Sybreon Ones Nought

This is one of my purple suits. This is the blue-ish purple one, which is why I wore it with a blue shirt. I have another one that is a red-ish purple one with a slightly different cutting and design. In my opinion, the red-purple one has better workmanship and design than this one. But all in all, I think that I like both purple suits.

I wore this the other day, to attend a formal evening function with a strict dress-code. I noticed a few guys staring at my suit. I wonder if they were staring because of the colour or because of the design. Unfortunately, the ladies did not take notice in my direction. Hehe.

The reason that my face has been cropped out of the photo is because I am totally not photogenic. There is a reason why I am usually behind the camera, rather than in front. This is actually the first time this suit and I appeared in a photo.

In real life, it is not quite as purple. This photo looks a little more purple because of the camera flash. That is also the reason why the shirt looks terribly shiny. Under diffused lighting, it looks darker and more subdued. It was never my intention to stand out in a crowd.

And yes, this is supposed to be worn without the tie, which was the reason why I chose this design in the first place! I hate ties!

After spending the last month working on a Windows machine, I have decided to go back to using Linux in the office. If I have to use it under virtualisation, so be it. I have come to understand why trying to do development work on a Windows machine is a joke. Seriously, you won’t understand it until you have actually used Linux for real-world embedded development.

Let us just talk about this from an embedded developer perspective.

One word – Emacs. There are few integrated development environments that are as featured as Emacs. It has everything under the hood and more in its back pocket. Just like a woman, it takes a while to learn all the right moves but once that’s mastered, life will be good. Try comparing Eclipse or the piece-of-shit CodeWarrior that I have to use at work is laughable. While notepad++ shows some promise, it is but an infant compared to Emacs.

Two words – Code management. Windows does not come with any sort of code management system. Therefore, developers have developed a lot of bad habits over the years when it comes to working with code revisions such as the multiple-folder technique. Instead, Linux comes with a host of code management tools from the venerable RCS to the most modern Git. Once you have experienced the beauty that is distributed code management, it is difficult to go back to anything inferior.

Three words – Support Tools and Utilities. When you experience some trouble with some piece of code, you need to have a lot of support to solve it. Windows does not come with anything. For example, when you have some really cryptic C code that you need to understand, there’s always cdecl on Linux and nothing equivalent on Windows. Doxygen is truly a life-saver when it comes to the tedious work of generating mundane documentation, which every engineer hates to do.

Obviously, this just applies to a specific area. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Microsoft’s own developer tools. Unfortunately, those are not universal and are not suitable for use in embedded development. Maybe this is an area that Microsoft should take care of. However, they seem to have little incentive to do so as few embedded systems are bloated enough to run Windows.

I mentioned to a friend of mine, the other day, that power is a system consideration. The traditional thinking in computer systems is that power is dependent on fabrication process, which is very true. However, it should not stop there. Hardware and software both play a role in optimising for low-power operation.

I can imagine some people going – what? While it makes sense that hardware affects power directly, it may not be so simple to imagine how software can affect power consumption until you realise that the operation of hardware is controlled by software. So, in order for hardware to optimise power usage, the software needs to be power aware.

Personally, I’m still waiting for the day when software compilers would be able to automagically compile software optimised for power. At present, they generally compile for either higher speed of execution or smaller memory footprint. It would be cool if there was a “-Op” compilation flag for GCC to tell it to power optimise the software.

Of course, the amount of power consumption used by modern microprocessors is often minimal, when compared against the power consumed by the entire system, including any analogue front-ends and display devices. However, if power budgets are tight, even saving a uA of current can help.

There are possibly more ways to do things but these are just off the top of my head. The ways in which software can apply power savings are several fold:

1. It can choose to use substitute instructions with ones that consume less power. For example, a multiply can sometimes be substituted with a shift, which uses less power.
2. It can optimise the use of memory so that less memory is needed and less memory transactions are performed. This goes beyond just optimising the use of cache memory.

Hopefully, someone will one day consider building a C compiler that is power aware. This may be a wonderful project for someone’s PhD. It would take a lot of experimentation to build up a profile of power consumption of each instruction. Then, it would take some thinking to find alternative algorithms to perform things with minimal power.

Although this is not a new phenomenon in the country, I have recently noticed some concerted effort at raising public funds through bonds. This only raises the hairs at the back of my neck. I have a gut feeling that tells me that this is not a good practice to keep up. Since I am not an economist, I casually asked an economist friend of mine about this last weekend.

I am of the opinion that our government is possibly having some cash flow problems, brought about by the stark drop in oil prices. Our last budget was planned on the basis that oil would stay at about $125 per barrel. However, it has dropped to less than half that value. Hence, it is very possible that our government is experiencing some cash issues.

So, the easiest solution out of this would be to issue bonds. Bonds are basically promises from the government to repay the money at a specific time in the future, with specific terms. Bonds are a good instrument for solving temporary cash flow problems as it is essentially what everyone does, borrow some cash to make more cash and then repay the loan with some interest.

But to me, this is borrowing against the future, to repay present debts. For some reason, my logic just cannot reconcile this positive feedback loop. If we are borrowing against the future, we are actually hedging that we will be able to repay those debts in the future. The trouble happens when we do not have enough cash to repay those debts, we will need to issue more bonds, to borrow even more money.

Somehow, I have a feeling that this is not sustainable and that the bubble will burst at some point. This is what our venerable TDM has described as ‘making money out of thin air’. Our government is literally ‘printing money out of thin air’. It is digging itself into debt with the rakyat. When it defaults, we are literally screwed because we have a vested interest in not letting it default.

Oh my, the picture just became even darker for me. I think that I should go run and hide away from all the Sukuk and Amanah Saham issues.

Well, I’m never going to be able to live this down. My photo was broadcast to the entire company recently, during a company-wide gathering. Unfortunately, it was not the most complimentary photo. Honestly, I have never been very photogenic but this photo was down-right sad. This has been confirmed by all my co-workers.

One of my co-workers commented that I looked extremely depressed in the photo. Another one commented that I look extremely geeky. Overall, the consensus was that my saham jatuh (stock fell) in the company. Furthermore, I met a bunch of new people yesterday to discuss some stuff and one of the commented that he can visibly ‘see’ that I look very geeky.

So, I guess that the thing is that I just look very geeky. I’m pretty sure that it is not a bad thing. I look the way I feel, which is basically expressing myself truthfully. The pretenders will merely express ‘geek chic’ but would not actually be geeks. True geeks are very hard to find, particularly in a country like Malaysia. I hope to do something to change that at some point.

I have always been proud of being a geek. In fact, my master plan is to be the #1 geek in Malaysia. That is going to take a lot of hard work to achieve though. It is not very easy to be a true geek because a true geek isn’t about appearances. We can smell a fake one from a mile away. A true geek is about mastery of a specific area of serious study – in my case it is computers. The visual appearance is just an unintended side-effect.

Geeks are way cool!

I can now talk about the incident that happened at the beginning of the month, to make me think that people are essentially selfish beings. I was involved in an automobile accident. As a result, I had to go through the hassle of making a police report, assisting in the investigation and making insurance claims. Therefore, I got to experience the process.

Due to the constant interaction that I had with the traffic police, it brought some random thoughts into my head. One question that I asked was – how could we reduce corruption in the police force. Then, the idea that came into my head was to separate the money from the authority. People with authority should not deal with the money and people who deal with money should not have any authority.

You see, when we commit a traffic offense in Malaysia, the police are the ones who will issue the fine and we pay the fine at the police station. We can choose to pay the fine at any other police station in the country. However, if we pay at the station that issued the fine, we may be able to talk to the officer in charge to reduce the fine.

This is just a recipe for disaster. We have just given the people with authority, the power to deal with the money.

It would be better if we had a system where the police issued the fine, but payment was made to a totally separate body like the banks or post-office or some thing else. The whole idea is to have some sort of power separation. So, there will be no incentive for us to bargain for a reduction. There is also no room for the people collecting the payment to give us any discount.

We should not just stop at the police. In fact, the principle of power separation is something that is supposed to be practiced. However, things are not always the case with us in Malaysia. Anyway, I’m presently trying to draft up a rather long article about technological steps to reduce corruption. It’s taken a while to put things down. So, I’ll only publish it when I am satisfied with it.

I have recently found out that in order to register a new born child with our National Registration Department (JPN), a number of documents need to be submitted, including a marriage certificate. I was told, on authority, that without a marriage cert, it may not be possible for the father to have his name listed as the father of the child. I was also told that this policy is something recent and things were not like this in the past.

Mater semper certa; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.
Mother is always certain; the father is whom the marriage shows

To me, that just does not quite make sense. It may have been true in the past, when proof of biological parentage was difficult to obtain. However, DNA tests have changed all that. It is fairly simple to prove that someone is a biological father of a child. Therefore, it does not make sense to me, that such a policy is now in place when it was not in the past.

So, the fact that a man is the biological father of a child is less important than he being married to the mother of the child. It does not matter if the child is carrying your genes or otherwise, as long as you are legally bound to the mother. If any sort of statistics are to be trusted, many men are not biological fathers of their own children anyway.

If our government denies the biological father the right to list himself down as the legal father of the child on the birth cert, is our government denying him some form of fundamental right? I’m too naive on issues of human rights and such. Therefore, I don’t really know so much about these things. But somehow, I just think that something does not smell quite right.

I can imagine one very sad scenario, where a new born child of a single mother who died at childbirth is considered an orphan because the father was not married to the mother. It doesn’t matter if the father was present and loves him very much. But because the father failed to get himself legally married, the child is now considered an orphan. This just sounds a bit screwy to me.

Anyway, I was just ranting off. I have a feeling that this is a bubble waiting to burst. As far as I understand it, there are many people who are not ‘legally’ married in Malaysia. Of course, everyone should get their marriages registered. However, this does not stop them from happily procreating. There may be some problems, particularly if the mother was a foreigner, with citizenship issues.

And if this is not something that is written in Law, and turns out to be the workings of some little Napolean in the government, then it is even worse. If JPN wants to insist on some sort of proof of being the father, I suggest that they insist on giving everyone a DNA check. Unfortunately, that opens up a whole other can of worms.