Sybreon Ones Nought

Contains Nudity
Found this cute little video on the net, might be Dutch – “A story about a boy and his homework, and his attempt to understand girls. This pretty much sums up the relationship between the opposite sexes.”

http://media.noob.us/flashplayer.swf

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1131687652968702015&hl=en&fs=true

Shocking? Nothing shocks me anymore. This is the kind of reporting that we need in Malaysia instead of all the feel-good shows that we are inundated with on our televisions.

There is another tiny laptop contender that has moved up to the top of the list – the Acer Aspire 1810T. It is the cousin to the Acer Ferrari that I talked about earlier. However, it has a couple of differences – it uses the Intel family of chipsets, it has a HDMI output, and it has a whopping 12-hour battery life!

According to most of the reviews that I have read, the battery life is extremely long even if it may not reach 12-hours. It can easily reach 8-hours on normal usage. According to one site, it is even greener than the average netbook and ultra-portable notebook class machines. This is a wonderful machine to have. Also, it is pretty cheap at only RM1849 in Malaysia.

The only drawbacks when compared to the Acer Ferrarri are: it comes with 2GB of memory but I can install another 2GB memory myself though it may cost a little extra; and it comes with the SU4100 processor that does not support hardware virtualisation. The 1810T is supposed to have a beefier model with a SU7300 processor that supports HVM and that would be a perfect buy for me but that would cost about RM400 more in a couple of months.

That said, even without HVM, it is not a show stopper. I will just have to make do with slower virtual machines, which is fine for development purposes.

PS: It even comes in Olympic Silver – with the Olympics Logo for an additional RM150 only!

I was really surprised when I read this in TheStar today. No, surprise is not the right word – it should be shell-shocked. Honestly, I do not know what our dearest PM did to have deserved such an award. He is not a technology pioneer, nor is he the chief executive of any technology. Granted, he is a chief executive of a country but our technology connectivity is back-water at best.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has been named by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as one of the three eminent personalities who have contributed to the ongoing digital revolution.

He joined chairman and chief executive officer of China Mobile Wang Jianzhou and Robert Kahn, one of the early pioneers of the Internet.

They were awarded the 2010 ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award in recognition of their dedication to promoting ICT (information and communications technology) as a means of providing a better life for humanity.

The article goes further to say that, “As part of the New Economic Model for Malaysia, he has placed a high priority on strengthening ICT infrastructure. His administration has supported the ITU in strengthening global cybersecurity through the Impact Centre in Cyberjaya.”

Okay, he got awarded for strengthening ICT infrastructure by setting up a global cyber-security centre. I still do not see how this is big enough to deserve such an award. There are lots of people who have contributed greatly to strengthening ICT infrastructure, greater than what our PM had done, from the guys at Bell Labs to the guys at Xerox Parc. In fact, I would put my money on the fact that our PM did not come up with this idea – it was probably proposed by some low-level functionary at one of our ministries or agencies.

However, one can argue that this is like another Obama – being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize based on expectations rather than achievement. Maybe the ITU feels that the priorities placed by our government on ICT in the NEM is expected to yield good results and strengthen global infrastructure, instead of waiting to see if it actually does do anything useful. Going by how things work in this country, I would hazard that it may not work as advertised.

I think that the ITU has made a mistake or at the very least, been pre-mature on the award. The NEM has not even been completely tabled. Maybe the ITU is hoping that by giving this award, they will force our PM to stick to the promises and not to shift our priorities over to agriculture like our previous PM did. Maybe it is a way to apply psychological pressure. Honestly, I think that they have been duped – they do not understand us enough.

I wonder how both sides are going to spin this bye-election result tomorrow. An upstanding Malay lost to an unknown Indian in a Malay majority constituency. I guess that the political analysts on both sides will be taking out their R calculators and doing deep statistical analyses on the results in the next weeks to figure out how that happened.

Regardless, I think that both sides of the political divide have learned their lessons. I sure hope that they both have. To the losers, there is plenty to learn with regards to operational details and political machinery. To the winners, there is also plenty to learn about how the voting patterns seemed to have moved away from racial lines. Interesting.

I also hope that both sides do not give up the war – the present battle has been both lost and won but the war is still ongoing and the stakes are terribly high.

I have started shopping around for a new laptop. My current laptop has been turned into a desktop replacement device – it is sitting under a 23″ monitor that plugs into it. The reason for this is because my laptop screen has five vertical stripes right in the centre, where the pixels have gotten stuck. The batteries have a life-span of about 3 minutes and so, it is permanently plugged into the mains. My laptop is almost 3 years old and while it is still a working device, my lifestyle has changed and having a mobility device would be useful.

So, I have started to shop around for a light laptop model – something that I can easily carry around in a small sling bag. Most people would immediately say netbook, but I have never ever thought that netbooks were a good purchase. I fully intend to do some real work on my mobile laptop instead of just surfing the net and reading email. So, I will need a slightly more capable machine than a typical netbook.

As before, I will start to chronicle different models that catch my eye as I go shopping before finally deciding on one. The first model that caught my eye is the Acer Ferrari One. The model sold in Malaysia has the following interesting specifications:

CPU: AMD L310 - 1.3GHz Dual Core, 1MB L2 Cache
RAM: 4GB DDR2
HDD: 320 GB
GFX: ATI HD3200
DSP: 11.6" HD-Ready LED backlit

It comes with wireless and wired networking options, a multi-card reader, dolby speakers and much more. As for my own criteria, for my work purpose, I need to have certain features. The main processor must be a dual-core processor with hardware virtualisation capabilities so that I can run virtual machines in it easily. It should also have more than 2GB of RAM for simulation and virtual machine purposes. I got to test out the keyboard on a demo unit and it seems fairly capable. It claims a 5-hour life on the standard 6-cell battery.

This seems to be a quality machine at a very reasonable price of RM2199 retail.

Okay, not for me obviously but a good friend of mine is getting married! Just got an email about it. I’m so excited now that I cannot sleep, that’s why I decided to write a short blog entry on it to get my thoughts out. I am really happy for my friend. The reason that I am happy for my friend is because – I was getting a little worried about whether my friend would ever find the right person in life.

This got me thinking about a couple of tangential things – the only constant thing in life is change and that one can never know what is beyond the next bend in life.

To think that we’ve known each other for years and gone through quite a bit in our similar journeys. Sometimes, I do miss those early days when we were bright-eyed students just getting started. Several years down the road and our lives have moved on. Honestly, I think that good things come to good people in the end and my friend is a good and kind person.

Well, I certainly wish them the best – “white head till old”, “early born expensive child” and all that.