Tech Enthusiast

Our World, Their War

2011-06-15T23:12:00.002+08:00

Thanks Nuffnang for organising this exciting contest!

The Autobots learn of a Cybertronian spacecraft hidden on the Moon, and race against the Decepticons to reach it and learn its secrets, which could turn the tide in the Transformers’ final battle.

I have opted for Option B: Tell us how you would defy the Autobots and destroy the world, and which Decepticons character you would like to transform into to destroy the world.

I would want to transform into Soundwave, Decepticon's Communication Officer. It is an important role as communications will reveal vital information that will turn the tide of war.

Unknown to the Autobots, I hacked one of the six new spy satellites that allow the humans to share up-to-date intelligence across a vast operational area. Through intercepted communications, I have learnt that the humans had uncovered our old Cybertronian battleship that crash landed on the moon and had recovered several items from it. Exactly what item that was taken is not named in the file. I believe there is more information that can be uncovered from the origin of the communication; a military installation code-named Facility D-49.

I passed on this piece of information to Megatron and he ordered an infiltration mission to gather more intelligence. A group of Pretenders are dispatched for the job. However, the Pretenders can be easily exposed during a full body scan at the D-49 entry point. So, Starscream and I will deploy with the Pretenders to provide distraction in order for the Pretender to gain access into D-49. At the silence and darkness of night, the Pretenders took the identity of the guards who are patrolling the outer perimeter of D-49 by scanning and transforming into them.

Frominto
The guns and the ID cards are taken to allow access to the inner perimeter. From there, the Pretenders move towards the entrance of the facility. When they arrived there, I transform into fighter jet and attack the facility with Starscream. The attack quickly turned the silent night into chaotic firestorm as all the armed personnel are experiencing deafening explosions and flying bullets all over the perimeter. The Autobots have been alerted of the situation and they are speeding their way to D-49.

In the cover of the surprise attack, the Pretenders sneaks into D-49 and gather intelligence regarding the items recovered from the Cybertronian battleship. While looking for the items, the Pretenders notify me that they detected unusual energy anomaly outside a secured lab that matches the Cybertronian energy signature. Realising it could be the energy cell from the Cybertronian battleship, I request reinforcements from Megatron to hold off the incoming Autobots. It should buy us more time while the Pretenders attempt to recover the energy cell.

Just seconds after the request is sent, I was shot by Ironhide. I quickly retaliated by firing several projectiles. He managed to dodge most but still sustained a few hits. At the same time, I realized that the Autobots are accompanied by USAF’s F-35s and they are firing at me and Starscream. Being outnumbered, I deploy Ravage for assistance. Starscream and I quickly turn all the F-35s into flying scrap metals and focus our attack on the Autobots. I get down to the ground and fights Ironhide. We exchanged a few blows and I was hit by a human’s experimental weapon firing from afar. It did tremendous damage to both Starscream and I. When I was about to retreat, the reinforcements had arrived to assist.

During the intense firefights, the Pretenders have managed to access the secured lab with keycards obtained from several high ranking officers. The keycards was disguise as the Ultimate Movie Card which packs more features than average cards. It allows the officers to access to most if not all the areas in the facility.

Using the keycard, the Pretenders had successfully recovered the energy cell and are exiting the facility with it. I dashed my way towards the facility’s entrance hoping I can heal myself with the energy cell. Optimus Prime was hot on my trail trying to stop me from getting to the energy cell. Fortunately, Scorponok managed to hold Optimus off a while and allow me to reach the Pretenders. Without second thought, I grabbed the energy cell and I can feel the rush of energy into my body and my wounds are healed in an instance. With the energy boost, I fly towards the space and transforms into satellite. I tell all Decepticons to fall back as I am going to unleashed my ion cannon on the entire facility.

The Autobots are forced to retreat. The next step for the Decepticons would be to resurrect the Cybertronian battleship with the energy cell and invasion of Earth will begin.

Happy 2011

2011-01-01T22:51:00.001+08:00

Greetings! Happy New Year!

This is the first post for 2011 and I'm going to start it off with some entertainment. Yeah!
I'm going to put up my personal anticipated movie list of 2011. Without much crap, here is it:

The Mechanic

I Am Number Four

Thor

Source Code

Super 8

The Green Lantern

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Cowboys and Aliens

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

*no trailer for this at the time of writing

I think that is pretty much all the movies that I have in mind at the time of writing =)

Have an awesome year! Cheers~

Google Explores Our Body With Body Browser

2010-12-18T00:22:00.003+08:00

The Google corporation has been providing us with innovative services that enhances our daily lives. What's next? Now their latest project is this, Google Body Browser. It is basically a 3D model of the human anatomy. On the educational front, this tool should be helpful for those involved in biological or medicinal studies. The 3D model is certainly more interesting to look at than the good old 2D diagrams. Moreover, this tool literally allows peeling off the tissues and organs to have a better view at desirable areas of interest. The layers that can be manipulated are the skin, muscles, bones, organs, circulatory system, and nervous system.

Upon clicking at the body parts, it will be focused and the name label will appear. The labeling also can be enabled where all the labels are displayed depending on the layer visible as well as the level of detail that you are looking at. If you can't find what you want, you can type in to search at the top right corner of the interface.

Click to view larger image
This tool is currently in Google Labs and requires a web browser with WebGL support (Chrome beta, Firefox 4.0b1) in order to ~~play~~ view it. Please do also note that it might take a couple of minutes to load all of the flesh, tissues and organs. Blame the ~~human body for being so complex~~ slow Streamyx connection.

On a side note, there is no option to choose the model's gender. Future feature maybe?

Checkout Body Browser now!

Source: Gizmodo

Google Beatbox

2010-12-03T22:35:00.001+08:00

I saw something interesting in Twitter last week and I'm posting about it now. Some of you may already saw this on your friend's Facebook statuses.

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click “listen”
5) Be amazed :)

You can make your own combination of beatbox with the following guide:

zk = suspended cymbal
bschk = snare
pv = brush
bk = bass
tk = flam1
vk = roll tap
kt = flam2
kttp = flam tap
krp = hi hat tap
pv = short roll
th = better hi hat
thp, ds = instant rimshot.

Source: techcrunch.com

Still YES 4G? NO!

2010-11-20T23:25:00.004+08:00

With all the adverts and hypes created by YTL earlier, us Malaysians have high expectations from them. Too bad for them, lots of us Malaysians are disappointed and frustrated (even turned away and say NO!) toward YES. YES, they didn't even past the first day and us rakyat already responding negatively.

Speaking about time, since I last saw this...

I have never seen the main site until the time this post is published (28 hours and counting!). The only thing is see is this...

Their official twitter said they were having Denial-of-Service (Dos) attacks. It may be true or its just them lousy at fixing the issue. Anyway, their team of engineers should have expected the high amount of traffic and possible ~~attacks~~ "risks" as part of risk management activity.

Moving on, the pricing. I was quite interested with the "Pay-as-you-use" and "No expiry" fact. Even Tan Sri says so:

It will have the lowest rate in the industry with no monthly commitment and conditions

Tan Sri Francis Yeoh

As it turns out, nothing is true about it. You need to maintain minimum usage of RM30 per month to keep the service active. What happened to the "no monthly commitment and conditions"?? Does Tan Sri missed the meeting with accounts department or overlooked the memo?

Is there any more misleading information that they tell? YES, literally. Technically YES is NOT 4G. It is based on WiMax technology.

4G as a standard defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will only see its final release in 2012.
ITU defines 4G speeds as reaching 100 Mbps. By that definition, says Davies, “No one, right now, (is offering) 4G.”

Quoted from: themalaysianinsider.com

As it is based on the WiMax technology, experience with P1 WiMax reminds the inability to get online on a higher floor in an office block / condominium. If you can barely get a signal at higher floors, how do we make and receive calls there? Whether this is true or otherwise, we need to watch out for reviews in the near future.

Sources:
The Star
themalaysianinsider.com
Lowyat.Net
malaysianwireless.com

YES 4G

2010-11-18T22:06:00.002+08:00

YES its coming tomorrow! Yes the YES 4G network by YTL Communications. Some of you might noticed the adverts at Lot 10 with some storm troopers hanging around.

More and more details is uncovered these few days. The pricing is rated at 9 cents per sms, per minute of talktime and every 3MB of data.

The leaflet shows the devices that are compatible for the 4G network. No pricing for the devices at the time of writing. Everything will be unveiled tomorrow at launch!

Source: glaringnotebook.com

Manipulate Body Shape With MovieReshape

2010-10-22T00:57:00.000+08:00

There is a new software in town! It allows the alteration of physical body shape. This amazing software is called MovieReshape. This piece of software can alter an actor's body proportion making him or her slimmer, fatter, taller or shorter. Actors can breathe a sigh of relief as they doesn't need to physically drop or gain weight according to a movie's need.

This software can recognise a body shape in a video and alters it according to a pre-defined proportion. This produces resultant video within few hours as compared to several days with conventional SFX software.

source: Switched

Youtube in 3D

2010-10-17T22:37:00.005+08:00

This is an old piece of news that I think not many people are aware of. Youtube actually had roll out support for 3D content since July 2009. You can search for 3D enabled video by including "yt3d:enable=true" keyword in your search.

Watching typical 360p 3D video will push the processor usage to around 70% to 80% (varies with processor). Watching the same 360p 3D video at full screen smoothly is impossible as it will stutter (for me at least, don't take my word for it :D). Perhaps it needs an i5 or i7 to view it smoothly, I don't know.
The reason for such processing power is basically because it renders 2 videos at the same time; the red stream and the blue stream and overlay them together creating the 3D effect that we know.

On top of the traditional red and blue 3D, Youtube also experiment with lots of different type of 3D rendering.

You can watch the same video in the images above here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVOwAC3VQw

Have fun exploring 3D!

"Its so real its out of the screen!"

Changing Background For Windows 7 Login Screen

2010-10-05T22:56:00.001+08:00

I think most of us has already using Windows 7. It must be boring to keep seeing the same old blue login screen over and over again.

Since the days of XP, talented folks had always came up with programs to change the background of the login screen. Windows 7 is no exception. The folks over at Tweaks.com has created a Logon Changer for Windows 7. It is a small app weighing less than 1MB and its very user friendly. Anyone can personalise their login screen with a few mouse clicks. Download it here.

The program is fairly straight forward to use. First, click on the "Change Logon Screen" and browse for your desires image. If the picture is too big, it will prompt the user to create copy of the image and adjusts it accordingly to fit the login screen. We simply just have to click Yes and OK. Then, the image will be implemented.

To check it, simply click on the "Test" button it provides and it will perform the "Lock" function and you can see the login screen. If you are not satisfy yet, simply login and change again =)

In case you want that default blue screen back for whatever reason it may be, you can simply click on the "Revert to Default Logon Screen". It will restore to the original background.

Happy customising. Cheers~

Unable to try Google Instant?

2010-09-30T23:17:00.000+08:00

For those of you who are tech savvy, you might have known that Google had roll-out their new enhanced search feature. Its called Google Instant. With this new enhancement, Google has once again pushed the boundary of searching technique.

Google Instant allows searches to be done as you type. This should help the users to use more relevant keywords to effectively search for their desired information. Coupled with a smarter prediction, better search results can be acquired much faster.

Google Instant has been roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Users on other domains can only access this new enhancement if they are signed into their Google Account.

I personally cannot access the Google Instant despite I have signed into my Google Account and I am using the newest Chrome beta browser. For all of you out there that wanted to try it out, you can go here: http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en

Go and try it out! Some of you might find it uncomfortable as the search result keep changing as you type. No worries, Google allow users to disable the feature via an option next to the Search button.

Have fun trying!

What If I’m a Russian Spy

2010-07-19T20:27:00.001+08:00

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: █████████████████████████████
To: ███████████████████████████████████████████████████
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2010 16:02:19
Subject: Urgent: ECHELON intercepted and decrypted Russian communication

From: ████████████████████████
To: █████████████████████
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 09:37:53
Subject: New Assignment

We have news from friends over at the SVR that heard a rumor saying that the movie "Salt" is an embedded video that trains FBI field agent to identify the modus operandi of our spies in deep cover programs. If its true, there will be more than 10 of our comrades that will get caught.

Your mission is to gain access to early screening of Salt and determine if the rumors are true. Take precaution as the level of alert of their field agents have been raised due to the arrest of 10 of our comrades. Because of this, we have arranged another agent to assist you in the mission. Rendezvous with her and discuss the course of action.

Let me know how your progress as the agency is watching this mission very closely.

For Mother Russia!

From: ████████████████████████
To: █████████████████████
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2010 15:17:34
Subject: RE: New Assignment

I have heard planning from this Nuffnang company that they will be giving out 75 invitations to creative bloggers to watch "Salt" 2 full days before the public release date. A perfect opportunity for this assignment. The first step of execution is of course to write a creative blog post. I'll try my best to get invited, else I would have to do some extra work to get it.

On the premiere day, I would be on-site early to scout the area to determine the risks and possible escape routes. Maybe to have a bite a Carl's Junior too. Anyway, I will blend in with other bloggers and at the same time keeping a low profile to avoid getting checked by field agents in disguise. Once the movie start rolling, I'll be more safe and I can focus on evaluating whether the movie is indeed a field agent training video. I wonder if its anything like Chuck.

I will contact you with the evaluation soon.

Hail to Mother Russia!

Invisible Computer Mouse

2010-07-10T17:43:00.006+08:00

Yes you did not read wrongly. It is now possible to navigate the computer cursor with an invisible mouse! Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has invented a way to make this a reality. The project is called "Mouseless" and is leaded by Pranav Mistry. For those who do not know, he is the same guy that developed the cool "Sixth Sense" project that allow users to interact with the surrounding like how Tom Cruise did in Minority Report. See Sixth Sense in practise.

How exactly does it function? Basically, there is infrared laser and camera. Both of these component detects the hand movement. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present, the infrared lasers lights up the area of hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera is then able to monitor the movement of the hand and interprets the movement. A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs about $20 to make.

Source: Project Mouseless

Synchronise Files With DropBox

2010-06-30T17:09:00.002+08:00

For those of you who have multiple PCs or laptops, do you find it difficult to synchronise files between your systems? You must copy each new/updated file into each of your systems. This is troublesome and it wastes time. Some of you might use automated file sync-ing program such as Microsoft Office Groove. The downside of using that is the all the systems must be turned on and connected to each other in order to sync the files. Consider this: What if you have finished a document in your desktop and you did not turn on the laptop to sync the file. Next morning you go to work/college taking the laptop that did not have the latest document.

Now, is there anything out there that lets us to sync files between systems and allow access to our files at anytime?
Well yes. It is called DropBox.

DropBox is designed in such a way that you do not need to turn on all of your systems to be able to sync files. It basically stores your file up in the cloud server and lets all your other systems to download/sync them when they are booted up.

Although it is stores your file in the cloud server, it is relatively secure.This is because all transmission of data are encrypted (SSL). In addition to that, files stored are also encrypted with AES-256, one of the strongest encryption in existence.

Another good thing is that it implements itself in the windows environment. There is no need for you to upload the files via web interface since there will be a dedicated folder for DropBox. Simply drag it into the folder and your files are uploaded, prepared to be sync/downloaded.

You can also share certain folder with your friends so that they can add and edit files in it. This can become useful to allow a group of friends or team members to access shared resources. To share a folder, simply choose the folder to share and enter their email addresses.

Not a Windows user? Don't worry as DropBox also can be used on Mac and Linux. This also means that you can share files across different platforms.

Think its useful? Register an account now. The free account gives you 2GB storage space. You can earn an additional 500MB when you invite your friends as well as few other tasks. Once you have registered, you can download the installer to integrate DropBox into your system.

For more information, take a tour or view the FAQs.

Hope you all find this tool useful.

Cheers~

Filing In The Gap

2010-05-24T21:47:00.007+08:00

Its been a few months since my blog literally died. Now I shall revive it with an update of what has happened in this few month's time. Call it a summary if you will.

Let's see, shortly after CNY I faced multiple assignments deadline as well as a presentation or two. Later I was in the exam week. Luckily its only 1 week and its celebration right after the final paper =)

Few weeks after holiday starts, me and my friends planned 1 day trip to Melaka. We enjoyed ourselves and did silly things there.

Then a week after that, I applied for Streamyx Uni Cool Pack. To cut grandmother story short, its bit troublesome as I was cut off from the world of internet for a week or two. Then I decided to pay TM Point a visit to ask them to send an email to some department that is able to bypass quarantine period and register me.

Couple of days later the technician called me and everything went smoothly right until I get my HP Mini 210.

Not too long after that, I attended my college's Sports Carnival. Not to play but to help out at the booth.

Then here I am, finished the first day of my level 2 studies and trying to revive my blog. Going to be real busy this time round. I will try to post short updates to keep my blog alive! XD

Little news on the tech side of life, about 15 days more Apple will have their WWDC 2010 and Steve Jobs will address the keynote of the conference. In simple English, unveiling latest gadget or software from Apple. Will the iPhone 4G the same as the recently leaked version? Or Apple has bigger secret to announce?

Source: Tom's Guide

Sau Gong Day

2010-02-14T22:11:00.001+08:00

With CNY around the bent... it is time to declare off-work (sau gong) day. My friends and I went to celebrate it at Sek Yuen. I'll let the picture talk.

After the lunch, we went to watch a movie make the sau gong day an enjoyable one. We watched this...

This movie is really really hilarious. The movie trailer does not reveal the comedic level of the movie at all. You will be surprised with their dialogues. This is a DEFINITE MUST-WATCH CNY movie.

I'm wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous roaring year!

CNY Mood

2010-02-06T10:37:00.000+08:00

Chinese New Year is just around the corner and assignment's progress is still not near completion. Plus with the CNY mood, the laziness grows more and more day by day.

This year's CNY trend might not be blasting/ listening to CNY songs but rather Lady Gaga's Poker Face.

That's all for this week. Gotta continue with assignments' progress. =/

Assignment Filled January

2010-01-31T19:48:00.001+08:00

What have I done since my previous post? The following occupies most of my time... =O

Can I truly enjoy the coming CNY?

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T17:51:00.001+08:00

Happy New Year! 2009 has ended and 2010 has started. This means my short holiday is also coming to an end and its time to be in full work mode :(

Anyway, its just a short new year greeting post from me =)

Google has a more innovative way of greeting new year. Visit Google and click on "I'm Feeling Lucky".

Cheers and have a wonderful new year!

Search Faster with Cooliris

2009-12-24T00:31:00.000+08:00

Often search for images with Google Images or look for videos on Youtube? Tired of clicking "next page" when browsing through pages after pages after pages of results? Here's a little something that reduces the boredom and speeds up searching.

Recently I have installed and tried out Cooliris. It is program that runs on your internet browser. You can call it an extension or plugin too. It speeds up the browsing by putting all the results in a 3D wall. This wall lets user to scheme and scan through results almost instantly without the need to click "next page" and wait for the page to load.

It can search through Google Images, Flickr, DeviantArt, Youtube and several others. Other than that, you can browse through your own library of pictures in your own computer too.

In addition to that, you can use it to look through albums in Facebook as well. Perfect for those of you that have friends with hundreds of photos =P. With just a click of a button at bottom left corner of the album/picture, it launches Cooliris to view the album you chosen.

Fun to use as it seems, this thing also eats up your RAM. You will lose 100MB of RAM upon startup and an additional 100MB to 300MB or more depending on how long the wall goes.

Cooliris is available for all major browsers. Check it out at their official site. I'm using it on Chrome 4. For those of you who are using Chrome 4, you can get it from here.

Cheers~

Trip to Royal Selangor

2009-11-17T21:37:00.007+08:00

I have visited Royal Selangor about a week ago. It was organised by 1 of my college's club, D'ArtZ Club. Coincidentally I am a committee member XD
We gathered at APIIT at 1030. Then bus took off at 1100. We reached the destination at about 1200 or 1210.

So here's a brief itenary of the trip.

We were given a tour through the history of the company, the founder, those boring things and a few fun activities. Then there's this 1:50 scale model of KLCC made entirely out of pewters.

Next, we visit the factory part of the facility. Before entering, we were given a welcome drink.

After the refreshing drink, we head to visit the factory where various pewter items are produced.

Here the worker pours the pewter into a crocodile shaped mould

After the tour of the factory, we were brought to the final area where pewters are for sale.

Here is the place where rich people are able to spend their extra money.

Here's a RM48K bowl which is perfect for mixing rojak.

Here's a RM54K big plate that is perfect for yee sang during CNY.

Then there's this RM98K piece of silver ornament. Perfect for uhmmm... showing your richness.

I think the ONLY pewter item I can buy at that time is this...

That concludes my trip to Royal Selangor =)

Fake Antivirus and Their Scam

2009-10-14T21:49:00.004+08:00

Virus and trojan. These are some of the words that are feared by majority of people that uses computer. In general belief, viruses are closely associated with all the weird and nasty things that happens on one's computer. Even if something happened and it has nothing to do with viruses, most would blame it on viruses.

Through this fear in majority of people, malicious software (malware) creators uses the fear factor as a method to spread their viruses. This type of malware is categorised as scareware. Scareware comes in the form of legit looking antivirus software.

Here I have an actual scareware at work which freaked my friend's dad. Prior of installing an antivirus software called "System Security", the background is changed into this.

This is the scareware's first move, that is to get the victim's attention with something that says their computer is infected. In this case, it changed the background. There are also popup notifications to further enhance the effect of this move.

The victim should be in total fear and would follow the scareware's instruction in order to remove the non-existent threat. It urges the user to run a full system scan. Few minutes elapsed and it would have scanned tonnes of trojans and viruses to scare the crap out of the victim.

After finish scanning, the victim would be asked to download additional things to get rid of those non-existent trojans. In reality, the victim is downloading more malware into their computer. This effectively slows down the computer to a crawl. In addition to that, all the victim's data also risks being stolen.

Rather than asking the victim to download things, the latest trend now requests the victim to purchase a license in order for the fake antivirus to be able to remove the non-existent threats. If not, the victim won't be able to use much of their computer as any program are blocked from running because the fake antivirus says all of them are infected. In simple words, they want the victim to pay money for a useless license or suffer the inability to use their computer. This is yet another category of malware called ransomware.

So in the interest of your computer security, ALWAYS trust the big names. To name a few; Avast, Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky, NOD32, and McAfee. You can't go wrong with them.

For those of you that don't have any antivirus protection yet, you can try Microsoft's new Security Essentials. Yes, I know several attempts by Microsoft in the field of security is unsuccessful in the past, but things have changed this time round. They seems to have learnt their mistake during the dark times with Vista and OneCare.

That's it for now. Hope it has helped broaden your knowledge in the field of computer security. Cheers!

Thousands of Hotmail Passwords Leaked

2009-10-06T18:18:00.000+08:00

The first website that were aware of this was Neowin.net. They later verified that the accounts compromised are genuine and they immediately alerted Microsoft's Security Response Center. Microsoft has officially confirmed that there are several thousand Windows Live Hotmail users' credentials exposed on a third party site due to phishing scams. Compromised accounts includes email domains of @hotmail.com, @msn.com, and @live.com. Currently, the leaked accounts include usernames in alphabetical order beginning from "ar" to "bl".

So if you suspect your email account has been compromised, be sure to change your password now. For those of you that have filled in your email and password to utilise services similar to what I've discussed previously, you must absolutely change your password as soon as possible.

One last note to you all, technically speaking it is IMPOSSIBLE to tell who has blocked you and MSN will NOT closed down and MSN will NOT charged you money to use and....... hope you get my point. In case you didn't, don't believe everything you see in the world wide web.

Attempt to revive blog

2009-09-17T15:46:00.002+08:00

A lot of things had happened since my last post.

But the most important 1 occurred yesterday...

After weeks of eager waiting for free time to do this.... i am finally....

using WINDOWS 7!

^_^

Maths and Science back in BM

2009-07-08T21:14:00.012+08:00

The initiative of PPSMI or Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris began in the year 2003. I was the first batch and it goes very well. In fact, there is an increase in the number of As achieved by students. In addition to that, majority of the students opted to answer the entire paper in English.

According to news for PMR 2008,

This year, 51.2% of candidates chose English, compared with 30.8% who answered in Malay and 18% who used a combination of both languages. Last year, only 21.5% of candidates answered the PMR Science paper wholly in English.
Education director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom described the increasing trend of candidates using English as “very encouraging”.
The subject that showed the biggest improvement in performance was English — the pass rate increased by 3.6 points from an average of 71.2% from 2003-2007 to 74.8% this year.
The disparity between the performance of urban and rural students was also narrowing. “Each year we see an improvement in the achievements of rural students,” he said.

For 2008's SPM,

Students in the rural areas, including the interior as well as Orang Asli students, who sat the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination last year outshone their peers in the urban areas where Science and Mathematics are concerned. And these two subjects were taught in English.
As such, Education Ministry director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom said the arguments that the teaching of these two subjects in English caused the rural students to lag might no longer hold water.
... a whopping 89.1 per cent of students who took up Additional Mathematics, answering the first paper fully in English.
... 76.8 per cent of those who sat for Chemistry Paper 3 writing their subjective answers in English.
"The gap between students in the urban and rural areas has been bridged and this is visible in their (rural students') better performance compared with their peers in towns."
Since the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English was introduced in 2003, there had been a steady improvement in students' performance in the subjects.

If there's such good feedback and result from students, why is there a need to revert back to BM? Just because they felt the national language is threaten by English, they revert it back. In fact, there are quite many BM words that are being derived from English words such as.... *deep breath*.... here goes... aktif, bos, boikot, komplex, komander, etnik, global, suspek, seksyen, abstrak, proses, teknik, aktiviti, mentaliti, personaliti, respirasi, realiti, majoriti, demostrasi, imaginasi, fungsi, misi, visi, aksi, reaksi, seksi... etc etc. All the words had gradually derived from English long before this PPSMI being initiated. Why only now they felt threaten while the use of those words had merged itself in BM long time ago? So much for protecting the national language... Malaysia Boleh!

How can Malaysia improve and develop to be competent in the global market if this continues? Doesn't all the previous students had problem translating terminologies from BM to English upon starting their tertiary studies? It is such a hassle and time consuming process as they need to adapt to the use of English terminologies.

Anyway, since this blog is about technology and IT, I'm going to relate it with that.

ENGLISH :
That server gives a plug and play service to the client using either hardware or software joystick. The joystick goes into the port of the client.

What happens if BM is used?

*hardware = barang keras
*software = barang lembut
*joystick = batang gembira
*plug and play = cucuk dan main
*port = lubang
*server = pelayan
*client = pelanggan

BM :
Pelayan itu memberi pelanggannya layanan cucuk dan main dengan menggunakan batang gembira jenis keras atau lembut. Batang gembira itu dimasukkan ke dalam lubang pelanggan.

Ackward isn't it?

Influenza A(H1N1)

2009-07-01T21:12:00.003+08:00

As of the time of writing, there are 196 cases in the country. With H1N1 cases on the rise, what we can do to protect ourselves?
Wear masks like how we went through SARS?

This 2 video sums it up :D

Although this first video is about SARS, the things is still applicable.

For those who likes Korean... this is a parody from Wondergirl's Nobody with H1N1 issue...

Go wash your hands now ^_^