Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Why IT developers only get balder

2009-07-04T04:05:16Z

There’s a lecturer in school with no hair. Just a shiny chrome atop the forehead of a really friendly person. I know that because I’ve met and talked to him on a few occasions, and he’s almost always smiling, even during the one time he barged into the classroom mid-lesson to conduct that one-off spot-check for unruly hair.

Thing is, each time I see him, my stomach would seize with fear, the cold emanating from a terrible thought that I might one day lose my hair too.

And my fear isn’t ungrounded. Whenever I get to breaking point in debugging code, I have an insane Hulk-like urge to rip apart my shirt, and then start dancing around the room like a mad rabbit. The trouble is, my brain retains full control over myself, and I end up clutching at my hair in utter frustration.

Now you know why a lot of IT developers no longer have their hair with them in this world. The concentrated power needed to solve weird complications in seemingly straightforward execution sucks the lifeforce out of the follicles, which is then harnessed into brain-juice to turbo-charge the brain, causing the person in question to either start singing Aaron Kwok’s songs like some sports dude high on endorphins, or to start disturbing his other classmates.

And since disturbing classmates also disrupts their ability to effectively troubleshoot their codes, they too need to harness the hair-lifeforce and in turn go similarly nutty. Which explains why in Singapore Polytechnic, most of the top students in school are also similarly off their rockers.

What happens to the hair then? With its lifeforce fully harvested, the strands fall off, leading to premature hair-loss. Somehow, the limited amount of hair on a person’s head seems to be enough to power the brain for the rest of his life, because he still remains productive way long after he lost his last strand of hair (otherwise affectionately known as the “Dipsy” strand).

This phenomenon is not just limited to developers in the IT industry. You can see this immediately when you get to university. Just look at all the bald professors in the faculties.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Why IT developers only get balder

Oh my freaking crap

2009-06-27T18:44:05Z

Picture walking along Suntec City shopping mall at 11.45pm, with nary another soul in sight. The lights are dimmed, to save energy of course; and since you take that route almost every Saturday evening, you won’t be expecting anything to be amiss. Until you see this:

I really wish companies setting up booths don’t do such scary stuff!

In case you still cannot figure out what’s happening, it’s a mannequin in bridal dress. Problem is, there’s a long white cloth draped over the mannequin, which makes you wonder about the reason for the drapes. Normal mannequins don’t exactly get draped over in the middle of the night.

Special thanks goes out to a friend who suggested that I delete the picture if it appears blurry. That was quite reassuring advice.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Oh my freaking crap

My very first singer

2009-06-26T18:00:23Z

Michael Jackson was my very first exposure to pop music. Back when I was still a child, my mother had always stuck the radio to the very “auntie” chinese radio station 95.8FM. Although there were the occasional few mandarin pop songs that I loved, the rest of the playlist were nearly non-understandable. Like, 1950s and 1960s stuff.

My head often breaks down at trying to grasp the meaning of the songs, but I often fail to do so (probably the germination of the chinese “potato” within me). I came to think that songs were about undecipherable words, and that I was only supposed to jig along with the rythmn. It worked well for the few more recent mando-pop songs the oldie station played, so that was the way I perceived music.

Until Michael Jackson.

Remember how you were sometimes overly obsessed with skipping between the small gaps in the tiles within large shopping malls for luck’s sake, and suddenly had the realisation that not only did it not work, but it was silly?

Well, imagine a ton of bricks falling off my back when in my primary 6 year, my class music teacher played Black or White on the tape deck in the music room.

I mean, it still wasn’t legible, because the singer shouts the lyrics too fast for my young ears to comprehend. But the screams, the hiccups, the high-pitched grunts were magical. It’s like somebody conveying his emotions, loud and clear, into my heart. And I could feel the bitterness tinged with hope. All that, before I could understand the term “racial discrimination”.

Of course, later on I would learn about the power of music as a conversational medium, but there’s no need to prove anything to my primary 6 self. I was touched by the song. Maybe even addicted. Since that was before the age of Compact Discs (spelled with nicely capitalised “C” and “D”), so a few of my classmates volunteered to dub copies of the music tapes off the “Dangerous” album for the rest of the class.

After I got my copy, I went home and switched off boring 95.8FM. Insert the newly dubbed tape, and woke the whole house up with “Black or White”. I got barred from the tape player for a few weeks after that. I guess suddenly playing a tape full of suggestive shouts where you’re used to only play tapes full of nursery rhymes is enough to scare your mother. I suggest nobody try this, especially if your family is traditionally conservative.

Introduction of Michael Jackson to Mums and Dads need to be done gently, lest you find yourself grounded. But even so, it was well worth the shocked expressions, even if the next few tapeless weeks were unbearable.

Later generations of Mums and Dads would forever forbid their sons and daughters from making Michael their idols after the baby dangling incident. Ok, and the alleged child molestation charges. I still maintain his innocence though; his actions show that he probably has a side that has never followed his 50 year old stature.

It is thus that it was a sad morning for me, when I woke up to see Twitter abuzz with news of Michael Jackson death. At 50 years old, he is way before his time; but for a man with multiple health issues, and under the intense pressure of public scrutiny, it’s probably the best he could have managed.

His music and philantrophic work has touched the lives of many. At least, he has certainly touched mine.

Rest in peace, Michael.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

My very first singer

E.T.A: Awesome indie animation

2009-06-25T17:52:33Z

As an art terrorist (as not so affectionately referred to by a certain art teacher in my secondary school), I have the tendancy to sit and gape in awe at great works. And by that I mean cool animations. However permanently I remain turned off static art, moving visuals never fail to amaze and stun me.

It’s probably the last of the art part of me that still hasn’t died yet. Which allows me to love the coffee maker. Enjoy!

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E.T.A: Awesome indie animation

New version of Outlook, and why it is going to break your emails

2009-06-25T10:40:40Z

Stay with me while I run through the technical stuff. Currently, all the nicely formatted emails you receive are all generated to follow a specification called HTML 3.2. When you open these emails in your email reader (be it Outlook, Thunderbird, or web mail), an engine reads the specially crafted document, and then renders your nicely formatted message for your viewing pleasure.

The problem is, some rendering engines do a decent job on displaying your messages, while others make the carefully made messages look like a blotched mess. Of course, I’m talking about Microsoft Outlook 2010. It’s part of the upcoming version of Office, and the rendering prowess of the engine used sucks to the core. In fact, that engine has been behind some of the most bloated and ugly messages you’ve seen on the web so far (if you have email contacts who use Outlook 2007), and it’s now poised to be the default rendering engine for Outlook 2010. This means that all your emails are going to look like the same crap your Outlook 2007 contacts have been stuck sending to you.

Look at a sample to see the horror to be unleashed if you, or your company IT department decides to upgrade to this monstrosity.

A website has been setup to campaign for Microsoft to regain some common sense. As the IE8 team has always trumpeted about, Internet Explorer isn’t that bad a renderer. Why don’t they use it for viewing emails? It’s as simple as that.

Now’s decision point. If you want all emails to your corporate email address to look like a mess, do absolutely nothing. Or else, you need to get your butt off right now and warn your IT department about this terrible program.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

New version of Outlook, and why it is going to break your emails

Bugs descend on PHP 5.2.4

2009-06-22T15:52:18Z

Yup, that was the cause for the emergency upgrade today.

You see, there’s apparently a bug triggered which crashes the FastCGI set-up we have over here on the server. The entire array of threads handling all the PHP processing just called it quits. Problem is, I couldn’t reproduce this issue, and the only symptoms of the problem is when nginx slaps all the pages with a 502 Gateway error, as well as occasions where pages on the server only load halfway, and then quit.

Because of this annoying problem, I had to find a new alternative to the spawn-fcgi method I was using on the server. A simple Google search leads to PHP-fpm, which patches PHP with an inbuilt FCGI manager. Today’s maintenance was to compile and install PHP-fpm on the server.

It’s annoying, because once you’ve gone down the road of compiling a package from the source files, you’re stuck doing this for the forseeable future: compiling new versions as they appear, and freezing the package in the package manager to avoid having the entire custom set-up overwritten whenever the distribution vendors update their repository. But as an indie-developer (fancy calling myself that) using non-mainstream tools, that’s the way I’m supposed to rock. So I rock. lmao

Besides, the upgraded PHP appears to run better than the spawn-fcgi set-up, so I’m pretty much pleased with the solution. Now hopefully, no weird bugs come up to bite me!

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Bugs descend on PHP 5.2.4

Emergency server maintenance

2009-06-22T15:52:47Z

Update: All done! See the follow-up post

There’ll be an emergency server maintenance on 22 June 2009 to resolve certain stability issues with the server. All domains hosted on SgBlogging will be disrupted intermittently between 11am to 10pm Singapore time (7pm to 6am UTC time).

I apologise for the inconvenience caused, as well as the very short notice. More to come in a follow-up post after the maintenance is over.

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Emergency server maintenance

Pay to bring your competitor’s site down

2009-06-14T12:09:40Z

I’ve actually read about commercial espionage and sabotage operations, but I’ve never given it serious thought. And that is despite the huge dramatisation about shady characters sitting in dark rooms, typing away at glowing monitor screens.

Come to think about it, it’s the dramatisation that got me to put it out of my mind! But the world and its dark side eventually finds its way around, and it’s made a lay-over at this blog:

(View the full image)

Thankfully, Askimet caught this comment, so it hasn’t been published. I’m not so sure about the numerous other blogs out there, so you might actually get to see the full contact details and IP address of similar comments.

The point is, sabotage remains a large part of the working world. Especially in the area of information systems management, where valuable data on customers, new products, or strategic competition plans are stored. There is a constant need for new and secure software development techniques to make sure that information is kept secure.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Pay to bring your competitor’s site down

Out of the Imagine Cup, and into a whole new world

2009-05-25T11:10:29Z

Things have been a bit messy for me lately. My team got kicked out of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition, and all of the sudden, we have lots of stuff due for submission.

I probably should explain a little: my team is doing a project for submission into the Imagine Cup competition, and are using it as our school’s final year project while we are about it. However, since the competition deadline was tight, the school allowed us to skip all the architecture design parts of the project, and go straight into the coding a workable application. (Although we have to come back eventually and fill out the missing pieces at a later time.)

And all that documentation suddenly became due when we bombed out of the competition. Barely two weeks to write out use case specifications and all the other system design diagrams for a medium sized Information Technology management system. It’s enough to make me dizzy, especially when the last time I took the actual module 2 semesters back, we took nearly 2 months to complete the development designs for a much smaller system! We’ll try to manage the best we can, but it comes to a point where we cannot target everything at once, so I’m adopting a prioritisation strategy. We’re doing the specifications for the main application; the rest of the information management system would have to wait a teeny bit.

With that, I must say that I’m disheartened that Microsoft does not see the value in our product, but I have total faith in the project’s viability. I hope we can secure the school’s support to push our project into a real product, since it would ease the transition for us a lot with the advice of the polytechnic’s Industry Services.

Already, I’m dreaming of the day I would invite Microsoft to our product launch keynote. =) I would love to prove them wrong about their initial judgement.

Read the original post at: Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Out of the Imagine Cup, and into a whole new world

Implications of AWARE’s Extra-Ordinary General meeting

2009-05-02T16:43:57Z

I followed the live feed from Wayang Party and The Online Citizen on the Association of Women for Action and Research’s extra-ordinary general meeting held today.

Personally, I’m not a religious person; I’m more of a spiritual-meditating kind. And besides that, I’m getting too busy to join in social causes like in the past. But AWARE’s EGM today has gotten me to sit up and take notice, for we are noticing the re-birth of social activism in Singapore.

For quite some time, us Singaporeans labelled as the post-independence generation have been criticised for not being active in pushing for our ideals, working for what we believe in. We’ve not seen the inter-racial riots in the 1950s and 60s exemplifying social extremism; nor have we experienced in person the euphoria of steering our own destiny during the push for Singapore’s self-governance, and subsequent merger into Malaysia in 1963.

In fact, before Internet came to Singapore, the government was complaining that Singaporeans were not speaking up on the issues close to our hearts, and even set-up a Speaker’s Corner. Social activism was limited to participation in niche organisations such as AWARE and SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).

However, today we have seen how Singaporeans can mobilise and speak out with one voice against an insidious take-over of a well-known secular organisation, and be able to turn out and show our support for a single, united cause. According to the live reports, more than 2000 new members had signed up since news of the new executive committee’s agenda spread on the Internet. On Twitter, the tag #awaresg has topped the trends lists, and new tweets are still constantly pouring in. Singaporeans have turned up at Suntec City in droves to drive home the message that they do not condone the use of dirty tricks to gain control of an organisation.

I believe that it is a positive day for social activism in Singapore. But that’s not the only good news. Today’s result has also shown that Singaporeans, religious or not, feel that there should be a clear separation of religion from secular organisations such as NGOs and organs of states. This is very strongly needed in our country, because of our multi-religious and multi-racial profile. We cannot afford to let one racial or religious group dictate another person’s life just because the former believes that it is right. While this success may seem small, I see this a significant reaffirmation of the country’s founding principles.

The good news doesn’t end here; like I mentioned previously, today’s EGM has demonstrated the self-correcting power of a properly functioning democratic system in any organisation. Freak election results do occur, as the examples in recent years have shown. The same apparatus which creates these freak results empower members to make it right. That’s the purpose of no-confidence motions. I sincerely hope that this episode would allow all Singaporeans to experience the cogs of democracy moving.

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Implications of AWARE’s Extra-Ordinary General meeting