Sybreon Ones Nought

I find this article from TheStar particularly funny. The article says that, “there is no need to conduct a physical evaluation test on the Eurocopter EC-725 Cougar helicopter prior to purchasing it because the Royal Malaysian Air Force has the helicopter’s technical data and documentation.”

As you all know, I have been going car shopping recently. I have already placed a booking fee for the car pictured above. Well, not exactly the car pictured above as I went for the brown silver instead. Also, I told them to get rid of some of the ah beng body work on it. Hopefully, I will be taking delivery of the car in a couple of weeks.

I had been holding on to the sales and specification brochures given to me by the sales people. I spent the last week studying it in detail and researching what the different things mentioned in the brochures actually mean. I have also been checking out online forums and reviews of the car to see if there were any major shortcomings for the car.

Then, after considering the quality/price, I made a preliminary decision to get this car. However, I still insisted on actually test driving it before making my final decision. So, I called up the nearest showroom and got them to send me a manual transmission (autos take the pleasure out of driving) model for testing. I took the car out for a little test drive around my housing area.

During the test drive, the sales person kept talking about the virtues of the car while I kept talking about the bad points (to try to drive the price down a little). In the end, I found the handling of the car to be a pleasure to drive and I could feel the latent power lying in the engine. I intend to do a further inspection in order to ensure that there are no defects before taking delivery.

So, I think that I did more due diligence into buying this car than our Ministry of Defence did for buying RM1.6billion worth of Eurocopters. I kind of shiver at the idea of placing our national security in the hands of these paper soldiers. Now, I truly wonder if we actually tested to see if the submarines we’ve purchased could sail through the Straights of Malacca.

I guess that the opposition government are finally getting on with their job of checking the government. I guess that they have given up on the notion of wresting control of power from the ruling government. They should just focus on doing a good job of being a strong opposition and take the next 4 years as an opportunity to learn about the intricacies of government.

This guy is the best kind of leader: Inspirational, Realistic, Logical, Pragmatic.

Man, I wish that he was my Prime Minister. Then, I would be able to sleep better at night knowing that the country is in the hands of someone who will work for the job, instead of someone who thinks that he deserves the job. Whomever made this ad deserves to win an award. This was an extremely well made ad that reaches out to peoples’ emotions.

Watch it and prepare to be inspired.

I have a personal beef against people who exhibit a ‘holier than thou’ attitude. This stems from my belief that there is no such thing as a universal moral code and that we are all sinful creatures. Therefore, there we should abstain from judging the actions of others simply because there is no benchmark or standard to judge someone against.

That is why I don’t get what is up with these MCA people. Chua Soi Lek is the ultimate political comeback story. Caught red-handed being adulterous, resigned from his cabinet and party positions, cast into the political wilderness, made a bid for the deputy president and won it. While raising the issue during campaigning is probably acceptable, I think that the rest of the MCA should just let it rest now.

I think that his conduct once he got caught, is commendable. Not many people in his position of power would willingly resign due to an affair. Personally, I think that this is a private matter between him and his family. If his family can forgive him and move on, I don’t think that it is the business of anyone else to pick on it. I guess that the rest of the grassroots believe in the same thing and decided to move on and pick him for deputy president.

However, some people will say that he is a morally flawed man. If he is able and willing to have an illicit affair and betray the trust of his family, he can definitely do something else that betrays the trust of the people. While this is also a valid argument, it is one that is cloaked in fear. I will now say that I do not put my trust in any politician and everyone else would be wise to do so. The key thing is to constantly keep and eye on him and to check his work.

Personally, I feel that there are not many people within MCA who are as capable as him. This was evident during the campaigning period where his strong track record never came into question. Nobody dared to challenge him on his capabilities. The only barb that they could pick on was the adultery. Since nobody is perfect, you just need to make a judgement call and put the right person into the job.

Chua Soi Lek has gotten a baptism by fire and this actually gives him more power than before. The rest of them at the top are probably equally as guilty, including the one who dared to campaign on a clean platform. They have just not been caught yet. Personally, I believe that all politicians are corrupt and I have yet to meet one who is not.

The one thing that saddens me when I look at the MCA is that it claims to represent the Malaysian Chinese people but honestly, it is irrelevant to a number of us – the ones who are English or Malay educated. The MCA fights on issues that we don’t really care about. I liked Chua Jui Meng’s idea of a more inclusive MCA but too bad he lost his bid for the presidency.

To those sore losers who think that they deserved to be deputy president, just get back to doing your work and if you have a good track record, your time will come.

I know that most of my readers are not technically inclined. So, I will try to explain things as simple as I can. I have just built a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) prototype at home. My purpose for doing so is to get some performance numbers so that I will know what resources I’ll need to design and build my final HTPC.

The prototype HTPC is using a small form factor and low powered computer that I used to sell. It uses a VIA 1GHz processor, which has the equivalent performance of a Celeron 600MHz or so. This is fairly underpowered and it shows. I have been testing the system for playing back films that were encoded with H264 and vorbis.

VCDs are encoded with MPEG1, DVDs with MPEG2 and Bluray uses H264. So, H264 is a superior method for encoding videos. It is able to compress the size of the video while maintaining a superior image quality. What this means is that I can store about 350 full length films on a 250Gb hard disk. However, the trade-off is that it requires more computing power to play the video as compared to other encoding methods.

The prototype HTPC will happily play back a DVD sized video encoded in H264. However, when I check the load consumption numbers, they are hovering at about 0.9, which means that 90% of the processor’s working time is being consumed during playback. This means that the processor cannot do anything else while playing the film. This is not very useful for the production HTPC that will probably have to stream the video files from somewhere off the network while playing it.

However, an Atom based system should be more than capable of doing it. The D945GCLF-2 board has a new dual-core Atom processor in it with HyperThreading capabilities running at 1.6GHz. This will effectively mean having about a 4.2GHz processor, which is more than sufficient. So, the new Atom board should be able to happily decode films and stream them off the network. They also come with S-Video/Composite ports at the back that can be connected directly to a TV set.

While most websites recommend running a HTPC with at least 512Mb of RAM, the prototype system has only got 128Mb of which 16Mb are used for shared video. So, this leaves the computer about 112Mb of memory. When a computer is low on memory, the operating system will use the harddisk to store parts of it, which will slow it down a lot. This shows as everything takes a long time to start and run. So, for the final HTPC, I will probably install 1Gb of RAM in it.

As for noise, the prototype system has a notebook harddisk and processor fan in it. However, the noise levels are such that I cannot hear them at all. There are so many other sources of noise in my living room that these things are not really a consideration at all. Once the film starts playing, I can no longer hear the computer anyway. However, for cost purposes, I would probably install a solid state storage in the final HTPC.

As for power, the Atom based system is fairly low on power. I believe that the total amount of heat dissipated is under 40W. So, that is like having a 40W light bulb sitting in the living room. While it will generate some heat and feel warm to the hand, it will unlikely start any fires in the TV cabinet.

And for the software, I am presently using the default build of Mythbuntu – a specialised version of Ubuntu Linux for media PCs. It works well enough for my purposes. I like the fact that it has a full OS installed, which allows me the freedom to download stuff onto the HTPC.

The one hardware thing that I was not able to test is surround sound because I do not have a suitable sound system. The board comes with SPDIF, which is often used to transmit 5.1 surround sound channels from a PC to audio equipment. However, I was able to test the playback of a 5.1 surround sound film and the 1GHz processor was unable to handle the job. As a result, the film stuttered a lot and the sound was horrible.

Another two things that I was not able to test is the remote control and IR transmitter functions. These will have to be bought and installed for a proper HTPC. It does not make sense to run a HTPC with a keyboard attached. The alternative is to connect a mini keyboard to the HTPC but even that seems rather bland.

So, all in all, it’s quite a successful prototype so far. I will try to assemble a final HTPC at some point in time. I’ve already identified all the components and will only need to pop down to LowYat (or order the parts online) at some point.

As far as geeks are concerned, I am possibly a very sociable one. Since I was young, I have never had problems talking to people of all ages. I could even get on a bus, have a conversation with the person sitting next to me, and then get off the bus without ever knowing his/her name. This being said, I am still a geek and am fairly socially inept. This is possibly a minor predicament for me because people tend to forget that I am a geek who would rather talk to computers than humans.

Even before I had a computer, I had plenty of other things to occupy myself with. As a child, I dreamed a lot. My grandmother used to say that it was real easy to keep me busy as all she had to do was give me a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. While I was growing up, there were so many books to read. I ended up spending a small fortune on books. I can still remember a time when paperbacks were sold for about RM8 but they often cost RM40 these days.

The books that occupied my time the most when I was in primary school were encyclopedias and such. I used to call them “knowledge books”. I would usually start by devouring the science and technology section followed by history and geography before hitting boring stuff like politics. At that time, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of random stuff and I was not shy to let people know that I know stuff. You cannot possibly get more socially inept than that.

When I was in secondary school, the reading habits changed considerably. I began reading fantasy fiction. Before this, I had no idea that books could make me cry. As a consequence of this fantasy pursuit, I ended up in the make belief world of Role-Playing Games (RPGs). These were games where we played characters and went about exploring, dungeon crawling and killing monsters on a piece of paper. You can hardly find a geekier social activity than that.

In the world of RPGs, all interactions were governed by rules. An element of chance is usually introduced by the throw of a die. All kinds of dice were used from 4 to 20 sided ones. However, everything was governed by rules. Since I liked to talk, I usually ended up being the Game Master (GM) whose job was to make sure the story flowed and the rules were followed. Children build their social skills through gaming and I just ended up with a different set of them.

Computers entered my life when I was very young. I started self learning programming at the age of 9 and by the time I was 12 I was writing viruses, network multi-player games, and graphical applications. Then, I got onto the Internet and that was the end of it. You couldn’t pry me away from my computer for any reason whatsoever. That was the beginning of the end. I ended up being a total geek and was absolutely proud of it.

As a result, I am a sociable socially inept geek. I can talk your ears off, but I am just as likely to offend you along the way.

Taking a line from a new book I just read: whatever my faults are, they are social, not moral.

Spending money always makes me happy. So, I have recently started shopping around for a new car. While there are many el-cheapo local cars to buy, I have decided to go for something a little better. So, I have been going around and visiting the showrooms of various car manufacturers.

While shopping around for a car, I have noticed several things. The Proton showroom that I went to has the worst sales people around. While sales people normally talk my ears off, there were a lot of long silent moments when I was speaking to the Proton sales person. I was waiting for him to tell me things about the car but he just kept silent while I looked at the brochure. According to my parents, this is the normal situation for Proton sales people. How sad.

Anyway, the car that I am looking for is a fairly basic sedan car. I am looking for an starter car and that is what I tell everyone when I step into the showroom. I tell them that I am looking for a basic entry level car. So, that means something in the range of a Toyota Vios, Honda City, Nissan Latio, Proton Persona, Kia Spectra, Hyundai Accent. However, most of the sales people did not understand what I meant.

I found it weird that people don’t normally buy cars like that, which was the impression that I had. I could literally see the confused look on their faces. I guess that they must have been trying to figure out which one of their models was called Starter. Most of them adapted quite quickly and introduced me to a suitable range of cars with a 1.5L engine.

A funny thing happened when I went to the Kia showroom. The sales person decided to introduce me to the new Spectra5, which is like a 5-seater MPV. It even comes with a RM5,000 Samsung voucher that I can use to buy myself a home theatre system if I wanted to. The sales person mentioned that they would normally introduce a 1.1L car as a basic starter car but seeing that I have kids, there is no point buying the small one and upgrading it later to a family car. So, the Spectra5 was a better car.

I then mentioned that I was not married, which resulted in the sudden change of expression on the sales person and silenced that topic immediately. The reason for the misunderstanding was because I had my 2 year old niece and nephew with me. The two kids were having a wonderful time running around and trying out all the different cars. The sales people were also kind enough to be nice to the kids and let them try out all the different cars.

My family feels that I should buy my car before I get a job simply because, it takes a while to get a car. There is always a short waiting period and you cannot really get around Malaysia without a car. Because my family has normally bought local cars, they are now advising me to get a foreign car as local cars will usually have more problems.

Anyway, after seeing 6 different brands, I have a rough idea of what cars are available and what are their prices. I have also learned a thing or two about buying cars. In fact, I have more or less made a choice of which car to get and I will probably go and test drive one next week. As usual, I believe in utilitarianism. So, it will probably not be the most beautiful thing to look at but it will be more than enough to get me from A to B.

/>My nephew celebrated his seventh birthday a few days ago. For his birthday gift I decided to buy him a chess set. I felt that it was a good time to learn how to play. On my part, this is a fairly long term commitment because I was the only one in my family who plays chess. So, it would be up to me to teach him how to play and also to play a game with him from time to time.

Today, I taught him how to play. Seeing that I have never actually been through a formal training method, I decided to just make stuff up as I went along. This was the scheme that I had come up with.

1. I started by introducing the different chess pieces to him and also their different values. I know that some people will say that the values do not reflect the actual strength of the pieces but I felt that this was the easiest way to teach a kid how to evaluate simple situations, by the numbers.
2. Then, I showed him how each piece moved and captured other pieces. I kept the rules simple and didn’t include more obscure situations such as en passant or even the rather common castling move. I’ll keep these other things for a later time.
3. Next, I wanted to test his understanding of the what I had already taught him and also teach him how to evaluate simple chess positions. I did this by setting up some simple scenarios. Then, I would ask him what the problem was, what are the different possible moves, and what were the consequences of each move.
4. In each situation, he had to work out what the final points were after the different pieces were captured. To keep things simple, I limited it to only a 2 move depth. So, in the end, he would choose the best move to make based on the points. I know that this isn’t always the case, but it is the simplest way of teaching chess in the beginning. Strategy would have to come later.
5. Finally, we had an actual match where I played white and he played black. When he made any move, I would ask him why he decided to make the move and what would he gain or lose by making each move. I would also explain every single move that I made and showed him the thought process that went into making each move.
6. In the end, I ended up playing both white and black, by actually showing him the different possible moves he could make and introducing a couple of new strategies such as forks and pins. All in all, I felt that it was a fairly good attacking game with neither side ever gaining a serious upper hand. After about an hour, he lost focus and I ended up playing the game myself.

All in all, I felt that it was good to play a familiar game again, after so many years. Chess is one of those few board games that I have always liked playing. When I was little, I have always dreamed of owning a fine chess set and board. Now that I can afford one, I am merely waiting for the right time to buy one. I had actually come across a good one while I was in Salzburg but the prospect of transporting it around for the rest of my holiday did not particularly appeal to me.

I have also realised that teaching the game is a very good way of improving my game. When playing the game, one mainly sees the board from one side but while teaching it, I had to see the board from both sides. So, I ended up making a lot of rather risky moves because I was interested in seeing where the game would go.

So, I guess that I will have to play a few more rounds with him to ensure that he has learned all the basic rules. Then I plan to introduce him to playing chess on computers so that he can gain some practice with beating the computer. I would need to find a chess software for windows that can have its AI calibrated to different levels. He needs to be able to win a game once in a while for him to build his confidence.