Haha! This reminds me of Nick's last year Yanchep Talk - You found out someone did the research you're doing and "cry like a baby". Also couple of months ago I got comments from my supervisors that my research results seem like good screen saver, I must be close to finishing based on Nick's talk again. Haha!
My fellow Malaysia countrymen should read this:
While Malaysia fiddles, its opportunities are running dry
by Michael Backman. Thanks Albert for pointing it to me.
Bank bale outs, a formula one racing track, an entire new capital city — Petronas has paid for them all. It's been an orgy of nonsense that Malaysia can ill afford.
Why? Because Malaysia's oil will run out in about 19 years. As it is, Malaysia will become a net oil importer in 2011 — that's just five years away.
So it's in this context that the latest debate about race and wealth is so sad.
It is time to move on, time to prepare the economy for life after oil. But, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, the Malaysian Government is more interested in stunts like sending a Malaysian into space when Malaysia's inadequate schools could have done with the cash, and arguing about wealth distribution using transparently ridiculous statistics.
That's not Malaysia "boleh", that's Malaysia "bodoh" (stupid).
Planet onetwenty is back with new cleaner look. I like it. And finally my blog is rendered properly without all the tags being exposed.
There is a feed that Nick put together as well. Mostly graphics or techy stuffs. I thought PhD comics should make it to the feeds.
I was looking at an email about What The Bleep Do We Know and google ads on the side lured me to these sites:
Know that by which everything else is known. Maharishi University, USA
Maharishi University of Management
Watching What The Bleep Do We Know? Change the world with us on Zaadz!
http://www.zaadz.com/
Interesting sites, but I'm a bit skeptical though. Transcendental Meditation on MUM is interesting. There are good pointers to good enlightening books on zaadz, and movies like Matrix, V for vendetta are among the most liked movies in that community. Cool.
The guys from EepyBird are back, with 251 bottles of Diet Coke and over 1,500 Mentos mints. In Experiment #137, they did a mint-powered version of the Bellagio fountains. This time, it's one giant Coke & Mentos chain reaction that has to be seen to be believed.
See here for the science behind.
I got this funny sms from my girlfriend.
Human = eat + sleep + work + enjoy
Pig = eat + sleep
Human = Pig + work + enjoy
Human - enjoy = Pig + work
Conclusion:
Human who cannot enjoy = Pig that can work
I've been slowly moving my online activities into Google:
Personalised Homepage with tools like To do list and games like Bejeweled and Color Junction. Calendar, Picasa photo album, recently I started using Alert, RSS Reader and Notebook.
All of these, let alone Gmail which was the very first thing I fall in love with Google, makes me wonder about how safe it is to put all eggs in one basket, though the basket seems iron solid and reliable now.
Stumbled upon this page and found that BankWest has the best rate of at-call saving account, a whooping 6.60% introductory rate for a year.
Some of my money will flow there. Haha!
INFOCHOICE | Banking | At-Call Savings
Google Alert is cool. I started using it a while ago and it picks up some new things about Malaysia+Perth
on the internet which I won't search regularly myself. Here's one of them.
Flight 720 - Malaysia - Brindha Sithambarnathan :: ABC Perth
I went to see the Honda Asimo humanoid robot at the Perth Royal Show on the last day. Very impressive robot. But I find real human are still way more interesting than robots.
Cool Origami gallery:
TT's origami gallery
And how to fold them here:
TT's Origami Page
Some CG of origami folding too here:
Smooth Origami Animation by Crease Line Adjustment
There's a picture of the Kongmoon Rice Stick (江门排粉 or beehoon as Malaysians call it) features on Greenpeace website saying that the rice they use to make this rice stick is dangerous as it's experimentally Genetically Engineered (GE)!
I had made beehoon soup at home last week. It was nice. Let me know if you see a third arm growing out from my back, ok?
Month in pictures: September 2006 | Greenpeace Australia Pacific
See if you can see what's wrong with it.
(Hint: They might have ran out of letter 'V' at the time of construction.)
Professional Development Lectures for Research Students now available online at Graduate Research School - Current Students
Perth - Singapore - Shanghai - Suzhou - Shanghai - Shenzhen - Shanghai - Singapore - Kuala Lumpur - Singapore - Perth
I'm now back in Perth again.
The length and urgency of my to do list don't look very good at the moment. So, there may be some lag till I catch up on the last couple of days log in China and the family reunion in KL and gathering in Singapore.
We took a domestic flight to Shenzhen (深圳) this morning at 8am. We reached Shenzhen at 10am+ and then took a taxi to the hotel to check in. The taxi driver (the locals called them shifu(师傅)) seems like a reasonable and nice guy. I had a good chat with him on the way and he drive with good manner.
Opps. Battery low! Gotta switch off.
Had a morning of free time before we head down to do more scary business negotiations. We went to ChengHuang temple (城隍庙) area for some shopping and had the famous xiaolong bun (南翔蟹黄小笼包) and soup bun (灌汤包). 
At night we went back to the hotel restaurant for dinner again and I checked out the toilet which I get entertained by Jolin Tsai (蔡依林)'s karaoke MTV.
Heaps of heated negotiation today. Scary business stuffs. It was at the government research center and the lunch was like those in military service. And we were 'privileged' enough to sit in the military personnel room (军人室), the food are ok, but the presentation was very different compared to other meals we had in those posh VIP. But the watermelon was impressive. Very sweet and fine, and even the usual white part close to the skin are very nice. :D~
And also we were offered bottled water that the astronauts drink. :P
We had dinner back in the hotel in a posh VIP room. Hugh table and golden cutlery.
But the highlight of the day was a tour to the Oriental Pearl Tower. We went through the whole thing - the middle deck, the top 'space cabin' (350m) and the Shanghai development museum. Very nice view of the whole shanghai night light. It's so huge that it's all buildings as far as the horizon can be seen. And the musuem has a very detail re-presentation of Shanghai of different time. Very very nice, but we were running late to the musuem part and were rushing through the whole thing....
Also, I got a good picture of the nine dragon pole on the 5-level highway. I was told that there were a myth: The location of the pole was the dragon neck in fengshui as told by a chief monk of a temple after repeated failure to drill the piling into that location. Then the monk finally revealed a specific time and method to drill and it was successful after that but the monk died straight after due to the revelation of heavenly secret. Nine dragons statue was put on as part of the solution by the monk.
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.
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.
Going to Shanghai for a week helping a company do translation. Yeah!!
Cape Telecoms Limited
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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?
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: 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.
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
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
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 voice is unbelieveable!
Amazing 11 year old girl singing
Or download it straight from here.
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.
"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."
"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."
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
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. :```)
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
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!
I missed this one today. Well, take the pm off, there's another chance soon.
07:06:07 06/07/06
This time it's better for those who don't wake up early.
11:10:09 08/07/06
01:02:03 04/05/06
06:06:06 06/06/06
20:06 20/06/2006
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!
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.
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....
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?"
You scored as Psychology. You should be a Psychology major!
What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!) created with QuizFarm.com |
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.
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
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.
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.
Did you missed it this morning to see this on your digital clock?
06:06:06 06/06/06
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. 
.
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 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 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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
