Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

So… the money belongs to the government now, eh?

2009-10-13T04:08:41Z

I’m upset at this letter in today’s forum pages:

Ministry: MP Low wrong on lift upgrading

I REFER to last Saturday’s letter by Member of Parliament for Hougang Low Thia Khiang, ‘No basis for MP not to announce lift upgrading’.

The joint letter last Friday by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) and the People’s Association (’Why grassroots advisers announce lift upgrading’) should be read in conjunction with Minister for National Development Mah Bow Tan’s explanation to the media last Wednesday.

As Mr Mah highlighted, HDB’s upgrading programmes are carried out and funded by the Government. This is no different from other government programmes such as the building of roads and schools.

These programmes have to be implemented through government channels. In the case of HDB upgrading, this channel is the advisers to grassroots organisations, who are appointed by the Government. Opposition MPs are not answerable to the Government, nor are they obliged to carry out and explain the Government’s policies.

The Government pays up to 90 per cent of the cost of the Lift Upgrading Programme (LUP), with the rest shared between the residents (5 per cent) and the town councils (5 per cent). Funding for LUP is possible only because of the Government and the Budget surpluses it has generated through prudent policies.

Opposition MPs are not responsible for generating budget surpluses. There is therefore no basis for opposition MPs to lead the LUP – a national programme funded mainly by the Government. Mr Low is mistaken when he cites the ‘will of the people’ expressed in general elections to justify why he should play a leading role in the LUP in Hougang. The will of the people expressed in general elections is to elect a government for the country as a whole; and not to elect separate local governments for each constituency.

Singapore has a one-level system of government. MPs, whether People’s Action Party or opposition, do not constitute a local government in their constituency.

However, MPs do have a role in running town councils. Their role in town management and maintenance is clearly defined in the Town Councils Act, and does not extend to implementing government programmes such as the LUP.

Lim Yuin Chien
Press Secretary to the
Minister for National Development

In it, the secretary mentions that the opposition MPs are not qualified to head the upgrading programme because:

The opposition MPs do not have credit in helping the government create a budget surplus.
The opposition MPs are not answerable to the government.
The upgrading programme is a government programme, and it is up to the government to appoint its agent.

The secretary also clarifies that the votes cast in the general elections are to:

Elect a government of state as a whole, instead of for separate local governments in each ward.
Elect a Member of Parliament in each ward for the purpose of town management and maintenance as defined by the Town Councils Act.

I call bullshit on this letter.

The opposition MPs do not have credit in helping the government create a budget surplus.

Firstly, it is the executive branch of the government’s job to run the country and manage the state’s funds. There is no way that any MPs, PAP or not, would be able to influence or command in any form, how the Cabinet manages the funds, except at the annual Budget debate. Thus, this point is a red herring.

The opposition MPs are not answerable to the government.

It is interesting to read about the second point. Why are Member of Parliaments supposed to be answerable to the government, when it’s actually the other way round? The government cabinet is accountable to the people via their elected representatives in Parliament; and for Hougang and Potong Pasir, it is Mr Low Thia Kiang and Mr Chiam See Tong.

The upgrading programme is a government programme, and it is up to the government to appoint its agent.

Another red herring. Surely if the government is all about accountability, it can appoint its own agent to helm the project; but is it so untenable to have the ward’s elected MP make the project announcement? Is it so hard to have the agent work with the elected MP just because he is a member of the opposition party?

Elect a government of state as a whole, instead of for separate local governments in each ward.

Wrong again. The General Elections are meant for the people to elect their representatives into Parliament. When the representatives have been elected, the President invites the majority party to form the government, consisting of elected Member of Parliaments. The government as a whole is being elected, but not directly.

I’m not opposed to the government appointing its own agent to head the project, but the agent should be working with the elected MP to conduct the works, despite his party affiliation. In this situation, the two MPs have been lobbying for many years to have their wards upgraded. When it finally comes, the people to announce the upgrades are the 2 losing PAP candidates for the wards; and the way it is portrayed makes it seem as if they were the ones who were responsible for getting the HDB to change its policy.

In fact, much of the outcry on this issue has always been on why the MPs are not the ones to announce the projects, when the government knows consciously that Mr Low Thia Kiang and Mr Chiam See Tong have been the ones most vocal and active about this issue. It’s very much a side-lining of the two politicians, as much as I can see from here. This letter appears to explain the situation, where in fact it is a distraction from the actual question that we have been asking:

Why aren’t the elected Member of Parliaments for Hougang and Potong Pasir the ones announcing the lift upgrades?

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

So… the money belongs to the government now, eh?

Close down blog?

2009-10-03T19:19:26Z

I’ve been wondering if I should close down this blog.

At first, I committed to writing a new post every day, if not about my life in the army, or my working life, or my schooling life; but I’ve been writing less frequently. Furthermore, this blog isn’t generating money at all, and the amount of benefit it brings to world isn’t as much as I would have wanted to.

I’m considering the possibility of converting this into an online magazine for fellow student computer programmers. This effectively excises my reflections and posts of my life from the blog, but I would probably just bring those over to some other publishing platform that makes it easier to do those kind of posts.

What do you think?

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Close down blog?

Really, really tired

2009-09-19T07:18:19Z

Very, very worrying. I’ve been struggling to learn and use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for a major re-write of our application for the hospital. There’s lots of new things to learn, weird behaviours to discover and work-around, and a self-imposed 5 Oct deadline to finish it.

I wake up in the afternoon, and face the monitor screen with absolutely no direction on how to get what I want done. Should I use a canvas for the slide-out menu? Should I use a grid instead? Both exhibit weird and undocumented behaviour which I don’t discover until I take the plunge, and start coding. And then only after I get the majority of that feature up working, I find a show-stopping behaviour, and I would need to tear everything down, and start over again.

If it’s just once or twice, or if I had all the time in the world, I would have simply treated this as a learning experience. But the high hopes placed within this project has caused me a lot of hand-wringing, and there is so much internal and external pressure that I’ve gone beyond thinking about it. It’s just mind-numbing paralysis as I search the Internet for non-existent documentation on WPF quirks.

The result being that I’m quite drained and disillusioned. I look at the plans I’ve drawn up, and being forced to reduce them more and more. These failures are getting quite trying for me, that I’m beginning to doubt my own ability to code. Seriously, I’m starting to think that the problem is with me.

I really, really need to get away from it all. I’m weary.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Really, really tired

Just saying…

2009-09-05T17:46:32Z

Prologue:
Of course, I realise that publishing this on my blog, where people who know me may read, and connect the dots, or potential employers may read and make judgements on is not a wise thing to do, but the lesson I’ve learnt is too invaluable for me to just shove into the back of my mind. All in, this current project I’m on has yielded me a lot of personal growth, and I sincerely believe that it will serve me well in life. Special thanks go to my project mentor and team mates for being so understanding.

That’s the good thing about being in school. You can make all the silly mistakes you want, and you’ll escape unscathed… mostly; it is a good place to be daring and learn all you can. This is the latest lesson I’ve learnt.

I’m just saying this, and only because this would most probably not reach the ears of the person I’m talking about (hopefully), but there really are some people who can test the limits of my patience.

More specifically, I’m referring to a person from a certain organisation who can somehow ruin my otherwise perfect day with his tactless comments. It’s not just me who’s affected. Others who have interacted with this specific person have told me that they had to exercise their restraints in conversation just to keep themselves calm.

Perfect training ground for the emotional quotient. Regardless of whether my EQ gets strengthened with increased interaction with this person, I find it unsettling for my health to be in extended contact with him. During a recent meeting, we could only sit down, seething as the person pointed out that we did wrong on everything in a project that we were on.

Advice appreciated. Tone, not so. Have you ever had somebody come up to you, and talk to you as if you could never do anything right? How did you feel?

After coming so far on a project, I probably was not prepared to accept so much criticism at one go, but a condescending tone was the absolute maximum I could handle. I scribbled on the scrap piece of paper I had to distract myself from the steaming rage. Looking at a smiling face that dispensed the words, I fought long and hard to stay calm.

The bottom line is clear to me. In retrospect, I understand the need to keep cool and focused under the fire, and I think this has been some serious eye-opener for me. I remember going ballistic after some serious teasing from certain friends many years ago. The army has taught me that the little teases and scandalous public dress-downs don’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Working in a call centre has taught me the virtue of being dispassionate under personal insult from angry customers.

That day was the latest challenge in my personal development. To be able to take affronts to my professional work and strategy from a person who can smile throughout the entire session. I realise that I’m not perfect, and that person has made some valid observations about my work. It is the delivery of the message I need to get used to.

Unfortunately, that person doesn’t eat yong tau hoo, last I recall. Perhaps he takes seafood? Otherwise, I would have treated him to a bowl just to demonstrate to myself that I can overcome this challenge. The challenge of keeping a poker face under fire. My mentor’s good at this though, I have a lot to learn from him.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Just saying…

About how much I know about compiling codes form source

2009-08-31T13:31:19Z

Practically speaking, I’m just a script kiddie copying and pasting walk-throughs made by the kind people in the Open Source movement. I set-up this web server with the help of Google, and a liberal amount of experimentation (and lots of reformatting to get rid of all the odd-balls that pop up).

So today, when I saw that php-cgi was listed as one of the updated modules, I panicked. Basically, I had compiled my version of php-cgi from source, patched with php-fpm to run the fastcgi instances. With that patched version written over by the official version from Ubuntu’s repository, I had to find some way to re-compile the version I needed for the set-up to continue working.

It’s my epiphany. I might have lived under the illusion that I knew what I was doing, but in reality, I’m being shown that the rabbit hole goes deeper than it initially did. I re-compiled a newer version of php with the help of a newer guide, with trepidation in my heart. Will the compilation work, or would it crash and burn?

I brought php-fpm back up after it was installed. Immediately, my own blog started to throw warnings all over the page. In fact, if you were here moments ago, you would have seen the errors crowding the front page. With nowhere to turn to except for Google, I search for an answer online. Thankfully, so many people already had the problem that it was solved quite quickly. I patched the file in question, and so now the errors are gone.

It’s all thanks to Google that I’m able to run this server on my own, as well as the great open source community out there for being willing to help the newbies. I, for one, am grateful for the opportunity to use and learn open source software.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

About how much I know about compiling codes form source

A message of hope

2009-08-24T17:32:17Z

At nearly a quarter of a century years old, I thought that I had finally gotten the rhythm of the world, and how to tick.

The events that unfolded these few months proved not only the unpredictability of this world, but also the extent of my naivety.

For the past 3 years of my polytechnic education, I’ve realised that many problems can be solved, especially since every single piece of possible dirt on any programming language can be found on the wonderful resource that’s commonly known as THE Internet. It’s the go-to tool to dig up documentation, code samples, and lots of discussion about programming.

It’s also my go-to tool whenever I got stuck during my own coding sessions. It all operates on a very simple, and elegant premise: the programming problem you’re stuck at has an extremely high probability of having been encountered and solved by countless predecessors before you. By combing discussion forum sites, or posting threads asking for help, most programming problems are very easily resolved.

It’s with this powerful and empowering mindset that I set out, and managed to re-write functions to print documents in Java when there are existing application programming interfaces that already do this. It was also with this same sheer brute-force that I came up with the algorithm for a movable carousel of CDs within a desktop application.

Then in the second semester of year 2, something drastic happened. I was being told that programming is a very tedious job, and that I shouldn’t like it. It probably has something to do with actually putting faith in that belief, but shortly after that, I started to lose steam on my assignments.

I’ll be the first to admit, it’s 100% my fault for actually allowing myself to be influenced so easily towards the negative; it’s still amazing that the episodics had a profound effect on my self-esteem. This is a lesson for me to be more inquisitive and careful in accepting what people want me to think.

I’ve never actually spoken to the person about this, because I have realised that it’s my own prerogative to be fully rooted and grounded in my beliefs. Being too easily receptive to another person’s opinion on how I should feel was my mistake, and it’s one that I’m still trying to sort out up until now. I neither blame the person, nor do I wish to out him/her at all.

You might be wondering who I’m referring to. Just be assured that it’s not you. I’ve been careful enough not to have that person on my MSN messenger or FaceBook, so he/she would not know that I’m talking about him/her. Got to be careful about social networking!

As I start anew on this final year project, I hope to find my previous mojo back. And this time, I’ll have my brain filtering software working at full capacity.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

A message of hope

Kakashi Gaiden — animated

2009-08-11T17:17:38Z

For the fans of Naruto whom have been asphyxiating with the anticipation since Shippuuden came along approximately 2 years ago, you can finally breath now.

That missing gap, a clearly deliberate omission of a pivotal event in the Naruto-verse, has finally arrived.

Kakashi Gaiden explains the events of the ninja world a few years before the birth of Uzumaki Naruto and his compatriots. If you have been wondering why Naruto’s sensei — Hatake Kakashi — has a single Sharingan in his left eye when he isn’t of Uchiha blood, and why he always visits the war memorial at the village before every mission, this is the episode that will show it all.

The animation quality is not as good as I would have liked, especially since I consider the gaiden a cannonical, and important part of Naruto’s story. It first came out in the manga many, many years back.

The action scenes are jerky, and the animators over-used the sepia toning in quite a few scenes, as if creating a visual clue as to the old age of the events being depicted. It may have worked for audiences whom might haven’t expected the gaiden to appear smack in the middle of the story, but since the manga didn’t intend for Kakashi’s story to be told so late into the story plot, it must have felt quite disjointed for the audiences who don’t touch the manga. That probably justified the liberal browning in this episode, but as someone who actually does read the serialised manga, the effect looked way off for me.

Nevertheless, the animators were still able to capture the essence of the sub-plot in a succinct, 40 minute dual-episode. I could feel the anguish and pain that the main characters felt at that time, although the side-characters could use some serious re-work. The antagonistic ninjas felt dull and one-dimensional, and their dialog only managed to jar me from the soap opera between the 3 main characters.

Overall, I would rate it a 7 out of 10. I had high hopes that the animation studio would place the gaiden in high regard, and at least make more effort for these 2 episodes than they have for the last 100-or so. Those episodes were a cure for insomaniacs at the very best, which was why I stopped paying attention to the anime, until I heard the news of Kakashi Gaiden’s animation. A real pity, I definitely won’t be watching the next episode (which is back to the current storyline), but for the sake of catching up on what the manga dudes have read so far, this is a must watch.

Animation quality: 5 out of 10
Story-telling: 8 out of 10
Continuity: 8 out of 10

Overall worthiness: 7 out of 10

You can watch the episode online at Narutospot.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Kakashi Gaiden — animated

Why your Facebook page isn’t your rant-board

2009-08-10T13:57:14Z

[Via @JoeAugustin, via @johnkerrnz, via @MarketingEds]

When a large part of your social network is on Facebook, you don’t really want to post up your negative thoughts about any one of your contact on your Facebook, because, well: I think your contact can see your rant.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

Why your Facebook page isn’t your rant-board

First in most frequently broken-down automated train line

2009-07-30T16:14:45Z

It has been touted to be the south-east asia’s first fully automated rapid transit. What the world doesn’t know is that it is also bloody expensive to construct and run, and that it also breaks down quite a lot.

Of course, I’m talking about the North-east line.

It broke down on the first day of operation, and then multiple times throughout its years of service. Interestingly, it would almost always be a different problem each time the system breaks down, but the end result is always the same: the staff stationed on the train proper has to open the compartment of manual controls, and over-ride the automatic system.

In short, they end up driving the train themselves.

How do I know? The train accelerates and decelerates irregularly, and slams to a stop at the odd station, while for most of the journey, the train stops behind the actual alignment with the platform doors, and has to inch forward bit by bit to match the screen doors. Other times, the train overshoots the stop line, and has to be reversed. Unlike the carefully math-controlled acceleration and deceleration, a human driving a train shows up like a light bulb in a dark room.

To give credit to SBSTransit, they’ve done a remarkable job of keeping the trains running, for a line that breaks down so often. But it’s like taking consolation in the grand scheme of bad things: it defeats the purpose of making the MRT line driverless if you’re going to employ people to stand inside the train to be ready to drive the train when it breaks down. And since lower labour costs was one of the original argument put forward for investing in the huge cost of automating the line, I feel cheated.

Just imagine how much lower the cost of the line would have been if it had been built as per the usual MRT lines? Less breakdown means less workhours lost, and thus lower economic damages. Labour costs would remain the same, since the employees standing around on the train would instead be inside the driver’s cabin. And the upfront investment would have been a lot less.

Of course, it is easy for me to criticise with the clarity of hindsight, but being made to be guinea pigs to a new, unproven system is a lot of unneeded expenditure, and brings a lot of inconvenience. I hope that the government has learnt its lesson. Public transportation in Singapore is a key infrastructure, using it to test unproven technology is going to bring a lot of problems for the commuters. That just isn’t worth the bragging rights for being first.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

First in most frequently broken-down automated train line

My chosen poison

2009-07-29T11:48:44Z

It’s late into the evening, and I’m at the school’s air-conditioned food court trying to get myself to do work.

I got quite a bit done during the day, but right now I only feel like doing anything other than my work. All around me, groups of people are jabbering over mouthfoods of dinner, and a rather rowdy bunch from some CCA or what sort are screaming at the top of their lungs.

So I plugged in the earphones, and played a little Osu!.

Which made things kind of worse, because right now I’m blogging instead of working on my assignment. Motivation is like a fly: really, really tough to catch. And even when you do, something you can always see other people doing fun stuff.

It’s tough to get things done in school.

But it’s even worse if I were to go home: I won’t get anything done at all, because I would be lazing on my bed. The strong attraction to beds is still there in 2009, more than 3 years after I finished my full time National Service.

So school’s my chosen poison, at least I get something done. With a lot of leg-dragging and cursing. And since it has been scientifically proven that swearing does make a person feel better, you can be sure that I won’t go down without a few hundred descriptions about human reproductive parts.

This post originates from Pkchukiss - Reality Wine. Read it on the original site:

My chosen poison