nüvi, the pocket sized GPS for urban travellers
The new Garmin’s nüvi is a pocket sized SiRFstar III GPS device with lots of features for urban travellers.
The nüvi
The nüvi in the car.
It is very much smaller than the GPSMap 60CS I owned. Features include MP3 player, audio book player from Audible.com, JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, and calculator. With microphone and speaker integrated, the nüvi lets you make and receive phone calls via optional Bluetooth wireless technology. Its touch screen makes operation, navigation and dialing easier.
GPSMap 60CS
I think I shall add nüvi to my Christmas wish list.
Decoration on TV set
I got up early to finish some undone tasks from yesterday. After emailing my works to my colleagues, I stared at the TV.
I don’t know why I suddenly think of the decorative items on top of our TV set. This photo was taken sometime last October.
Dietrich is very handful and likes to explore everything he sees. He pulled down the cloth and the pot. Soil was scattered everywhere. Since then, he started to take the stuffed toys and the lion dance toys (in the white translucent plastic boxes behind Pooh). Last month, both lion dance toys had become junks.
The top of the TV is bare now. The feeling is like I miss them so much.
The best Tandoori chicken in Malacca
It is hard to find a good Tandoori chicken restaurant in Malacca. By chance, I came across a restaurant in Taman Kota Laksamana serving Tandoori chicken and other Pakistani cuisine. First, I was just going for a tea with a friend one night. I saw many people came to this restaurant and ordered Tandoori chicken and Naan. Next, I decided to give it a try one day with my family.
The chef himself some staffs are from Pakistan. The Tandoori chicken, Naan, and other Pakistani cuisine have gotten the authentic taste and style. We especially love the spinach potato, Tandoori chicken and their curry.
We think this is the best Tandoori chicken restaurant in Malacca which worth a try. If you visit Jonker Street on Friday, Saturday or Sunday night, try to find this restaurant and have a nice supper before return to your home or hotel.
If you enjoy walking at night, a walk from Jonker Street to this restaurant is not too far away. I am sure you will have satisfaction after a delicious meal.
Young girls are getting violent!
A few weeks ago, there was a video clip posted on YouTube about schools girls bullying a schoolmate in Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia.
I found the video clip somewhere eventhough it had been taken down. The video had been rasterized for anonymity.
Download the video here.
What has happened to our society today? Young girls are getting violent.
Self-defense for women
Recently on TV, there are a few programs talking about women self-defense. Women self-defense classes like kick boxing with a mix of aerobics suddenly flourish, especially in big city Kuala Lumpur.
I wonder if these women self-defense classes are really effective in training.
Self-defense is not an easy task. Self-defense requires life-long commitment to training. Techniques will require long time, and often a life time, to be polished and refined.
Do these women self-defense instructors and students really understand the concept of self-defense? Do they believe in learning kicks and punches can prepare a person especially woman to defend herself?
In a real life-threatening situation, self-defense is a matter of dead or alive. It is totally different from kicking and punching sand bags, sparring with partners and etc. No rules applied. Another disadvantage of women is their physical strength. Can their training take down a 180 lbs male?
Many young people stop their Tae Kwon Do or Karate-do training after they receive their black belts. Many of them think a black belt is adequate to defend themselves. They do not understand the concept of martial arts and self-defense and often they are confused between sports and combat. Their instructors are solely responsible for this misconception.
Often in real-life situation, a person could have adrenaline rush. Adrenaline is a hormone secreted by human body under stress. A right amount of adrenaline could make a person stronger. For example, when chased by a dog, adrenaline will be secreted so that you can run faster to get out of danger. When the amount of adrenaline is over a person’s threshold, that person can experience trembling in their limbs. Not everybody is built the same. So, no matter how good your training is, if you get too much adrenaline, you will not be able to apply techniques effectively with your trembling limbs. Many people lack the understanding of how our body system works.
Every martial arts share the same fundamental concept of bio-mechanical, science, physics and mathematics. For instance, when throwing a punch, the skeletal alignment of your limb, shoulder, hips and legs together with the proper contraction of muscles are important to generate speed and power. As I observe some martial art instructors conducting their classes, they apply “monkeys see, monkeys do” approach. A punch is not just merely lunging your fist. It is a science. To understand the science, one must understand the external and internal weight change. To understand the external and internal weight change needs a lot of practicing, feeling and thinking and that takes years to achieve. One must also understand how the human body functions because not everybody has the same build.
Besides, self-defense is also psychologically and tactically demanding. Lots of mental and tactical training required.
I would say the best way to prevent crime is to instill high alertness of the environment and possible threats. Despite of many reported cases of bag snatching, I still see women hanging their handbags on their shoulder providing lots of good opportunity for crime to happen. People’s mentality is attributed to such happenings.
Malacca is developing real fast!
Umphhhh…. What can I write about Malacca?
Well, Malacca is developing real fast. I remembered when I came to Malacca 11 years ago, it was not much of development and the traffic was not heavy. I really liked Malacca then.
Now, although I still like Malacca, I hate the traffics and especially some roads have been converted to one way traffic. It’s kind of mess.
The place I stay was very nice, quiet and cooling at night. Now with the development, it is a busy small town and very hot. Trees are chopped down to develop more housing estates and high rise apartments. More concretes than 11 years ago. Addition to that, the students from MMU (Multimedia University) are causing real havocs. They are very rude and inconsiderate on roads. They don’t care about cleanliness and feelings of their neighbors. They do what they like to do as if they are the only one on earth. They are rude and uneducated bunch of yuppies.
Well, in the other side of Malacca, it is somehow beautiful with its own charms and heritage. Perhaps I will write about these next time.
Scenic Malacca
Here are some scenic photos of Malacca.
Welcome to Malacca’s Blog
I must say this is the first blogs for Malacca (Melaka). There will be some customization work going on from time to time. But you can start blogging.
We want to make this blog enjoyable to read and to serve useful information about Malacca. So please refrain yourselves from malicious posts and be a polite citizen of the world. This can help us to keep moderation to minimum.
You can blog about your experience, views, thoughts, suggestions and anything else you find interesting for others to read. You can also upload photos (no indecent photos please) about Malacca and her people that you find interesting.
So, go ahead enjoy your blogging.
Malacca’s Blog
I have just created Malacca’s Blog. My intention is to share experience, views and thoughts about Malacca. No politics. No flame war. No bias. No advertisement. No non-sense. Just about Malacca and her beauty.
If anyone is interested becoming a member of Malacca’s Blog, please send me your email address using contact form. I will send you an invitation to become a member of Malacca’s Blog.
UPDATE October 24, 2006:
Malacca Blog at http://malaccablogs.blogspot.com is not longer available. I have moved Malacca Blog to my weblog under Travel:Malacca.
Apple’s WWDC 2006 - Wish list
I am not able to attend WWDC but I surely like to see the following:
- Apple’s plan to incorporate Ada compiler (gnat) into Xcode. At present, the Ada compiler (gnat) is maintained independently by MacAda.org as well as individuals.
- Apple’s processor roadmap for PowerMac and if there is still some possibilities for Apple to adopt AMD. AMD is known for lower power consumption than Intel. Apple’s Intel roadmap has been concrete but I still wish Apple will adopt AMD.
- If any plan for making cross-platform GUI application development possible by making GTK native to Apple’s. At this moment, it is an open source project at http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net
Wonderful photos
Here are some wonderful pieces of work by Igor Siwanowicz.
马六甲博客成立啦！
马六甲博客成立啦！
如有兴趣加入马六甲博客会员，可和我联络。提供你的电邮箱我将发出邀请加入马六甲博客会员电邮。
Why do I choose Shorin-ryu Seibukan?
Many people ask me why I choose Shorin-ryu Seibukan. It is not affiliated to MAKAF (Malaysia Karate-do Federation). Wouldn’t be a waste if I join Seibukan?
IMO, it is not important if Shorin-ryu Seibukan is affiliated to MAKAF or not. What is MAKAF? It is just merely a political barn where people are playing with politics to ensure their continual survival and to secure their personal interest and benefits. Only people with limited karate knowledge will want affiliation to MAKAF.
Karate-do is not a sports. I want to train combat karate and not sports karate. At Shorin-ryu Seibukan, the original Okinawan traditional essence is still preserved in their training. The powerful and effective techniques of kata and ippon kumite are still in their traditional forms. It is one of the few traditional karate-do in Malaysia.
Sadly, karate-do in modern days can’t survive without sports. MAKAF, for instance, needs sports in order to survive. Without sports, there will be no funding from the government. Without sports, there will be no activities. We are also doing sports but our emphasis is mainly traditional karate. It’s alright for me.
We can see many other karate styles (ryu) make changes to their kata from time to time. Why? By making changes, they create an opportunity to give seminar worldwide so that they can make money from the seminar. They have to do this partly because they need money to survive. To my knowledge, Shorin-ryu Seibukan does not make changes to kata. Seibukan kata is still in their original forms. That’s how they preserve their traditional techniques.
I have a friend from my previous karate association. He was awarded Sandan because he had contributed as a committee member and donated some money to the association for buying their own dojo. He does not even understand what ryu or style means in karate-do. And he always talks about MAKAF and affiliation stuff. He was also former treasury of MAKAF. What is the point here having Sandan and served in MAKAF?
My decision was once reinforced when I met my second sensei, Rashid Dulkarnain Sensei of Aishoto-ryu , in June. Aishoto-ryu is not affiliated to anybody at all and they have no interest of doing so.
Rashid Sensei told me that my forth sensei performed kata wrongly 3 times when he took his sandan grading together with him many years ago and he still could get grade “A” while Rashid’s result was not as good as him even though Rashid could perform his kata without any mistakes. That’s one of the major reasons he and his brother, Syed Pakri Sensei (my first sensei), left and founded Aishoto-ryu. (Please refer to my website for more details about my karate life.)
The grading test took place in Port Dickson and I have verified this with undisclosed source.
I then realized that I had misunderstood Pakri and Rashid and I owed them my apology. They are truly for karate-do and they have sacrificed a lot for what they have done. They deserve honor.
UPDATE: May 1st, 2007
I have decided to quit the authentic Shorin-Ryu Seibukan due to political issues. I am devoted to improve my skills and to teach karate to young people and I am not interested to be caught in all kind of political conflicts. Whether authentic or not, I find it is the same as the other clone. It is better for me to embark on a search for a system which I believe is still untouched and have no interest in organization politics.
UPDATE: December 1st, 2007
I have switched over to Okinawa Karate-do Uechi-Ryu Zankai and officially become their member in July 2007. I have setup Malaysia Branch Doukoukai in Bukit Beruang, Melaka. You can visit our website here.
Recycling program
Dmitry was helping to sort out garbage for recycling. After sorted out the garbage, we would sent them to recycling center. We would keep the money (not much) in his piggy bank. It is not the money that matters but an education program so that our children will be aware of pollution and environment.
We started this program last year. I suggested to my wife after we discussed about recycling.
I discussed about recycling with a taxi driver while I was having a business trip in Taipei 2 years ago. I would order his cab to go to the airport every time I traveled to Taiwan. He told me about his recycle program. He said if we wanted to live on this earth, we must love it and keep it clean. But where to begin?
“The best place to start is our home.”, he said, “If we keep our home clean, our country will be clean. If we keep our country clean, the world will be clean.”
He possesses a master degree in mathematics. He chooses to be a taxi driver because he loves to have flexible hours and freedom to do things he loves to do. He also develops statistical and application software in his free time as a hobby.
Today, most Malaysians are so engrossed in work so that they can earn more money. Do they really care about the environment they live in? Do they think how the world will be in the future for their children?
PC is dead!
My Linux power workstation cum server is dead. It’s motherboard problem. The motherboard is Albatron’s KX-18D Pro II socket 462. It sported an AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB RAM, 120GB SATA hard disk, 256MB Video Graphics.
It was one of the fastest PC 2 years ago. Now, it is ancient. It is hard to find a replacement motherboard that supports Athlon XP 3000+.
Perhaps, I should get a dual G5 PowerMac. But it is very expensive.
武士道精神
刚和朋友闲聊过。谈及有没有试过使用空手道防身和它的实用性时，我们讲到有关武士道精神。
我认为空手道『型』的修练和随着年龄的增长和家庭安全责任感可培养武士道精神。
胆量会随着年龄一起增长。当家庭安全责任扛在肩上时，胆量也会增加。练习空手道『型』的要素之一，要如临大敌，身历其竟。一个人的年龄增长和家庭安全责任感能协助发挥这一要素。
把生命置之度外，随时付出生命保卫家人的安全的武士道精神能大大协助发挥空手道『型』的一击必杀。
当然，这是不简单的。这需要很多长时间的修练。
Screensaver as Desktop on Mac OS X
This is awesome. Run your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper on Mac OS X. Type the following in your Terminal window:
% /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/\ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/\ ScreenSaverEngine -background
Be amazed and enjoy!
Ada UK Conference 2006 Goodies
I found some goodies about Ada 2005 here. If you are interested to learn about Ada, it is certainly worth peeping.
Bushido
Just after a chat with friends. We talked about effectiveness of karate-do and if I had applied karate-do in real life. We talked about Bushido as well.
When one is getting older with the responsibility of family safety, practicing kata will cultivate the spirit of Bushido.
One’s courage will increase when getting older and bearing responsibility of family safety. One of the important criteria in practicing kata is that one must practice it as though in a real life fighting with real enemies. The age and responsibility will aid this practicing criteria.
The willingness to sacrifice one’s own life in order to protect one’s family can help a person to ultimately harness the spirit of Bushido and the lethal techniques of kata.
Of course, this is not easy. Understanding of kata, lifetime commitment and persistent training is necessary to achieve this state.
Successful propagation of florist gloxinia
Florist gloxinia or Sinningia speciosa is tough to propagate.
4 months ago, I tried to make 4 propagation by cutting a fresh leave and inserted the leave with its tuber into a pot of moist soil. Watered to keep the soil moist. After 4 to 6 weeks, the leave turned yellow than brown and died.
Do not throw away the dead leave. Roots could have grown at the tuber in the soil. It will take quite some time to grow into a plant. Only 1 out of 4 propagation was successful.
Here is the photo of the newly propagated plant I took today.
Housework
Dmitry helped to do some housework today. He was helping to clean the TV set. It had not been cleaned for some time. The screen was full of their handprint. He gave it a sparkling shine. Well done!
A drawback of AdaCGI
The AdaCGI is a nice Ada interface to CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to create an Ada application that can be invoked by HTML servers.
I am using AdaCGI to develop a mission-critical web application. However, I find that AdaCGI is unable to many things. One of the important features missing is that it can’t do redirection as in PHP:
do_redirect ( "index.php" );
I am not sure if there’s a way to do that in Ada/AdaCGI. I hope I will never need to code in PHP.
CT images
After many months of hacking and research, I finally got my Ada code to parse DICOM file structure and display a coronary CT image.
The Ada code is still far from perfect. I hope I can get it to work better before the end of the year. Nevertheless, the effort has paid off.
Ada 2005
After installing gcc-4.2 on my iBook, I am now having an Ada 2005 compiler in my tools collection.
One of the interesting new features caught my attention. Ada 2005 now supports new 32-bit character type, Wide_Wide_Character. The source code itself can have extended character set as well. That means a whole Greek and fractur character sets are available for identifiers. For example:
π : constant := Pi;
This feature will help making a lot of my codes more readable.
I found an interesting article while I was reading about Ada 2005. This article is about successful uses of Ada 2005 in deeply embedded systems.
Here is the article in pdf.
Xcode 2.3 and gcc-4.2 (Ada)
I have finally decided to update to Xcode 2.3 and gcc-4.2. There is not much information about how to install except from the MacAda mailing list. So, I decided to post the How-To here.
Here are the procedures:
- Uninstall previous Xcode installation by
$ sudo perl /Developer/Tools/uninstall-devtools.pl - Restart the computer
- Download and install Xcode 2.3
- Download and install gcc-3.3 Ada compiler from MacAda
- Download and install gcc-4.2 Ada compiler
- Unzip and untar the gcc-4.2 package with
$ tar -zxvf fsf-ppc-gcc-4.2.0-20060429.tgzor
$ tar -zxvf fsf-i686-ada-4.2-20060409.tgzdepending if you are using PowerPC or Intel Mac.
- Move the directory ada-4.2 to /usr/local
- Download and install Ada Plugin for Xcode and follow the instructions.
I tested Xcode by compiling some projects and it is great. But I still cannot manage to build Ada dynamic library with it. It looks like some problems with the flags. Here’s the error and warning messages I got:
warning -L: directory name (/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/darwin/default) does not exist
unknown flag: -Wl, -single_moduleA friend from Iran
A new friend of mine joined our training at Bukit Beruang this evening. His name is Hadi from Iran and has a black belt in Kyukoshinkai.
I came to know him from MMU karate club before I resigned from my previous karate association (read my article). He is studying in MMU. He had an argument with the instructor there over different philosophy and ideas. I met him again two Sundays ago at Jaya Jusco and invited him to join our training.
I enjoyed having him in my class. He is a person who likes to share his knowledge with others. The way he trained in his country was very different from the way Malaysian training karate-do. I can see the culture shock between him and MMU karate club.
I had heard a lot of complaints and bad comments about Hadi while I was still going to MMU for my training before I resigned. One of them was intense fear because of Hadi’s Kyokushinkai training was full contact kumite. The attitude there can never accept an open minded person and that’s not the correct mentality for a person who train in karate-do.
Indeed, I have enjoyed talking about karate with Hadi. I hope he will come for the training often.
Retiring
I guess I am going to write the last post for today. It is raining heavily with some thunders. After tucking 2 dinos to bed, I feel quite tire and sleepy tonight. Last night was rough.
Actually, I was thinking of updating some software on my iBook and working on my project. But I think it will be good to retire early tonight.
Hoping tomorrow will be better.
Daddy, I want Crazy Frog.
Dmitry has asked me to get him the Crazy Frog Hits album.
Today, he asked for it again. I feel so sorry that I don’t have the time to go shopping because we were busy getting sick from last week until today. I guess that will take another couple of days to have everything stabilized.
Dinos are recovering on track
What a relief to see both dinos are recovering on track. Activities in the house is slowly regaining its normal atmosphere.
Am I Cyberchondria?
Cyberchondria is a colloquial term for hypochondria in individuals who have researched medical conditions on the internet.
In my earlier post, Digital addiction, I mentioned about developed special skills using Internet to do some or any kind of research. I learned to use the Internet to learn about people’s diseases and medication 6 years ago when my second elder sister, Angie, was first diagnosed of stage-4 breast cancer.
I could remember that I had read about children doses for my medication on the product pamphlet. The drug is called Cough-en Linctus by Xepa-Soul Pattison. I gave a dose of 2.5ml to Dmitry early this morning at 0335. He had some good sleep after taking it. Cough-en is the most vile cough medicine ever created by man - it could knock out an elephant cold.
When I woke up this morning, I quickly searched the Internet for Cough-en and Pseudoephedrine. I learned a lot about Pseudoephedrine and I was quite shocked about its side effects.
I used to take a drug called Clarinase whenever I was down with Sinus or nose allergy. Anyone of these could make my day and Clarinase had been effective on me to reduce my symptoms.
Of course, I don’t simply take any medication. I like to learn about any medical condition before or after seeing a doctor.
I hope I will not become psychosomatic.
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