Photos of Naples and Pompeii

Christmas break was great. I took 4 days off and just relax at home.
And I got some time to revisit my Italy trip photos that I haven't sorted out to post on Picasaweb.

So here they are, Naples and Pompeii.
I only stayed one night in Naples, in order to go to Pompeii. I reached Naples just before dark. Found my way to my hostel. It was a hostel with character. The receptionist are friendly and helpful. She told me where to get the best pizza in town. :) And it was indeed the best I ever had.
But Naples is not good at night. I went to the pizza place called Sorbillo. I ordered a pizza and took it away wanting to find a nearby plaza to sit down and watch people. After 3 minutes walk I still haven't found anything like a plaza, but some chair at the side of the road, so I thought probably I just sit here will do, before the pizza gets cold. So I did. Before I took a first bite of my Margaretta, a guy who's walking his dog walked past and started talking to me in Italian. And eventually he had some English words that I understand, they are - "dangerous here, go home"!!

Then I was a bit scared. I took the pizza and walked back from where I came from. I got back to the pizza place and asked for a place to sit down. (they only have 4 tables). They graciously let me in. I half the Margaretta. It was great! And I ordered another pizza and ate half of it.
The journey back to the hostel is tiptoeing. I found all the bigger, more well-lit road to take and eventually made it back there safely. The Sydney couple I met in my room had started to worry about me. :P

The next morning, breakfast was included. And I had lots of nutella on my bread.

2007_09_17 Naples

I checked out after the filling breakfast and make my way to Pompeii. The ruin is huge. One full day to explore it is definitely worth it. For some unknown reason, the gate wasn't open until about 1 hour late. It was not a bad thing for me as I had all my luggages with me. I found the little shop up the road from the entrance which Lonely Planet mentioned to put my luggage. The young chap there is nice and helpful. I was worried that my laptop will not be safe but I have no choice but to trust the book and him. And it turns out that he is good so I let him keep the change from the storage fee.

Before the door open, there was a guy with a guide tag who was telling people where to go and what was happening. And he said he would get me the 10 euro ticket faster than everyone (so I don't have to queue) and be the guide for 1hour+ for an extra 10 euro. He only took down my name and I don't have to pay until he got me ticket. I thought it was alright so I joint.

The statistics is that 3 million people visited Pompeii every year, so it's about 10 thousand people a day!! So when the gate opened after everyone has been waiting for more than an hour, people rushed in like prison break. It was such a huge chaos there that I could not find that guy. So I paid another guy 20 euros to get in and to join his tour. He gave me a ticket and asked me to wait close to the entrance after I got in. So I got in and waited for him. And I couldn't remember that guys name or how he looked like (Italian all look alike, haha), and eventually the first guy showed up again. So I followed him with an unclear conscience.

The guide showed us to several of the main attractions inside and gave a good explanation of things. When the tour finished, I thought it was unfair to the guide that I followed him but didn't pay him (as I paid another guide and couldn't find him). So I told him and paid him the 10 euro he deserved and felt I did the right thing.
After the tour, I walked to the visitor center to get a map and a guide book (free) to walk around more myself. The map and the guidebook are very detailed but it's not given to you when you get the ticket. So make sure you ask for it if you're going there.

It is a big place. I did not cover everything but was happy with it. And now hit the photos.

2007_09_18 Pompeii

How I met your Mother theme song

I really like the CBS sitcom "How I met your Mother", so today I decided to play the theme song with my guitar. I did some search on internet for its chord and found that its name is "Hey Beautiful" by The Solids but had no luck with the chords. So I cracked it myself and here is the guitar chord. Sounds pretty like it.


C C#
A C#m F#m A D F#m Bm E
A

Tab:

C C#
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|

A C#m F#m A
|-5---5---4---4---|-2---2---0---0---|
|-5---5---5---5---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-6---6---6---6---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-7---7---6---6---|-4---4---2---2---|
|-7---7---4---4---|-4---4---0---0---|
|-5---5---4---4---|-2---2---0---0---|

D F#m Bm E
|-2---2---2---2---|-2---2---0---0---|
|-3---3---2---2---|-3---3---0---0---|
|-2---2---2---2---|-4---4---1---1---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-4---4---2---2---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-2---2---2---2---|

A
|-0---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-0---------------|
|-0---------------|

Happy^Googleplex

Yahoo!! Opps, no, I mean Happy^Googleplex (read: happy to the googolplex)!

Yes, we won. We're one of the top 3 finalists in the Google 3D campus competition (Aus/NZ). Hard work was rewarded. :D

Here's what they said in the email:

After much debate and deliberation by our SketchUp competition judges... you have been named one of the "Build Your Campus in 3D" Google SketchUp finalists! Congratulations!!! The judges were truly impressed and we all want to thank you for your hard work and dedication to delivering such a high-quality product.

As one of three finalist teams, you are invited to the all expenses paid on-site trip in February. You will visit our Google Sydney office, listen to a technical talk, and enjoy free time and planned activities, so plan to have a great time! The date is yet to be finalized, but we are shooting for either Friday, February 8th or Friday, February 22nd (depending on when our SketchUp resources are available for a technical talk). I will reach out again to confirm participation and follow-up with travel details.

Now I have a slight problem, I have planned to go back to Malaysia for Chinese New Year which is on 7 Feb, and stayed till end of Feb to help Peter with his Matlab Course in Spore and KL (although that was canceled). I hope eventually the date will be on 22 Feb then I will come back earlier from Malaysia.

Anyhow, it's bloody exciting. Google, here I come.

Update 19/12:

• 3 Finalists: UWA, University of Melbourne (2 teams)
• The winner will be announced during the on-site event in February
• Finalists will visit our Sydney office and enjoy a technical talk, office tour, food in Google's world-famous cafeterias, and planned activities in Sydney
  
• 33 teams officially registered for the competition,

Toyata Robot plays violin

From Reuters

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on China Central TV

陆克文总理中央台访问 (November 24, 2007)



Man! I'm impressed! 陆克文's Mandarin is so good! The Chinese journalist Xiaorui is rather snobbish looking though...

African fractals on TED

I stumbled upon this great talk on TED.
Ron Eglash on African fractals.



Try this Cornrow fractal with 250 iterations, 2% starting dilation, 75% translation, 20 degree rotation and 102% dilation.

Computer Network is cool

I used to think computer network is a boring subject back in my EE years.
But recently the perception has changed for me, the networking itself is boring, but what it makes available is really cool.
And this The Hack of the year which I stumbled upon prompted this post.
And I watched Die hard 4 recently, it's hackers too. So much actions. I throughly enjoyed it. And the hacker Mat Farrell kind of look like Nick. (follow the links to compare for yourself. Ahem!)

Is democracy really the best type of governance for South East Asia

Al Jazeera’s People & Power program

Is democracy really the best type of governance for South East Asia? People & Power investigate in a compelling discussion with four prominent Asians.

Photos of Venice, Bardi, Florence and Pisa

I have put up the photos of Venice for awhile, didn't remember to post it up here.

2007_09_14 Venice

After Venice, I checked out of the nice hotel and started my backpacker travel again. First stop was to went North a bit to meet up with Alessandro. Alessandro came to UWA as an visiting researcher in 2005 and we had some great time together.
He has been back to Italy for awhile and was working at University of Bologna which is 40 mins train ride from Modena. However, we met up at Fidenza which is a bit more North as he planned to drive me to Bardi to see a castle. It's nice catching up with old friend.

2007_09_15 Bardi Castle with Alessandro

After the castle trip, I took a train South to Florence. It was nice to have Alessandro do the talking to get my train ticket.

Florence was my favorite place in Italy. It's so historical, artistic, grand and stylish. I was amazed by the sight of the Duomo when I came across it on my first night. And the city is beautiful at night. Old buildings with very big doors, full length windows showing the latest fashion, well lit plaza with grand gate. I'm just in awe.

Two days in Florence is just enough to know what is available. I want to come back one day. And I met some students from California State Polytechnic University, they were in Italy for the Formula SAE competition, building a car and race it with other universities in the world. When I told them I'm from UWA, they burst out their admiration on UWA Motorsports team. I was quite happy about that.

2007_09_15-17 Florence

I took a short train ride from Florence to Pisa to see the famous leaning tower. It was a rainy day and I was trapped in the rained and had to buy an umbrella at an ultra ripped off price. Anyhow, the leaning tower is cool. And I met a nice Taiwanese girl Han ZhenHui. She asked me to take some photos for her, and she helped me took some also. Then we went off doing other things and met again at the train station. She was reading a travel guide full of pictures written in Japanese (so much cooler than Lonely Planet) and planned to go to another small town call San Giorgnenanmitmkajdsj?@#$. I chatted with her and then decided to tag along since she had it all planned. Eventually we didn't get to the place since there was no bus coming back after we reached the train station that we had to change to bus. So anyhow, we decided to go to a restaurant and eat. The pizza was good!

Coming back to Florence it was after 9pm, and I was still thinking about the pig besides a market that I saw in the morning while I followed a guided tour. The legend is that you touch the the pig then you'll return to Florence one day. Then she accompanied me to fulfilled the Pig quest. And here's her blog in Chinese - Han*Han's A Story.

And here are the photos in Pisa.

2007_09_16 Pisa

UWA on 3D campus collections

Seems like only 2 campuses had the collection properly done, just us UWA and Melbourne U by someone name Wei Wei.

Where are other schools?

Check it out.
Build Your Campus in 3D Competition (Australia and New Zealand) Collection

Happy Birthday to me

It was my birthday on Wednesday. I'm 28.

This year birthday came a bit unexpected. I was busy with things and suddenly I realised my birthday was approaching in less than a week's time. I went to get myself a portable hard drive on Saturday as I've been thinking about it for awhile. My internal hard drive is giving me a bit of problem and I didn't have enough storage space to empty it and give it a good formating. I suspect the file index table is the problem as I can copy a file to the drive and read it, but once I move the file within the drive, it will not be accessible anymore... Anyhow.

My lovely housemates Yeeting and David got me a chocolate mud cake at slightly before midnight. It was a surprise. Yeeting and I were watching our new found pastime How I met your Mother in my room while David was studying for exam. And half way through the show David suddenly came in, turned off my light (and I thought "thanks, that'll make the cinematic experience better") with the cake. :D
It was very nice. And I haven't had mud cake for a long time.



It took us 4 shots to get the cake into the photo, haha!

Stayed up late that night and Liangliang called me at 2am+ as she got the daylight saving the other way round. Haha!

I didn't go to lab as testified by Shih Ching on the day. Had a bit of Birthday blue thinking about my life, uncertainty and work after PhD.
In the evening I went for a cycle along Matilda Bay. Fantastically refreshing.

Then I decided to have Stuzzico pizza at East Perth. So David and I drove there at 6:30pm and found it's closed by 6pm. Bugger! Then I remember there's another branch on Hay Street closer to the city, so we went there and found out that they are close too.
Disappointed, we walked about that restaurant area and found the Love and Care Cafe which often caters for Malaysian event. So I decided to give it a try. We had Mee Goreng (fantastic, spicy, the sauce is great. 5/5), Mee Soto (Ok, rice cube a bit tasteless, 3/5) and a Nasi Goreng L&C (fantastic, fluffy rice, 5/5) and air bundung with cincao.
The serving of food is quite small, so two of us easily finished the three mains. It was very satisfying.

Then at about 8pm, Rina, Shih Ching, Jason, Lilian and later Alex came with a homemade cake by Rina. Rina called me and let me know she'd come but I didn't think about what to expect. So it was a crowd and a cake I didn't expect. Thank you so much.


Green tea icecream cake with my name in chocolate. :D~


I thought this shot is really cool - two different shirts about PhD and me caring about nothing but the cake.


The cake is really delicious with full flavour of green tea. If you want to taste it, check this website for Rina's new venture - cookies2sushi.
To my nerdy brain, the name sounds like a program that takes cookies and chucks out sushi. Ooo... look at the inside of the cake.


Thanks everyone who send me blessings through sms, msn, phone, email, physical gifts, transferred hug, and telepathy thoughts.


p/s: I went to Stuzzico again today to nail the pizza I missed. The rocket/salmon pizza is absolutely awesome! Highly recommended. Best pizza outside of Italy I had. I'll try the prosciutto pizza and panini next time.

PSA quiz night photos

Some photos on PSA quiz night last Friday

Our CSSE team - Tone, Jason, Rina, me, Shih Ching, Bob, John and Minh


The CSSE team 2


Broadway Pizza was great!


The Wong


The pretzel coaster that spoke my feeling


We won the Australian citizen test.


That was a lot of wine.

PSA quiz night last Friday

We went to Quiz night organised by the Postgraduate Students Association (PSA) last Friday. There were two teams from CSSE, and one of them emerged to take the second place (tied). Fun!

Read PSA Quiz Night and Tied for Second on Shih Ching's blog.

UWA in 3D

It has been a crazy week for me preparing an entry for the Google 3D campus competition (Aus/NZ). We decided to put a team together since we already have a team interested in modelling UWA in 3D. But modelling for Google Earth is a bit different because of the bandwidth and complexity constraint. So there are some considerable effort put in to make the models smaller in size and lesser in geometry. Most of the models are simply an empty shell with texture. anything that cannot be seen are to be taken out.
We applied some good tricks like using transparent texture to replace complex fences or row of pillars. Taking a snapshot of a complex windows structure of the model and replace the geometry with the snapshot works very well too.

The entry closed on 31 Oct 2007 midnight EST. And we hit the submit button at 9:35pm WST on Chris's laptop in his office down in G.(don't know which number, there has been some office shuffling recently). The historical moment was witnessed by Chris, Minh, Jonathan and myself. Chris has been a long captain in the team followed by me as the lead 3D modeller. Minh joint in couple of weeks ago and did some incredible work, and Jonathan came in like couple of days ago and did a great job with the business school, though a bit intensive on the geometry.
Others on the team includes Jayjay who initiated the whole UWA in 3D idea, Michael my fellow 3D modeller, Evgeni the quiet achiever, Bradley who did it the proper architect way, and John who took many great shots for the texturing.
Many other not on the 3D campus team gave us tremendous help to, thanks go to Louisa for keeping us informed on what is going on with ourselves, Leondro, David, Juan, Ashley, Ryan and Jeff for various help.

The madness was on Tuesday, me and Minh worked through the night in the lab to finish up as many models as possible. I started in the afternoon of 30/10 at about 2:30pm and persevered until 9:30pm of 31/10. About 30 hours of modelling. Wickedly fun! I heard Minh did longer!
Anyhow that night I hit my bed at 12:30am and recharged for two night worth of sleep until 4:30pm. Mad!!


Check the models out on 3D warehouse. You can see them either in Sketchup or Google Earth, both need installation. If you don't want to install a big software, use this 6MB SketchUp Viewer.
If you already have Google Earth installed, this 3D Warehouse network link will put a link to 3D model in Google Earth.

Several must see are:

Winthrop Hall


Physics



And unbelievably detailed Engineering buildings and Architecture.

Also check out the very clean Octagon Building and spiral staircase at Reid Library.

Amazing Way to Tie Your Shoes

I received an email attachment from my brother about shoelace. I usually do my shoelace once when I buy the shoes, and never again. But I'm still amazed by how cool some of the methods are.

My favourite - Lattice Lacing


See more at Ian's Shoelace site.

The Miniature Earth

If the world's population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this.

You and me are really really fortunate.

Maaf Zahir Batin

It's the end of Ramadan today and the celebration starts. In Malaysia, we call it the Hari Raya Puasa or Hari Raya Aidilfitri.

I take this opportunity to learn a bit more about this festival and its meaning. I found this article that explains the meaning of Maaf Zahir Batin, which means "forgive my physical and emotional (wrongdoings)".

I seek your forgiveness for things that I have done wrong in the past. If I have offended you in anyway, that was never my intention.

Selamat Hari Raya Puasa.

And then I'm thinking about Ketupat and Rendang

Images from Wikipedia.

VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Cool 3D modelling application developed at Adelaide U, appeared in Siggraph 2007.
VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Thanks Danno.

Conference photos at Modena are up

Four days of the International Conference of Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP) in Modena.
I split them into two albums, first one is the conference part - talks, posters, my presentation, my hotel, cool buildings, interesting toilet, etc. and the second one is the highlight of welcome cocktail at the Ferrari Museum and the very grand conference dinner.

2007_09_10-13 Conference days	2007_09_11-12 Galleria Ferrari & Conference Dinner

If you want more, there are more photos on the conference website photo page.

6.7% interest RaboPlus + $50 cash

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