qiism

Alternative OSes

2012-01-29T03:37:00.001+08:00

In Princeton, I crashed a lecture about the New Testament (with Xinyang). At first glance it seemed Mac notebooks have a penetration rate of 80%. In any case, Princeton had Macs everywhere. The computers for public use around the campus were almost uniformly Macs. A special deal with Apple?

Among PSC scholars, who were discussing which laptop to buy, many chose Macs (including the svelte MacBook Air).

In Wolfson college, the computers for public use are Linux PCs.

After switching to Computer Science, I realized it was the course for people like me. One of the reasons: among CompScis, Linux penetration rate is at least 90%. Mac users make up much of the remaining 10%. I spotted a Windows 7 system at lecture one day, so it's not a total washout for Microsoft. The course has a fair amount of crazy people who use Gentoo Linux and Arch Linux. Why crazy? Because anybody using Gentoo Linux must have, like me, also spent too much time on their computers at some point in their short (<= 20 years) lifetime. (Sorry, compiling a custom Linux kernel for your generic laptop can only be a waste of time, not recoverable even after years of using a performance-improved system; although I must qualify: it is also time invested into learning about the system).

Anyway, the question is: Where are the Windows users? (Ans: other faculties, including Engineering faculty)

To be fair, CompScis need some Unix system. The Windows Command Prompt is just bad -- you can't do anything useful on it. Even when using the Windows-only PCs in my college, I am often forced to PuTTy into a Linux terminal (because of the Networking voodoo they have done, both operate on the same filesystem).

So, finally switching to Computer Science was to find loads of like-minded people, with at least some knowledge of the bash shell. Aha, so this is where people like me go.

If I were Microsoft, I'd be very worried. Imagine hiring from a pool of graduates who have grown to think, "Linux is better". Even my Director of Studies, who works at Microsoft Research, was a contributor to Debian. (To be fair, that would have boosted his CV, not tarnished it.) But I'm very sure Windows for the desktop is still one of their cash cows.

Sure, you always need software for the masses, so the cash cow isn't dead. You will always need WYSIWYG editors. You always need somebody to write software like cPanel for those who cannot be bothered to learn about each individual component, just like you always need Windows for people who will violently object to using the bash shell. But if the people writing the software aren't satisfied users of it themselves, that's the end of eat your own dogfood.

I'd like to know: what do Microsoft's developers use to develop their own software? (Do they start PuTTy first thing in the morning?)

Managing the CUMSA Website

2012-01-28T05:55:00.000+08:00

One of the things that happened to me -- I starting managing the CUMSA website since Mar 2011. This is one of those story about the pitfalls of being a programmer instead of being a mere user.

The website runs Joomla, which is fair enough. A bit too complex, but otherwise served our needs. It came with a pretty decent ChronoForms (which, at V3.0, was 1 major version and 2 minor versions behind the latest release).

ChronoForms had some advantages over Google Docs:

Can send confirmation emails after form submission
Integrates with the rest of the website well.

But I had a problem: In Google Docs, I could share the spreadsheet containing the form results. Not so in ChronoForms. Moreover, the ChronoForms interface did not give me an easy way to view all results in a table after they came in. (It allowed me to export to CSV and Excel, but exporting to a spreadsheet is an overkill when all I want is to see my results). So the gung-ho then-22-year-old me decided to plunge into the ChronoForms code to fix the problem. The interface where I could delete unwanted results (e.g. by Spambots, test cases) was also annoying -- it only showed the record number, not the record data, and record numbers were so useful because I could divine the data held by the record from it.

So I fixed the record manager (the only place I could delete records) so that instead of showing just the pretty useless "id", it showed the values of the form fields too. I also created an "Export to HTML" option, with which I was quite pleased.

ChronoForms also had a convenient Form Wizard. Seriously, drag-and-drop beats anything done via text files. It is why MS Access (maybe ASP.NET too -- but I haven't tried it) remains the fastest way to create a CRUD interface for a relational database. Anyway, about the Form Wizard -- I loved it, but it was dumb in some other ways -- I couldn't insert any HTML at all. I couldn't insert images. I couldn't insert links, boldface text, italics text etc. And the peculiarity of the Form Wizard was that it ignores all changes made directly to the HTML after using the Wizard. So while I could easily insert images and links by editing the HTML of the form directly, all these changes were lost if I wanted to use the Wizard again. Aw...

Finally, this month, I fixed the "Text" form component to treat input as HTML, rather than text. Yay.

Yet, yet, there was this one more problem: ChronoForms was astoundingly slow! I thought that maybe my web host was overloaded, so I switched from SiteGround to StableHost. That sort of improved the responsiveness of the web site, but ChronoForms was still slow! It was ridiculous -- it took 20 seconds to load the index of forms, while all other pages loaded blazingly fast -- the Form Wizard, the Tables Manager, the Tables Creator etc. all worked fine.

I thought, maybe it's the licensing server. I trawled the code to find where ChronoForms tried to communicate with the licence server -- it didn't exist.

I don't know why I put up with it for so long. The index page was of paramount importance. It was the index page after all, and all form management functions go through this page. It taking 20s to load wasn't acceptable. (e.g. between saving a form, and creating the table for it, takes 20s. Between saving the table, and editing the form, another 20s. It was infuriating.).

Finally, today, I was incensed enough to profile the code:

// DEBUG USE ONLY
function startTime() {
global $startTime;
global $allTimes;
$allTimes = array();
$startTime = time();

}

function recordTime($a, $b) {

global $startTime, $allTimes;

$timeDiff = time() - $startTime;

$allTimes[] = <<EOF

Time Profiling: $a $b $timeDiff

EOF;

}

function printAllTimes() {

global $allTimes;

echo implode('', $allTimes);

}

recordTime(__FILE__, __LINE__); // insert everywhere, liberally

Awfully, awfully, as I narrowed down on the offending code, I discovered the time difference were either 0s, or 22s. Nothing in between. It wasn't a gradual accumulation of time cost. There was a single line of a massive time bomb somewhere.

I finally narrowed it down to these 4 lines:

$showtipday = $configs->get('showtipoftheday', 1);
if($showtipday){
HTML_ChronoContact::showTipOfDay();
}

which called the showTipOfDay() method, which started with the following 3 lines:

function showTipOfDay(){
global $mainframe;
$rssurl = 'http://www.chronoengine.com/tips-and-hints/33-chronoforms-tips.html?format=feed&type=rss';

That was the reason, darn it. I KNEW the reason. It was connecting to a slow third party server, but it wasn't the licence server, it was the RSS feed on the HTTP server.

There are a few lessons learnt here though:

App developers, DO NOT load data from third party servers in PHP. NO. NEVER. It's slow. It's irritating. People are used to broadband speeds, and nobody likes to wait, especially not for RSS feeds from your weak, puny server that they don't read. It's 2012 -- please let the page load first, then use AJAX to load the rest. Thank you very much.

To myself: Stop being so gung-ho. Just download the latest ChronoForms.

As I reflect, plunging into the source code of ChronoForms (I'm thankful and surprised that they didn't obfuscate it) was such a bad idea. On one hand, it was "fun" -- by the hacker definition of fun. On the other hand, it is a bad idea to "hack core". Now that I'm handing over (hopefully, I will), what will the next webmaster do? Upgrade ChronoForms? -- He may lose all the enhancements I added to it! Who knows whether the people at ChronoEngine have a product that now meets our needs?

Yet, if I had invested the time into installing ChronoForms v4, perhaps much of my pain and anguish could have been avoided. But therein lies the issue: change, and the unwillingness to it. Simply put, when I received the reins from my predecessor, he taught me how to use ChronoForms v3.0. It was a horror to use, but it worked, and I knew how to use it. Now, having built a mental model around v3.0, all I wanted was to make embellishments to it where it was deficient.

Now this probably happens way too often in the world. In companies, major organizations, nobody wants change. What worked before can be expected to work in the future. Perhaps less well, but it will still work. Film cameras still have a niche market don't they? What have people been saying about Singapore's civil service, in particular its recruitment methods?

Stubbornness to change is a bad thing. If I had just bitten the bullet and changed it, it might have worked out alright. But I did not.

So came the first core hack, then the second, then the third. Now it's a beast too ancient, but too familiar to throw away. To overcome its deficiencies in the U of CRUD, I have even grafted in an additional systems onto this animal -- a CakePHP 2.0 system with a custom scaffold, running parallel to the system.

Close-up, it looks perfectly fine. It's like doing work at a messy desk -- one concentrates solely on the work, and it's fine. But when told to clear up the desk for the next person, he takes a step back, looks at his desk, and is taken aback by the massive junkyard of a desk.

It's the model of haphazard software development. Without proper planning and specification, the developer inserts a hack into one part of the system as he sees fit. A while later, another hack in another part. Finally, it all holds up together, but so messily! There are too many sub-systems, each with their own idiosyncrasies, making the life of the next person so much harder! But the scariest part of it all -- it was ONE person's work. ONE person created this Frankenstein, just ONE. ONE person who made 10,000 idiosyncrasies!

This Frankenstein is going to return to haunt me, I know. Unless somebody kills it (replace it with Wordpress, please...), but it won't be me. Oh dear.

Religion?

2012-01-12T23:05:00.000+08:00

This video is making it's rounds on Facebook.

I spotted one objection raised by a Facebook "friend" (although I've actually forgotten how he became an acquaintance):

Besides the logical inconsistencies in his proposition, this guy has not understood what Jesus meant by "it is finished." Jesus, by his death, has elevated mankind to a level where we can call God, Abba Father. That brings us closer to our communion with the Holy Trinity which is our true destiny. The closest glimpse we have here on earth, other than marriage, is our dear Church. Therefore, as this video becomes viral, I am saddened that what Jesus meant by his life, death and resurrection is now constrained by what this guy says, the same fault he accused the Church of doing.

Not wanting to start a Facebook flame war, I'll post my reply on my obscure blog. Nicely, somebody has transcribed everything (Thanks!). Here's an extract, probably with the controversial parts in bold.

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion?
What if I told you voting Republican really wasn’t his mission?
What if I told you Republican doesn’t automatically mean Christian, and just because you call some people blind doesn’t automatically give you vision.
I mean if religion is so great, why is it starting so many wars? Why does it build huge churches but fails to feed the poor?
Tells single moms God doesn’t love them if they’d ever had a divorce, but in the Old Testament, God actually calls religious people whores.
Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice, tend to ridicule God’s people, they did it to John the Baptist.

I'm not arguing for or against the video or my Facebook acquaintance's ideas, for or against "religion", but consider Revelations 2:

“To the angel of the church of Ephesus write,
‘These things says He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands: I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars; and you have persevered and have patience, and have labored for My name’s sake and have not become weary. Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.

Is it therefore not possible for "the Church" to be doing many things, but not fault-free at the same time? Revelations show that it is certainly possible. Even further in Revelations, it simply says:

Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready.”

Is there therefore not a preparation that has to take place before the bride of the Lamb -- the Church -- is ready?

In short, all I want to say is that what my acquaintance meant by "the Church" -- you know what that refers to -- is not faultless. The "accusation" levelled against it this time is not the first, and won't be the last.

Why I Refuse to Upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10

2011-11-14T08:36:00.001+08:00

Last year, I'd stave off the itch to upgrade for a while, before I succumb.

This year, I'm not going to do that, because:

Don't fix what's not broken
Apart from the mainstream bluez-utils not working well with my Bluetooth devices (I use the version from 10.10), everything else is working just fine. I had issues the same time last year with the microphone (imagine not being able to Skype home!), but it's now working just fine. The graphics are OK. Suspend and hibernate work as reliably as on Windows (i.e., not very).

Given how delicate a working Linux system can be (I'm not risking my Bluetooth/ Webcam/ Wireless NIC/ Keyboard/ Touchpad/ Touchscreen/ Backlight/ Audio/ Fn-keys/ ), and having found the balance of the myriad of forces that keeps this system in equilibrium, I'm not messing around with a new version unless I absolutely need to.

You see, the upgrade is never annoying. It's discovering a few days/ weeks/ months later when you're rushing to do something that some component is now broken (e.g. using Bluetooth to transfer files from your mobile phone to your PC and realize that Bluetooth is down) that is most annoying. I can't do automated regression tests on all my hardware, so I have to go easy on upgrades. I'm using Linux >90% of the time now and I'm not risking my working environment for frivolous version numbers.

Gnome 2
Because in Unity and Gnome 3, the developers failed to follow the principle in the last section.

Conclusion
Conservatism is directly related to age.

Batteries

2011-10-17T03:35:00.002+08:00

My Nokia phone battery became swollen/ bloated. That was terribly annoying, because the battery charge indicator was no longer accurate. It would still last 24 hours if I only sent texts during the day, but once I started using the GPS, GPRS or anything that sucks additional power from the battery, the phone quickly shows "Battery Low" and activates "power saving mode". If I continued using it, it would die after some time of continued use. If I ceased and desisted, after another 30 minutes, the battery indicator would show full charge again.

Basically the battery had become unreliable. It was plainly annoying. I couldn't do anything useful on the phone for extended periods of time without killing it. Upon inspection, it was clear that the phone battery (a BP-4L) was swollen. All I needed to do was to replace the battery. But where do I find a replacement battery?

In Singapore, I would make a trip to some second-hand phone shops. Easily done.

In Cambridge, tough luck. Phones4U, despite their promising name, stocks zero batteries, offering this reason: there are so many phones out there, each using different batteries. Therefore it is impossible to stock all phone batteries.

That reason sucks. This is the real reason: Cambridge is too small. Help! I still like my E72, but the battery is dying!

Crying to Google for help then yielded me Amazon.co.uk. It offered a BP-4L for £6.99. It was delivered within 4 days. In fact, on a Saturday. Wow!

Moreover, since Lithium batteries degrade with age, I was careful to check the age of the battery. It was manufactured Jul 2011. Excellent!
======
Where could I find a bicycle chain lubricant? Should I use cooking oil? Several websites advised against it, and recommended a proper lubricant. That made me raise an eyebrow -- where can I get lubricant? Should I cycle 3km to the *best* cycle store in Cambridge? Should I visit an overpriced repair centre? I googled one brand of lubricant. Lo and behold -- Amazon.co.uk. I ordered it and received it on the same day as I received my BP-4L.
======
My bicycle light batteries died. Great. I searched high and low for it -- Ryman's, Sainsbury's, WHSmith. NONE sold size "N" batteries. I couldn't believe it. Eventually, I found them at Boots, but at £2.20 per cell, I paid a whopping £4.40 for a pair of "N" size batteries (no choice -- I needed it that day).

Who cares anyway... I'm on scholarship money. But that's not the point.

'Cos guess what: on Amazon.co.uk, it offers £1.08 for 2 "N" size batteries. Free delivery.

Amazon.co.uk FTW.

MS Access Alternative

2011-09-29T00:47:00.001+08:00

There needs to be a HTML-based MS Access alternative. It's enormously frustrating when MS Access cocks up at the office, and I have to make a 1-hr return trip to solve a problem in 5 minutes.

I shall identify the following excellent points about MS Access, but also their limitations:

Formats and input masks. When doing data entry, nobody has the patience to type the colon (:) between the hours and the minutes. I'd like to key it in as <0> <9> <3> <0> and for it to appear as 09:30 AM. As far as I know, no spreadsheet software is intelligent enough for this yet, but MS Access does it excellently.

But then, Access is limited to very few ways of providing inputs. Either a keyboard or a drop-down menu. With the recent versions, you can have a calendar control. Still, despite the wealth of controls MS Access provides, you cannot create custom controls easily. What if you wanted a colour picker? File storage? The controls Access provides then becomes very limiting.

However, writing custom controls with HTML today is now a piece of cake. You can have everything under the sun, from spreadsheets to word processors. HTML+Javascript should be embraced.

Forms. It's incredibly easy to create forms in Access. In less than 5 clicks you can create a CRUD interface for any table -- that's wwwwwwwaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy faster than any RoR scaffold, not to mention easier (Mongrel? What's that?) and more usable (e.g. native calendar controls). In under a minute, you can add another subform and have a CRUD for related tables. In under an hour, you'll have a prototype of the application up and running.

BUT once you start using multiple forms, the limitations of a VB-based interface become obvious. The fixed window sizes, stubborn borders and paddings that refuse to disappear (because of the spacey look-and-feel/ theme/ control UI), wasted space, spurious scrollbars... one side of the problem is that I am trying to cram too many fields into one screen. On the other hand, I need those fields. But the stubborn UI and GUI and theming of this aged interface refuse to cooperate. It looks nice on tutorials, but in the real world when 20+ fields might be needed I need something compact rather than good looking.

BASIC. BASIC is venerable, admittedly. But Javascript (+ jQuery) (or C#, Python, PHP) >>>>>>> BASIC any day.

Reports. This is where I faced the greatest problems. I need to have reports that don't randomly chop off the ends of my field because I gave it 5px less than it needed. VB Forms are just a bad, bad platform for reports.

On the other hand, this is where HTML shines if used with a framework like RoR/CakePHP. All the major browsers are able to dynamically lay out content in an optimum manner even if not given hints (e.g. width="3*"). Adding a column is much less of a pain than in Access (at a to the area and a to the area, vs adding a control, resizing/moving everything else to the right, discover that your last few fields are being chopped off, resize again...). If all else fails, fitting all your data into one page's width by reducing the font size by 20% is a trivial CSS exercise, but a nightmare with VB forms.

Moreover, with a framework where you can create custom controls, you can hide/show fields dynamically, anywhere you want, with custom conditions e.g. show the `Remarks` field on a separate row if it is not empty. You can create custom views (e.g. rwx-r-x-r-x for a `Permissions` column). You can even use colour codes! (e.g. red for r--, blue for rw-, green for rwx) You don't have to be restricted to Access's controls. You don't need to build incredibly complex queries just for the purpose of one report (e.g. SELECT ..., StringRepresentationOfPermissions(`Permissions`) AS StringPermissions, ... FROM ..., where StringRepresentationOfPermissions is some crazy function that does formatting, and breaks a lot of rules about the division between Control, View and Model).

On a HTML page, you can also blur the lines between forms and reports. You have have the query controls (e.g. Show Entries for Month Of: ...) on the same page as the reports, which can be hidden during printing using CSS @media print rules.

Reports also become too unwieldy if there are too many custom queries. For example, we needed one report style for certain clients, and another report style for other clients. To properly write a query form, with code that generates the report, provides sorting options, hides some columns, has some subtotals, excludes certain other subtotals... would have been too complex.

Also, not all reports are meant to be printed. Some reports are meant to be seen on-screen and action taken on offending items. Presenting these reports PDF-style is just counter-productive when a proper HTML Table-like element is what's needed.

Batch Actions. Beyond CRUD, there will be times when more random access, more batch access is required, e.g. to create 100 new records with slightly varying parameters. Or when dealing with poorly, or difficult-to-normalize tables*. This is the point where VBA and generic Access reports are being stretched to their limit and specialized frameworks like RoR should take over.

* For example, we had a table Cases, which each has one Driver and one Medic. Both Driver and Medic are entries in Employee. But occasionally (e.g. with an understudy) we have one Driver but two Medic(s). Or we might have Nurses, Equipment Sales, Equipment Rental etc. But in our remuneration accounting system, Driver and Medic remunerations are calculated differently. However, when we are not dealing with remuneration issues, we tend to want to display Drivers and their associated Medic. And for the same case, we might have different Teams of Drivers and Medics. Multiple summaries need to be generated (e.g. Count(Medic) / Count(Driver & Medic)), which entail multiple queries. Should I even add to the complexity by creating the table Teams, which can contain Employee but not Equipment Sales/Rental and Nurses? To normalize the database to handle all possible cases would have blown up the complexity of the relationships in the database and made data entry for the most common case (Driver + Medic) overly complicated. To use generic Access reports to handle them would have simply been impossible. In general, CS101 does not accept such realities in the world, whereas a programmer dealing with a complete framework like RoR, unencumbered by the user interface of Access does.

Windows, Microsoft Office. Microsoft Access is part of Microsoft Office Professional, and it is expensive. It only runs on Microsoft Windows. It is file based, so backup is easy, but accessing it from 7000 miles away with a computer that only has Microsoft Office Standard is a headache. Even if it were possible, it would be read-only. Troubleshooting over the phone 10km away is already a pain.

A locally accessible web interface, which can be made publicly but securely accessible with VPN, would make troubleshooting a lot easier. (Just kill me if you need me to Remote Desktop to a desktop computer connected to the Internet by a GSM dongle to manage Access 2007/2010's fancy 32-bit colour interface. Text-based HTML is better).

=======================
I'm not sure if I presented my case for better MS Access reports well enough, although the length of that section should be enough to get a sense of my frustration, which I temporarily overcame at that time by the use of WAMP(hp) + COM. It was a disgusting solution that worked. There was no RoR or CakePHP support for MS Access, so I reinvented the wheel, predictably badly. But it worked. This brings me to my next point:

=======================

Jet Database Engine sucks. Virtually no one supports it. Not RoR, not PHP. Using the ADODB COM object on PHP is a pain, trust me. It doesn't support concurrency (although I wouldn't dare allow concurrency yet). But then, Microsoft Access doesn't seem to play well with SQLite or MySQL the last time I tried. So I couldn't use an alternative.

Conclusion

It could just be blissful ignorance here, but convince me that less than 50% of small-enterprise applications are not plain data-entry CRUD with perhaps a some batch actions added to them. In fact, that's basically what all accounting software are, and they are everywhere (It's scary how many accounting software packages use ancient platforms like Foxpro.)

If so, I believe that there is a huge market need for a good MS Access alternative, preferably web-based. RoR and jQueryUI have already won half the battle. Who will be the developer for that?

Boarding Pass

2011-09-22T22:08:00.006+08:00

Dear Airlines,

Please change your boarding passes ONCE AND FOR ALL. Why has a ridiculous design not changed in years? Don't you know about these major annoyances with boarding passes:

The boarding pass is too large for the passport, for jeans pockets, for shirt pocket and for any easily accessible compartment in general.
Because of (1) they stick out of jeans pockets looking really stupid. Jeans pockets are usually too shallow to admit anything longer than a passport, and boarding passes bust that limit.
Because of (1) the boarding pass tears apart easily, especially between the part you retain and the part I retain. I don't yet know if this invalidates the boarding pass, but it worries me that you might stop me from taking my connecting flight. It is not so much a problem while in the airport, but quite a serious one if I had a long-haul flight before a connecting flight, and I had kept my boarding pass and passport in my pocket, and tossed and turned while sleeping on board sardine class -- I might have shredded the boarding pass on board.

Why can't you reduce the size of your boarding pass? Why? Because all your competitors are doing the same, and there's no need for improvement? Why not save some paper?

There has always been one solution that I have not tried, but will try very soon since this has been stretching the limit of my patience: fold the boarding pass in half. It will then fit nicely into my red passport. My only concern is this: it might destroy the 2d barcodes (are 2d barcodes "bar"-codes?) on the newer types of boarding passes. If you are worth your salt, the 2d barcode will have some kind of error correction, am I right? A white line cutting across the barcode will not be catastrophic, will it?

You'd better hope it won't, because if the barcode reader doesn't work, your flight stewards and stewardesses are going to have to key in the details manually. Since you have never forbidden anyone from folding his boarding pass, not at the check-in counter or in the fine print, you can't fault me if I waste their time keying in details manually at the gate, can you?

Still, why don't you just shrink the stupid thing?

Computer Science, and Other Stuff

2011-09-20T17:14:00.001+08:00

It's been 2 months since I switched courses, and what a 2 months it has been! One month was spent absolutely not studying, and the other was spent studying. Wow.

Reality is sinking in. There'll be no more cables, fluids, and structures for me. That's bad. Theoretical jet engines are fun. Even for electronics and electricity, there'll be so few of that. As far as operating systems go, I have a pretty good layman's knowledge of it, helped by the fact that I read the textbook 2 years ago. Oh well. Well. Maybe I should just take both the Engineering and the Computer Science IB papers!

Math is nice, until it gets too onerous, e.g. Prove a + 1 = a - 1 + 1. But it's so obvious?! How do you know? But, but, it's seriously obvious! But you can't prove it, can you? That's why I'm not doing Math... but I think I appreciate Math enough to do Computer Science :).

On a more serious note, I'm tired of studying. I'm simply tired. Not physically, not even mentally, but really tired. Tired of living? Maybe. I don't want to go back to Cambridge and face another dim, awful winter, rushing about to gain knowledge, appreciate art, or whatever. Or to meet people, or to induct people, even friends. I just want to 'settle down'.

Unfortunately, this world won't ever allow me to do that. Why am I finding ways to fill time? What, vacation this winter? Internship next summer? What to do with my weekends? My afternoons? Alton towers for one weekend? I'm tired. "Sian" is the best word to use. I feel like I'm forcing time to pass quietly.

Arguably, I'm living too comfortably now, and not everyone has the luxury of saying that. Nevertheless...

Formals

2011-06-26T16:26:00.001+08:00

(Typed on my E72 while on the LHR-SIN A380)

Have you sat on mainstream airliner before? Then you will know what a formal dinner at a Cambridge college is like, or what a formal Western dinner is in general. Apart from the fact that it's all served in one platter - tray, I beg your pardon - airline food comprises of what formal dinners are made up of. I speak of Singapore Airlines, with which I'll have a particularly close affliation to in the years to come.

So, for my Singaporean friends, here's how to tackle an airplane meal in the style of Cambridge formals: first, when meals are being served, ask for red or white wine (impt!). Then start with the bread. Spread some butter on it. Then, eat the starter (usually some salad) at your top left hand corner. Now eat your main course. Then, dessert est servie. Feel happy with yourself, and when the stewardess come round again, ask for coffee. Formals are the same thing, except that each course is served separately, you don't get the cheese and crackers served on planes and you might get mint-flavoured chocolates with your coffee at the end of your meal at formals.

No matter, that is the style of typical Western dinners, from what I've observed thus far - bread, starter, main, dessert, then coffee and mints. That's your airline meal demystified, if you have ever wondered how they decided on the spread of food served. Clearly, it is catered to a Western audience.

Airlines other than the business-class business and angmoh loving SIA might have meals in other styles... But hey I'm flying London-Singapore...

Singlish

2011-06-13T02:24:00.000+08:00

Living overseas in an English-speaking country made me more conscious of my Singaporean identity. I would never have thought of listing 'Singlish' on Facebook as one of my languages I speak one year ago. But from the daily code switching, and the level of 'stiffness' I feel when speaking to non-SMB (Singapore/ Malaysia/ Brunei) people, I have since conceded that it's way too different, and way too distinctive.

You can pick out SMB English speakers with relatively few words. Even our "hello" is different from the typical English "hello". Our "hel-" is low-pitched and on speaking "-lo" the pitch glides upwards; the normal "hello" here seems to start high and end somewhere in the middle. The other important trait is the lack of distinction between long and short vowels. With traits like this, it is perfectly possible to pick out SMB English speakers after hearing around just 2-3 spoken words!

But the more important issue is the "stiffness" I feel when speaking "proper" English. It feels as though I had to subconsciously recall all the primary school English lessons I've had a long time ago and apply them. They are not hard to recall -- I have no problems typing this entry -- but it is not effortless. Perhaps its just because essay-writing mode is slower than talk-cock mode, just like interpreted mode is always slower than compiled mode...

Chim Chim Chimera

2011-06-07T07:11:00.000+08:00

http://www.katewerk.com/chimera.html

I have newfound respect for Biology. In Physics, everything seems to occur in a deterministic way. Even if it doesn't, it will at least follow a fixed probability distribution. But in cells and living organisms, oh my, there are no rules. If there are rules, they are only guidelines.

I've read before that in a pregnant woman, the mother's blood stream does not interfere with the foetus', for obvious reasons. Otherwise, the mother's immune system might attack the foetus, and vice versa. Yet the article above shows that nothing in biology is solid. The placenta may prevent mixing of the mother's and the foetus' blood, but it is by no means impermeable to cells. Minuscule amounts of cells from each system may cross the boundary and mix.

Even in our biological identity, we are like fluids. If chimeras were any more common, we would have to reject the lack of DNA evidence as a reliable way to acquit suspects, since we can never be sure that the suspect might have chimeric cells.

Nothing is certain. Individuals can be cured of AIDS. Individuals can be born conjoined twins. Individuals can be born mirror imaged; with less, or more limbs and digits; never to undergo puberty; without a fully functioning immune system (whatever that means); with a more powerful immune system; without being able to walk on twos... It's all probability, and with 6 billion people, so much is probable. So much is rare. So much is unimaginable.

*** No intention to offend anybody, btw ***

Weather

2011-05-30T07:26:00.000+08:00

As a child, when I read children's encyclopaedias, written in the Western world, I could never understand the obsession with "green" houses that kept heat IN. I was trying to understand it from the context of a tropical country, where I grew up. I was mortified by the idea.

It is remarkable how lucky Northern Europe is to have such nice weather. The weather is so good that for years they could concentrate on the task of trying to keep warm instead of keeping cool. So much so that indoor cooling systems (fans, air-conditioners) were left for others to invent, namely the Americans, whose large continent made for terrible summers inland. (I guess Southern Europeans tackled the problem with the almighty siesta?)

Keeping cool is intuitively and thermodynamically harder than keeping warm. You could keep warm by simply burning down a forest, but there are not many possible endothermic processes in nature that could be exploited. Dissolving salt in water is endothermic, but dissolving enough salt to keep houses cool would have required impractically huge supply chains from the coast, not to mention the immense waste of water that would have been. Evaporation is another endothermic process, and this was exploited by the Romans, famous for their aqueducts and ever-running supplies of water, by piping water around their walls. Impressive, but that was an immense waste of water. Again, the Europeans were lucky -- their rivers apparently never dry up, and with their mountainous terrain, did not have to pump water, but could simply let the water trickle down from up high assisted by gravity.

====== Short rant on the London Tube =======
Being so fortunate, the operators of the London Tube then overlooked the problem of temperature when they decided to bring in new cars which were totally glassed in. Apart from two breathing holes at the ends of each car, there are zero windows. Zilch. Given the old infrastructure, it is perfectly understandable why they cannot install air-conditioning on the oldest and deepest lines. But to cut off ventilation within the trains too -- that's idiocy.

Again, recall that humans are good heat sources. (body temperature 37°C, while 40°C is not an uncommon temperature for commercial "hot springs") A carful of human beings packed like sardines is... quite... warm, even in winter. In fact, it is very warm especially in winter, when everyone is decked out in at least 3 layers of clothing and jammed into the trains during rush hour.

I've heard that Europeans are not very fond of moving air, like those from a fan. Perhaps that's why they decided against louvred windows on the trains, and why most households don't have indoor cooling systems. And that's probably also why a 30°C heatwave is fatal for them. Pity.
====== Rant ends ======

Otherwise, with average maximum temperatures of around 20°C, honestly, they do not need air-conditioning. (But everybody loves a refrigerator to keep food fresh.)
============
I'm getting jaded by this weather though. I have grown quite used to it, but I still somehow prefer a constant sweat to a constant chill.

There are many nice benefits to a constant chill. Firstly, mosquitoes disappear. Or, even if they exist, they can't sting you because you'd have kept your windows shut to keep the heat in (yes, the human body is an amazing heat source. In a room at 20°C, your body is 17°C warmer than the room. The temperature difference is like that between room temperature and the water in a hot water bath.)

You can also go for a run at any time. Even running at mid-day, you won't feel like you were a 19-yo doing national service again. You don't have to wait till the heat has subsided (5, 6pm?) before using what precious little time left before dark to keep fit.

Incidentally, at the equator, the sun sets almost vertically, making dusk very short. Nearer to the poles, the sun sets diagonally, and that makes it take a long time to set. (This translates to an awfully long time when you are unsure whether to use bicycle lights.)

But I just don't like a constant chill. I don't like having to grab a jacket every time I work. I don't like huddling under the covers in the morning. I don't like wearing thick layers in the toilet, or wearing a thin layer, but feeling drafts of cold air from the window.

It's like how I used to sleep in air-conditioned rooms. The following day, I would be freezing (it must have been the same temperature as I am getting now on a daily basis). At 6 a.m. that feeling is very unpleasant, considering that 6 a.m.'s are already quite chilly by Singapore standards. One monsoon season, my siblings and I decided that a ceiling fan at night was sufficient. I never regretted it. My mother insists that I should at least run the air-conditioner occasionally, to avoid its joints becoming stiff, but I'd stubbornly refuse.

NCMP Line-up

2011-05-08T06:31:00.000+08:00

Assuming the opposition parties exercise the option to field NCMPs, we'll have 3:

(1) 1x candidate from SPP - Potong Pasir (49.64% of votes), i.e. Lina Chiam
(2) 1x candidate from WP - Joo Chiat (48.99% of votes), i.e. Yee Jenn Jong
(3) 1x candidate from WP - East Coast GRC (45.17% of votes), ??

And just for fun, the next candidates in order are
(4) Second candidate from East Coast GRC
(5) Third candidate from East Coast GRC (up to three NCMPs from each GRC allowed)
(6) 1x candidate from NSP - Marine Parade GRC (43.35% of votes), i.e. Nicole Seah (hahaha)

i.e.

Nicole Seah (and NSP), you're out. Try harder next time, maybe at an SMC. Or rather, get better candidates -- 24-year-old leading a team against the former Prime Minister?
SPP's participation in parliament will be diminished. (Then again, with one Chiam frail and the other not so sharp, their participation would have been limited even if they won more seats.)
Because WP has the authority to choose candidates, they could, in theory, force Yee Jenn Jong to give up the NCMP seat and give the NCMP seats to East Coast GRC team members instead.

Finally, while NCMPs seats are really just token gestures and consolation prizes, I think the fact that the number of NCMP seats was increased to 9 is symbolic of the willingness of the PAP to listen to alternative voices. This feels like a pretty good alternative to proportional representation.

Who Should I Vote For?

2011-04-30T05:15:00.000+08:00

Btw, I'm a Mountbatten SMC guy, unceremoniously sliced off from Marine Parade GRC. That slight (or honour) aside...

Tell me, who should I vote for?

For PAP, because they can build swimming pools? Because they can twist PUB's arms to upgrade the drains? Because they can twist HDB's arms to firstly upgrade the lifts, secondly install lift level indicators? Because they have a minister to do the necessary arm-twisting?

For NSP, because in the present government, I find the salaries ridiculous, the tactics dishonest, some policies questionable? Because even if Jeanette was elected MP, and uses her status as an elected MP to try to do some arm-twisting, the minister-in-charge can still overrule her?

On one hand, my head is stuck in the clouds. On the other, my feet are still stuck in the mud. Do I want to debate national issues, or ground issues? You know where each party wants to fight the battle, and they are fighting apples with oranges; debating with different premises. It's like having my left hand in hot water, and right hand in cold, and I am not a thermocouple.

===========

What differentiates me from people in other constituencies? School? I studied in Bishan. My sister studied in Buona Vista. As if it makes us different. Work? Housing? Is housing what we are voting for, so that someone can manage our estates better? Are we voting for estate managers? Aren't there too many overqualified estate managers?

People to represent our voices on national issues? Problem of democracy: Are we smart enough to have a say on national issues? Does anyone trust Iceland to repay its debts now?

For fairer representation on national issues?

I know FPTP is not fair. AV (Britain is going to have a referendum on Alternative Voting system soon, and I was offered a say, if I could be bothered to) might be 'fairer' -- so what about AV? Fine, it gives you fairer representation. Will you therefore keep your education budget? How about PR? Isn't that the fairest? Germany has a PR government (at least since the1920s!!). Finland has PR. New Zealand has PR. Oh, but Indonesia, Russia and Congo have PR too. Big deal about representation. You can have your say, but will it be acted upon?

You can have 30% minority MPs -- can they veto a bill?

Conversely, we can have things being acted upon, but where's our say?

PAP says that for a good government to last, you need proper succession from one capable person to another. That presupposes that they are good. (Fine, they are.)

But, succession to 27-year-olds? Meanwhile, your capable persons (scholar candidates) abandon you?

I am convinced that good government is more than just about who you (or I) vote for. Voting in certain countries is a choice between two thugs. Great.

Website Management

2011-04-27T02:32:00.000+08:00

I manage a website running Joomla 1.5. On this website, we use forms to collect data.

I mostly manage the website and design the forms that others request. However, this forms system was terribly unwieldy. It was difficult for the administrator (myself) to obtain the results in a table (unlike Google Docs), let alone for the actual users of the form data.

So I began modifying the PHP code that runs the form system to allow easier access. And what I saw made me want to cry:

$database->setQuery("SELECT * FROM ... WHERE id='" + JRequest::getVar('...') + "'");

N.B.: getVar(...) is similar to $_REQUEST[...].

OH MY GOD, I screamed in my head. Guys, don't you know what is SQL injection? Don't you even sanitize your input with mysql_escape_string() or JDatabase->getEscaped() or something like that? At all?

This form system is not a native Joomla component, so updating Joomla (which I did once) will not save me from the vulnerabilities in this component.

But I figured: In whatever I do to make life convenient for the other form users, I still have to give them access to the form data via the administrative interface. (The code is part of the administrative interface code.) Which means, to do SQL injection, they first need the admin password. And if they already have the admin password, it is much easier to DROP TABLE via the admin interface then by SQL injection anyway. Anyway.

Meanwhile, I have not found anything worrying in the public interface.

So I'm leaving this vuln unresolved. It is not the weakest link in the chain that I know of, so strengthening it does not improve overall security. Whatever the case, I should first focus on vulns in the public interface, where any ah mao ah kow without password can access.

Although I must say, for a programmer, the code simply shows a lack of care by the original author. Did you care that your "id" might contain a single quote? No. Have you considered the possibility? Obviously not. Did you know that PHP variables are not strongly-typed? Yes. Didn't it strike you that it could be a string instead of an integer? Huh?

High Speed Rail

2011-04-18T21:40:00.000+08:00

I LOVE high speed rail. Granted, UK's definition of high-speed falls short of expectations. 200 km/h? What's that?

But the fact that Cambridge-London takes only 1 hour, with trains every half-hour, makes the commute between Cambridge and Imperial College like the commute between home and NTU. (!!)

Apparently, some Temasek Review contributor accused (unsurprisingly) the Singapore and Malaysian governments of wasting money and drawing attention to "sexy" projects while refusing to upgrade existing infrastructure. He probably never lived in the UK.

If for a moment we ignore the corruption, the poor internal security, the inefficiencies at the checkpoints, or even traffic grid-locks in a certain city, high speed rail is an extremely convenient way to travel. Singaporeans may whine somewhat if the venue for a gathering is Jurong West, or Woodlands, but no one would really refuse to go. Currently if CUMSA organizes a gathering in Singapore, the Malaysians are normally excluded, for logistical reasons. However, if the travel time could be cut to 2.5 hours -- equivalent of Katong-NTU -- then I believe the scale will suddenly tip in favour of attending. We could even organize it in KL for that matter.

Moreover, the TR writer forgets something -- does he imagine that the planners will be abysmally stupid enough to build a railway line to KL without stopping at Melaka? Or without extending it to Penang (at some point)? I can almost see the tourism revenues in both countries going up blindingly fast, and all the little stops long the line turning overnight into tourist hot spots. The ability to pick up and drop off passengers, while incurring a small time cost, would immensely increase the flexibility of travel.

I believe there are many positive externalities to having a high-speed railway. I think there is a time limit below which travel ceases to be a travel, but becomes a mere commute instead. The psychological barriers to commuting are far less than to travelling.

Currently, all the options for travel seem equally dreadful. The KL airport is far from town. Airlines are too strict and temperamental. They can cancel your flight, but you cannot miss their timing. The train is about just as fast as the bus. Long-distance driving by car is exhausting.

I would go as far as say that the railway should be subsidized to encourage intercity travel, with regular services every hour, for the simple reason that cheap travel opens up new economic opportunities and lowers costs. Cheap transport into cities was a major factor for the development of suburbs and the growth of cities, and HSR has the potential to further stimulate growth in both countries.

But to end off, I have to remove the assumptions made earlier... hm...

MetroCard

2011-04-12T23:28:00.001+08:00

It's 2011, 9 years since I received my ez-link card. I remember this clearly, because I lost* my student pass in primary school, and desperately needed the photo ez-link to take subsidized public transport. I was only ever issued the blue (secondary school) ez-link card, so it must have been 9 years ago, when I entered secondary school.

Well, 9 years ago, when New York was still using tokens to take trains, Singapore did away with the magnetic farecard (which we had been using since as early as I can remember taking public transport) and issued every student with an RFID-powered ez-link card.

Then, 7 years ago, or 2 years since Singapore introduced ez-link cards en masse and abolished the magnetic farecard, New York decided to make the switch from tokens, to a magnetic strip card. Groundbreaking move!... not.

If only that was the worst part. It isn't.

Perhaps it's a hangup over contactless cards. You know, about how your privacy may be invaded, or perhaps fearmongering by magnetic card special interests that people can track your location, deduct fares without your knowing it.

Still, magnetic strips wouldn't be half the problem they are if you didn't have to *manually* swipe your cards at the readers. Half the time, it does not work. Humans tend to swipe the cards with the wrong force/angle/pressure it seems.

"At least it's a smart card!" you might say, but hey, in London, the magnetic strip (National Rail tickets) coexists with the RFID (Oyster), and works better. The faregate takes your card, scans it without error, and spits the card back to you. New York MTA, it's 2011, and you expect your customers to swipe their own card? Why didn't you have machines "eat" the card and swipe the card on its own? Was it too hard back in 2003 to build machines that swiped magnetic cards at exactly the correct angle, speed and pressure? We had those machines on every bus in Singapore in the bygone days -- you couldn't fit similar machines in your metro system?

It's always kind of weird, I guess, that the most vibrant cities are not always the most technologically advanced cities.

Well, to NY's relative credit, Philadephia's still using tokens, which in my opinion, along with pennies and 2-pence coins, is an idiotic piece of technology.

* Lost? Actually it wasn't lost. Tell you a secret. When I first received my student pass in the early primary school years, I didn't know what it was for and promptly discarded it.

JUICY NEWS MUST BE KEPT SECRET

2011-04-11T08:08:00.002+08:00

i've signed a confidentiality agreement.

Iceland day 0

2011-03-19T17:13:00.000+08:00

After a long bus ride,

Suit

2011-02-18T07:58:00.000+08:00

Just recalled how donning a suit was one of the most loathsome things in Singapore. Hot, heavy, sweaty, expensive, dry-clean only... Long pants and sleeves were already bad enough. Ties further restricted air and blood circulation. Suits bake those wearing them.

Here, people wear it like it's nothing.

It's so different living where sweating is not the norm.

Rousseau

2011-01-29T00:15:00.000+08:00

Sometimes the unbelievers put the believers to shame:

Religion, considered in relation to society, which is either general or particular, may also be divided into two kinds: the religion of man, and that of the citizen. The first, which has neither temples, nor altars, nor rites, and is confined to the purely internal cult of the supreme God and the eternal obligations of morality, is the religion of the Gospel pure and simple, the true theism, what may be called natural divine right or law. The other, which is codified in a single country, gives it its gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its dogmas, its rites, and its external cult prescribed by law; outside the single nation that follows it, all the world is in its sight infidel, foreign and barbarous; the duties and rights of man extend for it only as far as its own altars. Of this kind were all the religions of early peoples, which we may define as civil or positive divine right or law.

There is a third sort of religion of a more singular kind, which gives men two codes of legislation, two rulers, and two countries, renders them subject to contradictory duties, and makes it impossible for them to be faithful both to religion and to citizenship. Such are the religions of the Lamas and of the Japanese, and such is Roman Christianity, which may be called the religion of the priest. It leads to a sort of mixed and anti-social code which has no name.

In their political aspect, all these three kinds of religion have their defects. The third is so clearly bad, that it is waste of time to stop to prove it such. All that destroys social unity is worthless; all institutions that set man in contradiction to himself are worthless.

The second is good in that it unites the divine cult with love of the laws, and, making country the object of the citizens' adoration, teaches them that service done to the State is service done to its tutelary god. It is a form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates. To die for one's country then becomes martyrdom; violation of its laws, impiety; and to subject one who is guilty to public execration is to condemn him to the anger of the gods: Sacer estod.

On the other hand, it is bad in that, being founded on lies and error, it deceives men, makes them credulous and superstitious, and drowns the true cult of the Divinity in empty ceremonial. It is bad, again, when it becomes tyrannous and exclusive, and makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant, so that it breathes fire and slaughter, and regards as a sacred act the killing of every one who does not believe in its gods. The result is to place such a people in a natural state of war with all others, so that its security is deeply endangered.

There remains therefore the religion of man or Christianity — not the Christianity of to-day, but that of the Gospel, which is entirely different. By means of this holy, sublime, and real religion all men, being children of one God, recognise one another as brothers, and the society that unites them is not dissolved even at death.

But this religion, having no particular relation to the body politic, leaves the laws in possession of the force they have in themselves without making any addition to it; and thus one of the great bonds that unite society considered in severally fails to operate. Nay, more, so far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the State, it has the effect of taking them away from all earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.

We are told that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. I see in this supposition only one great difficulty: that a society of true Christians would not be a society of men.

I say further that such a society, with all its perfection, would be neither the strongest nor the most lasting: the very fact that it was perfect would rob it of its bond of union; the flaw that would destroy it would lie in its very perfection.

Every one would do his duty; the people would be law-abiding, the rulers just and temperate; the magistrates upright and incorruptible; the soldiers would scorn death; there would be neither vanity nor luxury. So far, so good; but let us hear more.

Christianity as a religion is entirely spiritual, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christian is not of this world. He does his duty, indeed, but does it with profound indifference to the good or ill success of his cares. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to him whether things go well or ill here on earth. If the State is prosperous, he hardly dares to share in the public happiness, for fear he may grow proud of his country's glory; if the State is languishing, he blesses the hand of God that is hard upon His people.

For the State to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be good Christians; if by ill hap there should be a single self-seeker or hypocrite, a Catiline or a Cromwell, for instance, he would certainly get the better of his pious compatriots. Christian charity does not readily allow a man to think hardly of his neighbours. As soon as, by some trick, he has discovered the art of imposing on them and getting hold of a share in the public authority, you have a man established in dignity; it is the will of God that he be respected: very soon you have a power; it is God's will that it be obeyed: and if the power is abused by him who wields it, it is the scourge wherewith God punishes His children. There would be scruples about driving out the usurper: public tranquillity would have to be disturbed, violence would have to be employed, and blood spilt; all this accords ill with Christian meekness; and after all, in this vale of sorrows, what does it matter whether we are free men or serfs? The essential thing is to get to heaven, and resignation is only an additional means of doing so.

If war breaks out with another State, the citizens march readily out to battle; not one of them thinks of flight; they do their duty, but they have no passion for victory; they know better how to die than how to conquer. What does it matter whether they win or lose? Does not Providence know better than they what is meet for them? Only think to what account a proud, impetuous and passionate enemy could turn their stoicism! Set over against them those generous peoples who were devoured by ardent love of glory and of their country, imagine your Christian republic face to face with Sparta or Rome: the pious Christians will be beaten, crushed and destroyed, before they know where they are, or will owe their safety only to the contempt their enemy will conceive for them. It was to my mind a fine oath that was taken by the soldiers of Fabius, who swore, not to conquer or die, but to come back victorious — and kept their oath. Christians would never have taken such an oath; they would have looked on it as tempting God.

But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.

I shall be told that Christian troops are excellent. I deny it. Show me an instance. For my part, I know of no Christian troops. I shall be told of the Crusades. Without disputing the valour of the Crusaders, I answer that, so far from being Christians, they were the priests' soldiery, citizens of the Church. They fought for their spiritual country, which the Church had, somehow or other, made temporal. Well understood, this goes back to paganism: as the Gospel sets up no national religion, a holy war is impossible among Christians.

Under the pagan emperors, the Christian soldiers were brave; every Christian writer affirms it, and I believe it: it was a case of honourable emulation of the pagan troops. As soon as the emperors were Christian, this emulation no longer existed, and, when the Cross had driven out the eagle, Roman valour wholly disappeared.

But, setting aside political considerations, let us come back to what is right, and settle our principles on this important point. The right which the social compact gives the Sovereign over the subjects does not, we have seen, exceed the limits of public expediency.46 The subjects then owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions only to such an extent as they matter to the community. Now, it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion. That will make him love his duty; but the dogmas of that religion concern the State and its members only so far as they have reference to morality and to the duties which he who professes them is bound to do to others. Each man may have, over and above, what opinions he pleases, without it being the Sovereign's business to take cognisance of them; for, as the Sovereign has no authority in the other world, whatever the lot of its subjects may be in the life to come, that is not its business, provided they are good citizens in this life.

There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.47 While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.

Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect;48 and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforce priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.

Now that there is and can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. But whoever dares to say: Outside the Church is no salvation, ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a theocratic government; in any other, it is fatal. The reason for which Henry IV is said to have embraced the Roman religion ought to make every honest man leave it, and still more any prince who knows how to reason.

Loving God's Judgment and His Appearing?

2011-01-24T01:59:00.000+08:00

Will we Christians rejoice with the rest of creation at God's coming judgment? God help us...

Psa 96
10 Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns;
Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved;
He will judge the peoples with equity."
11 Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
Let the sea roar, and all it contains;
12 Let the field exult, and all that is in it
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy
13 Before the LORD, for He is coming,
For He is coming to judge the earth
He will judge the world in righteousness
And the peoples in His faithfulness.

2 Tim 4
8 in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.

Rev 22
... Come, Lord Jesus!

Religiosity

2011-01-09T04:44:00.000+08:00

What would you say to a Muslim who eats pork? Or Hindu who eats beef? Or a Catholic who instructs the pop on morality?

What would you say to a Christian who is not "religious"? For God demands "my life, my all".

You who ask, "Why have you become more religious," read what's below (and indeed, there's more, if only time and space permitted), and ask the other, "Why are you so irreligious?"

You, Christian, what have you believed in? 50-50?
Part One

================

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me;
and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. (Matt 10:37-38)
================
And (the young man) said to Him, "Teacher, I have kept all these things (the commandments: Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, honour your father and your mother) from my youth up."
Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him,
"One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." (Mark 10:21)
================
For kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matt 13:44)
================
No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. (Luk 9:62)
================
I have been crucified with Christ; and
it is no longer I who live,
but Christ lives in me; and
the life which I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself up for me. (Gal 2:20)
================
For you were bought at a price: therefore glorify God in your body (1 Cor 6:20)

But the point is this: that when you consider what God has done for us, what ought you do?
Part Two

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For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another (Gal 6:13)

================

For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth,

there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a

terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.

...

How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who

has trampled under foot the Son of God, and
has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and
has insulted the Spirit of grace? (Heb 10:26, 29)

================

Our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds. (Tit 2:14)

================

If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practise the truth. (1 Jn 1:6)

List of countries by English-speaking population

2010-12-03T06:41:00.000+08:00

From this:

Rank	Country	First language
1	United States	214,809,000^[21]
2	United Kingdom	58,200,000^[22]
3	Canada	18,232,195^[23]
...
10	Trinidad and Tobago	1,145,000
11	Singapore	884,418^[29]
12	Guyana	650,000
...
66	Guadeloupe	200
67	Saint Pierre and Miquelon	188
68	Niue	78
69	Pitcairn	46
70	Tokelau	40
71	East Timor	30

What? 30 speakers in East Timor?
I can understand why Pitcairn has 46: the population's only 50 (according to Wikipedia).

Who was so damn sure that in a country of ONE MILLION people there are only 30 (thirty, three zero) native speakers of English? Can you name them? Come on, if you can tell me there are thirty of them you can probably name them.

For your information, there are about 750 letters and punctuation marks in this post. Multiply that by 1,333 and that will give you 1,000,000.

For comparison, there are thirty dots in the next line (that's the number of native English speakers in Timor Leste):
..... ..... ..... ..... ..... .....

everything looks better with some snow

2010-11-27T18:05:00.001+08:00

Eph 2

2010-11-25T07:49:00.000+08:00

1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Important Answer to the (Rightfully) Irrelevant Question

2010-11-01T07:47:00.004+08:00

Which denomination are you from?

I'm a Christian just as you are!

Is Christ divided? Was the Presbytery crucified for you? Were you baptized into the Local Church Movement*?

What can be a better reply? Oh, for more wisdom to see beyond earthly divisions!

* Particular for the local church movement, it's often feels weird to say "I'm from the Church in XXX" and then to receive a reply "which Church?", which is still pointless division. Yet supposing we really believe in a single Church, then it's more logical to make the stand from the start.

** The question can be circumvented by asking "which church do you go to?" But it can be countered by picking on the loose usage of the term "church". It would not prevent the "Church in XXX/Which Church?" conundrum but still gets the more important point across first.

*** Is it irrelevant? Don't I need to know your beliefs and practices? Yes, it is, but among those who are weak it is hardly the most pressing issue. Among those who are strong(er), it is far too simplistic to think you can generalize his/her beliefs with a one-word description.

The Falling and Yellowing Autumn Leaves

2010-10-30T18:51:00.000+08:00

Most leaves are still green. The grass is still green. Bushes outside my accommodation are still green.

But the leaves are piling up in ever increasing amounts.

Writing

2010-10-29T05:10:00.000+08:00

I cannot explain it, but I have lost the will to write.

Should I rant about how expensive food (and just about everything!) is here (in the UK)?
Should I rant about how crazy their drinking culture is?
Should I rant about how slowly the coursework is picking up in a place as prestigious as CU?
Should I rant about how hard it is to find free wireless networks outside of Singapore?
Should I rant about how slow customs was at Heathrow?
Should I rant about how I argued with a professor about gravity?
Should I rant about how poorly equipped the building is where I live?
Should I rant about the weather? The heating?

Should I rant about the student newspapers? The UK newspapers? The injustices in the welfare cuts? The people who complain about the cuts?

But I don't see a need to. It's not worth my time. Not they are all unimportant -- some are important. Perhaps without GP -- a paper that forces you to critique and pick a stand -- I could not be bothered at all about stuff going on around me.

Perhaps it is the recognition that nothing is simple. Once you have heard the SAF oldies speak about organizations, people and society, you can hardly keep an ideal.

Perhaps it is realizing that nothing that comes your way happens by chance.

Without Murmuring or Questioning

2010-10-27T06:11:00.000+08:00

Phil 2 (14) Do all things without murmurings and questionings, (15) that ye may become blameless and harmless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye are seen as lights in the world.

Drinking parties

2010-10-22T05:49:00.000+08:00

3For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. 4They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you.

On the one hand, I remember these words when they offer me a drink, or invite me to a club.

On the other hand, I hope it is not simply my excuse for my anti-social nature.

Still,

7The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.

English English

2010-10-08T06:41:00.000+08:00

I think I know what's the problem. In Singapore, Singlish is our informal register while English is our formal register. They are strictly divided between work and play, and never overlap.

On the other hand, in the UK (and possibly elsewhere), English is both the formal and informal register. For us, the challenge is in talking normally and casually in a register that we have only used in formal occasions before. The accent is not the problem -- CMIO all have different accents anyway, but we understand one another -- but the ang moh accent is a hint that this person does not understand Singlish, and a fallback to proper English is required, whereupon we freeze up.

Same with China Chinese, even Malaysian Chinese. Mandarin + English jargon is the norm among Chinese-speaking Singaporeans (don't believe? Who in Singapore actually says 公积金?). But when we hear someone speaking impeccable Mandarin (in any accent -- China, or even the almost undetectable Malaysian accent), it is a hint that this person may not understand English jargon and it is time to fall back to proper Mandarin, whereupon we trip up for lack of technical vocabulary.

This is my theory.

Whatever the case, it is so relaxing to unfreeze my tongue just by speaking to a Singaporean, Malaysian or even Chinese students who had studied in Singapore. It is like taking off a stuffy suit and putting on T-shirts and berms.

Oh, Cambridge

2010-10-07T04:30:00.000+08:00

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,

And all these things shall be added unto you.

THAT shall be my study technique.

camp

2010-09-24T20:31:00.002+08:00

i am going to a camp far far away
it is on a remote island
14 hours away
the confinement is 8 weeks long,
with a high probability of extra duty
the liability is for 4 years
for that the government gives
a monthly allowance
i won't carry a rifle
the pen's mightier than the sword
nights off are restricted to the island
but it's a big island
oh, and nights off are given daily
i bunk in an ulu spot
removed from urban hustle
i cannot cabut
because it is my duty
or else government will make me
pay and pay
hampir setengah mati
i shall return
worn and weary
aged
with one more piece of paper
to my name

Old Hong Kong Stamps and Commorative Stamps

2010-09-24T16:27:00.000+08:00

From my grand-aunt. Available for sale, negotiable. Anyone keen?

Backing Up Email

2010-09-13T20:16:00.000+08:00

How long does it take to backup your Microsoft Outlook Email?

Regularly? Unobtrusively?

It turns out that Microsoft Outlook stores its data in ONE BIG FILE. Doing daily backups of ONE BIG FILE is not a wise idea, especially if your backup disk is only 500GB and your BIG FILE is already 1GB.

If I had a system based on binary diffs, it would have worked, but I didn't. I was using Cobian Backup instead. Its an excellent piece of software, but its concept of incremental backup does not mean backing up just the differences, but only the files that differ, which means it is not as space efficient as Subversion could be.

I had to revisit a NS-time project where I had to make it super-duper easy to make email backups. With the prior experience, I re-wrote the script in one afternoon. Tomorrow, I have to tweak the script to save the email store onto the backup disk.
=====
During my NS, we had one PC where we kept all our files, all our emails and all our templates. Without our files, emails and templates, we would not be able to refer to past conversations and we would be totally at a loss what to do.

Of course, when the PC started to crash perhaps once every week, the regulars started to get worried. Then they realized, of course, that they could NOT transfer the old data anywhere. The LAN was locked down tight. There was no way to share files and folders, except via the public folders that provided a puny 50MB of space. To get an example of how puny it was, two months' worth of emails, IIRC, is already about 100MB in size.

In short, a network solution was impossible. We had to transfer files via a thumbdrive. Anything that requires plugging in the same thumbdrive into two different computers requires time. Time requires discipline. Security is also a concern, so the thumbdrives have to be scanned for viruses, and scanning requires even more discipline. And finally, the overbearing security consciousness of the SAF meant that a proper backup made to another account (just in case the original IT smart card was lost/ destroyed/ damaged) had to be first decrypted, then re-encrypted. One slight mistake in the process and the entire file becomes useless. The most convenient way, therefore, was to not backup altogether. In short, backups were rarely done. Even a macro to simplify the unnecessarily complicated Archive Folders... dialog box could not help much.

So in a network like AMS's, where security is virtually non-existent, the trade-off is that back-ups can be done very easily. Is that a good trade-off?

linux

2010-09-04T22:39:00.001+08:00

i have to eat my words...

Ubuntu 10.4 is a good alternative to Presto or Windows XP+AVG+AVG scheduled scans when I need Internet access *fast*.

It is also far easier to install and use Subversion on Ubuntu than on Windows.

But the preference ends (and must end) here.

Upsetting the Ethnic Balance

2010-09-03T13:52:00.000+08:00

The ethnic makeup of Singapore has hardly changed. The government had used migration to compensate for slow reproductive rates in certain ethnic groups by bringing in migrants of similar ethnicity. It's quite telling when the government needs to pull in hoards of PRC Chinese and ROI Indians even while "it is not easy to attract Malay or pribumi talent from Southeast Asia," and the ethnic makeup stays the same.

Visa Application

2010-09-02T12:05:00.000+08:00

In most of our travels, we (referring to Singaporeans) just take our passport and go. Visas are generally unheard of, unless you want to work or study overseas. The visa application today reminded me of this and made me so glad I am holding a Singapore passport.

This is especially true if a visa application requires passports to be sent to an embassy in a different country. Imagine the risk if it something should happen to it. Imagine the time wasted at application centres, and being confined to your country until your passport returns to you. Imagine the visa application fees.

Yes, Singapore is a great place to live and work, even though "the majority of netizens" might disagree, and its passports are one of the best of its kind; not that there aren't any bad things about the current establishment, or that it is perfect, or that there are no reasons for discontent, or that the budgeting has always been as tight as we could wish, or that the salaries paid to politicians are generally acceptable... but as far as we can "live peacefully and quietly in all godliness and holiness" (1 Tim 2:1), it is a wonderful thing.

As we count our blessings in Singapore, I want to remember 2 Cor 8: Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time, your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, as it is written, "He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little."

To give to the churches which lack, in our time of plenty...

Time Check

2010-08-30T14:10:00.000+08:00

It is 13:50 as I begin to write this.

PM made his rally speech last night, which was not over until 10pm.

Amazingly, Temasek Review already knew that "the majority of netizens" are unimpressed by PM's speech. Wow! Did they start a poll? When did it start? 10 PM? When did it end? 7AM? Was the poll open while normal people were awake and using their computers/ iPhones? Were they able to solicit even 20, maybe 30 comments from these "netizens"?

Sure, "voicing dissent is not unpatriotic; it is our duty." Sure. If this is biased, untruthful reporting, so is claiming that the "majority of netizens" have a certain opinion of PM's speech, without having done a proper poll. What netizens? How many netizens? When? What about "netizens" who make less noise? At least claim that initial comments from netizens writing in to TR are unimpressed. Highlight that one of the comments source is your main website -- not that the people who visit your website necessarily have a biased viewpoint, but you know the demographics of your own visitors. Make it clear that it was TR netizens only -- not TOC netizens, for example.

Yes, you included your sources, but they were right at the end of the page. And that does not change the fact that the first sentence was a misleading comment.

I have no problem with the rest of the article. It is Temask Review and I know what to expect. But it is the first sentence that is offending. If that was the true voice of Singapore, then Singaporeans are truly idiots at surveys and statistics.

Good "Instant" Coffee

2010-08-23T09:13:00.001+08:00

This beats all the 3-in-ones! (Raiding the MOH Ops Centre pantry at least 1x per day.)

Google Docs -- the Good and Bad

2010-08-18T00:06:00.000+08:00

So it came to pass that I was to be stuck many days and many hours in an Ops Centre (again), although this time, I am a civilian and not an owner of the Ops Room. I am a contractor.

It is not a 24-hr Ops Room, but the work lasts from 7am to 11pm. The beauty of 24-hr Ops Rooms is that the same computer can accumulate plenty of dust from being handed over from A to B to A to B and so on. My ADG Ops Room PC had amazing uptimes despite running Windows XP. In general only my programming and the other crazy things I did on it could crash it.

Of course, 24-hr duty cycles are tiring. But in a 16-hour Ops Room with strangers and intruders, as a matter of principle you simply have to take the computer with you when you leave. If A does the morning shifts and B the evening shifts, then both must have separate laptops, otherwise B will take the laptop from A and A will be left without a FLOP the next day.

That's when Google Docs became so charming. Since having two laptops is inevitable, we needed a way to synchronize data, even while isolated from the company LAN and from the other person's computer. A thumbdrive will not do -- A could transfer to B, but B will not be able to transfer data to A the next day (without defeating the shift system). Emailing works, only when you have enough computer literacy going around and enough patience to do manual version control. (B->A: These are the most updated files as of 17 Aug 11:46. B->A: Oh no! There is an amendment to XXX.doc as of 17 Aug 11:47. A->B: There is a mistake in ...)

That's the beauty of Google Docs (or cloud computing in general) -- we share the same timetable, the same contact list, the same to-do list -- everything is synchronized. I update the stand-up timings, he updates the stand-down timings. I amend the contact list and everyone sees the corrected number. I can access the data from home while he updates it from work. We have migrated the eternal uptime of a permanent 24-hr PC to Google's 99.9% uptime servers.

Granted, it's not as easy to use. I still need my PivotTables and Autofilters. Also with an unstable 3G broadband shared among 6+ users, it is slow. On the other hand, speed issues aside, we don't analyze data everyday so I can always postpone the date on which I export the GSpreadsheet to Excel to generate the PivotTable. But when that happens, I have left the realm of cloud computing and entered into version control hell. (pivottable 10 Aug.xls, pivottable 12 Aug.xls, pivottable 12 Aug (2).xls, ...) Autofilters? Ah well, it sucks not having filters but that's just too bad. I hide the offending rows. As far as data entry in tabular form is concerned, an online spreadsheet does the job reasonably well. Just. keep. hiding. old. data. Delay processing the data until the end.

In short, it has been a rough experience, but I'm thankful that there was a solution.

After all, I have not paid a cent for it.

(which leads one to wonder how GOOG makes money out of it, how much supernormal profits it must be making from advertising, and how sustainable this whole cloud computing business is...)

Colossians

2010-08-11T23:12:00.000+08:00

Was going through 1 Cor 8 in the Wed pursuit, and remembered a verse vaguely. Flipping (as literally as it can be done on a mobile phone) through the Bible I landed on Colossians 2 (1 Tim is similar but not quite):

16Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day--

17things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.

18Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,

19and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.

20If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as,

21"Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!"

22(which all refer to things destined to perish with use)--in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?

23These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence

Would you see that it is not a matter of saying grace, eating fish, flagellation or fes tiv als etc.?

Excel Formulaics

2010-08-07T12:48:00.000+08:00

People deluded by the benefits of the command line and regular expressions may not realize that alternatives are possible on Windows, without using Cygwin or the Command Prompt. No, not using VIM for Windows either.

We think ourselves extremely smart when we do this in VIM:

Apples
Oranges
Kiwis
Bananas

>> :s/^(.*)$/<li>$1</li>

Giving us:

<li>Apples</li>

<li>Oranges</li>
<li>Kiwis</li>
<li>Bananas</li>

Giving me:

<li>Apples</li> <li>Oranges</li> <li>Kiwis</li> <li>Bananas</li>

Oh yea. Well done. You know Regex. Bravo. Brilliant. But it could have been done relatively simply in Excel, without having to man sed, man perlre, or anything of that sort.

Consider the following:

	A	B	C	D
1	<li>	Apples	</li>	=CONCATENATE(B4,C4,D4)
2	<li>	Oranges	</li>	=CONCATENATE(B5,C5,D5)
3	<li>	Kiwis	</li>	=CONCATENATE(B6,C6,D6)
4	<li>	Bananas	</li>	=CONCATENATE(B7,C7,D7)

With this method, I copy D1:D4 to Notepad, and voila, the HTML <LI> elements are formed:

<li>Apples</li> <li>Oranges</li> <li>Kiwis</li> <li>Bananas</li>

The benefits of using Excel:

No funny markup required (s//, m//). No need for funny flags (//g, //i). No need to count brackets ($1, $2). Just a handy formula sheet.
Formatting functions are available for you. The program is smart enough to understand Dates, Times, and Numbers. (=TEXT( [value], [format] ) )
Compared to Perl/ sed, you get to see your intermediate results, without much complications, without having to dig deep into the Regex syntax to understand your code. No lengthy debugging.
Compared to VIM, you get to preserve your intermediate results, anywhere in a spreadsheet with 65,536 rows x 256 columns. No more lengthy undos.
Compared to VIM, because of the previous benefit, you can even merge multiple intermediate results.
Finally, compared to all other command line options, the process is visible.

A slightly more complicated example:

NRIC Checker. e.g.

[cell2]: MID([cell], 2, 1) * 2 + MID([cell], 3,1) * 7 + ... MID([cell], 8,1) * 2 , 11)

[cell3]: MOD(cell2,11)

[cell4]: MID("ABCDEFGHIZJ", 11 - [cell3], 1)

[cell5]: if ([cell4] = MID([cell], 9, 1), "Valid", "Invalid")

Isn't that clear? And simple? Excel is almost like a programming interface. The cells are variables. Formulas in cells are functions. Because all the intermediate results are displayed on screen, it's super-easy to debug. At the same time you can just "hide" the entire column to make your spreadsheet more presentable. Text processing has never been easier.

Another example, which showcases the "power" when Excel's text processing and number crunching are combined:

	A	B	C
1	Al Bo	Dn Chu	$55
2	Al Bo	Dn Fr	$50
3	Bo Chu	Al Dn	$45
4	Chu Fr	Dn Bo	$40

Where Al, Bo, Chu, Dn and Fr are persons. The task now is to pay Al $55 for every cell in the first row with his name in it, $50 for every cell in the second row with his name and so on. How should it be done?

I used Excel's COUNTIF function. The syntax: COUNTIF( , )

I wished the following was possible (but it wasn't):
COUNTIF(A1:C4, CONTAINS("Al"))

But I could duplicate the values in the cells:

	D	E
1	=CONCATENATE(" ", A1, " ")	=CONCATENATE(" ", B1, " ")
2	=CONCATENATE(" ", A2, " ")	=CONCATENATE(" ", B2, " ")
3	=CONCATENATE(" ", A3, " ")	=CONCATENATE(" ", B3, " ")
4	=CONCATENATE(" ", A4, " ")	=CONCATENATE(" ", B4, " ")

This pads all the original values of the cells with spaces before and after. This is so I can match the cells with
=COUNTIF( [cells] , "* Al *")

Finally, I the count of each row by the price:
=COUNTIF( D1:E1 , "* Al *") * C1
=COUNTIF( D2:E2 , "* Al *") * C2
=COUNTIF( D3:E3 , "* Al *") * C3
=COUNTIF( D4:E4 , "* Al *") * C4

I sum the above values, and pay Al the total.

Conclusion: Excel rocks, even if you don't have VIM/ Perl/ sed. OpenOffice works just fine too.

2010-07-20T18:50:00.000+08:00

Row rages over defining who is a Jew

Who is a Jew? The full answer has always had somewhat blurred edges.

Birthright, ethnicity, conversion to Judaism and religious practice have all contributed, but doubt and confusion have persisted for generations.

In Israel uncertainty has excluded more than a quarter of million people, who think they are Jewish, from full membership.

This has horrified the huge and influential Jewish diaspora, particularly Jews living in the US - about half of the Jews in the world - because they see that the implications of this bill are limitless. All Jewish births, marriages and deaths - the right to decide who is Jewish - will reside with a small group of ultra-orthodox rabbis in Israel.

Rabbis in the diaspora will lose their religious authority at the stroke of a pen.
'Crossed the line'

Jerry Silverman, the head of the Jewish Federation, which represents Jews in the US, says: "This is a very, very divisive piece of legislation that crosses the line. This is something that we cannot, and will not, sit back and see happen."

He and others in the Jewish diaspora are furiously lobbying the Israeli government and warning of the effects that the proposed bill might have.

Nehemiah 13

1 On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever come into the assembly of God, 2 because they had not met the children of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them. However, our God turned the curse into a blessing. 3 So it was, when they had heard the Law, that they separated all the mixed multitude from Israel.

Router Hell

2010-07-11T22:58:00.000+08:00

I bought some routers/ access points some time ago to deliver connectivity to the whole house. (Yea, it's too big.) Today, the routers are aging. They are:

Linksys WAP54G (a bad choice) with DD-WRT
Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT
Belkin router (terrible choice... no custom firmware and crashes often)

Recently, the two Linksys routers refused to talk to each other over WDS. My printer could not print, and connectivity in the second floor was compromised.

I managed to devise a solution that creates two wireless networks, and a Private LAN within a Private LAN:

Internet -- 192.168.2.* - 192.168.1.*

It's a disgusting solution that would also wreck all UPnP/DMZ apps. But since MSN now uses a file transfer server, I guess it doesn't matter?

Response

2010-07-10T21:25:00.000+08:00

Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind. - Phi 3:15

PSC OBS

2010-07-10T19:06:00.000+08:00

What a span of three days.

I thought I spread enough insect repellent, but they still attacked the parts of my hand where it was spread too thin. In fact, I used my right hand to squeeze repellent onto my left hand, so my right hand got it worst. The cunning sandflies.

Time for myself to shut up

2010-07-06T22:15:00.002+08:00

Unless you absolutely insist. Because it is getting pointless, isn't it?

But if you turn again,

I thank God that my words do not convince you now, lest my little knowledge gains any glory. But if you do return, then God has done his marvellous work in you. Because my words can never convince. In fact, knowledge and wisdom as you know it can never convince you, except the power of the Spirit, because that is how we were saved.

* But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Gentiles foolishness.

Has reason died for you? Was reason nailed to the cross for you? Was reason resurrected from the dead? Does reason give you eternal life? No! But Christ has and will do so. Even if this does not give me "joy" as you think of it, this gives me more satisfaction than knowing that everything I do has taken place after thorough reasoning.

Do I reject reason? With the affairs of the world, no. But with the affairs of God, yes I must. Not because my reasoning is any bad, but because it is limited, and I concede God's wisdom to be greater. And "unless [I] abide in [Him], [I] can do nothing".

Do I know what I'm going to get? No. But by faith, Abraham went out of the land of Ur to a land he did not know. And by faith, other Christians (whom I know) have run the race, fought the fight. And thus being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, do I know what I am going to get?

What newness of life do I expect? One that walks in the Spirit. Expresses the glory of Christ. Demonstrate, by my living, God's nature and righteousness. To understand and do the will of the Father.

* Because "only He who does the will of the Father [will enter the kingdom of heaven]"

Do I know what I'm abandoning? Yes... Liberty. To choose anything of my own accord.

But again I concede that at times, even oftentimes, I will lapse into my self. That is why we won't see a perfect Church, or at best only for short periods of time. That is also why we look at one another (or when we look at the state that some Christians are in) we are disappointed. Moreover many in the Church are immature and non-believers might not be able to see the Church as the light of the world. But God is cleansing the Church with the water of the word -- and we ought to strive higher and better and press on. And the Church continues to encourage one another to fight this fight.

Google the Ultimate Monopoly

2010-06-30T10:41:00.002+08:00

Successes:

Google Search
Google Mail
Google Translate
to some extent, Google Talk, because of GMail integration

Failures:

Nexus One
Google Docs
Google Buzz
Google Wave
Other things you've never heard of

Predicted Failures (Personal List):

Chrome OS
Google TV

Yet these guys can continue developing, developing, developing...
Spending hours and hours with hardly any probability of success.
Or let's put it this way, success, maybe. But business plan, none at all.
Some people describe it this way: throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick.

How can a company survive without a proper business plan? (See the Google Chrome OS video. Brin has no business motive for the OS. He just hopes that this OS will be useful. I don't know whether to believe him, but I am very sure this spaghetti won't be sticky)
How can it employ so many people, spend so many resources, without the hope of making money?
Because it is already making big bucks.

In simple economics, the barriers to entry to Google's existing position in search makes Google exceptionally dominant in the market. It has enormous supernormal profits -- in terms of both time and money. It has so much supernormal profits that they can afford to waste people's time, money and effort doing projects that are not profitable, and still make a profit.

Surprisingly, no one's complaining. But competition watchdogs could take note of this.

Joke of Two Cities

2010-06-28T08:37:00.002+08:00

Encountered this joke:

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: "The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur."

We know that the original word (in English) is "the LORD", but it has been changed to "Monseigneur". Isn't this a change of a proper noun? So where is the pronoun?

Dickens assumed here that since in English, the original went "the Lord" (not noticing LORD and Lord are different), it will be directly translated to French, "le seigneur". The replacement of the article with a pronoun, the possessive "mon" ("my"), would give "mon seigneur", which he then rendered as "Monseigneur", which was now coincidentally the same as the honorific title given to this aristocrat.

One problem: In French, it wasn't written as "le seigneur".

In English translations, the Hebrew YHWH is translated "the LORD", while "the Lord" was used for ADN.

But in French translations, YHWH isn't rendered as le seigneur but as l'Éternal (at least in recent translations). So if Monseigneur really said,

"A Monseigneur la terre et ce qu'elle renferme."

instead of

"A l'Éternal la terre et ce qu'elle renferme."

It would have been a change of a proper noun, not a pronoun. In other words it would have been an obvious case of blasphemy, not an innocuous change of a pronoun.

So if you only knew English, you wouldn't get the joke. You would think it was a change of a proper noun.

But if you read a French version of the joke, you wouldn't get it either. You would think that it was also a change of a proper noun.

You will need a half-past-six command of French (comme moi), a mind that thinks in and translates from English, and familiarity only with the English Bible. (Like Dickens?)

For whom he foreknew

2010-06-27T16:01:00.003+08:00

... He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son ...

ergo we are not yet in the (full) image of Him.

But the question is, "To what extent are we in the image of God?"

You may perhaps know why I am asking this question.

A search on the word "image", and the results (showing only relevant results):

Origin of Likeness
Genesis 1:26
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Genesis 1:27
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

The Likeness Inherited
Genesis 5:3
And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

The Likeness to God Affirmed
Genesis 9:6
“ Whoever sheds man’s blood,By man his blood shall be shed; For in the image of God He made man.
1 Corinthians 11:7
For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.

But still not a perfect image
Romans 8:29
For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
2 Corinthians 3:18
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
1 Corinthians 15:49
And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.

Christ being the better image of God
2 Corinthians 4:4
whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.
Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
Hebrews 1:3
who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

The old image needs to be renewed in knowledge
Colossians 3:10
and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him,

Of Law and Medicine

2010-06-26T21:46:00.002+08:00

I was staring at the photos and wondering why I was not there.

Is it my loss? My gain? Or for an equally good alternative that I am not there?

Of course, it is ridiculous to think that I could even be in both if I really wanted to.

But some part of me seems cut off from those places. I think I might want to be there after all.

Nonsense. Clearly I'm desiring to be where people will go "ooh" and "aah" after learning that I am there.

Either that, or I'm having difficulty absorbing the fact that I will have to engage their services at some point in the future. Perhaps a Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory refusing to be see a doctor because he would rather believe in self-treatment than be treated by "inferior minds".

(What are you thinking?! You think all of them are of inferior mind to yours?!) Good question. How could I even bring myself to think such an arrogant thought?

Or perhaps wondering about what I might think when engaging their services in the future. I could have gone down your path, rich man, but I chose this ---- road instead.

That is not good. It's not good to be that competitive, even if I can't help thinking of it that way and rationalizing it to be the opposite. You can't be your own lawyer, doctor, engineer all at the same time. Or perhaps, one could... But it would be far more efficient to just rely on others when you need them, and let them rely on you when they need you. After all, you don't need a doctor 24 / 7 do you?

Even LKY had GKS.

What are you living for anyway??

======================

That I may be contented with my lot.

And finish this sojourn.

Living By Faith

2010-06-21T00:18:00.002+08:00

SSF shared how she would pray to God to wake herself up in time for morning watch, i.e. to not rely on her own strength but rely on God's faithfulness.

Tried it on Saturday night. Told God, make me wake up at the time you want. But then, I wanted to set an alarm for the next day, just in case God didn't wake me up, or I simply overslept. But after setting the alarm, I felt it was not right to not trust God, and by faith I cancelled the alarm.

The next day I woke at 7am, way in advance of the 8.30am I would have set my alarm to. Praise the Lord!

But... I cannot imagine living by faith this way (i.e. not setting alarms) when school resumes, or after turning in very late, or after an offence that draws me far from God. Can I live without setting my alarm clock for the next 365 days of my life? Even 30 days? 7 days? Can I trust God to wake me up, not only in time for the next day's activities, but also morning watch?

I mean, Sunday morning is "just church meeting" right? Punctuality "isn't that important". Moreover, I can fall back on so many people - my grandmother, my sister, my mother - to wake me up in case I lapse, and there is no direct physical punishment for being late. Whereas lateness at school results in demerit points -- a bad testimony too.

Tonight, I'm turning in late, as you can probably see. Alarm / no alarm?

Goodbye, Linux

2010-06-12T23:06:00.000+08:00

It was fun having you around, yet at the same time, you were a pain. There was once when I harboured a thought that you might perhaps overtake the world. Then I thought maybe you weren't that great a Desktop system, so I thought you might be a good programming platform.

After all, you had VIM. Then I thought Notepad++ was easier.

Today I don't care. Disappear! Do I need a webserver? I have XAMPP and XSP/Mono. They are sufficient for programming needs, while my blog is sufficient for webserver needs. Have you heard of VB? It runs on Windows too!

Do I want to run Wine? Ah, I might as well run Windows!

Do I want to run Qemu? Maybe, but as most platforms that run on it are experimental, so are you.

What do I want from you? K3B to burn CDs? Perhaps -- that's something that Windows does not have. But as for everything else,
- Digital cameras - you lose
- Camcorders - you lose
- Music players - you lose
- Webcams - you lose
- Bluetooth - you barely make it. Actually, since I want Nokia Maps, you lose
- Audio formats and players - you lose
- Backlight compatibility (Intel iMac) - you lose
- MSN - (what? Pidgin?) you lose.
- Speed of GUI - with GTK, you lose
- Web browsers - Windows has Chrome, IE AND Firefox, and Firefox on Windows is faster than on GTK. Have you heard? Windows has Safari too! You lose.
- Microsoft Office - Drunk with wine? Non merci. You lose
- Network stability/ Wifi stability - You lose
- Movie player - you lose
- Equation editor - you lose. I'm not TeX-ing my equations. Not yet.

In fact, you gave me more pain. I still have flac files that I need to convert to (horror!) MP3.

To be honest, I cannot find any reason to boot into you. There is still much for me to learn, but currently I'm not trying to learn. The dark Gentoo days are far, far behind me.

I might let you remain as a loopback device on my NTFS partition. But, be warned! You are a loopback file. Misbehave, and the Delete key is all it takes to wipe out all memory of your existence.

Mundane

2010-06-10T23:33:00.002+08:00

Some of the mundane things I did today:

Jump-started the Toyota Camry. With my sister and aunt gone, there aren't enough people to keep the cars running and their batteries charged.
Discovered that jump-starting petrol engines is so much easier than jump-starting diesel engines. (I guess sparks require less energy than a compression-induced explosion).
Went aghast at the homework from Cambridge, titled Preparing for the Week 1 Lego Mindstorms Exercise. That is in addition to Preparatory Problems. I haven't touched either.
Uninstalled Ubuntu from my mother's laptop. There was a time I slipped in an Ubuntu installation on every laptop that entered my household. No longer. Disk space is more important today. It was precisely because I learnt that there was only 70+ MB left of disk space on the laptop that I decided to uninstall Ubuntu. In any case, I can always reinstall Ubuntu using Wubi if I really want to use it one day.
Wondered why NS.sg doesn't confirm whether I really wanted to take my IPPT on 3 July.
Wondered how I'm going to finish the ePrep courses by August at this rate. French Level 4 and 5 were added to the Rosetta stone course midway through my subscription, and it is only there where things started to get interesting. I'm not busy, but sufficiently occupied to be unable to sit through the courses.

A random potpourri

2010-06-07T23:51:00.002+08:00

⁶ “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

That's ridiculously often, or is it not? May we have such love for God's word!

⁹ Rejoice, O young man, in your youth,
And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth;
Walk in the ways of your heart,
And in the sight of your eyes;
But know that for all these
God will bring you into judgment.
¹⁰ Therefore remove sorrow from your heart,
And put away evil from your flesh,
For childhood and youth are vanity.
¹ Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth,
Before the difficult days come,
And the years draw near when you say,
“ I have no pleasure in them”:

How easy is it for an old man to love God? I speak of somebody I know.

Can you aspire to be like prophet Daniel? But the whole story of Daniel began when he was only a youth.
Can you aspire to be like Joseph? It also began when he was a mere youth.
David? Samuel? Solomon?

Of course, there are those like Job and Paul, but even for them, they laid their foundations early.

It takes years to grow in the Lord. What do you do if you looked back and saw that your last 50 years had been spent entirely devoted to the earthly businesses? Perhaps now you are retired, and you have all the time to devote to God. But you are also frail, easily tired; your eyesight's failing, your mind's getting blunt, and worst of all, you are still spiritually immature!

Even now, I might say that "I have faith" that God will pave the way for me to grow in him for the rest of my life. At 21, I can say that with much patience. If I were 80, I'd be impatient! Talk about instant gratification: at 80, nearing my end, I would want religious instant gratification more than somebody from the "instant noodle" generation!

I suppose that, as a member of Christ's body, the old man still has his function. The Church is not complete without him, inasmuch as it is not complete without the servant who buried his one talent, but a talent that is buried is a talent buried.

This is not meant to condemn anybody. Let us rather mourn. Let this also not be a display of arrogance from a youth, but a severe warning for myself and those who read this blog.

Fuel Injector

2010-06-06T20:38:00.002+08:00

My family uses a few cars. Why we need 4 cars is a story I'm not going to touch on.

Of the cars, my favourite is the 1.6 Altis. Compared to Camry or BMW (and especially the BMW. I'm not sure which model it is... I just dislike it) its windows are more low-set, giving the driver and excellent view of his surroundings. In particular, unlike the Prius, Camry or the new Lancers GLX, where the boots are so high they impair the view from the rear-view mirror, the Altis has a relatively low boot.

Its acceleration sucks. On top of that, one of its tyres cannot hold pressures above 160 kPa, i.e. we (in my family, that means I) have to pump it every few days. But its small size and fuel efficiency makes it nice to use.

But the most curious thing about this 4-speed automatic is that at highway speeds (i.e. at gear 4 and 70 km/h - ~~120~~90 km/h) it starts whistling, albeit very softly. This whistling disappears if I lift my foot off the accelerator. If I happen to be stepping on the accelerator at a certain critical point, such that the car is moving at constant speed, the whistling will start to stutter, as though it was trying to maintain a certain balance between the periods of acceleration to keep the car at constant speed.

More importantly, the frequency of the whistling sound increases with speed. Because I am able to identify the note it is whistling, I can also tell when I'm hitting ~~more than 10 km/h above~~ the speed limit, without looking at the speedometer.

My guess is that the whistling comes from the fuel injector, firstly because its presence depends on my stepping hard enough on the accelerator, and secondly because its pitch is dependent on speed, and fuel injector are supposed to inject only once every engine cycle (which at a constant gear is proportional to speed). So I prepared this table to see if the frequency is directly related to the engine speed.

	Hz	1000 RPM
C#	17.32	1.04
D	18.35	1.1
D#	19.45	1.17
E	20.6	1.24
F	21.83	1.31
F#	23.12	1.39
G	24.5	1.47
G#	25.96	1.56
A	27.5	1.65
A#	29.14	1.75
B	30.87	1.85
C	32.7	1.96
C#	34.65	2.08
D	36.71	2.2
D#	38.89	2.33
E	41.2	2.47
F	43.65	2.62
F#	46.25	2.77
G	49	2.94
G#	51.91	3.11

The notes marked in red on the left are the notes I perceive while driving (assuming my perfect pitch is that "perfect". Interestingly I am unable to tell which octave it was played on.), for the range of engine speeds on the right, marked in red, for which these sounds are heard.

Analysis of Results

Clearly, something is wrong here. The range of notes is too wide for the range of speeds. Secondly, in terms of Hz, the notes are way too low for what I hear. Those notes are barely above the lower limit of human hearing (assumed to be 20 Hz), which from my observations is definitely not the case.

I can only think of the following explanations:

Firstly, I could be hearing the harmonic frequencies (i.e. frequencies in multiples of 2 above the fundamental frequency / octaves above the fundamental frequency, assuming the open-pipe model), rather than the fundamental frequency. This would explain why I hear the notes one or two octaves above our threshold of hearing.
Secondly, to explain the mismatch between notes and range:

Inaccurate tachometer
Faulty "perfect pitch" (I doubt this one too)
Harmonic notes that are not exactly double

Finally, if all else fails, then it is because I have used the wrong model for the origin of the whistling noise (perhaps it does not come from the fuel injector)

On the other hand, I imagine that it is possible that if my speedometer, or even my tachometer should die, I would still be able to stick to the speed limit just by listening to the sound of the car.

Why I Hate MS Office 2007

2010-06-05T14:02:00.002+08:00

What do you call THIS:

The FILE menu?

The MS OFFICE LOGO?
The Round Button at the Top-left hand corner,
you know, the one with the RED, BLUE, GREEN and YELLOW colours??

And then you realize, they don't even know that button exists.

Human's love-hate relationship with words has resulted in a peculiar phenomenon. We hated the 10 years we spend studying the English language which we now use somewhat effectively in Poly, JC, Uni.

In general, we hated studying, until our mature sensibilities, rational thinking (jobs, money) and irrational thinking (the "higher" pleasures of the intellect) got the better of us.

But we also discovered that whenever a word was emblazoned on a 2D plane, we cannot help but read it, interpret it and think about it.

Case in point:

Don't think about a pink-coloured elephant.

Wait... you just pictured a pink-coloured elephant in your head didn't you?

Case in point (2):

Hi!

You said "Hi" in your head didn't you?

Case in point (3):

Don't read the next line.

You are unable to follow instructions.

You read the above line, didn't you?

My point? If you named a menu/ a button/ an XYZ "File", everybody will find the File menu in an instant, because he cannot help but read the File menu when he sees it.

If you put a picture, and especially an abstract picture (if they had put a picture of a gorilla, it would have been easy -- "click on the gorilla") comprising 4 rounded squares, you will need a thousand words to describe the picture to the person, and even so, because he doesn't automatically read pictures, he many not be able to find the round button with red, blue, green and yellow unfilled rounded squares.

Case in point:

What is the name of this blog? You probably remember it is QI-something.

How many mountain ranges are there in the photo above? You don't know!

You must have seen the title of the blog as often as you saw the mountain ranges. But you only noticed the title, not the number of mountain ranges. So how do I bring to people's attention the existence of that button. That one?

In short, words capture attention better than pictures. Remember when "LOOK HERE" posters were plastered all over Singapore? They didn't plaster "No Smoking" signs -- they chose "LOOK HERE".

Consequently, Microsoft's choice of an abstract icon for an important button makes over-the-telephone assistance to a computer dumb-dumb impossible, or at least challenging.

They should STOP STOP using the Fluent interface.

Actually, Microsoft made a pact with the telcos to charge us more minutes. They also have a conspiracy to sell more remote assistance software.

Ethics and Philosophy

2010-06-04T22:18:00.008+08:00

I wanted to add something more (about Ethics and Philosophy), but I just couldn't find the words for it.

It started off with my sister asking why God was so cruel as to instruct the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan completely.

¹⁰Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. ¹¹Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: ¹²not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger. ¹³Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
¹⁴What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! ¹⁵For he says to Moses,
"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.¹⁶It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. ¹⁷For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: "I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth."¹⁸Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
¹⁹One of you will say to me: "Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?" ²⁰But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' ²¹Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?
²²What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? ²³What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— ²⁴even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

Perhaps we should look at Paul's statement at the start of the chapter:

¹I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit— ²I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. ³For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, ⁴the people of Israel

If Paul had this attitude toward the people of his own race, what shall my attitude be toward my friends? My family? And in the next chapter:

¹Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.

What is our prayer for our fellow "Gentiles"? If so, what should we do? It is continued:

¹⁴How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? ¹⁵And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

And then, knowing that we were chosen not by reason of our merit, my attitude should not be of conceit (i.e. like not saying, you accursed of God, you devil's accomplice, you murderer of Christ, you, or worst of all: you NON-Christian):

¹¹Again I ask: Did [the Jews] stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. ¹²But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring!
...
²⁵I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.

And finally, Ch 12:

¹Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your [reasonable] act of worship. ²Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
...
¹⁴Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. ¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. ¹⁶Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

Interview

2010-06-03T19:45:00.001+08:00

This feels so wrong. How should I give a job interview to someone 6 years my senior (i.e 129% age)?

Take my life

2010-05-30T14:08:00.002+08:00

For the few who actually visit:

Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
Swift and beautiful for Thee;
Take my voice and let me sing,
Always, only for my King.
Take my lips and let them be
Filled with messages from Thee;
Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold.
Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in endless praise;
Take my intellect and use
Every pow’r as Thou shalt choose.
Take my will and make it Thine,
It shall be no longer mine;
Take my heart, it is Thine own,
It shall be Thy royal throne.
Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure store;
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee.

North-facing

2010-05-21T17:57:00.001+08:00

I personally dislike this time of the year, when the sun beats into from my north-facing room.

Pogrom

2010-05-19T16:57:00.003+08:00

A book I am reading describes a pogrom against the Jews in Russia in the early 20th century.

It was said to have taken place in Easter, after Mass, and was a culmination of the weeks of anti-Semitic rumours that preceded it.

Surely, these were God-fearing people who attended Mass and hated the people who "killed our Lord".

What, where was the church? Was there no direction? Ignoring the events before the pogrom, after the incident, was there no disciplining of the wrongdoers? Was there no repentance? What was their reaction? "Good job, well done?"

After Nineveh learnt about their sins the whole city was in sackcloth and ashes. And they weren't even God's people.

Well, apparently the priests themselves were complicit.

MTL

2010-05-15T12:34:00.003+08:00

Two more reasons why we need MTL:

You can go to a canteen auntie and say, "嗨！美女！" But to do an equivalent in English is just so wrong.
Pipi Player has so much good stuff, for free, because it is supported by advertisements. But the names of all the shows are in Chinese only.

A bout of cold and airplanes do not mix

2010-05-09T16:26:00.000+08:00

It's painful

Weird

2010-05-08T12:47:00.002+08:00

I created a very weird thing. Have you ever seen a marriage of such incompatible things?

Microsoft Access database backend and frontend data entry system
A PHP-written report generating frontend, which

Uses the MS Access backend via DAO.DBEngine, via COM
Has to parse the MS Access output based on System locale when dealing with time and date
Requires a Firefox browser to properly print.

Oh no! MS Access, COM, Firefox, PHP. Moreover, it is locale specific. It breaks when transferring between systems with different locales (e.g. English (US), English (UK) and English (Australia) -- all of them are used in computer systems in Singapore).

It feels so wrong.

The problem lies with MS Access reports. I love MS Access. It is so easy to create a professional-looking data-entry system, and, with some VBA, create many, many nifty shortcuts.

But the reports -- they are too rigid. Every box has a fixed width, a fixed size, a fixed height. But in HTML, I can quickly create different report templates by deleting columns, adding columns, and the browser will gladly fit everything into a browser window, or a Landscape A4-sized paper, depending on what I want it to do. Columns that require more space get more space, and columns that require less get less. Rows that need more height get ample height.

But still, it is an ugly marriage of deeply incompatible systems. I almost feel the rebellion when I cannot click an ID number on the report to open up the data entry form in MS Access.

I'm so tempted to MySQL-PHP it or RoR it, but that entails re-writing the MS Access input frontend, which is no piece of cake.

ASP.NET? ~~Kexi?~~ (You'd have to kill me first to make me to put Linux in front of computer-fearing computer illiterates).

Words

2010-05-05T21:15:00.004+08:00

Choose your words wisely...

You do not know when you are going to regret them.

Even an ~~ejaculation~~ outburst of "mild" vocabulary -- "bloody", "shit" -- looks so bad on hindsight, years in the future.

I feel like deleting them.

* Even though it's a nice word to use, it has too many sexual overtones. Pity.

"Windows Live"

2010-04-25T20:59:00.002+08:00

I think the people of my generation and older, and some of the slightly younger ones, will forever think of it as MSN Messenger.

I shudder to imagine that little kids half my age will say, "Talk to you on Windows Live!"

Oh, the pure marketing pitch. Oh, the bloat. Oh, Oh!

Did Newton Answer Halley's Question?

2010-04-19T18:35:00.002+08:00

Did Newton Answer Halley's Question?

In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit [Newton] at Cambridge. After they had been some time together, the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. The Doctor, struck with joy and amazement, asked him how he knew it. Why, saith he, I have calculated it. Whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sir Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it and then to send it him…

...

And yet, it’s a curious fact that when the Principia was published (at Halley’s expense) in 1687, it did not actually contain the demonstration that Halley had requested. In a careful series of propositions (11 to 13 of Book 1), the Principia shows that a planet moving in a conical orbit under the influence of a central force toward one of the foci is undergoing acceleration toward that foci with a magnitude proportional to the reciprocal of the squared distance, and hence is subject to an inverse-square force. This is the converse of Halley’s question, which asked for a demonstration of the shape of an orbit given that the planet was subjected to an inverse-square force. The first edition of Principia simply stated that the answer to Halley’s question “followed from” the converse proposition, which of course is not a generally valid argument. Newton later claimed that he hadn’t included the proof for the original question – the one that prompted the entire work – because he regarded it as “very obvious”.

Do Not Love The World

2010-04-19T18:16:00.002+08:00

"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him"

Do I love the world? Do I love the anticipation of school grades, university admission results, the latest technology, the latest MRT line, the next job, the next big movie? The next Windows, the next Linux, the next Mac, the next Office? Do I love the anticipation of going to the UK for studies, sightseeing around Europe, learning a new language, enjoying myself? Do I love doing well at my job, receiving praises and recognition for it? Do I love the intellectual thrill of finding the hyperbolic cosines in a catenary? Of finding conics in the inverse sine rule? Of philosophy and of mathematics? Do I love the ruckus about Malaysian politics, Thai politics, Singapore politics, US politics, China politics etc.?

Presence

2010-03-18T00:16:00.002+08:00

1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Leave this place, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt, and go up to the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, saying, 'I will give it to your descendants.' 2 I will send an angel before you ... 3 Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way."
...

12 Moses said to the LORD, "You have been telling me, 'Lead these people,' but you have not let me know whom you will send with me...."

14 The LORD replied, "My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."

15 Then Moses said to him, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?"

Pressured

2010-03-16T00:08:00.002+08:00

Some time ago, the Straits Times started a discussion on tipping. They described a restaurant that eschewed the service charge in favour of tips, and went on about how bad Singapore's tipping culture was. The writer even advocated tipping over service charge. Letters to the forum followed, of course, about both bad and good service at restaurants. Even longer editorials appeared about the tipping culture.

It sounds like a hot topic for discussion, except it was started and sustained and ended by the same newspaper. I think it was a dumb topic. I think tipping is just a veiled form of bribery and, like Fair Trade, distorts markets and suppresses wages anyway. That said, I just felt eerie how the newspaper was starting and ending topics for discussion unilaterally. Who are they to decide the "talk of town"? They could just as easily start a new topic on why everybody ought to be vegetarian, and we would be forced to endure an "erudite" debate on it, even if we are entirely uninterested in gum!

And I feel the same pressure watching them chase Jack Neo. Puh-lease... I'm so totally interested in learning about his extra-marital flings and his wife's fainting spell. While sex sells, I thought it has been blown out of proportion: it doesn't need to be plastered on every corner of the page.

Standing Tall in the Train

2010-03-15T23:25:00.003+08:00

I'm 181 cm, you see.

Lecture

2010-03-12T23:49:00.000+08:00

The pope criticizes the laity:

The Pope has faced a backlash after urging Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight the UK's Equality Bill with "missionary zeal".

Pope Benedict XVI said the bill - which could end the right of the Church to ban gay people from senior positions - "violates natural law".

And the laity criticizes the pope:

Mr Hughes, speaking in Rome, said: "As a Catholic, I am appalled by the attitude of the Pope. Religious leaders should be trying to eradicate inequality, not perpetuate it."

Clearly

I'm so sure this is the root of my sorrows

2010-03-12T23:25:00.003+08:00

http://www.redmondpie.com/google-china-fiasco-new-scary-details-revealed-9140429/

A new form of attack is being leveraged by hackers, called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) –think of APT as a ‘ticking bomb’, an apparently-benign piece of software that can be turned on at any time. These APTs can avoid detection and remain dormant for months or years, only turning on when the ‘coast is clear’. In this most recent case, an unpatched zero-day attack on Internet Explorer 6 was the entry point.
These attacks are theft-oriented — the sole purpose behind these APT attacks are to get at sensitive data: email, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets, etc. Corporate secrets, counter-intelligence, you name it.
‘Spear-phishing’ provides the way in — spear phishing is a ‘targeted’ attack where email, chat or other communication tools are used to trick individuals in a position of power. In this case, a campaign of phishing attacks tailored towards getting a counter-terrorism official’s password was successful. Once you have a way in — malware, via the high-ranking and high-clearance user — it’s much easier to get more data…and so the web of exploited and compromised machines and accounts grows!
A very clever way of sending the data back home — once the network and users have been compromised and the data harvested, it has to be sent back. In these advanced APT attacks, data is compressed and then slowly leaked out of the home network using false headers and custom protocols sent over obscure or misleading ports (SSL, in this case).

Marah, Massah and Meribah

2010-03-05T23:38:00.005+08:00

For three days [the Israelites] travelled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter (That is why the place is called Marah.) So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "What are we to drink?"

Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water and the water became sweet.
...
In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death."

Then the LORD said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you..."

So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you will know that it was the LORD who brought you out of Egypt, and in the morning you will see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?"

"... Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the LORD."
...
The whole Israelite community... camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, "Give us water to drink."

Moses replied, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the LORD to the test?"

But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, "Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?"

Then Moses cried out to the LORD, "What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me."

I recalled the grumblings I had, which I also raised to others, and took home this warning, "You are not grumbling against us, but the LORD." Shall I grumble because of thirst? Shall I quarrel with others for the same reason? Shall I test the LORD?

The other aspect is of pleasure. If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.

I felt like I was being spun round and round, denied pleasures yet not finding a suitable alternative. I had ever considered, Why should I sacrifice Saturday afternoons, Sunday mornings, Monday evenings and Wednesday evenings? Why am I in IT altogether? Why am I bound by "God's" "laws"? Why don't I visit a club? Get drunk, break out of my socially inept, introverted self, get wild? No one's even asking you to go there every week, just A FIRST visit wouldn't hurt? You don't even have to get drunk if you don't want to? Instead of subsisting on, omgz, "WHAT'S THIS?" (translates to "manna")?

I think I felt starved, and sick of this food.

And so it was, until I came to this part of Exodus.

Guitar

2010-02-20T22:59:00.002+08:00

Sibling rivalry is such a vague and irrational thing. It arises and affects your decisions subconsciously, until you realize you had made a bad decision somewhere down the road, by which time it is too late.

The guitar is all the craze these days. Guitar players perhaps outnumber piano/keyboard players at least 5:1 or 6:1 because of its low barriers to entry (cost-wise), yet it is pleasantly versatile and polyphonic. Church members, void deck loiterers, ensemble members, rock bands - everybody seems to know the guitar. You could pick up the guitar as a school CCA, but you would need a well-off parent breathing down your back to learn the piano.

(I suppose you could learn the piano on an electric keyboard, a much cheaper option, but I think the teachers would then refuse to teach.)

I am not referring to the prodigies, of course. Those kinds are to keyboards like fish to water and have their debuts at age 7. Ordinary kids, especially kids whose parents are not musicians themselves, tend to lack the motivation until much later -- like old tadpoles using their newly developed lungs for the first time.

Some years after I stopped piano lessons, my mother encouraged me to pick up the guitar. Overarching all these was her wish that we could play at church meetings. I was reluctant, but she bought a guitar anyway. I did explore how to tune the guitar, play some chords, play a few notes here and there, but I did not take it any further.

And then, when my younger brother did take it further, I did not want to learn it anymore. And perhaps that's the irony. At that time, I could more or less improvise on the piano. He tried (and even took lessons for it, where I had none) but was never adept at it. Did he pick up the guitar out of interest, or was it to find a different niche? I shall assume the best and believe that he took it up out of interest.

But once in JC, I avoided the guitar ensemble. Partly because I thought it was too common; I didn't want to follow the crowd. Partly because of pride. I did not want to learn everything from scratch, or worse, to be behind my brother in it. Harmonica -- aha, that was something I knew, having played a cheap diatonic before.

Perhaps my choice of CCA wasn't bad per se, but my absolute refusal to learn the guitar, in spite of the investment my mother made.
----
Time weathered down these weird feelings. It put a more rational perspective to past and present events. Even so, his Higher Chinese A2 compared to my B3 remains a poignant stab in the heart.
----
One day, my younger sister joined RGS's guitar ensemble. Perhaps being younger in years instead of older makes you more immune to the envy of the achievements of siblings. Or perhaps most people are not like me.

(Our family has a very weird sleeping arrangement, for historical reasons. My younger sis sleeps in my grandmother's room, but her homework, guitar and clothes are all in my bedroom, and her toothbrush in the bathroom attached to it. My toothbrush is not in that attached toilet. My clothes are in my elder sister's bedroom, adjacent to my bedroom; while her toothbrush is in the attached toilet in my bedroom. Only my brother has everything in one room.)

(Oh, and living in a big house with many toilets blunts the need to replenish toiletries, to ridiculous proportions. When your soap has run out, you simply grab one from another bathroom... and never return it, and the next unexpecting person in the shower with no soap has to call out for rescue. When your toothpaste runs out, you rob it from another toilet. The four of us share two toilets between us, and normally two tubes of toothpaste. When one tube of toothpaste runs out, the toothbrushes gather in one toilet, hastening the demise of the remaining tube.

Our stock of toothpaste is downstairs; our toothbrushes upstairs. The moments when we realize the last tube of toothpaste is almost dry are when we are barely awake or almost asleep and reluctant to fight gravity. We squeeze, contort and abuse the tube till it is absolutely dry, and the ultimate loser runs off for the toothpaste -- a horrible game of musical chairs)

So my younger sister's guitar is in my bedroom all the time. And on those occasions when she's rushing her homework or watching Japanese dramas with the lights on at late night, denying me sleep, I began playing on the guitar.

Not being left-handed, I didn't learn to play the guitar upside-down, like some who learnt without teachers. Still, I'm picking up rudiments of improvisation. What about sibling rivalry? Maybe it is affecting me less. Maybe I am less affected now because I am charting my own course -- improvisation instead of scores. Maybe because I don't hear my brother playing much anymore, and my sister only plays the scores, and I'm bored stiff. Maybe because I've learnt that music is best exchanged or best played cooperatively? Maybe... ?

8 words a line

2010-02-20T14:40:00.002+08:00

Recently, Cambridge Trusts sent me an application form for a bursary. On the form, I found one of the last things I wanted to see -- an essay question that had to be filled out on paper.

I must say that after 2 years of separation from handwritten essays, I had almost forgotten how to plan an essay with pen and paper. 2 months' separation from my last admissions essays also made me uncomfortable writing anything about myself, let alone on paper. Finally, the question limited my response to 150 words, which is asphyxiating compared to all the essays I had ever write by hand, with the exception of passage summaries which had a strict word limit.

I learnt a technique in those days to count my words. In those days, I never did a draft copy of my summaries - I preferred to pen them down and lock the answer in as I wrote to save time.With a pencil I would divide the writing area into 8 columns. The vertical lines I drew and the horizontal lines of the foolscap paper intersected to form a grid. Starting with the top left box, I put each word and its adjacent punctuation marks in each box. By simply counting the lines, I could quickly count the number of words I had written. If I had any caret marks or cancellations, I would note them down on my margins after I completed each line, e.g. -1, -2, +2, +3. Finally, multiplying 8 by the number of complete lines, and adding to the result the sum of the numbers on my margins gave me my word count, and saved myself the tedious counting of words.

Of course, some words were longer than others and overfilled their boxes. Otherwise, my hastily freehand lines gave me boxes of such unequal size that some could fill a lobster, and others only a microscopic shrimp. Some lines were so completely made up of 2-4 letter words that the huge expanses between the words made it obvious that the words were deliberately spaced out. Finally, even after you erased the vertical lines, and despite all the long words that did not quite fit their allocated spaces, the 8 columns were still visible. Even though the words were misaligned, they were distinctively skewer-able. If you could stick a satay stick through words, you would have gotten 8 kebabs, where the pieces of meat may not have been skewered through their centres, but are skewered nonetheless.

Not that I cared: in an exam, time is paramount. I tried to do the same thing again, but ended up using doing my draft on a computer, performing an instant word count, and transferring the words onto paper.

I cannot remember clearly, was it Anne Ang who taught us this technique? Whoever it was, I remember vaguely that he/she advised us not to even bother erasing the vertical lines after we were done (but she did advise using rulers. In JC I disregarded both advices). Well, it is plain courtesy to erase them for the examiner's pleasure, although, as I have mentioned, erasing it would not make it any less obvious that you were serving the examiner 8 kebabs.

Failing Ethernet Connection

2010-02-20T00:06:00.002+08:00

My laptop at work was suffering from a ghastly problem. There was a problem with the ethernet port on the floor. Half the time, the laptop was unable to detect the presence of the ethernet cable. It would oscillate between "Network cable unplugged" and "Acquiring network address" for about five times, before trying to "Acquire network address" for about 30 seconds, and then either succeeding in the connection, or throwing up a "Limited Connection". If there was a "Limited Connection", I would either have to reseat the cable, or disable and re-enable the ethernet port by software.

It was frustrating because I was always afraid of disconnecting the laptop from its stand or shutting it down, because after I put it back or start it up, I would never know how long I would need before the connection succeeds again.

Worst of all, today, it refused to connect at all. The IT department knew about my problem, but ignored it the last time because it surfaced sporadically; today, it was caught up in an emergency, and I could not expect any assistance from them.

However, I found a solution in adjusting the hardware settings by switching the speed from 100Mbits/s full to 10Mbits/s half, the lowest possible setting. Sure, 10Mbits/s is absymal, but it worked like a charm, and connects immediately after inserting the cable. Anyway, most Internet traffic never exceed 1Mbits/s in speed, and as for LAN, apart from e-mail, we don't do file transfer, so 10Mbits/s is more than sufficient.

In short, I'm glad to have discovered this trick, and am perfectly happy with the results.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

2010-02-16T14:32:00.008+08:00

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Urgent Message From Pastor Rony

I have received a number of emails from people who have been saddened and hurt by the testimonies of an ex-monk and an ex-nun. I realized that my presentation and comments were wrong and offensive. So I sincerely apologize for my insensitivity towards the Buddhists and Taoists, and solemnly promise that it will never happen again.

When we have received those emails, we immediately removed the video clips from our website. I urge those who have posted those clips on the YouTube to remove them as well.

After reading the frank views from those emails, I was also prompted to tell my members not only to continue to love souls, but also to respect other beliefs and not to ridicule them in any way, shape or fashion.

Let's put our goal to build a harmonious Singapore a top priority.

Acts 4:

5The next day the rulers, elders and teachers of the law met in Jerusalem. 6Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and the other men of the high priest's family. 7They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: "By what power or what name did you do this?"

8Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: "Rulers and elders of the people! 9If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, 10then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11He is
" 'the stone you builders rejected,
which has become the capstone.' 12Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."

13When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. 14But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say. [...]

18Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19But Peter and John replied, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. 20For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

Acts 5

21At daybreak they entered the temple courts, as they had been told, and began to teach the people.

[...]

27Having brought the apostles, they made them appear before the Sanhedrin to be questioned by the high priest. 28"We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name," he said. "Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood."

29Peter and the other apostles replied: "We must obey God rather than men! 30The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. 32We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him."

To me, what was shocking is the speed of his about-turn; from being "insensitive" to suddenly being open to a chat with other leaders.

So what was he doing in his video? In whose name was he doing it? Was he obeying God, or men? If God, then why does he turn remorseful so quickly? Was it a PR stunt? If men, why was he in the video at all?

Whoever he was obeying, I think more apologies are warranted than just "for [his] insensitivity towards the Buddhists and Taoists" -- this time to the members of L.E. who, I believe, were expecting a sermon that came with more authority.

6 Schools

2010-02-15T14:57:00.003+08:00

Cornell

Carnegie-Mellon

MIT

Northwestern

Princeton
Stanford

5 schools applied for with admissions counselling and lots of guidance and rewriting.

1 school applied for with raw truth.

If that 1 school accepts me, I'd eat my old camouflage jockey cap.

Ephesians

2010-02-15T14:46:00.004+08:00

Eph 4:25-32:

Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Neither give place to the devil.

Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.

And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness, and wrath and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

Job Productivity

2010-02-11T20:00:00.004+08:00

As a factor input in the form of labour, your productivity in a span of time t_start to t_end can either be:

E(t_start, t_end) = γ(t_end - t_start) — (1)

Or, it can be

E(t_start, t_end) = n(t_start, t_end) — (2)
where n(t_i, t_j) ~ Po(λ(t_j - t_i)) — (2)

Because jobs tend to be a mixture of both, we generalize it as such:

E(t_start, t_end) = (1 - k) γ(t_end - t_start) + k n(t_start, t_end), 0 ≤ k ≤ 1 — (3)

It depends on your job, really. If yours is a manufacturing job, or a exam script marker in the halls of Cambridge, k would be closer to 0. If yours is as an intern trawling the net for papers that study a very specific relationship between two macroeconomic variables, then k will be much closer to 1.

If I had to give k a name, I would call it the product-by-luck constant.

If I were Randall Munroe, I might plot various occupations on a graph of job satisfaction against k, and plot the same occupations on a graph of salary against k. But then, I'm not him. I don't draw comic strips full-time.

Of course, my guess is high k jobs pay better and give more satisfaction. High k jobs also give you more opportunity to slack off. You cannot slack away from the assembly line without incurring some cost, but you can always go to the pantry for a cup of coffee in the middle of an Internet search. Because, after all, you count your lucky stars hoping you hit the web pages containing the information you want.

Similarly, you cannot run away from marking scripts if there are scripts to mark, but you can always try to leave the reception counter unattended if enquiries follow a Poisson distribution.

In general, the manufacturing industry are low-k, and the services high-k. That's why you can probably generalize how k links to salary and job satisfaction.

On the other hand, a high k job with a quota of product (E) to meet means everything depends on λ. If λ is high, good. If not, you're in trouble. (A spate of really bad luck won't save you even under high λ though.)

In an internship, where tasks can come and go so fast, you don't really have time to assess the λ for each task. Until you are in the thick of it do you realize it's actually quite low.

In which case, you work overtime.

overtime coefficient, ω = ( working hours + hours overtime ) / (working hours)

By doing so, and assuming a k = 1 job,

E(t_{start of work}, t_{end of overtime}) = n' (t_{start of work}, t_{end of overtime}),
where n' (t_i, t_j) ~ Po (ω λ t_i - t_j)

Thus you increase your chances of getting your results. The Poisson distribution, by nature being a random distribution, means there are still no guarantees of course. Just hope really, really hard that you are on the right side of statistical significance.

Having laid down this model, let's proceed to do some regressions on different occupations, shall we?

This analysis is of course limited because:

It does not account for the effect of heterogenosity among workers. Different workers will have different γ and λ values.
It does not account for fatigue. The γ, λ, and ω may be functions of time.

Would you like to create a better model and verify it with some empirical evidence?

Late Bus

2010-02-01T19:46:00.002+08:00

My bus driver was stuck in a horrible jam at Bugis. Maybe he picked the wrong lanes (he did not stick to the bus lane, but joined the cars on the regular lanes), because buses after him could somehow overtake him.

He was cursing and blaring the horn at the cars in front of him, at the trishaw uncle, at the buses after him that cut into his lane and even at a car that stopped to give way to crossing pedestrians. I checked my handphone, and realized it was already the time I usually got home, but I was not even halfway through my journey. Still, with nothing on my agenda, I was cool.

Not the driver though. After emerging out of the dreadful jam, he radioed to the SBS Transit HQ to ask, "我的后车在哪里？" He was from China, and so were his swear words.

The person at the other end did not understand him.

“我已经迟了三十四分钟！刚才塞得很厉害！我的后车在哪里？”
“……你现在再哪里？”
“Lavendar”
“Huh？”
“Lavendar Lavendar Lamendar 劳明达！我迟了三十四分钟。我的后车在哪里？十分钟？十五分钟？叫他快点驾！”

In the end, I don't think the concept of 后车 ever got across. Maybe it did, because despite speeding from red light to red light, the service 32 bus after him appeared behind him some 5 minutes later and overtook him. Another curse resonated in the bus.

The stresses of a bus driver. I don't blame him for his cursing, or his misuse of the horn. I think I understand what he is going through.

But the passengers also have their share of sorrows. When service 32 is late by 34 minutes, that means a good number of bus stops along the way has not seen a bus 32 come for at least 45 minutes. That is when they start cursing like the driver.

I want my circle line.

Internship Offer

2010-01-30T14:43:00.001+08:00

Hello,

Would any of your friends be interested in a 2 month internship at IE
Singapore? Job scope as follows. Pls contact Meng Chung (cc-ed) to follow
up. Thanks.

[2. MS LEE MENG CHUNG
Job Title : ASST DIRECTOR - AD
DID : 64334701
Email: LEE_MENG_CHUNG@IESINGAPORE.GOV.SG
Unit: RESEARCH & STATISTICS DIVISION (RSD)
Parent: PLANNING GROUP (PG)
Organisation: INTERNATIONAL ENTERPRISE SINGAPORE (IE)
Description: [copied from SGDI.gov.sg]]

Job Scope:
You will be working on an analysis of certain Singapore's macro indicators
and helping out to streamline the product codes for Singapore.

Your key responsibilities include:

• checking through Excel worksheet to ensure that the formulae are
programmed correctly
• testing out various scenarios using Excel programs
•cross-matching data and ensuring that mapping of data is done correctly.
• contributing to the organisational excellence efforts in the division

Requirements:
You should possess a knowledge of Excel software. You should possess sound
IT and numerical skills, good knowledge of statistical computation methods
and industry, occupation & education classifications.

Economic Statistics

2010-01-27T23:39:00.002+08:00

So apparently, web sites look as crappy as this can provide better information than this.

The first one looks like crap - a mash of Javascript snippets and HTML 3.2, put together by a team of programmers in the absence of designers. If it was my government, I might have cried and hid my face in shame. So I though.

The second one looks so professional... but the server administrators wound up being super stingy on disk space.

The good thing about messiness is that everything remains on your table. It may be hard to find what you want, but it is there.

The bad thing about neatness is that once the overzealous administrator decides it is old, it's gone!

You would think a .gov.sg would have a good collection of electronic archives, at least better than a website pieced together by amateurs. Our government, after all, provides so many services electronically. Yet in the year of our Lord 2010, I am still going to need to make a trip to the paper library.

18th APPF "Talk"

2010-01-21T22:06:00.003+08:00

This was the e-mail we received some time last year:

The Parliament is keen to take in scholars to help out for the event and we
also feel that the Forum is a very good opportunity to expose you on the
work of the Government. You may be asked to perform duties such as:

(a) Rapporteurs - Take notes at meetings, amend draft resolutions during
the course of Committee meetings, prepare reports of meetings, liaise with
the Reports Co-ordinator in the production of papers, reports etc

(b) Protocol/Liaison Officers - Attached to delegations and undertake
protocol/liaison work at the conference venue and airport

(c) Facilitator - Assist the Reports Coordinator in typing/photocopying of
documents and compilation of final Report, uploading documents/photographs
onto the APPF website, ensure facilities are set up and ready for various
meetings, assist in ushering duties, etc.

On the term "Liaison Officers"

So the 18th APPF came and went. Seven of us were roped in as "Liaison Officers".

In Year 2006, "Liaison Officers" were roped in to guide the International Physics Olympiad teams around. In Year 2010, "Liaison Officers" were roped in to guide APPF delegations around. And God knows how many "Liaison Officers" Singapore has designated to guide all manners of teams around Singapore.

"A liaison officer or LNO is a person that liaises between two organizations to communicate and coordinate their activities" (Wikipedia) If Navy needed an officer to coordinate air defence issues with the Air Force, that would be a liaison officer. But you don't get "liaison officers" to lead a bunch of pre-university students from all over the world around Singapore. That's an overkill. What in the world are we liaising? Still, if overkills kill, our graveyards would be full.

In the APhO 07 in Shanghai, they called themselves "volunteers" (志愿者).
In the IPhO 07 in Esfahan, I'm not very sure what they called themselves but I think they called themselves "guides".

"Guide" would be sufficient. "Liaison officer" is way too self-important. It would be like calling every new recruit "senior head of department", or bus drivers "bus captains", or cleaners "sanitation manager". What department are you leading? Over how many men are you captain of? Why does sanitation need management?

On Pigging on Surplus Food
In the last 4 days, I never knew what an empty stomach felt like. The hotel served heaps upon heaps of food to the satiated parliamentarian delegates that there was always surplus food for us; and we left behind just as much surplus food for the rubbish bins.

Ridiculous amounts of wastage.

And ridiculous amounts of care in preparing the food.

It was my first time seeing onde-onde served in sauce bowls - one onde per bowl with a slice of cherry beside it. What, is the onde such an exquisite thing? Does it cost $5 per onde?

On APPF Outcomes
Urge. Recognize. Recommend. Strongly desire.

Puh-lease. Such grandstanding! Such high-handedness! Such top-down administration! What exactly do they expect to achieve? Where's the "Demand"? "Require"?

They spent 3 whole days staying in top hotels, wasting so much food and funds, pulling civil servants away from their duties, pulling retirees from their retirement, to do what? To draft a communique laden with grammatical mistakes, politically correct overtones, compromises, appeasements, and zero binding power.

Don't. Waste. My. Time.

Programming Language of Choice

2009-12-29T21:53:00.003+08:00

Copied over from TIOBE Programming Language Index:

Position Dec 2009	Position Dec 2008	Programming Language	Ratings Dec 2009	Delta Dec 2008	Status
1	1	Java	17.061%	-2.31%	A
2	2	C	16.285%	+0.12%	A
3	4	PHP	9.770%	+0.29%	A
4	3	C++	9.175%	-1.72%	A
5	5	(Visual) Basic	7.778%	-1.70%	A
6	6	C#	6.258%	+1.61%	A
7	7	Python	5.185%	+0.62%	A
8	9	JavaScript	3.515%	+0.45%	A
9	8	Perl	2.692%	-0.91%	A
10	11	Ruby	2.653%	+0.34%	A

Which is comforting to know that my favourite languages (Java, PHP, Javascript and Visual Basic, Perl) are all in the list.

Till my last day in Air Force, nothing could replace Javascript + Visual Basic (+ OLE Automation + HTML) in my heart. Ever since ORD, nothing can replace PHP + Javascript + Visual Basic (+ OLE Automation + HTML).

Java is the language I use for full-blown apps requiring a GUI. But if I can replace it with HTML, I would.

Familiarity is a hard thing to break. I've done a bit of work in C, in Vala, C#, and even had to meddle around with Python while fixing my Gentoo. I don't touch Ruby because I don't want to learn a new language. Ruby seems to require so radical and fixed a methodology I simply cannot think when writing Ruby.

I use Java over C# because 1. I don't know how to install C#, MS VC# etc. but I have done Java so many times. I prefer the Java GUI because of its MVC model, and the paint(Graphics) method, implemented to great effect in, say, "JTreeTables". Try doing the same with GTK and you'd cry (I think). Not that I've studied C# much, but I love Javadoc. The Java API is well-planned. I love how it is entirely documented ON ONE WEB PAGE! The inheritance trees are all clearly shown. I know where to find all the important stuff (Toolkit, Vector, Hashtable, URL etc.) If I didn't know, finding a keyword in the classes list easily yields it (e.g. MIDI, Zip, HttpRequest). That's much better than MSDN.

java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2
Ctrl+F, search for keyword
voila!

I used to use Perl to muck around with regexps. In the near future, I can foresee myself still using Perl, but would be increasingly choosing PHP over Perl. What I've said about Java's documentation applies to PHP as well:

www.php.net
type keyword in search box
voila!

Not that perl doesn't leave a similar option,

open search engine (extra step)
type perlfunc/ perlre/ perlretut
search for keyword
voila.

But it requires one extra step. Finally the functions in perlfunc are way too limited to be of much use. But the moment they start modularizing (e.g. CGI, Zip) everything, I'm turned off. Who likes to search for modules?

It pales in comparison to even VBA:

Object Browser (the best reason to love MS over OpenOffice)
type keyword in search box
voila!

I don't use Python because I've never needed it. OpenOffice uses it, yes, but OpenOffice Basic suffices well enough for my needs. And if ever I needed something more solid, I would run it with Javascript (new ActiveX("com.sun.ServiceManager")), because on COM, all languages work the same anyway, except Visual Basic, which holds a position of certain privilege a with respect to Event Handlers.

It would be nice to learn the following:

Flash/ ActionScript
Ruby
C#

But until I'm stuck in an environment with no other options (unlikely, since the worst-possible environment is still either HTML/Javascript (on Windows) or perl (on Linux)), I don't see how I can use those languages and thereby learn them.

Anyway, good documentation is important to me. I avoid MSDN like the plague. It's good, but isn't it always a bit too slow, a bit too large and the search results a bit unspecific? The individual technologies are always nested too deeply. I have no idea, for example, how to find documentation on the Worksheet class in Excel 2000, or the JScript/ VBScript language reference on MSDN. I hate searching the MSDN Library. Honestly, Google returns better results for my queries. If it weren't for the Object Browser and code autocompletion, Microsoft Office VBA would be more hated by me than OpenOffice.org Basic.

Work

2009-12-23T23:45:00.002+08:00

Work.
Work.
Work.

My family currently needs work-life balance. Family time = company meeting time. Working hours = working non-stop.

After these "hours", personal time = essay time. Sigh.

FYI I did the website. Comments, anybody?

In a related news, I'm now licensed to do CPR for the next 2 years. Would you like to collapse in front of me?

I just wonder, come March next year, whether I should simply apply for Medicine faculty at NUS? Would that not save me a lot of trouble?

Why am I applying to the US? Or UK?

But I have heard stories about Yong Loo Lin School, in fact about the problems with teaching Medicine in Singapore. Basically, there are too many students to too few resources (that's right: patients). I've also heard unflattering stories about our Engineering faculties. If I should apply local at all, I think I would hide within Science, just because I haven't heard horror stories from it at all.

Why not Engineering somewhere far away, then Medicine at Duke?

How will God lead me in this?

Diesel

2009-12-02T15:00:00.002+08:00

I love diesel vehicles. Diesel trucks. Diesel ambulances.

They have a sense of ruggedness and quaintness to themselves. Manual transmission is an added plus.

They have the ability to start the vehicle rolling with clutch pedal alone, without depressing the accelerator pedal. Petrol vehicles would just stall and die miserably.

Diesel is cheap. But polluting, though.

Finally, the big vehicles stroll along at a measly 60 km/h. Any higher, you would be breaking the speed limit or burning the engine.

Reminds me of the good old STK-DTC (Singapore Technologies Kinetics - Driver Training Centre) days. No air-con, sweltering cabins, speed warning devices, natural ventilation with added exhaust particulates but a super-powerful engine. Water fording and towing capabilities added.

It's like why I love boots too -- not that they are comfortable, but in a rain they keep out water like no other.

SLA Maps + GPS Enabled Tracking system

2009-11-28T01:44:00.002+08:00

Pulled off this to merge a GPS tracking system which had a really lousy mapping system and the SLA map which has absolutely no ability to work with the GPS system.

So now, I have vehicles appearing on a super-duper large SLA map.

However, this is for personal and non-commercial use only.

Another OOo Rant

2009-11-20T11:16:00.002+08:00

It doesn't make sense!
It doesn't make sense!
It doesn't make sense!
It doesn't make sense!
It doesn't make sense!

They can develop a whole new chart module. A notes (now comments) module. Two major releases (2.0, 3.0). Re-implement the whole graphics interface around GTK/ Qt.

And somehow, after going halfway round the globe, they haven't scratched some basic itches.

My color picker!! Darn it.

Dotted table borders!!!

They still can't do it.

CSS1 was completed in 1996. 13 years, during which we had the Asian financial crisis, Chinese embassy bombing, 911, Iraq war, Afghan war. Google hadn't existed and Yahoo was king.

And OOo still doesn't support border-style: dotted on tables. It only goes to show they have got their priorities ALL WRONG!

Final Words

2009-11-09T23:48:00.000+08:00

Dear Friends,

I don't know if any of you have chosen to extend this date, but
Do you remember the significance of this date?
It was the date our sergeants a long time ago told us to look out for.
Of course, this date was too far away at that time,
It was not tangible; we looked forward to another date then.
Today, we live in this very day we waited for
Our sergeants have passed their own dates months ago,
Leaving us to complete our obligation.
Whether for the better, or for the worse,
Whether we learnt anything, or learnt nothing,
Whether NS is good or bad,
It was a phase that was not in our power to change.
We have aged 2 years in service.
2 indelible years of our limited lives.
Thank you for starting this 2 years together with me,
And ending it with me, as I hope, today.

Final Words 2

2009-11-09T10:38:00.002+08:00

Dear AFS Buddies,

In BMT, I was incompetent.
In SISPEC -- I just learnt from my Interview Booklet -- I was only "average".
You made the difference when we were posted to Air Force School.
You accepted my shortcomings, turned them into strengths
You accepted my oddities, made them exceptional.
I don't know if I'll see you again in green.
In fact, I think I might never.
You have been the greatest.
I shall never forget.

Why I Hate Web Logs, Including My Own

2009-11-07T21:59:00.001+08:00

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html

NRIC Number Enigma

2009-11-07T14:07:00.003+08:00

Just when I was feeling very proud of myself for creating an NRIC Validator on the OA, somebody had to buck my trend.

I was trying to clear a Mr Ang (not his actual name) into a protected location, hence I needed his NRIC Number.

His NRIC No was S17XXXXXF.

The validator said it was wrong. The checksum letter was "I". When we called the person (let's call him Mr Raj) that supplied us this contractor's NRIC number, he insisted it was correct. He had even checked with Mr Ang, who insisted that was his NRIC number.

That's impossible! The validator had never been wrong before!

What was more intriguing was that when we checked his date of birth, it was XX-Jul-1971.

XX-Jul-1971, S17XXXXXF. How is that possible? Hadn't NRIC numbers begun to register birth years since 1969?

In fact, after I rearranged the first two digits, the NRIC number became valid! (Switching 1 and 7 in this case changes the checksum by 3, thus moving I to F). So we called up Mr Raj and told him to ask Mr Ang why his birth year was not reflected in his NRIC. If there was anything nobody should be able to deny, it was that birth years ought to be in the NRIC number for people born in and after 1969.

Mr Raj later called back, saying Mr Ang insisted it was S17XXXXXF. WHY? WHY? WHY? Did he read his number off his NRIC? Or did he read it from his failing memory? Did he read it off his birth certificate? Does the national registry make exceptions to the checksum rule? (If they did, then why use checksums at all?) Or do they NOT even check that the letters have been assigned correctly? Did he read it off, say, a birth certificate or a driving licence where the number might have been keyed in wrongly? WHY WHY WHY does he INSIST S17XXXXXF is correct???

Exasperated, we just submited the S17XXXXXF NRIC Number.

ORD Countdown

2009-11-06T23:41:00.002+08:00

My ORD Countdown hourglass didn't make it. Yahoo! Geocities closed 14 days before my ORD date.

How ominous.

Bleak?

2009-10-10T22:29:00.002+08:00

Must read.

A sharp criticism that leaves nothing to the imagination. I haven't read another essay as comprehensive as this.

Computer Terminology

2009-09-27T16:07:00.002+08:00

These days, there are discussions on the currency of the floppy disk icon, a symbol of the bygone days used to describe the action of "saving" a file onto some media.

But after reading comments here and there, it occurred to me that it was an irrelevant question. After all, the average child this day is more likely to encounter certain concepts and words on the computer even before they encounter situation in real life which the word was previously used to describe.

Take for example, the word "Edit". What would a child know about "Editing" except that "Edit" is often the drop-down menu after "File"?

Similarly, take "Format". "Folder". "Document". "Property". I encounter these most frequently on computers.

"Scan", maybe "View": These words I probably first saw them on the computer.

Who knows when children will first learn that "Files" are abstract objects on the computer containing data before learning that it is also a (usually) plastic tool to keep paper documents together?

What all these means is that whatever the save icon represents doesn't matter. Just like these nouns and verbs turned into computer terminology have become instead computer terminology also describing actual objects and actions, in the case of the floppy disk the meaning can also flow the other way.

Finally, what is hindering software developers from cooking up a word, and then transferring usage of that word onto physical objects? Nothing?