular crab meat. The fried rice has fish-roe and mushroom gravy in it. Nice!

When my sister casually mentioned that I love the restaurant so much that I would like to ‘treat wine’ there, the Captain very quickly gave me his name card and explained to us that they are not part of the package and I will need to request for them separately.

I don’t really know how to illustrate the quality of the food. However, I hope that the photos will be able to do it some justice. All the food was served in individual portions. I forgot to mention but the service was excellent too. Yum!

Well, this is my other purple suit. Like I had mentioned earlier, it is a form of really dark-red. This is my favourite suit. In actual truth, I only have two suits now and they are both purple. I will probably need to get a regular suit for work purposes in the future.

Today is Wesak Day. I would normally go to the temple and do my thing annually. However, I was not able to do my thing today. Instead, I ended up just doing some dana and then had a look around the old place. It has been years since I had stepped into the place. Not much has changed at all.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

Gajah sama gajah berlawan, Pelanduk mati di tengah.

At first, I had a lot of things to write about today. However, after seeing what has happened in Perak today, I’m quite sad that such a thing has happened. You see, while this picture does not tell the whole story, it certainly shows a lot.

Personally, I would have to agree with Tun Dr M that BN truly screwed up the take-over of Perak. They really should learn from how our government engineered the take-over of Sime Darby on the London Stock Exchange. When you want to do a take-over, it has to be planned in advance and executed flawlessly. Otherwise, you risk a lot of back lash from revealing your hand.

The matter between the two Menteri Besar is still being deliberated at the Federal Court. That situation is a little murky because the Sultan is involved and the constitution is not very clear on the matter. That is why it is being referred to the courts for a decision.

However, the situation with the Assembly Speaker was never in question. By law, he was the lawful speaker of the assembly. His appointment had nothing to do with ‘confidence’ nor does it have anything to do with the Sultan. This is where the BN botched up the job.

They should have shown a little patience and restraint. They should have waited till the sitting of the assembly before springing their trap. In one fell swoop, they could have voted out the speaker and tossed out the Menteri Besar unquestionably. Unfortunately, the acted prematurely.

As a result, neither party is satisfied. One side is trying desperately to bull-doze its way through while the other side is trying to be as stubborn as a rock. Obviously, something has got to give. I just hope that the rakyat does not end up dying in between.

There are reasons why procedures are in place. Even the triads and gangsters follow procedures. We can argue about the right or wrong of these procedures, but they still need to be followed. Let’s try to stick to the procedures, yar!

I encountered an case in the office today where a co-worker recommended that we do not check code into our source code management system because it is accessible company wide. Obviously, this is a legal, ethical and moral issue.

However, this highlighted a problem with closed-source development. With open-source development, this would be a non-issue. The code is supposed to be publicly available anyway. So, the only ACL practices are there to control who can clobber the code if they wish to.

Personally, I think that even implementing ACL on our code repository would not fix the issue. Instead of anyone company-wide being able to steal the code, anyone in our team can do so. So, the ethical, legal and moral issues are still an issue. The whole idea of using a code repository is so that others can share the code. So, at some point, other people can ‘steal’ the code if they wish to.

The only true solution to this problem is to open-source the code. However, working in a closed-source company means that I would not be able to push this through. Everyone would just look at me in an odd way if I ever suggested it.

The trouble is that with this issue, some people may be hesitant on checking in their code. This would just screw up our development process.

While I think that there are valid reasons for not liking what Wong Chin Huat did, I think that our police needs to learn some lessons in public relations. The police have been so heavy handed for so long that they don’t seem to know how to act with an even hand.

I would think that on the governments’ side, they would argue that he was the ‘ring leader’ and tried to stir things up by getting everyone to wear black on Thursday. Incidentally, I would be wearing black, if only because I have only black shirts left in my clean pile.

I think that this is quite different from getting people to wear yellow, like for Bersih. With yellow, it is easy for the police to catch the people who are involved. Not many people wear a bright yellow shirt. But for black, things are a little more dicey. Lots of people wear black, if only to blend in.

Moreover, they have probably learned that it is difficult to catch the masses. Instead, they should focus on the ‘leaders’. However, what the police and the government may have failed to understand is the nature of the present fight. There are no ‘leaders’ per se.

What the Internet allows is the flattening of hierarchies. Anyone with a connection and some perseverance can be a ‘leader’. Anyone with a blog can shout his mouth off. It’s kind of difficult to identify ‘leaders’ in the traditional sense anymore.

So, maybe the cops should bear this in mind for the future. Denying him an audience with opposition politicians is fine. But denying him an audience with his lawyers is definitely illegal in some book. They should have at least given him a chance to speak to the lawyers. That would have been good public relations.

In fact, the police could have even issued a public statement to the press, to explain the motivations behind their actions and what they plan to do. At the very least, that would neutralise the FUD that the opposition politicians try to create with this situation. The police are trying to create their own FUD too, but it does not work anymore. The people have gotten tired of it. Plus, the opposition politicians are much better spinners than the government.

So, I’ll be wearing black tomorrow, if only because I only have black shirts left in my clean pile and I do not want to wear some stinky shirt.

You have got to watch the video to believe it. A night-time city-scape generated procedurally. If you don’t understand what that means, it means that the whole city is created using mathematical formulae. In typical games, environments like these would be laid out by hand. That is why, games look boring after a while because it is the same old thing ad nauseum. But if everything was generated with algorithms, merely tweaking some of the parameters and throwing some randomness into the mix will result in entirely different results. Granted, the present proof of concept is rather limited but it’s the concept that counts!

As for applications – both the XBOX360 and PS3 are fans of procedurally generated content. The PS3 certainly has enough computing power to create an entire city from scratch. So, it makes sense that gaming companies might want to take it up and create their own virtual cities on the fly. It would make the games interesting to even the developers themselves.

Kudos, Shamus!

I’m copying ad-verbatim from Zubedy’s blog. I certainly think that it makes plenty of sense.

We want a Social Contract that …
1. Sees wrong as wrong and right as right, no matter who did it.
2. No individual or community is left behind regardless of race or geography.
3. We work towards zero poverty – it’s superfluous to have skyscrapers and state of the art structures when there are Malaysians who do not have a place to call home.
4. Recognizes the Malay and indigenous customs form the core culture while the Chinese, Indian and other cultures play strong supportive roles to make our nation a unique and exciting brand.
5. All Malaysian children receive a first rate education, every child is supported and encouraged to achieve his or her maximum potential.
6. Encourages us to practice sustainable development without corruption.
7. Allows us learn and appreciate our own religion while at the same time encourages us to understand the religions practiced by our fellow Malaysians.
8. We help each other in business and transfer knowledge and skills from one community to another.
9. Treats non-Malaysians serving in our nation, Bangladeshis or Europeans; with equality, respect and dignity.
10. Does not introduce racism and division to our children at school or at home.
11. We provide adequate health care for all.
12. We look at our constitution as a whole and not pick and choose out of context to suit an argument.
13. Do unto your Malaysian brothers and sisters as you would like them do unto you.
14. Acknowledges that we are Many Colors, but One Race, Bangsa Malaysia