Beautiful Siti Nurhaliza

Her voice is a thing of beauty.

I do not discriminate against any language when I listen to music. So, I have listened to many singers from many nationalities and of them all, I still find her singing to be the best. The only other singer that I’d put in the same class would be Jacky Cheung, and that’s saying something. But she is different from him. She has a sound that is very unique and different from other commercially successful singers. I am truly awed. If I was a man of God, I would think that He put her here with us so that she can sing to us and remind us of the beauty of Heaven.

But she has one flaw, that is she can only sing in Malay. In recent years, she has attempted to sing some English and Mandarin songs, to hopefully introduce her voice to a new audience. It’s usually a duet with some established foreign artiste. However, her struggle with the lyrics is obvious and she is unable to deliver the proper emotions to the song, even though her voice still delivers. This ultimately limits her main audience to the few SEA countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei.

This is not to say that music cannot transcend geographical and language boundaries. But, retailers don’t really care about the quality of the artists as long as they help move merchandise off the shelves. So, if they wanted to sell her in any other country, the record label would have to throw in serious marketing dollars to push her albums or you would be hard pressed to find any of her albums on the shelf. Ultimately, I don’t think that anyone believes enough to do it.

Which leads me to a rather confounding problem. I tried to google for an online store that may carry her DVDs but I failed to find any. I was hoping that YesAsia or some of the other stores might carry her songs. I even tried looking for her songs, at some rather unsavoury sites, with many dodgy popup ads but I still failed to find any useful ones either. So, the only channel left for me to whet my appetite for her songs, is YouTube, which is also where I find most of the other Malay songs that I like to listen to.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering why I like listening to Malay songs, the reason is because I feel that the language is a very beautiful one, much like French. It isn’t my mother tongue, it isn’t even my second language. Malay is my third language but I speak it well enough to pass off as a native. So, I just love it when it’s put to song, more so than English or Chinese songs. Don’t ask me how or why, but there is just a very poetic and lyrical feel to the language. If it were to take on physical form, she would be it, totally and purely.


This video is from part of her concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 2005. She was invited to sing as part of the Royal Albert’s programme on Asian artists. If the Wikipedia entry is correct, this concert was also the first time that the London Symphony Orchestra accompanied an Asian singer on stage. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend at the time. Otherwise, I would most certainly have gone.


This video is an excerpt of a longer song, also from the same concert. That’s a very nice kebaya, by the way. Did I happen to say that she’s not too bad on the eyes either? Obviously, that has not affected my judgement on her singing in any way whatsoever. It doesn’t change the fact that she has a beautiful voice.


More of her, from the same concert.


And just to show you that she’s not all about lovey-dovey balads. Jom Joget! This song’s melody and rhythm is probably quite close to being traditional Malay music. You may have noticed that the scale is not so regular.

April Fools

Today is one of the days that I dislike the most, in the year. It’s the 1st of April, which is widely celebrated as April Fool’s Day in many countries. It is also the day in which, my information filters have to work over time trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff. The Internet is already bad enough on most days, but is made worse today when people try to go all out to disguise pranks as real news.

Some companies like to go all the way, and release fake products, on this day. When I say, “all the way”, I really mean all the way. They would create mock screen shots, websites, trailers and even user reviews, just to make the story look real. Just look at the amount of effort that they put into making this year’s hoaxes:


From our heroes at Blizzard, we have The Bard Hero and Molten Core. They actually drew up really good looking concept art and videos.


From our geniuses at Google, we get Google Custom Time and Virgle (you’ve got to see it to believe it!). They even managed to rope in Richard Branson into the prank!


But this one takes the cake. Legend of Zelda Movie! Seriously…

Nuff said.

Comic Value

I recently thought that I might dabble in a little bit of comics. That’s when I found out that it isn’t easy at all. This little comic that I did, took me a few hours to do. I had a simulation running at the time. So, I was technically “working” on my research project. Anyway, I think that I will try to make a little comic to supplement my entries. I hope to get better at it as I go along.

I was never very good at drawing on a computer. So, most of the graphics used are public domain clip-art that I got from Open Clip Art. I used the free (as in speech) software, InkScape, to create the illustrations. I then exported the illustrations into a PNG format, which is an open graphics format. See a pattern developing here? Lots of freedom and openness involved.

As a result, I am also releasing the comics using a free (as in speech) license. I have decided to release them under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. I hope that you’ll all enjoy the comics!

PWN2OWN

As reported here and here, it is kind of good to see that Linux was the only operating system left standing in the end. If we read into how the hacking competition was conducted, it becomes quite clear that the Open Source way of doing things is probably the best way to do things.

For many years, the main selling point for the Open Source way was the fact that anyone could look and modify the source code of computer programmes, freely. The logic behind this is that with many eyeballs looking at the code, the chances of spotting errors is higher. This is also the logic behind peer-review in science.

In this particular competition, three different laptops were configured and the hackers were challenged to break into the system “as-is” and if they succeeded, they would walk home with some cash and the laptop that they broke into. Surprisingly, the first one to fall was the AirBook. You could possibly consider that the AirBook, being such a beautiful machine, would have attracted the most attempts. But that still doesn’t change the fact that it fell so quickly.

Some slightly more technical people will, at this point, quote that OSX is based on an Open Source operating system, Darwin, which is itself a descendent of FreeBSD. But then, there are many parts of OSX that is proprietary, like the graphical user interface running on top of Darwin. Also, it is reported that the culprit that caused the downfall of the AirBook, was actually a piece of software by Adobe.

Then the rules were relaxed further to allow the machines to be compromised using any pre-installed software on the system. This caused the Windows machine to be breached, again due to a problem with a piece of software from Adobe. On the last day, the rules were relaxed further, to allow the machines to be compromised using any commonly installed 3rd party software. And surprisingly, the Linux machine held on without being compromised.

Instead of gloating on the strengths of Linux, I would just like to point out that there is a correlation between openness and security. When I was a boy, I was once told by a Debian developer that, security by obscurity is not security at all. That totally confounded me at the time but I have since learned the wisdom of such words.

A truly secure system is one that is thoroughly open, that you could fiddle with as much as you’d like, and still remain secure. The Linux operating system is developed on an open platform. All the various bits running on top of it are also bound by the same rules. Even random 3rd party software are often developed along the same lines. So, openness breeds security.

Clicking the Ads

If you happen across any interesting advert on this blog, please do not hesitate to click on it. I hope to make just enough money to help pay for the maintenance of this website. Thanks!

Gender Miscommunication

There is an article about a recent study on how men were found commonly to perceive more sexual intent in women’s behaviour than women are intending to convey. This study is from Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. However, the study also shows that men were quite likely to misperceive sexual interest as friendliness. After reading it, all I can say that it is a sexist piece of crap.

Aside from the many flaws in the research methodology, it is patently clear that the conclusions drawn are one sided and designed to provoke discourse. As any student of real communication knows, communication is a two way process based on an agreed protocol. If either party does not communicate correctly, or if they were using different protocols, error free communications is impossible. Even when both parties communicate correctly with the same protocol, there is still a finite probability of error and therefore, error correction mechanisms need to be built into the communication system.

In a typical communications system, a message is first encapsulated with some extra information in order to identify the target of the message and also some error checking information. Then, the message is transformed into a signal for transmission, which is transmitted through a suitable medium, either wired or wireless. The signal may even be routed through several intermediate devices before reaching the intended target. When the receiver receives the signal, it will convert it from the transmission form into a readable form and extract the message. Afterwards, it will check this message against the extra information to see if it was the intended target and if the message was error free. Finally, the receiver would send another message back in the opposite direction, in order to acknowledge receipt of the message. That’s how all communication systems work in this world.

There are so many potential places for errors to happen between the transmission and reception of the message. The transmitter may foul things up when converting the intended message into a transmissible form. The medium of transmission can introduce noise and cross-talk into the system, which may garble up the message. The receiver may also foul things up when converting between the received signal and the intended message. Whether or not the intended message was correct, in the first place, is also questionable.

When a garbled message is received, there are error correction mechanisms to handle the problem. But in order for the mechanisms to work, both transmitter and receiver would have to agree on the same algorithm to use. Otherwise, even this correction would fail thoroughly and garble up the message even further. And the trouble with human communication is that, both genders use very different error handling mechanisms. Males tend to be encouraged by ambiguous intentions while females tend to err on the side of caution.

In the event of a communication breakdown, the first thing that an engineer will need to do is to ensure that both transmitter and receiver are using the same communication protocol. Then, the engineer would have to check to ensure that the transmitter is working and sending the intended message correctly. Finally, the receiver would need to be checked to ensure that it is still receiving the same message transmitted and is extracting the intended message from the transmitter. The path of the message has to be traced from the source to the destination.

The trouble with human communication is that the protocol is highly flawed. Human languages have too many nuances and meanings associated with each word and phrase that it is never entirely possible to understand the exact meaning of a statement. Non-verbal communications are even worse. Nobody really knows when a smile is more than a smile or otherwise. When such a problem happens in a communication system, both transmitter and receiver will need to fall back onto the lowest common denominator, a simple protocol that both sides can understand clearly.

Therefore, it is rather unfair to place judgement that the receivers are clueless. It is just as likely that the transmitters are clueless too. But the best thing to do in such cases, is just to fall back to the lowest common denominator, to clear the air, so to speak. However, I’m very sure that many other people will disagree with me on this. Some people insist on doing all the dancing around. Well, I’m sure that none of these people are communication engineers. d:

Software Upgrade

This latest version of WordPress has just been released and this blog has been upgraded to the latest version. You won’t see much of a different in the front because most of the changes made have been to the behind-the-scenes stuff.