Thanks to Hisao Yamada-san, a friend from Steply, who has helped to identify the above flower. It is one of my favorites. The name is Torenia fournieri or Wishbone flower.

Go here for more photos of flowers and plants in my garden.

It was a shocking morning when I learned about Steve’s death from a friend’s message on my iPhone 4. Then, I confirmed the news by reading Apple’s website and Twitter on my iMac.

No words can adequately express my sadness. My condolences to his family.

Steve, you have been a great inspiration to me. Well, I worked today to its fullest and always will be. ”Never settle!”

Here is a video “The Crazy Ones” with Steve Jobs voiced over.

君不见，黄河之水天上来，奔流到海不复回。
君不见，高堂明镜悲白发，朝如青丝暮成雪。
人生得意须尽欢，莫使金樽空对月。
与君歌一曲，请君为我侧耳听。
与尔同销万古愁。
－－剪取自李白的《将进酒》。

One thing for sure, this rally has changed my perception and the spirit of a true Malaysia, where all races – Malays, Indians and Chinese united under one cause despite of the unwarranted, tyrannical acts by the National Front government and the police. I have never felt more proud of being a Malaysian.

A quote from a friend of mine from Hong Kong:

Democracy won’t come to you, is you go and get it. if you have chance just speak out loud, or shout from the rooftop. – Atropos

And from famous actor Clint Eastwood

Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands. – Clint Eastwood

What happened today on July 9, 2011 will be written in the history of Malaysia. This is the day when fellow Malaysians stood up bravely to defend their civil liberties which have long been disrespected by the ruling government since independence. I don’t want my children, when they grow up, ask me: “Dad, what had you done on July 9, 2011?” and I can’t answer them. So I decided to wear yellow (the signature color of Bersih) and walked in town to show support. Honestly, as a father of three and the breadwinner for my family, such decision was not without fear. Why fear you may ask? Perhaps Malaysia is the only region in the world where you can be arrested for merely wearing yellow. And being arrested is one thing, how you would be treated after arrest is another.

This morning, I wore a yellow T-shirt and moved around at certain parts of the town. In the afternoon, after meeting my client at his office, I walked from Hatten Square, crossed the main road, and walked length of Dataran Pahlawan in the same T-shirt.

Having been following up the rally happenings in Kuala Lumpur since morning, I thought I could at least feel a little of the Bersih atmosphere here in Melaka. Disappointedly, I only saw large crowds, mostly Chinese, hanging out at Hatten Square and Dataran Pahlawan happily as usual. Everyone seemed carefree and undisturbed by the fact that thousands of people were being treated inhumanly by the police just because they wanted to ask for a clean democracy for all Malaysians. I hardly spotted one that wore yellow. If you look at the photos taken during the Bersih rally, you can see most of the protestors are Malays, relatively few Chinese took part in the rally. I am not being racist here, my point is there are too many Chinese Malaysians who simply don’t give a damn to the wellbeing of the country. They don’t even care to vote. All they care about are how much money they can make and how well they can live. With such attitudes, no wonder the Chinese are being called “pendatang” or squatters in spite of the fact that they are born in Malaysia. I think these people really deserve such labeling.

Although what I did was insignificant and actually nothing compared to those who had risked being arrested, injured or even losing their life to join the Bersih 2.0 movement in Kuala Lumpur today, I am glad that I have made one tiny step to conquer my fear by wearing yellow and walking on busy road and in busy malls in the heart of Melaka, with the spirit of Bersih (Clean).

If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. – Dale Carnegie

“猪相”：它们的吃”很省”(猪食)，它们老爱在一角落​臭挤(猪圈)，它们永远看似很”满足”(猪样)，但“开​心”是装/堆出来(猪也会涂口红)，它们甘受宰制(猪脑​)，它们有发癫的时侯(猪嚎嚎大叫时)。它们爱窝裹斗，​猪咬猪，自己打自己人。当狼来了，个个夹着尾巴鸟兽散。​可怜一两只被牺牲在狼的血盆大口之下泪流满面，认命!

On August 27, Gustaf Thorslund contacted me about his wish to use my code and continue the development of AdaOthello. Today, I received another email from Gustaf informing me that he has revived the project.

First, I would like to express my gratitude to Gustaf to take my code, make a second home for it, and taking it to a new height. I originally released AdaOthello under GPL 2.0 or later and I continue to wish to keep it that way.

You can find AdaOthello at its second home here.

Android has been regarded as a savior to those who hate to be controlled and tied down by Apple’s strictly guarded iPhone. It is also one of the competitors closest to iPhone. While Apple’s latest iPhone 4 has a new feature called “FaceTime”, the Android on the other hand gets Sex.

FaceTime is a feature to make video call from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi. No special account or screen name is required to make video calls. Therefore, users can forget about Skype and Apple’s iChat AV. Certainly, FaceTime is a great aide for people with hearing impairment and mute to communicate using sign language.

There are plenty of sex/porn apps for Android devices. There is even an adult-exclusive app store called MiKandi to cater such need. Now the store has reached a new milestone, introducing the first live adult web-cam streaming app for mobile devices called Sex Live Chat. You can read the story here. With live sex chat, you can watch the party on the other side engaged in some actions, and vice versa, if you like to. I will let your imagination run wild.

It is pathetic for a brilliant mobile platform to resort to sexual elements to promote its use. This greatly contrasts with Apple’s iDevices where you can find a wild variety of education apps along with useful business and productivity apps, etc, more than you can imagine.

As a parent, I will invest in iDevices for my kids and never an Android device. The latter is well analogized to the pest in our household.

The above screenshot shows the signal bar on my iPhone 3GS with iOS 4. By comparing with the screenshot below, it is obvious that the signal bar (especially bar 1 and 2) has become taller.

At the same location (my desk), I covered the back of my iPhone 3GS with my palm, the signal would drop 1 to 3 bars after about 22 seconds. After updating to iOS 4.0.1, I repeated the test. The signal bar would reduce 1 bar after more than 25 seconds.

Well, this is a very low tech test and is not accountable to conclude that the new software in iOS 4.0.1 has displayed the signal strength more accurately. Anyway, there is a huge difference before and after.

Among all I was reading, there was one that caught my attention, the one that I paused all my activities, and let it touch deeply into my heart. I can’t help to shed my tears.

This is the most beautiful and touching commercial I’ve ever watched. Besides the artistic and beautiful photography, the video portrays how beautiful life is and how fragile it can be. Take a moment off your work (yes, I know you are busy) to watch this video. I bet and I hope it will make you realize how beautiful our lives are.

Enjoy!

This is the new “wear your seatbelt” ad the UK is doing – started by a man not hired to do it, but because the cause is important to him, he came up with this idea, and now it’s being hailed across the world as a ‘beautiful’ commercial. And now the video has become so popular with the general public that people are forwarding it to friends/family on their own so quickly that it has spread all over the world in a very short time.

You can watch here too.

For the past two weeks, I had been bugged by a silly tiny bug in one of my codes. Things weren’t moving at all. They were all still and my progress in a software project was stagnant. Before the bug was identified and removed, I could not move on to other tasks as they were highly dependent on the unit testing of that particular buggy code.

Yesterday, I finally managed to debug it and deducted 5 tasks. In actual fact, I only completed one task but deleted four. The four tasks which I deleted were no longer applicable because I completed one task which was dependent on the other four. I deleted them because they became obsolete.

So, yesterday, I completed one task that would allow me to complete more tasks today. In other words, imagine that we were traveling on a time machine to yesterday, it would be: today I completed one task and tomorrow I will be able to move on to other tasks. Confusing, isn’t it?

For a software developer, someday he/she will write many lines of code, perhaps a thousand. But someday, he/she will only write just one line of code or perhaps none. When the productivity is only one line of code for a day, is it too low? It is not. Sometimes, that single line of code will serve as a connector to many pieces of code together. That one single line that software developer has produced today, will allow many tasks to be completed tomorrow.

Praise yourself if you have got only one task done today because you will complete more tomorrow. The caveat, however, is that you do not make this an excuse for not having done so much today.

In my design, I break down the HTML template into header, body and footer so that I can reuse the common codes in header and footer. That means, all the body templates are without <html> tag. This missing <html> tag disables the syntax-coloring feature of code editor, leading to a more laborious code reading.

Before this, I had gone through every line of html source code in the template file umpteen times. This “obscure” bug, if not removed, would throw a monkey wrench in my works. I browsed the Internet and read articles in hope that I would get some clues. So, I was reading a few articles about Extensions in Safari 5. Extensions are not really impressive to me as I do not need to add missing functionalities to my browser. Safari itself is more than enough for my daily browsing activities. Somehow, my curiosity had driven me to enable the Develop menu in Safari 5. After activating it, I noticed some debugging tools in the menu. I enabled the web inspector by selecting Show Web Inspector in the Develop menu (Figure 1) then navigated to the web page I wanted to debug. To use these debugging tools, the Develop menu must first be activated. Here is a simple guide to enabling the menu.

Figure 1

Safari 5 immediately detected two error messages as shown in Figure 2. These two errors were easily corrected. After removing these unmatched </div> tags, my web page still did not show up properly with the intended layout.

Figure 2

Then I selected the Elements tab and it showed me the page source in debugging mode as shown in Figure 3. I instantly spotted the <div class=”data-base-layer”> tag which was supposed to be in the <div id=”container”> tag.

Figure 3

I clicked on the little grey triangles in the left pane to expand the <div id=”container”> tag and the <form> tag. There were two <div class=”data-base-layer”> tags (labelled as “1″ in Figure 4) and the one in label “2″ was supposed to be right after them.

Figure 4

I checked the source file again and they seemed to be in the correct place. Further investigation finally reviewed that there were two very tiny typos lurking somewhere within the second <div class=”data-base-layer”> tag as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

The web inspector in Safari 5 has helped me to identify errors effortlessly. If only I had such inquisitiveness two weeks ago, I would have saved so much time and efforts in debugging my HTML codes. An proverb says: “Curiosity killed the cat.” It is not always true, at least in this case. I will say: “Curiosity saved the donkey.”

Click on Safari menu and select Preferences. In the preferences window, select the Advanced tab and then click the checkbox for Show Develop menu in menu bar.

The Develop menu will then appear in Safari menu bar. Select Show Web Inspector to inspect your HTML code. You can also activate extensions support by selecting Enable Extensions in Develop menu. Extensions let you add those missing features.

This video shows the young Steve Jobs revealing the insanely great Macintosh in 1984. It is so classic and what a nostalgia!

His doctor came in when I was there. He said my uncle suffers from acute Transverse Myelitis.

Transverse Myelitis (TM) is a neurological syndrome caused by the inflammation of spinal cord. It is a complicated disease and takes times to eradicate inflammation. His doctor has done lumbar MRI today. They will do another thoracic MRI tomorrow to confirm clinical diagnosis.

I like to be preserved this way after my death. My children can have a portion of “me” in a nice decorative glass flower in their home, if they want to.

The nuclear energy is the greenest energy currently available on Earth. James Lovelock, a scientist, environmentalist, futurologist and the father of Gaia Hypothesis wrote in his book: “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”, that the nuclear energy is indeed greener than any other form of power generating plants including solar voltaic and wind energy farm. A 1GW wind farm requires 2 millions tons of concrete, enough to build 30,000 homes for 100,000 people. That quantity of concrete would release 1 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

The under-construction Bakun Dam, located in Sarawak on the Balui River, will be the tallest concrete-faced rockfill dam in the world and the largest dam in Asia outside of China. Its powerhouse with 8 penstocks to powertrains comprising 8 vertical shaft Francis turbines of 300MW each, 8 air-cooled generators of 360MVA each and 8 oil-immersed transformers (360MVA each) will generate about 2.4GW of electricity. The dam has 16.71 million cubic meters of filled volume.  With catchment area of 14,750 km square, its gross storage capacity is 43,800 million cubic meters. How much concrete is required to build this dam? How much carbon dioxide will be released by the concrete? How much biodiversity would have perished under catchment area that large?

I read from various sources about people’s objections (including politicians’) of this nuclear energy project. This should not be a political issue and never be one. This should be an environmental, safety and social-economic issues at top.

TNB, the sole electricity distributor/supplier in Malaysia is not the sole energy producer. TNB buys, under contract, energy from many other producers. Unfair advantages, unscrupulous practice and increasing fuel cost in the produce-supply chain have contributed to rising energy cost, leading Malaysians to cry foul. The substandard service provided by TNB worsens the situation. As a corporation with revenue of MYR25.75 billion and net income of MYR2.6 billion as of fiscal year 2008, TNB is cutting more corners to reduce its operating costs and to maximize its profit with unhealthy practices, e.g. bi-monthly meter reading practice has stirred uproars in recent week. Being greenest, nuclear energy is more profitable than any other energy production. Could this help to reduce electricity cost for Malaysians considering the unhealthy practices and unfair advantages TNB has in its glossary bag?

I am not going to write more about TNB’s malpractice and sluggish substandard service. Ask any Malaysians, they will be able to tell you stories whole day and night. Instead, I am going to write more about safety.

The next question: Is it really safe to have nuclear power plant in Malaysia? This question does not imply that nuclear power plant is not safe. Rather, the human factors in managing and operating the nuclear power plant.

Alongside the nuclear physics in the power plant is the safety critical computer system, which includes both hardware and software, that is used to control and monitor the nuclear power plant. This safety critical system is the most crucial part and the entire operation of a nuclear power plant heavily relies on it.

Safety critical system is a computer (including software), electronic or electromechanical system whose failure may be a catastrophe, causing injury or death to human beings. This safety critical system comprises high integrity software. The safety critical system, both hardware and software, will likely be integrated and maintained by foreign contractors.

Nuclear power plant software are developed using Ada and/or SPARK programming language. SPARK is a subset of Ada. In the mid 1990s, UTM (University Technology Malaysia) KL campus was teaching Ada in CASE (Center for Advanced Software Engineering). At that time, CASE was a collaboration between UTM and Thomson CSF under special arrangement between the government of France and Malaysia. The Ada course was not long lived. Two years later, it was replaced by Java due to ignorance and market driven trends. Java is not a suitable candidate for high integrity, safety critical, real-time and distributed application development. Today, none of the universities in Malaysia is teaching Ada. According to my hitherto knowledge, apparently none of the Malaysia academies have submitted any high integrity and safety critical system related papers in international conferences and scientific journals.

It does not only require software engineers with Ada or SPARK knowledge. In safety critical software engineering, the individual developers, the entire team and organization are required to go through rigorous software development and safety critical validation processes. It takes years to achieve Carnegie-Mellon’s SEI (Software Engineering Institute) CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Level 5. Safety critical system development requires utterly strong discipline and engineering ethics in every requirement, design, development, testing and maintenance process and every process needs to be validated. Other than software process, there are many other non-software related risk assessments to comply.

Malaysia lacks qualified software engineers of such competency to develop and to maintain high integrity software system. It is costly to maintain such system by contract. The maintenance will increase the cost of energy production and hence will be borne by consumers.

The safety critical system of a nuclear power plant must be thoroughly tested with proven track records. With the loosey-goosey attitude of many Malaysians, will they have capability to manage the system and safety critical issues? Will they be effective to respond to emergencies, for example, system shutdown or nuclear melt down?

The disposal of nuclear waste poses another safety issue. If the engine of a RMAF (Royal Malaysia Air Force) fighter jet could go missing and be exported, can you imagine the potential hazard of missing nuclear waste?

Objection should be rational, not emotional. It is imbecilic to politicize the objection without scrutinizing facts. I, in my book, embrace nuclear energy for it is the greenest energy. On the contrary, I do not have any confidence in the management of safety related issues in Malaysia.

The candidate from Pakatan Rakyat or People’s Coalition is Zaid Ibrahim, a well known household name to every Malaysians. He quit Barisan Nasional or National Coalition and later joined PKR because he found BN’s doings are against his principle. A man of principle, he is.

What is the reason for PKR to field Zaid in this by-election? Zaid is an intellectual man. He will be best known and accepted in a city constituency where more working professionals or literates can easily understand his capabilities and visions. I have no intention to scorn the intelligence or intellectual level of the people of Hulu Selangor. There may be many professionals working in the city are from Hulu Selangor.

Is Zaid Ibrahim a sure win by PR? Or is PR desperate to find a good candidate from its arsenal, looking at the number of PR’s members turned “Froggies”?

I hope democracy will prevail this Sunday.

Religion is a fraternity of politics which is engineered by politicians to control people’s behaviors and minds. — Adrian Hoe 2010.

This is why “Religion” has initial “R” which comes after “P”.

Well, I have only one New Year resolution for 2010, to fully implement my MIS (Medical Information System) at client’s site before 2010 ends. Simple as that.

Well, I admit that I was wrong. I am developing a cloud/web-based MIS (Medical Information System) which enables patient to be able to view certain information and interact with the clinic/doctor from anywhere. Likewise, it also provides doctors greater mobility and still are able to care for their patients while they are away.

After reading articles (on Apple’s website) how iPhones help hospitals in the U.S. to provide better healthcare at lower cost, I decided to build the MIS with iPhone support. I based my decision on these reasons:

1. Ease of use. I have been toying/using around with an iPod Touch for a few months and I find that it is easy to navigate/use. iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone without the phone. You get what I mean.
2. Beautiful UI. Apple is well known for its brilliant UI (User Interface) in Mac OS X and iPhone OS. Nothing else comes closer to it.
3. Security. All applications must be approved by Apple and be signed with license keys issued by Apple. Apple’s iTunes Store is the only place to download applications. I can be rest assured  to have less (or none) headache about spooky applications from unreliable sources. Of course, there are jail broken iPhones which do not play by the rules but I am not too worried about that.

So, I went ahead ordering one last week. Last night, I went to Maxis center to collect my 32GB Black iPhone. It is such a beauty.

Give me a couple of weeks mingling with it and I promise you I will write about my experience.

I have been using Apple’s iDisk to sync and share files among my computers, iPod Touch (iPhone) and as well as clients and co-workers. Two days ago, I discovered Dropbox and I now find it easier to use than iDisk and it is faster! It is free for a 2GB storage or upgrade with a small monthly fee.

One cool feature of Dropbox is that when someone drops you a file in your folder, Dropbox notifies you using Growl. iDisk lacks this notification feature and usually the file arrives silently unless the sender texts or emails you.

Dropbox can work offline. Dropbox on Mac will sync your files and folders to your local hard disks and allows you to access later even when offline. The sync is done automatically.

I used to copy some files on my USB drive and take them to my clients. Now I no longer need to bring anything. Just use my client’s Internet browser to access my Dropbox and viola! The files will be transfered to my client’s Mac.

Of course, there are many ways to use Dropbox for your productivity. For example, taking your lecture notes to the lecture hall without carrying anything at all, not even USB pen drive. There are some other ways of using Dropbox, read here. But that’s not all. Please tell me if you find any other use of it.

Sign up here for extra 250MB of disk space!

Heredity, diet and health condition can affect a young woman’s menarche. This is something most parents with growing young daughters have overlook. Diet plays a very important part in young women especially teenage girls. Many teenage girls despite of having their menarche years earlier, neglects or intentionally limit their dietary intakes for body slimming purposes. This ignorance can seriously affect their reproductive system.

One most interesting fact I learned about menstruation is the term “Nightlighting”.

The word “menstruation” is etymologically related to “moon”. The terms “menstruation” and “menses” are derived from the Latin mensis (month), which in turn relates to the Greek mene (moon) and to the roots of the English words month and moon—reflecting the fact that the moon also takes close to 28 days to revolve around the Earth (actually 27.32 days). The synodical lunar month, the period between two new moons (or full moons), is 29.53 days long. — Wikipedia

In some traditional societies without nightlighting believe that women ovulate in full moon and menstruate in new moon. There are studies in both humans and animals where artificial lighting at night does alter the menstruation cycle. While none of the studies have suggested the lunar phase affects the ovulation cycle, bright light exposure in the morning stimulates more regular cycles.

Research also suggested that sensitivity of women’s cycles to nightlighting is related to nutritional deficiencies of certain minerals and vitamins. Again, balanced and healthy diet is utmost important to women’s health.

接下来的，不会只是一场暴风骤雨这么简单。现在最重要的是把手上的软件工程开发出来，抢先把一却安顿下来再说。

Fornax is a 6-year old PC running Ubuntu. It wasn’t working properly due to the cooling fan in its power supply unit. Until about two weeks ago, I replaced the old fan. I am not very confident about the replacement because it is a third party part and the replacement isn’t as good as expected, but it works. I have to shut it down every night before going to bed.

So, the last thing before I go to bed is to backup the svn directory and then shutdown the server. I am quite fed up with this extra manual works. Last night, before going to bed, I decided to automate this process. And I did it this morning.

I wrote a simple bash shell script to do the backup. I cron it so that the process will start automatically at 2300 hours and then shutdown.

#!/bin/bash

BACKUPFILE=/tmp/backups/svn-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz

rm /tmp/backups/svn-*.gz
tar -cj /svn > $BACKUPFILE
for COMPUTER in host1 host2
do
   scp $BACKUPFILE user@$COMPUTER:Desktop/
done
/sbin/shutdown -h +5

UPDATE (05/10/2009): I setup a password-less ssh login so that no password is required for scp (secured copy). Now, after the backup, the backup file will be copied automatically to two other computers for safe keeping.

My dad has been admitted to hospital for 8 days. He has been diagnosed hepatoma with huge lesions in both right and left lobe, metabolic syndrome X (full house), and renal impairment. Last Saturday, sonogram confirmed his hepatoma and renal impairment are in the end stage. His doctor started him on hemodialysis last week and he was doing really badly with all the reactions: fever and vomiting. Today he did much better after his 4th hemodialysis.

Yesterday, he told my sister, Mee, and I his last wishes. We broke into tears and this was the first time I saw my dad crying. I did not sleep at all last night thinking a lot of things. There are many problems interwoven and almost impossible to resolve. 4 A.M. in the morning, this idea suddenly flashed through my mind. I wanted to present him the certificate which I earned after passing a professional examination.

Actually, I intended to present to mom and dad after I acquired all three diplomas. But I should do it now to cheer him up a little and to keep his fighting spirit burning. Although the doctors said he has 3 to 6 months to live, we think that dad may do better if he hasn’t given up. You see, our dad is a fighter.

So was my decision. I went to the hospital very early at 5:30 A.M. Came home for a short morning nap at 10:30 A.M. After lunch, I was out to send lunch to Mee and to pick Dmitry from school. Then I went downtown to frame my diploma and to do other chores.

LA got the kids ready and we went to the hospital around 8 P.M. Dad was having satay for his supper. He had been taking satay as supper for the last few days. Satay is his favorite food since young. I have his influence. After he was done with his supper, I showed my diploma to him and mom.

Well, what diploma is this?

To be honest, I am no longer particular at how people see me and when they ask me question like “Where do you graduate from?”

Today, I proudly announced to the world that I am a self-trained software engineer without any tertiary education. And the diploma I am having is the certificate (level 4) accorded by the British Computer Society (BCS) after passing the level 4 professional examination in April this year. After completing the diploma (level 5) and the professional graudate diploma or PGdip (level 6), I will be able to do my Master in some accredited universities in UK.

I have three very good reasons to pursue BCS diplomas:

1. My commitment to my clients for continual acquisition of new knowledge and skills in computer science and information technology.
2. To pursue further in the field of Computer Science.
3. I have proven to be able to achieve to some extent without a formal tertiary education in Computer Science. (I actually showed him my posts and photos giving seminars and judging university students’ final year project at http://adrianhoe.com and explained to him how some students and lecturers feared my questions when judging their projects. He jokingly said I like to scold them.)

When I told dad, he was very happy and gave me a thumb up. He also told me that he dreamed of me receiving my Master degree. And now I have to live his dream and take it further.

I wish he can see me living his dream and going further. I wish, I wish and I wish!

And I also like to thank mom and dad for their support as well as many those who have inspired me and given me the will to start studying again.

Explaining to dad (with his intra jugular catheter or IJC on his neck) that I have two more to go.

Dad told me that he dreamed of me getting a Master. Now I have to fulfill his dream and take it further.

With Rich and Nik on his bed.

With Mee and dad stroking Nik's head.

Nik, the little "Monster", was sharing his cheers.

Nik: What's up? Huh?

Dmitry was admiring the diploma with auntie Mee.

About 30 minutes to midnight, the nurse came in to give dad some medication and his nebulizer. I told the nurse about the glucose level and she took the reading after everything was settled. I reminded the nurse to take note that the glucose level was taken post-supper. Then we tucked my dad to bed.

Half an hour later, he said he wanted to pass motion. I called the nurse to get help. Then there was some commotion. Two nurses and I helped my dad to get up the bed to sit on the commode. While waiting, the nurses changed the bed linen. Unfortunately, nothing had been passed out. Dad actually fell asleep around midnight.

Around 1:45A.M. this morning, he woke up again. He wanted to pee and to have some water. Then he went back to sleep. He was sleeping quite soundly that I could hear him snoring.

He woke up again at 3A.M. complaining his back was itching. He told me to rub some Betamethasone cream. He went back to sleep only this time he was sleeping sounder. Unfortunately, he was disturbed by the nurse again 5A.M. in the morning. The nurse took his blood pressure and glucose level reading. His glucose level was 6.5 compared to 13.5 at 11:30P.M. After the nurse gave him medication and empty his urine bag, he went back to sleep.

At 7A.M. another nurse came in trying to wake him up for a morning wash, I told the nurse to allow him to sleep. The nurse told me that there would be no student nurses today because of the Merdeka holiday. I replied without hesitation, “Then the nurse can do it. That’s what the nurses are for.” The nurse wasn’t quite happy getting a whack (literally) from me. She stood there for a while then took off.

As there were college students came to do their internship with me before, I really dislike the idea that businesses and company take advantage on interns as a damn cheap labor to do all sort of donkey jobs. I can imagine how these in-house nurses take advantages on training nurses and get them to do all sort of donkey jobs the in-house nurses won’t like to do. I think that nurse deserves a whack from me.

He woke up at 8A.M. to wash, took his breakfast and medication and watch the live telecast of Merdeka celebration on TV.

Mom, Mee and BS came so I went home at 9A.M. Before I went home, a nurse came to assist my dad to the washroom for passing motion and then gave him a morning bath.

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沉墨羽

As far as “Unity” or “One Malaysia” is concerned, the word “Bumiputera”, should be strikeout and will never exist in the dictionary of the Malay language. Literally translated, it means prince of the land. The ethnics Chinese and Indians, although they are the lawful citizens of Malaysia, they are not the prince of the land.

Let all be referred to as “Rakyat Malaysia” (Malaysia citizens). For example, there should never be “Bumiputera” and “Non-Bumiputera” pricing in housing properties sales. But when election comes, they call all “Rakyat Malaysia” to vote.

How can the country unite whilst the people are divided into “Bumiputera” and “Non-Bumiputera”? I wish Mr. Najib, the new prime minister, will critically consider to abolish the word “Bumiputera” if he is really serious about uniting the people of Malaysia.

Ahmad is Buiputera Rakyat Malaysia. Sivakumar is non-Bumiputera Rakyat Malaysia. I am non-Bumiputera Rakyat Malaysia.

So why divide citizens of Malaysia into Bumiputera and non-Bumiputera?

I called ISEC emergency number and spoke to a nurse on duty. She advised me to go to A&E of a nearby hospital to have my eye checked. One of the factor could be infection.

LA took me to Pantai Hospital. After the medical officer had examined my eye, he rang the opthalmologist on-call, Dr. Lim.

From their phone conversation, we could tell that he was reluctant to come. After many times of persuasion and insistance by the medical officer, he finally agreed to come. But we were told that we would have to wait. What an arrogant bastard!

A doctor on-call is a doctor on night duty. He has to respond to emergency cases at night regardless of the parient’s condition. This doctor’s attitude was really irritating. WTF! After some thoughts, I decided to go home without seeing him. I did not want this irresponsible doctor to earn my money. Furthermore, my pain had subsided due to the paracetamol I took before we left home.

Ok. I am lazy. I have been using rsync to sync folders I am working on between my Macs. I have been using command line scripts in Terminal for almost two years and finally I have gotten lazy over the task.

The thing is, I need to execute the scripts in Terminal every time I want to synch my folders. Of course, I could simply use cron to automate the tasks at specific time but I ran the risk to cause havoc between the folders on different Macs. It is best not to cron the task.

So, I learned up AppleScript and after a ten-minute hack, I wrote a nice AppleScripts to do the job. It is quick and dirty.

set debug to false

with timeout of (30 * 60) seconds
	tell application "Terminal"
		set Window_Title to "Sync Documents"
		set Rsync_Cmd to "rsync -acrtv --delete
			/Users/username/Documents/
			username@xxx:Documents"
		set output_doc to do shell script Rsync_Cmd
		choose from list paragraphs of output_doc with prompt
			"Result:" with title Window_Title with empty
			selection allowed
	end tell
end timeout

Copy the script to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder and save it as “sync documents.scpt”. Then launch Script Editor to edit username to your login name and xxx to your Mac IP address or computer name. This script will sync your Documents folder under your user home directory. To execute this AppleScript, at Finder, click on the script icon on the menu bar and select the script to launch.

rsync uses ssh. If you have not setup a password-less ssh login, you will need ssh-askpass in /usr/libexec. Unfortunately, it does not ship with Mac OS X. You can get it at Joe Mocker’s weblog.

I have several reasons to buy an iPod Touch but I am not going to talk about them here. One most ostensible use of it is that I am no longer required to lug my MacBook (code-named Uranus) everywhere I go. Since it replaces the function of Uranus when it is not with me, I name my iPod Touch, Miranda, one of the five moons of Uranus. Miranda is the inner most and smallest moon of Uranus and is also referred to Uranus V.

If you are running a business, your data lost can cause you a fortune. Data is the most valuable byproduct of any business. For example, customer database, sales and invoicing, stock inventory, etc.

There are numeral factors that can cause data lost. The most common are hard drive failure (electronic or mechanical), accidental deletion of file(s) or partition(s), accidental reformat of hard drive and OS failure. Fire and flood can also damage your hard disks. On advanced computing hardware, data lost can cause by the reasons mentioned earlier as well as RAID controller failure, rebuild RAID configuration failure, damaged or lost RAID configuration, corrupt or damaged partition table, etc. If you lose your data due to any of this or other reasons, you will need data recovery service.

If you are using a Mac, you need not to worry at all. The DataRecoveryGroup also provides Mac data recovery service to Mac users. They also provide server data recovery service to recover data from RAID disk arrays on servers.

We will switch off all the lights for entire two nights, leaving only the refrigerator and at least 1 (and maximum 2) fan(s) on.

In fact, I have been doing this since 2007. As the matter of fact, this initiative is not started by the Australians (as I heard from TV advertisement). Read here and here.

Why only an hour? Make it the whole weekend for our Earth. This will further reduce energy consumption.

The iPhone 3G that makes you drool...

I was truly disappointed after reading the details on Maxis’ website. The selling price is very high and apart of this, Maxis locks you in with either 24 months or 6 months contract. The worst thing is that if you breach the service contract or choose to opt out before the contract matured, there is a huge penalty awaiting you ahead.

We have paid so much for the iPhone with our own pocket, why is there still hefty monthly service fees and contract commitment?

Is that another dirty Apple‘s trick?

It looks kind of odd for an Apple enthusiast like me to comment about Apple negatively in two consecutive blog entries.

In my opinion, Apple’s marketing and sales strategies have  leveraged Apple to become the most successful and profitable computer company. Ever since Apple released the first generation iPhone, it has become a hit globally including Malaysia. You will not be surprised to read petitions from fellow Malaysians to urge Apple to make available iPhone in Malaysia as soon as possible.

Well, like else everywhere, Apple does not only make profit from iPhone sales, it makes another tier of profit from the service contracts. The arrangement is made with service provider prior to the launch of iPhone. That’s why Maxis’ iPhone service contract comes with huge unfair penalty.

Very well, to me, iPhone is a nice to have it but not a must have but still wants to have it kind of thing. It is cool. It will make heads turn and eyes pop when you take your iPhone out of your pocket.

If you read carefully Maxis iPhone 3G rate plans here, you will find the data service is not unlimited. There is additional data usage charge after you have used up the allocated usage stipulated under your contract.

Now a dangerous pitfall that will lead you to huge phone bill is that if you are using some iPhone apps which automatically connect to Internet to update itself or sync information, your usage meter will be running without you knowing it until your bill arrives. Most applications will connect to Internet automatically even your iPhone is in standby mode. Beware!

Personally, I prefer using an iPod Touch and a regular cell phone to having the all-in-one iPhone. I will have total freedom to change my phone as I wish or when necessary. With iPhone, you are locked in with it unless you become to hate it so much and will just chuck it away into the garbage.

I still will consider getting an iPhone if Apple allows iPhone users to choose any service provider they like. I believe iPhone sales will leap even higher with this restriction removed.

As for the running meter of data service, I am not too concerned as I will be able to comprehend and prevent it as I am technically savvy. How about people who are not? They will either have to pay huge bills or to disable iPhone apps. What use then if you disable iPhone apps?

Why?

There are numeral reasons for that:

1. All Macs work straight out of their boxes. No configuration, no installation of sort. Gadgets like MiniDV cameras just work by connecting to any Mac with a FireWire cable, basically any well known brands of digital cameras will work straight out of their boxes with any Mac without installing any drivers (iPhoto), calendar and contact will sync with any supported cell phones and many more.
2. Friendly and stunning user interface make it easy to work on Mac.
3. Colors and graphics are superb on Mac. Nothing comes close to it.
4. The damn Mac just works without crashing the entire system (although sometimes they do but negligible) comparing to other systems running Windows and Linux.
5. Applications running on Mac are very easy to use and always come with great features and usability.
6. and the list goes on and on….

In plain simple words, Macs get your jobs done.

The other two compelling reasons are Apple’s brilliant packaging and product finishing which give value for money kind of feeling. The packaging boxes are usually compact and slim, using less material and they are environmental friendly. As long as the product design and finishing are concerned, no other PC manufacturer can rival Apple’s ingenious design.

Apple is notoriously well known for its secrecy. Apple was also the largest participant in Macworld Expo and Conference as well as several other similar trade show. Last December, Apple abruptly announced that it would stop participating in future events. Macworld 2009 which was held in January this year was Apple’s last participation.

By tradition, Apple would announce upcoming product release. Users would usually stop buying Apple’s until they got an idea of what was coming along and would wait until a new product was available. This hurt Apple’s business prior to every expos and conferences. The change of strategy will leave speculation high up in the stake.

The new aluminum MacBook lacks of FireWire port is under fire by many MacBook and especially MiniDV tape camcorder users. Without the FireWire port, it becomes not possible to transfer video from MiniDV tape camcorders.

The lack of FireWire port also disable the FireWire disk mode which is quite useful to salvage the contents of hard disk if there is any problem to boot. By connecting MacBook via FireWire, user is able to transfer data from one Mac to another.

New DV camcorders support USB for transferring video images, responded Steve Jobs to unhappy new aluminum MacBook users. Indeed, all new DV camcorders (with built-in hard disk or flash storage media) support only USB for transferring video. But there are still many old MiniDV tape camcorder users like me wanting to be able to transfer from an old MiniDV tape camcorder. My Panasonic MiniDV tape camcorder which only supports FireWire is still in excellent working condition and I have no intention to change a new camcorder. I have no intention to “upgrade” my white MacBook to the all new aluminum MacBook either.

Apple has been deleting all posts (about lack of FireWire in new aluminum MacBook) in its forum. You can read about users complaining in other forums here and here.

The all new aluminum MacBook is something nice to have but not must have. To a seasoned Mac user like me who is cautious in choosing my Mac, it does not have any better contribution to my computing other than its stylish outlook, the new multi-touch-buttonless-smooth-glass trackpad.

Although it sports 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM, the price which differenced by $300 (RM1,100 in Malaysia) between 2.0GHz aluminum and white MacBook does not worth the performance per dollar. There is also a difference of 40GB between both models and other technical specifications are identical. With the extra $300 (or RM1,100), you can upgrade the 120GB hard disk drive to 250GB or 320GB plus AppleCare Protection Plan. If you top up about $100 (or RM390), you can upgrade your 2GB DDR2 SDRAM to 4GB in the white MacBook and it still will run as fast as the aluminum MacBook with original spec.

Let’s come back to the lack of FireWire port in new aluminum MacBook. All white and previous MacBook have built-in FireWire 400 port while the MacBook Pro series supports FireWire 800. FireWire 400 can transfer data between devices at 100, 200 and 400 Mbit/s half-duplex data rates. The actual data transfer rate is slightly lower, for example, at 98.304, 196.608, and 393.216 Mbit/s respectively.

Data transfer over FireWire 400 interfaces generally outperforms similar transfer over USB2.0 interfaces though it nominally runs at signaling rate at 480Mbit/s, slightly higher than FireWire 400.

The FireWire enables remote control (play, rewind, etc.) of connected camcorder/device. With the exclusion of FireWire support on latest digital camcorders, remote control of the devices becomes not possible.

Again, why does Apple discontinue FireWire support on the new aluminum MacBook? Is it an oversight or plainly to cut costs?

Does it indicate Apple’s intention to move MacBook users for video capability to higher and more expensive hardware such as MacBook Pro? The speculation is not without fundamental analysis. The argument for getting a USB-FireWire converter or even upgrade to newer digital camcorder does not justify dollars spent. Why should one spend extra money for extra gadget? Why should a person throw away a still working old camcorder just for a USB connection?

With the economic downturn, Apple is no exception to be affected by this world financial crisis. In the last week or two, Apple slashed prices and spiked up the specs to lure buyers. The white MacBook is there to stay to help ramping up Apple’s sales. How long will it be before Apple sends the white MacBook to EOL (End Of Life)? Definitely not within these few weeks. Three months later?

Another trend you can see or forecast is the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be released sometime around June or September, as we can already see that Apple has rolled out all new models from its arsenal. By then, Apple would have sold many Mac and those new Mac owners would be rushing to upgrade to the new Snow Leopard optimized for dual/quad core processors, unleashing more powerful multi-core processing power horse. Apple will cash in again for the upgrade. If you are not in urgent need to buy a Mac or upgrade or replace a Mac, do wait till Snow Leopard is released. It will be worth the wait.

Talking about Mac OS X upgrade, my iBook came with Jaguar. When Panther was released about a year later, everybody was rushing for the upgrade. I waited until Tiger was released and unfortunately, my iBook died not long after I gave it a Tiger. When I purchased my other Macs, they came with Tiger. I acquired a Leopard upgrade at someone’s disposal. I wanted the Time Machine feature to safe guard my data after my iBook was dead. I had sleepless nights worrying about my data and thank God that my data was safe. 

If you are in need of a lower cost MacBook with FireWire capability, do grab the white MacBook now because we have no idea when Apple will pull the plug.

Apple’s marketing and sales strategy exploit human psychology very well. Trend and new state-of-the-art hardware will make heads turn. Apple understands that perfectly well and it uses this intuitive human behavior to cash in. New and unseasoned Apple users, oftentimes teenagers, who are not giving a thought and are not following up Apple’s strategic plan will likely fall prey to coughing out hard-earned dollars for the new cool leading edge hardware to impress people around them.

Is Apple playing dirty tricks to feed its share holders? You judge for yourselves. Apple is no doubt the world most profiting computer company with very happy investors. So, if you ever need to buy a Mac now, do consider the facts and justify your needs and dollars wisely.

The upgrade is inevitable because some of my sites were affected by Yahoo! Counter  malicious malware. It is a nasty injection of script. I could not locate where it was injected and my web host wasn’t very helpful. I decided to upgrade, hopefully, to wipe out the code injection.

Now, I have to file a request to Google to clear the malware listing of my sites.

Dmitry took part in a multi-game and 4 x 50m event. His team was in 4th place thus he did not win anything but his old folks, LA and I won prizes in parents’ events.

LA won first place for threading a needle. She was the fastest of all leaving behind other mothers with a big gap. I won a second place for picking up a mineral water bottle using a drinking straw and ran 10 meters to the finish line. Both prices were bath towels.

The prize is not important. What important is to show Dmitry sporting spirit from his daddy and mommy.

Before the opening ceremony

Line up and get ready

In a multi-sport event

D was in action in 4 x 50m event

The organizer explained how to play the game

1, 2, GO!

Got tanned under the hot sun.

Not too long after the first news, came another one. LA’s ex-colleague and friend, madam Chua, was admitted to Malacca’s General Hospital on the second day of Chinese New Year due to lung cancer with metastasis to the bone and brain. She was literally coma laying helplessly in the bed. She has no children.

Her husband is a hemodialysis patient. He collapsed with high blood pressure (200+Hg) after hearing the news. LA’s friends were trying to seek some volunteering help to assist in taking care of her.

I called up my friend, Benji, in Kuala Lumpur and he helped to pull together some church members in Malacca to help.

This evening at 1700 hours, we were supposed to meet up with Chua’s husband and other family members at the hospital to discuss with doctors to make arrangement to send Chua to palliative care unit. I rushed home and then we sent our children to grandma’s. We were late. On our way to the hospital, we received a call from another friend informing us Chua had just passed away a while ago.

We were shocked. When we arrived at the ward at 1730 hours, the nurse told us that Chua passed away at 1700 hours. We had lots of mixed feeling. It is certainly good for her because she no longer needs to bear the sufferings in silence and in her motionless body.

Nothing ambitious, worked as a clinic nurse for more than 10 years, a passer-by has just passed the pathway of life. Gone were her agonies and yesterday tales. Finally, peace she found. We would like to thank Benji, Pastor Paul, Dr. John and a few others who have lent a helping hand and prayer. Thank you.

We were at the hospital to help her husband and her niece until the caretaker arrived. On our way back, we went to a temple to pray for her. May her soul rest in peace.

It takes years of hard work for the People’s Coalition to win majority seats in a few states in northern peninsular. Sparrow became Phoenix by the power of people. It then betrays her own people and opts to be fowl.

Let us together despise them, spit on them.

PS: It is the fault of PKR for accepting the crossover from the other camp. They destroyed what they have sowed. Who is to be blamed?

With today’s miniaturization technology, a tiny GPS tracking device has opened up new potential. You can now monitor where your kids go after school. At the size of no thicker than a golf ball, these GPS trackers can monitor in real-time, the GPS location and movement of the devices from anywhere in the world using any standard web browser.

But GPS tracking is also a very controversial debate. Although,  you are able to know the whereabout of your kids, their privacy has been violated. Nobody likes to be monitored or tracked. While some overly concerned parents are worrying their children’s safety, privacy is still a debatable issue. Parents can inform their children about the GPS tracking devices and the reasons to have one, privacy will still be an issue to older children when they begin to understand their rights about privacy.

Privacy issue is not so much of a concern in commercial sector especially in fleet tracking. Company needs to know the progress of the drivers and the exact location for planning and in case of emergency. Drivers will be informed of the GPS tracking devices and have to accept the terms when accepting the jobs.

Discover is the best application that allows me to wirelessly transfer my files to iPod touch and view it. It is free and secured. Unlike other free applications of the same class, Discover is only limited to physical storage available on your iPod touch. It supports many file formats such as PDF, Office document formats (which I don’t use), and Unicode support (C/C++, Objective-C and more). Unfortunately, it does not recognize Ada source files. I hope BBase will support Ada in coming release.

Download Discover from iTunes store and install into iPod touch. Just launch Discover and connect (using any WebDAV enabled browser) to iPod touch with the IP address provided on the iPod screen. You can setup secured access with passwords to protect your iPod touch from unauthorized access.

User review is one thing. When come to pricing and offering, it is impossible to recommend a good shop offering good price. ShopWiki is a good site to shop for a digital camera. At ShopWiki, there are links to online shops offering wide range of digital cameras with good price.

At its Canon Digital Cameras page, you can select from Canon’s compact digital cameras to digital SLR cameras and a wide range of accessories, like the lenses, flashes and more. You can also browse other major brands such as Sony, Nikon and more.

With ShopWiki, shopping for a digital camera is so easy in the comfort of your home.

After I took it out from the box, I put it on screen protector film and soft silicon skin right away. I have heard and read about scratching screen, drops and oily finger marks on iPod Touch and iPhone. I think it is good to protect my investment.

I have an iPod nano which my sister gave me more than a year ago. I seldom use it but most often I use it to listen to podcasts and some music. The reason for me to acquire an iPod Touch is to explore some ideas and to develop some useful software for it.

iPod Touch is a very powerful device besides music and video playing. It is in fact a powerful PDA for many applications in my opinion.

The idea is to design different programs with advertisements and messages interleaved among documentary and his own educational videos for playback on different days of the week. And the most important thing is to allow the doctor himself to easily update his educational videos and advertisements anytime as he wishes from his new 24″ iMac.

After I installed Apple TV a few days ago, I realized it did not have movie playlist. After Googling for a while, I wasn’t alone. Here is a blog entry with the same problem. And I found out the Apple TV Software Update 2.3 allows movie playlist in iTunes to be seen on Apple TV. I downloaded the 2.3 update this afternoon, and after I activated the movie playlist in Apple TV settings, it is now able to play the movies in the playlist as desired.

I pondered why Apple did not ship Apple TV with new software update 2.3. It was released in November 2008. About the Apple TV software update can be found here.