China Day 2: Suzhou

Today itenarary is to Suzhou(苏州).

8:30am Breakfast at the Sichuan 四川 restaurant at the hotel. Buns, congee (皮蛋瘦肉粥) and some small dishes. Hot and peppery. And some freshly made noodle (担担面) too. The people working in the restaurant are all very young and doesn't seem very well trained. Haha! And they keep smiling with shyness.


9am+ Got on the van and headed to Suzhou. Saw quite some stuffs on the way. Lots of electric bicycles, tricycle taxis, five-level Highway with nine dragon scupture on the center pole, lots of huge advertisement boards, etc. The pity is I didn't get many good photo of all these as I'm in the car and the glass is not very clean. Haha！

11am+ we reached the factory and had some exchange. And the water they provide is from Nestle.


After the factory tour, it's LUNCH!! Yeah! We went to SongHe Restaurant (松鹤楼) on the historical ShanTang Street (山塘街). The food are very nice. Small portion of many many dishes without the scary super expensive stuffs. Ha!




Outside our room in the restaurant. Very Suzhou look.


Gui Fish 桂鱼


Chicken Head Rice 鸡头米


little lake trout 小塘鲤鱼


Sugar vinegar white raddish 糖醋萝卜



After the lunch, we had some 20 mins to walk on the historical street.
Me on the ShanTang Street


Water way and boat


Theatre

Then we had a long drive back to Shanghai. Had another long and exhausting meeting in a cafe called 上岛咖啡厅. By the time the meeting is done, it's almost 9pm. Everyone was rather tired but still not hungry because of the late lunch and finger food. So we all went back to hotel and rest. I managed to borrow my boss's laptop to check email and blog about this.

Tomorrow morning breakfast at 7:30am. Then some big negotiation are awaiting. Big day tomorrow! Stay tune. Hope I'll have time tomorrow night too.

China Day 1: Shanghai

I'm in Shanghai(上海)!!!!!! Unreal!

Pearl Tower (明珠塔)

Shanghai airport is huge! And the city is a mix of old and modern. Big highway with bicycles on it. :P

The China people are nice to us. They insisted to order shark fin soup after we order some very specials dishes and declined the shark fin openly. I killed a small shark today. But the soup is really really nice, so thick and yummy. It's not anythin like the sharkfin soup we have at wedding... it's one bowl each separately with candle at the bottom... And the restaurant is at the side of the Huang Pu river(黄浦江). Superb view of both side of the river night light...


The hotel is beauiful too, called DongHai Hotel 东海宾馆. We stayed at the top floor, great far away view, but looking directly down is not very good, messy rof top of flats. About RMB470 a night. The workers in the hotels are nice but not very experienced let alone professional. Lots of young cute girls everywhere... :P Probably all concentrated at these high class places...



Gotta sleep. Good night.

I'm going to Shanghai!!

Going to Shanghai for a week helping a company do translation. Yeah!!

Cape Telecoms Limited

I'm in the news

I went to Applecross Primary School last week to do a presentation for the Computer science school. And the Melville Times had a photographer over and picked up the news.

Busy weekends

I've been really busy for the past week or so and will continue to be very busy for the next couple of weeks or so.

Last weekends was pretty full. I went to a comedy night sponsored by my housemate's Deloite social club. It's the Big Hooha at Brisbane Hotel on Saturday night. That was the first time I've been to a live comedy. I have to say that they are very fast, creative and well-expressed.

There are 6 guys and 2 gals in the team - one is sort of the MC, two teams each has 2 guys 1 gal and one guy is at the back with a keyboard and music effect.
It was really funny! They can express whatever with no or very little props and the audience can still make out what they are trying to play as. And many little games they played on stage are ad hoc, getting a word from the audience and come out with stuffs within seconds. Pretty amazing talent. So I really enjoyed it. :D


Then Sunday was the UWA EXPO. I was helping up at CS school with photographing and at the vision lab. Here are the photos of UWA EXPO @ CSSE, also featured on the The Wonderful World of Computer Science page. I managed to sneak in to one of the photo I took. Hehehe!

photos of UWA EXPO @ CSSE.

Then after I finished my duty at uni, I rushed off with friends to the AMWA Malaysian community food fair for Charity. Here's some photos featured on AMWA website.

AMWA Community Food Fair for Charity.

Demolition of school

You may have listened to this hilarious Irish kid Becky's proposal to knock her school down. If you haven't, here it is:
Demolition Becky

At UWA, we have some real demolition going on at the old Chemistry building enar the guild. I only managed to took some shots before it's all cleaned up. I didn't have my camera with me when it was actually being knocked down bits by bits.

Digital beautification

If you like the look of Charlize Theron in real life than in the film Monster, here's your digital savior:

Digital Face Beautification
Or do they really mean beatification as the page title reads??

Beware of those photos you see on dating websites! Haha!

Apple OS X Leopard, amazingly Cool!

I just watched the opening keynote speech of Apple CEO Steve job's at WWDC 2006. The preview into their new OS X Leopard is really blowing me away! Now that you can run MS Windows under apple machine when you really need it, there is less resistance to switch over to Mac with such a great user experience.

Watch it at here:
Apple CEO Steve job's keynote speech at WWDC 2006

MALAYSIA CENTRAL: Mycen Blog Directory: Malaysian Online Blogs

MALAYSIA CENTRAL: Mycen Blog Directory: Malaysian Online Journals, Weblogs, Themed Blog, Blogs, Bloggers, Blogging

Rafidah Aziz in Perth

I heard from AMWA committee awhile ago that Rafidah Aziz, the International Trade and Industry Minister of Malaysia is coming to Perth for some trade mission. I didn't realise it's today. But Robin Wong somehow got in to have an afternoon with Rafidah Aziz.
Again, another example of "it's who you know, not what you know that gets you to places". Malaysia is especially good at it!

Robin did a good job as a blogger to document the event from his perspective. So at least he may justify the lunch paid by taxpayer's money with his detailed article.

I'm still wondering how the news about these goodies gets channelled out to the connected luckies? Can somebody tell me?

My poor car has a tough time again

Bad news this morning. The back of my car got crashed this morning!
I parked on the road side and there wasn't much space between the road and where I parked so the guy didn't allow enough room and crashed into it. The car was even displaced so it's at an angle to the road when I saw it.

When Derong told me about it, there was no one there already. So I thought it'll be a major money drain to fix up the boot cover, the bumper and the back light cover. But after 15 mins inspection of the car, just before we left, I found a small piece of paper stuck in the hole of the torn metal. He was nice enough to left his name and contact for me, not like last time.

So I spent an hour+ talking to him getting his insurance details, calling up insurance company and stuff.. Need to get a quote for the repair tomorrow and all those troubles... At least I don't have to pay for it.

David Suzuki is coming to Perth!!!

DAVID SUZUKI: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY - FAREWELL TOUR (065103)

Mon 7.30-9pm Sep 18
David Suzuki has published 32 books including the most widely used genetics textbook in the United States. In addition to scholarly and popular works on genetics, he has written extensively about ecology, technology, the future and his own life. To all of his writing, David brings his gift for exploring and sharing complex ideas with clarity and passion. Don't miss this opportunity to hear David speak in Perth on his farewell tour of Australia.

Biologists inform us that human beings appeared on earth about 150,000 years ago on the savannahs of Africa. Compared to the other animals that shared the plains with us, we were not impressive in numbers, size, speed, strength or sensory acuity. Our survival attribute was the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain that endowed us with immense memory, curiosity and creativity. It invented the concept of "future" and thus was the only animal that realized we could shape the future by our actions in the present. Foresight, looking ahead, recognizing opportunities and hazards and choosing accordingly was a strategy that more than compensated for our physical and sensory deficits. We have become the most numerous mammal on the planet and supplemented by technology, consumptive demand and global economics, we have become a new kind of force, altering the physical, chemical and biological features of the planet on a geological scale as no other species ever has. Now we have all the amplified predictive capacity of scientists, supercomputers, engineers and telecommunications and for over 40 years, the leading scientists of the world have been telling us we are headed down a dangerous path - altering the atmosphere, poisoning earth, air and water, deforesting the planet, extinguishing species and so on. The disaster that hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans had been warned of for years, but now we are ignoring the very strategy for survival and ignoring these warnings. Why are we turning our backs on our most important ability and what can we do about it? David Suzuki will discuss the answers to these urgent questions.

Click here to register.

He came to Perth 2 years ago, I didn't know who he was. And when we decided to check it out, the tickets were sold out. This year I will be there.
My ex-housemate Kaz left several of his books - "Good news for a change", "from Naked ape to Super species" and "The scared balance" - which I am still slowly munching through. His vision and research into sustainable future is really inspiring.

Malaysian Community Food Fair for Charity

Date: 20 August 2006
Time: 11am-3pm
Venue: Queens Park Recreation Center
Centre St. (Cnr George St), Queens Park WA 6107
Food: Halal and non-halal food donated by restaurants and home mama.

We already have $7000 worth of food, now want to get people to come and eat them. :D The voucher is $10 a booklet (inc. $5 for main, $2x2 for kueh and $1 for drink) and you can get them from me.

Current Food list: Hold your saliva!!
100 Nasi Lemak
300 Penang Laksa
50 Beef Rendang
100 Vegetarian Loh Mai Kai
18 Fried Chicken drum stick.
100 Fish Balls/Meat Balls/Crab Stick
50 Curry Chicken
50 Beef Rendang
50 Fried Rice
200 Mee Goreng
30 Fried Hokkien Mee
100 Fried Kuih Tew
100 Nasi Birani
100 Matabah
300 Satay
100 A Char
500 Curry Puff
100 Hum Chim Peng
200 BBQ Buns
30 Asian muffins
100 spring roll
Yum Kuih
Sri Muka
Kuih Talam

Fund raised will go to:
Silver Jubilee Home for the Aged Penang, Malaysia
Jalan Sungai Dua, 11700 Penang, Malaysia
Currently house 220 residents. It provides homes for destitute Malaysian with ages of 60 years and above, free of charge so that they have a place to call home.

Supported by Association of Malaysians in Western Australia (AMWA), more information on AMWA website: amwa.org.au

Come along for a good feast, meet some nice Malaysians and do a good cause. I've got vouchers with me.

Photo Tourism

Photo Tourism

Danno told me about it. Really cool stuffs! From Szeliski and Seitz's group again. And they use David Lowe's descriptor to get the correspondances. I shall really look at Lowe's magic discriptor and cash it on my research too. :P

Serious system crash

My home PC crashed again!

I usually hibernate my system every night when I go to bed so it'll wake up faster the next day. The last reboot I did was after the ZoneAlarm problem.
My Firefox can't connect to internet properly yesterday morning, so I decided to give it a reboot. But it kept coming back to the screen asking me to choose SafeMode or Normal Boot. And the normal boot will stop after the WinXP splash screen came up for a while then a blue screen showed up for half a second and then reboot itself and brought me back to the choosing Safemode/Mornal boot screen.

I managed to take a photo of the blue screen and it has

Technical information:
**STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC00000??,

The "??," are gibberish that I cannot make out, seems like it rebooted before it showed everything.

I could still get into safemode (without Network support) and back up whatever I want to back up. And I thought I'd just reinstall the OS.

But the real scary thing is after I changed the Boot priority to "Boot from CD" and nothing else, and rebooted with my XP CD in the CDROM. It gave me an Error of "System Halted" on a black screen. So I cannot even boot from CD!!!

Seems like this time is a big one! Can anyone shed some light on what may go wrong?
My system is probably 4-5 years old now. Don't just die like that, please!!

I hope it's not Horatio trying to straighten things up and I stuffed it up again...

Amazing 11 year old girl singing

The voice is unbelieveable!

Amazing 11 year old girl singing
Or download it straight from here.

You think you're thinking by yourself?!

I read an article recommended by an old friend titled
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING by Tim O'Shea.
It's quite a long article but I learnt a lot from it. It discusses about how the mass media and our everyday life perception are largely products of PR-industry to create a public perception about some idea or product. I include some parts of the article that I found worth thinking seriously about:

The father of Spin -- Edward Bernays who described

the public is a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

In Bernays' Propaganda:

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

It also talks about how scientific research are controlled by big corporations.

JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science . Huber's shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis
2. make predictions for that hypothesis
3. test the predictions
4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings

THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?"

THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"
It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect
* public health
* the environment

A lot of the claims are cited on
Stauber & Rampton, "Trust Us, We're Experts", Tarcher/Putnam 2001

It shall be a good enlightening read too.

Bloody Zone Alarm!!

Last night, when I turned on my computer, there was a little reminder that a new version of Zone Alarm is available and asked if I wanted to update it. So I did the usual thing, no problem, update it since ZA has been a great firewall for me.

But it turned out to be a disaster that took me 4 hours to revert and still didn't know why!

The update didn't work, and somehow I have no permission to either run it or kill it! And it blocked out my internet!!! Then it's a long series of search on internet after uninstalling it.

Then re-downloaded it, re-installed it, reboot, didn't work, clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-installed it, reboot, still didn't work, tried again re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still bloody didn't work, re-re-clean-uninstalled it, found more detail information, follow some lengthy instructions, cleaned registry, deleted files, reboot into safe mode, deleted more files, reboot into normal mode, re-re-downloaded it, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still freaking didn't work!!!

At my despair, I decided to not use it any more. So I re-re-re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, and with the guts feeling of having messed around with the I decided to do a system restore back to before all these mess.

So I did a system restore back to Thursday, another reboot and to my astonishment, the little [Z|A] icon showed up on my system tray! So back to square one, with 4 hours of hope and frustration well rewarded...

What firewall do you use? Is there an alternative to the free and yet powerful ZoneAlarm? Hope it doesn't give me problem anymore....


Oh, a side story. When I was panicking about the firewall being turned off for update and eventually malfunction, I was simultaneously checking on other things on the net. And one of them was the online Chinese radio from Malaysia - WAONLINE, and somehow their frontpage got hacked (http://www.waonline.com.my) see hacked screenshot here. But I wasn't sure and thought could it be my firefox got hijacked!! And had a good paranoid!


I'm glad that the disaster is over. :```)

Super Deformed on Planet OneTwenty

Yesterday, I blogged about Onetwenty picked up the Horatio feed, today, there's a new look on
Planet OneTwenty with the super deformed cartoon shape of the bloggers. Haha! Those cute avatars I made for the 60Hz home made game GOMM are just so funny! Thanks for the cooperation from everyone who posed for it. :D

Planet onetwenty is fast!

Soon after I blogged about Horatio's hilarious blog, planet onetwenty picked it up and it's now included in their feeds. Good job Jim!

Another nice combination

I missed this one today. Well, take the pm off, there's another chance soon.

07:06:07 06/07/06

Another fun date will come in 3 days

This time it's better for those who don't wake up early.

11:10:09 08/07/06

But it's not as elegent as several beautiful date-time combination that happened in the past couple of months.

01:02:03   04/05/06
06:06:06   06/06/06
  20:06   20/06/2006

Horatio invades the virtual space

The super Horatio figure that used to fly around CS in my early years here is invading the virtual space now. Of course, it's from its original creator, the almighty Danno!

He's also trying to confuse my possible internet fans with this very similar URL:
http://tzu-yen.blogspot.com/

I took a screenshot of that page at 15:00WST 04/07/2006 for archiving purpose.


I like this joke. Good one Danno!

Hoax and untrue forwarded emails

Some of my friends like to forward emails they received and found interesting or alarming or attractive or fun, etc. to me, like many of you who has an email address and some friends. :P

Some of those emails are alarming health advices like "you eat prawn and vitamin C together, YOU DIE!";
some really touches me to help like "For each email forwarded, some companies or foundation will donate 2cents to this very cute and nice but badly ill kid";
or very attractive one which I'd want to get like "Send this email out to this email address and 20 people to receive a free PSP!!";
some require immediate action to avoid disastrous consequences like
"Yahoo will close your account if you don't send this to 20 people to let them know you're an active user.".

There are many other variations. I used to struggle to whether believe it, believe my friend on it to avoid missing out or being a cold hearted deadwood. But thanks to the search engine, and Google is my friend on this. Recently I'd just copy a big chunk of the text in the email and search it on google, when I verified that it's not true in less than 5 minutes, I'd email back the person who forwarded that to me and let him/her know about it as well.

The followings are what I wrote on several different cases. I just copy and paste them here. Save me typing them and paraphrasing them again. Reading back these email I sent out, I think I was rather frustrated at times and was not very courteous on my words. Hope it doesn't offend you. :P

Hi there,
Good to hear from you. And I enjoy some good email attachments from time to time. However, I shall let you know that a lot of the email floating around internet are purely rubbish created by jokers, like this one unfortunately. So I copy a paragraph from a page I get after google about some text from this email:

source:
http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-make-a-wish.htm

Whenever you receive an email that urges you to immediately forward that mail to everyone you know, there is a very good chance the email is a hoax. Please take the time to verify the message by doing a Google search before you send it on to anyone else. In most cases when you take an arbitrary sentence from the message and google for it you'll end up with many hoax warning pages as the result.

The following email is one such hoax. It says the Make A Wish Foundation will donate seven cents toward the medical bills of a child dying from cancer for every address you forward this email to. This is completely fake. Amy Bruce does not exist. Please forward the URL of this page to teh person who sent you this email.

The Foundation has made no promise of donating money for forwarded emails because it has no way of knowing if or how many times anyone forwards any email. Whoever came up with this sick joke is taking advantage of the good will of helpful people. The story pushes all the right buttons: A sick, innocent child, the double victim of abuse and cancer. Yet it's all a lie. This hoax has been around since 1999 and is documented as a hoax on several websites.

More details on:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/cancer.asp

Make a wish foundation denying that they had anything to do with this e-mail:
http://www.wish.org/home/chainletters.htm


Please send this to the people you send this email to, and get this email from. Let's stop rubbish on internet/email and keep the good ones alive.

Take care.

Hi, K,

Google and snopes.com is your friend for this one.

Just copy a big chunk of the original text into google and search for it. And chances are you'll get something in snopes.com telling you whether it's true or false with sensible reasonings.

This is what I did, I copy this whole chunk of text
"Dear YAHOO User, Because of the sudden rush of people signing up to YAHOO, it has come to our attention that we are vastly running out of resources. So, within a month's time,anyone" and put it into google.

Google link

Then the first one come out to be from snopes.com :
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/overload.asp

Read it and be happy for becoming wiser over internet hoaxes. :)

Thanks for sharing the alert, I did a search in Google for "prawn" and "Vitamin C", and these are the top hits:

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/shrimp.htm
http://breakthechain.org/exclusives/prawns.html
http://www.bighoaxes.com/hoaxe_6_380.html
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/v/vitaminshrimp.htm


Who do I trust? To eat or not to eat?
A responsible 'broadcaster' of important information should really includes his/her contact for careful/skeptical readers to verify the source.

Hi guys,

I personally think Sony will not do such unbounded giveaways. But I still wish it to be true, so I did a search on google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sonyworld+free+psp

And unfortunately, my guess was right. See the links:
http://www.playstation.com.au/news/pspemailhoax.jhtml
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/sonypsp.asp

I guess the dangerous part of this kind of emails is that the pspgiveaway@sonyworld.com email address you have to send to to get the goodies might be a spammer's fishing net. So when people forward to their friends hoping to get the goodies and hoping their friends can get the goodies too, the real "goodies" can turn out to be more spams, as the spammers now have your email address!!

Anyway, keep the email flowings. At least this hoax keeps us in touch. Haha! Have a wonderful day!

I'm not a KFC supporter. And they could be using Genetically
Engineered sources as their supply, (think about it, chicken used to
take 9 months to mature, now only 21 days?!! How on earth could that
be natural!!) but I would still want people to know that this article
is another internet Hoax!

do a search on google with the words University+of+New+Hampshire+kfc
Google link

Or go straight here to Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp

Here's a short extract from the site:

# Links on KFC's web site (such as the About KFC page clearly
describe its product as "chicken" numerous times, something it could
hardly get away with if the government were prohibiting the company
from using that word. And the KFC web site can also be reached through
the domain name kentuckyfriedchicken.com.
.........

Send this back to those who sent to you lah. Stop all these crap, this
is not the right way to bring down KFC.

Last minute heartbroken!

The Australian Socceroo played so well vs Italian in the match. And with one red card to the Italian, Socceroo has 11 players against Italian's 10. There were many good opportunities for Australian to score especially in the second half!

At the very last minute, Italian is awarded with a penalty, which didn't really seem very justifying with what happened in my biased and ignorant opinion, and it was a goal!!!!!

What a anticlimax way to lose the match for Australia! The world cup is over for Aussies. :- (

My housemate is very upset and her MSN becomes:
"suddenly the World Cup is meaningless - WTH!! penalty shot for Italy, bloody unfair!!!"

Haha! Well, I don't think I'll stay up late to watch the soccer anymore until probably the final. Hopefully I won't dream of that disheartening penalty tonight....

Work at Home Scam

Email spams are getting rather out of control lately. I get several of those spams into my uni inbox everyday, slipped through the department spam filter.

I got another one today and since it's Saturday morning and I'm rather happy, I check it out and see what kind of crap these spammers actually offers besides viagra.

So I copy the link and paste it into my firefox browser.

Everything on that website sounds pretty sensible. Like they are offering real job for people living in Australia with a valid bank account to work for them as a payment processing manager, and get 10% commission for each transaction, not bad at all! Sounded too good to be true to me, so I googled it and found this website:

Work at Home Scam: The check or funds processing business and how to analyze a check/funds processing scam letter:

"Never, ever, EVER cash a check for a stranger.
Never, ever, EVER accept any funds on behalf of someone else. Period.
Never, ever, EVER accept funds from one party and send them off to another. That is money laundering.

By accepting funds on behalf of another party you are taking full, legal, and responsible possession of those funds. Are you sure this is the kind of business you want to engage in with a complete stranger thousands of miles away?"

A good read and have me staying alert on internet scams! By the way, I include the website from the email for your reading pleasure:
http://www.bestfast-job.com/

What is your Perfect Major?

You scored as Psychology. You should be a Psychology major! Psychology 92% Philosophy 83% Anthropology 75% Engineering 75% Sociology 75% Mathematics 67% Art 67% Theater 67% Dance 42% Biology 42% English 42% Journalism 33% Chemistry 25% Linguistics 17% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!) created with QuizFarm.com

David China holiday

My housemate David went back to China today. I sent him to airport in the morning after getting the apple struddel. In his absence for the next 30 days, these photos shall remind me of him.






Talking about these photos, they were taken using the PhotoBooth program on Apple iMac. The new Apple computers are such beautiful piece of work. It comes with a built-in camera on top of the LCD screen. Hmm... screen... it looks like a screen but it's actually the whole computer with DVD burner on the side of the 'screen' and the whole CPU in the 'screen'. The mouse and keyboard are just as elegent. Oh, it also has a remote control for music!!
And the interface on is also so cleanly beautiful.

Oh, back to the PhotoBooth program, it has real time effect built in (to the hardware I think), so all these shape change and pencil effects are rendered in real time!
If not because it costs ~$2000, I'll get one.

Morphing Out of Identity Politics: Black or White and Terminator 2

I'm going to give a demo talk to some gifted children with other CSSE people on Thursday. So I was searching for interesting demo to raise interests on the kids and I found this nice piece of article about image morphing and film making from a American literature researcher's point of view.

Bad Morphing Out of Identity Politics: Black or White and Terminator 2 by Ron Alcalay

Automatic Photo Pop-up by CMU group

Stumbled upon this press release through Engadget.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images

They even have Matlab code available on their Automatic Photo Pop-up page. Sure to try it out sometimes.

The paper:
D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, "Automatic Photo Pop-up", ACM SIGGRAPH 2005.

iCalendar Plugin for Outlook

I was searching for an alexking.org: Blog > iCalendar Plugin for Outlook? so I can "subscribe" to my google calender from Outlook instead of "import" it.
Somehow Mozilla Sunbird does not work on my machine. And I was thinking ahead on getting a new mobile phone which can synchronise with my calander on PC. And more would support Outlook I thought...

Found Remote Calendars which claims to do the job. The installation is a bit of a pain. Need to download the bulky .NET Framework 2.0 and its installation took a long time too (~10mins).

And eventually, I found out that it needs Office 2003 to run, and I have a Office XP which is 2002! Crap! Wasted my time.
There's another way that involves signing up to a third party website to read the iCal and it has a program to sync with Outlook but need to connect to their server... Too many sign up to do, I'm not that desperate yet.

EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA

Found a blog on EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA.

Lots of 06 this morning

Did you missed it this morning to see this on your digital clock?

06:06:06 06/06/06

Bob in my lab said: "Orh! I missed it, but I don't miss it."

AMWA Agung's trophy GOlf Tournament

I was flat out over the weekends helping out in the AMWA golf event. It was tiring, but it was a great success, so we were all pleased.

The golfing ground is in Mandurah, at Meadow Spring Golf and Country Club. It's about 45mins drive from Perth.

Saturday morning, we went there to put the prizes and goody bags together. Terry, Nirmaljit and Peter got a lot of sponsors. Tourism Malaysia provided the bag, inside there are AMWA cap, Gatorade drink, spring water, chocolate, nougat, pen and even curry sauce! So every golfer gets a goody bag.
Besides that every golfer gets a prize ranging from golf bag plus some dinner vouchers worth $500 for first place to toaster, umbrella, heater, wine, t-shirt, etc. for the not so pro.
The lucky draw was impressive too with MAS KL return ticket and many free hotel stays and dinner vouchers.
For me, I didn't play golf, and I didn't get the raffle tickets. But I got a beautiful tourism Malaysia writing notebook and pen, and AMWA cap and T-shirt. Happy.

The packing was quite quick as we had a more than 10 people from AMWA helping up. When that was done, we came back to Perth and was just in time to go to the Agung birthday celebration organised by the Malaysia consulate. It was at the Technopark in Curtin. Good food with some cultural performance. I met an old tassie friend Alvin there and caught up with some chat, some bad news and some good news...

Then Sunday is the actual golf day. It was scheduled to tee-off at 9am. Registration at 8am. We need to get there by 7:30am. So, I met up with Jackson, our treasurer who will drive down at 6:30am. So I had to leave home at 6am to get to the meeting place!!! It was early for me, even though I've started a healthy lifestyle change recently to sleep at 11pm every day.
Anyway, we got there in time and the event started off quite smoothly, except that we forgot to take a group photo before the golfers rushed off to teir game. I was the photographer for the day, so I guess I could have taken a more active role to make sure the group photo would happen. Note taken.
I wasn't assigned any position except for taking photos. But my two sets of batteries still failed me!! One set go flat before we even started, so I put in the other fully charged set, and took the flat set to charge. Within 30 photos, the battery light started flashing again?!! It was fully charged, about a week ago and I didn't expect it to depleted that soon. But anyway, I had to ask Jackson to drive me out to the town to get a set of normal AA battery.
It was good because he need to buy some raffle tickets too, and we had to wait for 20mins for Coles to open. So we had some free time there to grab some brekky. I had a turkish bread from Baker's Delight. It was so so delicious!! :a

When we got back, there were some rice dumplings there made by Shirley, the wife of AMWA vice president. That dumplings fed my desire for it since dragonboat festival a week ago. Then it came the interesting part of the day, we set off to the greens on an electric-powered golf buggy. I was stationed at hole 11 (par 3) where we had a $10 bull's eye competition. I was there to check if anyone's ball landed within 1.5m around the hole. If that happens the person will win the pool of money. So I was there checking, taking photos, cheering and chatting with the golfers as well as playing with the cool buggy.

That was about the exciting part of the day. Later we had lunch there and the prize giving. Lunch wasn't too fantastic, it was only ok. The guitarist/singer/amcee Scott Quak was legendary! He sings pretty well, plays the guitar and have a great sense of humour. When we were waiting for the final scoring, he was cracking jokes non-stop for more than 15mins, one followed by another! Amazing. And the crowd responded with tearful laughters.

The whole event concluded at about 5pm due to the scoring delay. I can't belief they don't have computer program to calculate the score. Anyway, I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. Jackson drove me back to our meeting place. It was dark again when I reach home.
My housemate was considerate enough to spare me from cooking dinner. So we went out to a vietnamese restaurant on Roe street for dinner. I had a raw beef Pho, and it was very satisfying. Dead tired though.

The photos of the day are up at AMWA website.
.

Google has an office in Sydney

Official Google Blog: On the map Down Under

It'd be nice to work there, wouldn't it?

However, what prompted me to blog this was the fact that the photo on that page is a .gif file!! You would expect Googler to know ".png is better than .gif", and "use jpeg for photos" rules of thumb, wouldn't you?

Harvey Norman 15cents digital 4R print

Harvey Norman 15cents digital 4R print is back! Yeah!! I just went there this afternoon and printed 80 photos which I prepared last time but missed out last time.
It's half price!! Until 28/5/2006.

I may go back for more. Haha!!
Check out their website to confirm if you like:
Harvey Norman

Google Trends

Google launch another interesting tool Google Trends

Shih Ching told us that and we tried some searches like Beijing 2008, terrorism, bali, etc. and Perth turned out quite high in the ranking!!

Then even more absurd is when I tried searching for mahathir, Batu Pahat came out as the top?! A small town in Johor, not even the capital, why is that? Does Batu Pahat has a national internet exchange or what?

By the way, it's not the number of search but the ratio of number of search divided by the total search give the ranking. So, I guess it's because that's the thing that we are familiar with and search, that's why it's the "trend" in town...

PCRM--Health--Milk: No Longer Recommended or Required

PCRM--Health--Milk: No Longer Recommended or Required

1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity

I'm reading David Suzuki's books "The sacred balance" and "Naked apes to super species" and came across this document it mentioned in the books.

1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity

AMWA Lunch with Craig Fong

I went to AMWA luncheon at Satay Fiesta at Mt Pleasant. Today's event is general network plus meeting with actor Craig Fong.
Craig is born and raised in WA but spent his past 10 years in Asia (mainly KL) as an actor/tv host. He recently also published 3 books on romance titled "The adventure of Jerry and Jane".

His highest profile movie is Entrapment that's shot in KL twin tower by Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Can't remember there's this Craig Fong guy in that movie? Or don't even know this movie? Haha! I knew this movie but don't remember Craig is in it. He shared a brief moment with Catherine Zeta-Jones as a character (kaylayfair?) Cage.

He's got another better movie which he played lead called Spinning Gasing (a Malaysian production) which won some awards. A nice guy, pretty charming in real person too.

The satay and curry at Satay Fiesta is great too. I like it. And if you had read this and wonder if it's vegetarian, no it's not. It's my first big chuck of meat in 2 weeks. Tasty! But I was very sleepy later on when I got back to office. :P

The owner of the small Satay Fiesta is a light hearted uncle, Teddy Lim. He used to be a lawyer, now retired to Perth and started running this satay place since last year. Cool uh!

Got a photo with Craig, maybe can show off later when he really become famous!! Wish you best of luck, Craig!



More photos are at AMWA Photo Gallery.

Smiley face mouse icon in MATLAB

I was plotting some graph in MATLAB (R14) and was using the Show/Hide Plot Tool button.
When I toggled between show and hide plot, suddenly the mouse pointer become a smiley face!!!



I later found that I need to use the Rotate 3D function first, then toggle show and hide plot for it to happen. Is it an easter egg in Matlab? It's funny.

In order to get this screenshot, I tried to use PrintScreen but the very mouse cursor that I want is not included in the captured image. So I did a quick search and found ACA Capture, a shareware that does the job.
More screen capture softwares can be found on download-by.net.

Yong Peng house 3D model

I'm obsessed with 3D modelling! And the new Sketch Up 3D modelling software released by Google is a great tool to use. It's a lot easier to model than anim8or I used before. Though it lacks the precise dimension and placement functionality in this version (not sure if it is included in the comercial version), general modeling of house and stuffs is pretty easy. And it has some sample texture that is good enough to make the model look real in an hour or first trial.

I started learning it and tried modeling my old house in Malaysia from memory. It turned out to be very satisfying. Simple, clean and the file size is manageable (~1MB) so far.

Here are some picture of it to show off my ~15hours of work.

Same view but different rendering modes


Non-perspetive view of floor plan and standard engineering drawign views


A view from my parents' room into the living room. Doors, windows and furniture haven't been modelled.


I'll have to stop being so obsessed with it otherwise my phd will be at stake. No more suicidal 5 hours straight late night modelling!!! Good night.

Perspective Rectification

I was coding up perspective transformation for my research and it turns out to be quite handy at doing my own photos.

When you take a photo of a painting or some flat pattern on the wall or on the floor, it's never easy to line up perfectly perpendicular to the object, so the result is usually a slightly side-on view. The square is slightly skewed and circle not really round.

Here's what it does.

Original photo:


Rectified and cropped version of the artwork from my grandma.


It's very useful for getting texture to put on 3D models. More on this later.

I shall post the matlab source code to my matlab page when it's up to release standard.

I'm touched by Annalakshmi

It's unreal!

Imagine on the bank of Swan River, second floor fine restaurant besides the Bell Tower.
Imagine beautiful basmati rice, spicy curry, fresh vegetables, fine indian cuisine.
Imagine endless helpings, eat to your heart's content.

How much do you think a meal like that will cost you?

On the front page of Annalakshmi brochure it writes

Eat
to your heart's content and
pay
what your heart feels

Yee Ting told me about this place. Derong had some incident today so he didn't cook. So we went to check out this Annalakshmi restaurant that provides FREE vegetarian food.
The place is situated besides the Bell Tower, beautifully overlooking the river with Kings Park and city light from the other side of river reflecting on the serene water. The food is mouth watering. The basmati rice is so fluffy, and the other one has some spices in it which makes it very tasty by its own.

I had two helpings, and I was so very full and satisfied. Yummmmmm. When we left, I donated $5, which my heart feels happy. :)

It will be a restaurant I'd frequent. And it's vegetarian! Hmm... Yes, I've been trying on vegetarian diet since I'm back to Perth. So, it's been almost 2 weeks I have not eaten big chunk of meat. A BBQ pork bun was the max amount of meat I had since I'm back.
I'm still functioning pretty well, and my digestive system seems to like it. So I shall continue with it.
I'm not on any religious reason or I cannot take meat. Just minimize the intake of meat for the greater good. Natural fresh food is the way to go! Not vegetarian meat, deep fried potatoes, artificially flavoured processed that's neither meat nor vegies...

Check out
the Story behind Annalakshmi, I'm so touched to see such non-profit organisation can function and run so well. The restaurant is run by volunteers and the proceeds go to The Temple of Service, a charity organisation that provide free food and medical services in india.
I'm particularly moved by their grand vision to serve. Anyone walks in to be their guest, and the anyone includes really everyone, without any condition (even the hardest of all, can you pay?). It's such a grand vision, embracing all.

You cannot put a price on the food prepared by a mother or a wife, and this is why at Annalakshmi you - eat as you like and pay as you feel.

Do not press, can you?

DO NOT CLICK HERE

I'm back to Perth or South Park?

This is the Welcome back to Perth present I get (stuck on my wall) from Shih Ching and Danno. It does look like me if I am to appear in South Park. Haha! My 'lightning' yellow jumper, yellow nike cap (it'd be perfect if the tick is there), and my green pants. And yes, I'm too lazy to shave every day.

I like it, I like it a lot, it's a good picture.

You can draw one for yourself at South Park Studio.

Eight below

Went to watched Eight below last night. Great show. The super air-con made the cinema feel like the freezing antarctic too.

Good to be home 2

Continued from previous story a while ago.

So after the wedding, I stayed in JB for another night and followed a KL friend's car to get to Seremban (about 1 hour south of KL). Got to Seremban at 5pm+ and I set off with my girlfriend and some of her friends to KL to attend a forum discussing about a current issue of Chinese primary school internal corruption cases. Got back and had some further chat with the friends and finally went to bed at 2am+, and the next morning, we had planned to go to the east coast for vacations. Oh....

Anyway, not enough sleep, but my girlfriend and myself are still very excited about it. So we set off a little later than planned, and had 3 days of very sweet and relaxing stay in Kijal and Teluk Cempedak on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia.
Beautiful resort, nice warm water, big waves of South China Sea, bright hot sun for perfect photographs...

The food there are great too. We had breakfast included in the accommodation and it's buffet style. I got to sample a great range of Malaysian food that I had long for ages all at the same time - roti canai, nasi lemak, rendang, ketupat... Yumm.

And we went out for some local specialities hunt as well. One of the special food at Kijal/Cukai area is stuffed crab - stir fry crab meat with some vegies stuffed back into crab shell and covered with egg, then the whole thing deep fried to seal up. Pretty cool.
And the coffee and charcoal toasted bread at Hai Peng in Cukai is not to be missed. Thick pieces of white bread toasted and top with butter and kaya... absolutely delicious!
Satay Zul near Teluk Cempedak has great Satay and Nasi lemak. It's at the intersection (T-junction) of two main streets.
There's this "durian bom" and BBQ bun in Kuantan.

Tired again. That's about my busy schedule. After the trip, it was a bit more relax and I have time to go back to YongPeng and rest for a while...
Now I'm in Seremban again, at my brother's place, enjoying his wireless broadband in aircon room. Hahaha!!! Sweet!

Good to be home

It's been a very tight schedule I had since flying off from Perth. And finally today I have access to internet ( dial up, Xb ) and can post some updates.

I touched down KLIA on 24/3 10pm. Got out and my family were there to fetch me. So touched, Papa mama came up from Yongpeng, and my sister came down from KL, my brother drove from Senawang to take all of us. And they were rewarded by the famous Corica apple strudle from Perth. :a

I had a good sleep that night. The next morning, we have a yumcha brunch with Tanliang and her mom in Seremban. Koko missed out because he had to work that day. Then we went back to YongPeng that afternoon.
Reached home at 5pm, I started packing my bag and eat "big bun" at the same time as Yekleng was coming to pick me up at 6pm to go JB. He arrived on time and we set off to his base to prepare for his wedding ceremony on Sunday...

I met quite a few old highschool friends and had long chat with Yekleng as I was in his car most of the time... Slept at 3am that night and had to wake up at 6am to go fight our way through to get the bride.

Sunday was a long day, but real fun, though I was extremely tired. The sister gang of the bride set up some tough challenges, eg to eat real salty egg, drink crazy sauces and drink mixture, singing and dancing to prove the worthiness of our friend to get the girl. It was good fun. Then the tea ceremony... rest, photos, and at 5pm we got to the wedding dinner place.
I started drafting my MC speeches and I was glad that the night went well. :)

Tired.... To be continued

Flying banana

I'm off to Malaysia on Friday 24/3.

Many things to do back in my hometown. First thing would be YekLeng's wedding. I'm his MC and I haven't been to many wedding reception dinner myself, so I'm doing some last minute research on what to say... If you understand Chinese, here's some resources.

Then I'll go to some nice beaches on the east coast of Malaysia with my girlfriend and family. I shall visit my high school as it has been my regular activity over every holiday back home. Have some chat with my teachers and see how the school is doing, maybe have a little chat session with the students, let them inspire me.

And I bring all my matlab codes and research literature with me and hope over the 5 weeks, I'll get 2 weeks to keep working on my research, otherwise by the time I'm back, I'll have to spend a while to get back into where I left off. I'd like to do some writing there. As the thesis is going to be due in not very distant future.

And of course spending lots of quality time with the people I love would make the trip worth.

I'd also get my a good supply of the thing I need to last me till the next time I get back, which I predict would be when I finish my PhD.

And I won't forget to bring back the armouring Tshirt to protect myself.

Lastly, why flying banana? Because I bring out my yellow jumper today as the weather turns really cold. So I'm back to my banana look. Haha!! Well, folks in Perth, you'll see this bright yellow happy face back in May.

Depending on how the internet is, I'd try to keep you posted with my holiday back in Malaysia. Take care.

Crazy simpson tune by guitarist

Crazy simpson tune by guitarist

Thanks Jason.

Happy anniversary Lalilaza daily

I'm a one year old blogger on 10th March 2006. Missed the actual date by one week. Well, it's probably a good thing showing that I actually has something else to do than remembering the anniversary of my blog. :P

The first post - Lalilaza daily: Where it all begins - saw the world on 10/03/2005. In this past year, 10/3/2005 till 10/3/2006, there were 287 posts.

Some statistics:

0.786 post/day
5.5 posts/week
23.5 posts/month
a post every 30.5 hours

Hope you enjoy reading this blog for the past year. And come back for more about my life. :)

My photos features on UWA CSSE website

Jayjay, our new school manager is doing a fantastic job at lifting up the school image, getting together all the good things happening around the school and letting everyone knows.
Here's a photo gallery link: The Wonderful World of Computer Science, which I contributed several of them.
And here's the awesome animation page showcasting many cool animations made under the school. I have a couple there too. :)

My work is archieved as part of knowledge in the world

I'm writing up my annual report and have to trace back to what I've done in the past year. Then I want to put a link to the DICTA paper in the report and I remember I've been to the IEEE Xplore page that has my paper. But I can't find it, so I think I'll put a link here for future reference and for your reading pleasure.

T.Y. Wong, P. Kovesi, A. Datta. Towards Quantitative Measures of Image Morphng Quality. In B. Lovell, etc., editor, Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications, 2005. DICTA ' 05. Proceedings, pages 126-133, Cairns, Australia. IEEE Computer Society. 2005.

CutePDF - Create PDF for free

Send your printjob to CutePDF and it come out to be a pdf file.

CutePDF - Create PDF for free, Save PDF Forms, Edit PDF easily; FormMax - E-Form Designer.

Oh crikey, Look at this beauty!

 

My housemate's room had a visitor that wasn't very welcomed. We went through quite a a big fuss to took it out into a glass and made sure its friends and family weren't in there.

Then I look at it up close and found it amusing. Then I took the camera out and took some photos of it under my bicycle spotlight. It's beautiful.

When the photoshot was over, it was released back into the nature (across the road as my housemate didn't want another visit anytime soon). 

Parking sign 8pm-1pm?!

This sign is at Cottesloe, opposite Cottesloe Center, in front of the Jade Court Chinese restaurant. I was worried that I'd get fine because I can't work out the time period...

Siok invited me to a dinner at the Jade Court. And it turned out that it's Nanthida's 16th birthday the day before. Casey, Thira and her friend (Carrie?) were there too. It was a nice dinner, and we catch up on some recent thoughts and events.

Carrie told me she knows someone doing phd in computer science called Adam Dunn. Haha! Small world hey! Her brother is your mate, Adam!

Ping Pong fun!

I started playing table tennis since my primary school time and loved it since then. However, I never had formal training of any sort in it. Until I come to UWA and joined the UWA TTClub, I met some very good players who introduced me some concepts to improve on my table tennis skills.

And yesterday, the nice Vietnamese uncle John gave me a stack of notes to read. It's eye-opening and has so much insights into how good TT players do their tricks. So I did a search on the net on the author of the article and found this:
Greg's Table tennis page.

Heaps of stuffs there from techniques to gadget buying guides. And he's based in Perth. :)

Quality chats: "listen to people as possibilities"

I'm so grateful to have two very authentic housemates. Derong moved in last July and YeeTing moved in just last month. The interesting thing is that they both have done the Landmark forum because I introduced them to it. And now they discover their blindspots in everyday life, sometimes help me discover mine, and we have such high quality sharings on a daily basis.

Since Derong moved in, we have been very good friend and in the past couple of weeks we worked together to revive the UWA Table tennis club. It was all good, we discussed and bounced ideas and set up stall on O-Day, got sunburnt together... But recently the discussion become kind of dry and it felt more like a burden than fun when it comes to TTClub matters.

We had one session working out the budget and bookings tonight and we eventually figured out the optimal solution. But there wasn't much fun in the process. Then Derong started exploring with me why the organising of it become un-fun.

I felt slightly uneasy for a split second but then I welcomed the exploration because I knew there's something unsaid about the relationship when it comes to TTClub matters and it is not very healthy. So we started sharing authentically about how we felt and what was going on.

I realised that I've been acting like more of a guiding master to the whole thing instead of actually having discussion with him, and I felt he is not well-organised sometimes and kept dwelling on that point to make him more organised.

He also realised that he has been focusing on some negative part of his other friends and loses touch with the real essence of the persons. And that reflects exactly like what I'm doing to him.

I then recalled how I admired him when we just knew each other for 2 month or so, while he was telling me about his amazing experiences in his highschool time. And how different I look at him (as not-too-well-organised) when we're in the recent TTClub matters. It was a shame!

One thing I learnt from Landmark coaching sparked into my mind:

You shall only listen to them as possibilities and nothing but possibilites.

I remember my coach did that to me, she would not take any complaint or winge I gave her, she only listens to me as "I can, just need to work it out". And it is a very powerful listening!!

And that is the key to this issue we had there. I stop listening to Derong as possibilities. What he is possible in my subconscious mind has shrunk a lot and I treated him as that, no wonder he felt like crap!

Now that I know what I did (which I'm not proud of at all), I can tune back to the original admiring view I have of him. And that just make discussion so much more enjoyable. He is able to contribute a lot more, and when he's loose on any part of organisation, I can remind him, but not condemn him as I subconsciously had been doing.

And I can say that this kind of subconscious negative view of people are very common especially with people very close in life. We would have a condemning tone when this person does something AGAIN! And we would not put this kind of tone to any other people. It could be just one small mistake, we would simply (not even thinking) remind the person with a condemning tone. A lot of time the tone is subconscious, all we want to do is to remind, but because of this negative image we have on this particular area for this person, we would express it quite differently.

Catching it and dissolving it, life is so much better.
I recommend the Landmark Forum to you. Yes, again! Now even more unreserved.

Bizzarre MSN search results

I accidentally did a search on the word "hibiscusrealm" on MSN.com the other day, and to my astonishment, my homepage on www.hibiscusrealm.net turned out to be the top result! And this blog ranks no.2 because it has a link to it.


MSN must have some odd (and not very smart) algorithm to work out the rank of their search result. Not like Google, it returns the mainpage of www.hibiscusrealm.net which is much more reasonable.

Perspective fun

Man! This is so cool!!
The first look at those picture, you may feel there are some lines or circle superimposed on the photograph, but it turns out that those lines are actually in the scene. Looking at a different angle, it won't be the beautiful shapes anymore. I wonder how he calculate out all the precise position of the paints, does he has a 3D model of the whole scene and raytrace it back from the optical center?

Check out his website:
Felice Varini

One of the coolest, with mirror:
mirror lines
Click on "Hor point de vue" and select "Ouvrir" to see the scene from other angles.

Oh, there's actually a page in English explaining about his passion about architectural space.

Thanks shih ching for showing the picture to us, and Danno for getting the original website.

Don't ask me about my thesis

Thanks Angie for organising the T-shirt. It's great!!

Here you can see the front. The back has all the names of senior postgrads in CSSE making up the phrase.

I like it, I like a lot, it's a good T-shirt!

Yekleng's wedding photo

YekLeng's wedding photos are up at yekleng's space.
Very nice. Go and have a look.





I'll be back to Malaysia on 24/3 to attend their wedding on 26th. And I'm honoured to be one of his "brother" team to help him in any way to win the bride on the day. I'm very excited.

Chinese version here

Eventful week

The last week was packed with events.
Badawi's visit to Perth, O-Day, AMWA BBQ and neighbour's Birthday party.

I've blogged about Badawi's meeting with student, so I'll go on to his Honourary Doctorate conferement ceremony. I went to Curtin Uni on Wednesday morning for the ceremony. It took several correspondances to get my name on the list to be admitted into the ceremony. And on the day, there are many security personnels there for the event. But surprisingly, there's no registration process to get in, so anyone could just pop in and will be able to get in...
Anyway, the ceremony was ok, the aboriginal welcome was interesting with the didgeridoo. I was surprised to find that the chancellor of Curtin Uni, Eric Tan was born in Malaysia, it made the event even more special. :)
See here for photos I took and put on AMWA website.

Friday was Orientation Day on UWA. I helped set up a stall for the long-non-publicised Table tennis club. We moved a table tennis table to James Oval where the event was and it turned out to be a very very good publicity tool. Got quite some people signed up on the day and many more showed interest. And Derong's idea of making a sticker instead of just hand out flyers turned out to be very effective as well. :)
We are in the process of getting more tables and more playing time for the club for our expansion.
It was a fun day. Haven't been involved with clubs for a long time. But we all got sun burnt. :`( It hurts.

Saturday, AMWA had a family BBQ in Kings park near by. About 60 people showed up, and many people brought a plate of great food to share. It was good. And I met quite a few people of my age as well. So it was good. Photos of the day, see here.

Then Saturday night my neighbour had a birthday party. So we went over. I was amazed by the stylishness of his garden and living room. He is a talented architect, I can tell.

My resarch work lags quite a bit this week. Will tune into work hard mode as my prime minister told me to do so.

Photo with Badawi

Thanks Thomas for giving me this group photo taken with my prime minister Badawi and other UWA students. It is an honour.
See here for previous post about this event.

News coverage:
The Star | Bernama

Face recognition stuffs

I went to a psychology seminar on the topic "Unfamiliar faces aren't faces" which talks about the diffference between familiar and unfamiliar face recognition. An interesting paper here.

I then went off to try to find out about the face grid its uses in the paper and how it come about and maybe that'll be useful to my morphing research. Then I found out about this great document on face recognition.
Report on Facial Expression Understanding by Ekman, Huang, Sejnowski and Hager.

And Wiskott has a bibliography on face recognition:
Face Recognition (Computational Models)

DICTA group photo

I am filling up the publication audit for the school and checking up the DICTA website to confirm some information. And they have put the group photos up. I might have been there for quite a while.

DICTA2005 Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications

Honorary Doctorate for Badawi

The Honourable Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Prime Minister of Malaysia, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology by the Curtin University of Technology. Here's some photos on AMWA's website.

(This is a trace-back blog updated on 09/08/2006.)

Badawi is in Perth

The Consulate General of Malaysia organised a meeting between the Hon Dato Seri’ Abdullah Bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, Prime Minister of Malaysia and all Malaysian students currently pursuing tertiary education in Perth, Western Australia.
I was one of the 250 students who were there today. Badawi is in Perth to receive the honourary doctorate to be conferred to him tomorrow by Curtin University of Technology, see new release on Curtin website.

I got there at around 3:30pm, the ballroom was easy to find in the Hyatt hotel because there is a big concentration of Malaysians at the side of the main entrance. So I made my way there and put in my registration under UWA.

The seatings were dining style in a big ballroom. I happened to find an empty seat on the second row of table, with some student leaders (ISC and AMS) from Curtin. I was quite impressed with their manner the moment I joined the table and thought they must have good involvement in student organisation and it was proven to be right later when they turned out to be the office bearers. :)

The MC gave some general briefing about the flow of program, and without noticeable delay (I wasn't looking at my watch) Badawi arrived.

We sang Negaraku and a new song called "Jalur Gemilang", there was a bacaan doa (prayer), and then the PM gave his speech and took some questions/comments.

Some of the points I took down from his speech:

Students today are decision-makers tomorrow. It's the human capital that countries and companies are trying to utilise well. He stressed on the point that "first class facilities" has to be matched with "first class mentality" of the people managing it. Ya, very true, that's a serious shortcomings that Malaysia suffers and has to overcome ASAP.

He then discussed about what makes a "Man of Quality" that can serve a country/company well? Smart is not enough, it's more important to have good value, be honoest and sincere, ie have a good character. He said it in Malay which I am glad that I still understand - "Pandai tapi tipu --> lagi susah!"

He also mentioned about some plan of Malaysian government such as the emphasis on bio-technology (the wonders that oil palm produces through R&D), pharmaceutical area, and he made a point on corruption fighting struggle as well.

He ended his speech by re-emphasis a point he made at the beginning:

It's not that you're not capable, it's that you're not putting in enough work, effort, focus!
There is no easy way to success, Work hard!

There were some refreshment at the end of it, and group photo then bersurai.

It finished at 7pm. I left the hotel and headed to my car. To my astonishement, there was a ticket on my windscreen, I thought: "Not again?!". Double checking the expensive piece of paper and the road sign, revealed that it is a pay parking bay till 4:15pm, which I read in a hurry when I arrived, but I miss the top of it in red "C 4:15-6pm". After 4:15pm, it's not free parking as I thought but NO PARKING!
That makes the meeting with Badawi quite a lot more expensive.
Oh well, it was my fault to rush and not checking it throughly. Lesson learnt.

Group photo with Badawi (UWA students) click here.

House cleaning anyone?

Just yesterday and today, I got more than 30 "comments" on this blog from House cleaning company. All spams!! Now I have a filter in my gmail account that block it.

Creative blog. I just kept looking at it over...

Fine blog. I found your site suitable for another
visit! And when I'm able to surf the web, I look for
blogs as great as your work.
No matter when you are, just stop by and check for my ...

Excellent blog.  I go though the web in search of
blogs like this one. Its so good, that I plan on
returning to its site!
Hey why don't you peep my ...

Wondrous blog. Your site was very pleasing and I
will go back again! I like surfing the net for blogs
as good as yours.
I know that you love my work so, look up my ...

BAD!

Check up your car regularly

One day after I got my harddisk failure resolved, my car gave me another surprise!
I went to another AMWA monthly committee meeting on Saturday. I drove to the city parked my car in the Pier Street carpark. After the long meeting which centered around new membership, this coming week BBQ in Kings park and our Prime Minister Badawi's visit to Perth, I went back to the car park and get my car at 12:30pm.

Strange thing happened - my immobilisor didn't respond. It keeps flashing and immobilise my car!! So my car cannot move. The following 1.5 hours, I was there making callssss to find people to help solve the problem. The fact that it was a Saturday really made the situation harder! And it was not easy to get a car electrician that will come out to fix it. And beore the incidence, I didn't know it's car electrician's area of expertise. Tried locksmith and it was no good and the people they refered me to was too busy for the job.

So eventually, I got a friend (Thanks a lot Lingcai!) to make some calls to locate the right person. He agreed to come by at 3pm. I was glad and I had some time to fill up my stomach. So I did that and strolled around the city and got a stereogram book from the secondhand bookshop. I was quite happy by then. :)

The rest was not adrama anymore, the car electrician came by with his son and put a new immobilisor in, messy wiring and awkward working condition in the not-very-well-lit carpark. The electrician's son looks very asian, and it turns out that his wife is Chinese, from JB, Malaysia. Ha!
It cost me $120 for the whole lot. And being in the carpark for another 3 hours after I paid at 12:30pm, I thought I might need to pay some stupid amount of parking again before I can get out. But I told the cashier guy about the incidence and he was very nice to let me go. So, I was happy again. :)

I got out of the carpark, it's 3:45pm! I went to do some quick groceries shopping and got my hair cut too. What a day!

Scientific American: One Face, One Neuron

Scientific American: One Face, One Neuron

This is cool!!

Back up your computer NOW!

My small 20GB harddisk died on Thursday morning. :`(

I heard some sound (later I found out it's called the "click of death") coming from my computer box on Wednesday afternoon. I was a hot day and I hibernated my computer straight after. That night it was still fine. But I did a shutdown that night and Thursday morning, it refused to boot.

I went to get a new harddisk with 10x capacity. WD2000JB - Western Digital 200GB HDD with 8MB cache. Got it from Netplus (again). If I went there 2 hours earlier, I might be able to get a 250GB one with only $6 more. It was "on low stock" when I first checked, but became out of stock just before I left my house. Oh well, 200GB should be plenty anyway.

So I spent quite some time getting the system back on. Now it's back to life, but I lost some data.

Not sure if I'll go for the Raid system to make two harddisk work together with redundancy to ensure minimal data lost in such case... Not sure how much effort will be required to set it up. If it's too much, I'll probably back it up regularly manually...

May your hard disk be strong.

Chat in Gmail. Cool!

Google has just included Google Talk into Gmail. I tried it, it's a good idea. One more IM to play with. But GTalk emoticon is still very primitive compare to what MSN has to offer. But here (on the left) are some cute stuffs I found. More on GTalk emoticons.

I heard news that Yahoo has exposed its users details and led to some internet journalists being jailed in China. Got the news from screenshots.

When the information leave your computer into the www, it is out there to be exposed. So although the internet site claims that they'll keep your thing private to you, if you really don't want people to see it, keep it safe on your own PC.
And all these free internet email providers have no obligation to keep your data anyway. If they want, they can just shut down Gmail and blogger or anything like that and all our precious emails and contacts, all our efforts of blogging will be gone!
So I think I shall back up all these things on a regular basis to avoid a tragic story!

Matlab tips and tricks

Matlab tips and tricks by Gabriel Peyre

Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes

Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes

A good collection of optical illusions. Most of them I've seen before, but there are several new ones that impressed me.

| Three Streams | Blind Spot Experiment | Color Vision Test |


I did not dare to watch the "Pikachu Hypnotic eyes" yet as it' slast at night and I don't want to faint or feel sick after watching it.

To hack or not to hack?

I'm wondering if I'm the only person in the whole world who uses anim8or to generate test images with known camera parameters and then uses MATLAB to work with the images, with those known camera parameters...

Hmm... I guess I'm not the only one as I know SQ is using it as well. (we sit back to back in the lab.)

There's some weird thing I don't understand why. The images from Anim8or have a half pixel distance difference from what is calculated from Matlab?! For example, a textured cube with 8 vertices in space, I know the vertices, I know the position and pyr of the camera, so in anim8or, I position everything as desired and render the image. No problem! When I get this image into Matlab, I calculate the image points using the vertices and camera matrix and overlay them on the image, strangely enough, the two set sof points don't exactly match. But, it matches exactly when I add 0.5 to all the image points I calculated in Matlab!

So, to have a good morph (as that's what my research is on in case you don't know), I have to have the feature points exactly on. But it'll screw up the fundamental matrix and the projective geomatry because the image point is HACKED!

Well... What should I do to get over this? The great spirit of the universe, please enlighten me!

Professor Terzopoulos won Oscar

Found it on Ramesh Jain’s Blog that Terzopoulos just won the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards! See it here and here.

I knew Terzopoulos from his work in "snakes" (energy minimisation spline) with Kass. And I came across Jain's work too through similarity measure...

It's funny to know that Jain has a blog as well. I'll be checking it out to see what this distinguised researcher usually does.

Rotation Matrix again

I'm back to doing som experiment and want to generate some random 3D points and then some random cameras that point to those points. So, I have to set the random focal length (within some range), the position of the center of image (principle point) and the rotation matrix for the camera to face the point cloud.

I forgot how to do them already, so some online readings directed me to these good sources:

Concepture overview, fully illustrated presentation:eScience Lectures Notes : Transformation in 3D

Plain text explanation with code: Matrix and Quaternion FAQ