After I read that, I felt that there was something wrong with the IGPs interpretation of extraditions. I am not a lawyer but even I know that you cannot just ask another government to extradite people to your country on whim and fancy. So, I looked it up on Wikipedia, the ever informative source. While the details may be different because a lot of it depends on the exact wording of our extradition agreements with the UK, I don’t think that it would be possible for the UK government to comply with the extradition request.

You see, one of the fundamental principles behind extraditions is that the person must have committed or at least be a suspect for a criminal offence in both nations. As I understand it writing articles bad-mouthing your Prime Minister and his family is not a criminal offence in the UK. According to the internets the UK has just recently decriminalised defamation and it is now a civil issue. Maybe that is why RPK has decided to holiday there this season. I hear that it will be a white Christmas this year. Nice!

In addition, the country must also be satisfied that the person who is being extradited would receive a fair trial, which is something that RPK claims that he will never receive. Since he has previously been detained without trial under the ISA, his claims are not without merit. The UK has refused to extradite many other people far more nefarious than RPK and who have done far worse things that bad-mouth other people because those people would receive a show-trial and a death sentence at home. That would not satisfy the UK on issues of human rights, due process and what nots.

So, I don’t think that our IGP will succeed in getting RPK extradited. However, if our government wishes to affect an extra-ordinary rendition, now that would be a whole different matter entirely.

PS: I still wonder how RPK gets to move in and out of Malaysia so easily. One would think that his name would be flagged at all entry and exit points in the country. That just totally beguiles me or maybe he is just really good at parkour.

PPS: I am a lawyer buruk.

Honestly, I have never seen visual effects that are this spectacular. You know what they say about CGI – it can mimic pretty much everything except human expression. Well, while they got away with a lot of things by making use of an alien race, the facial emotions and expressions were very human. And the sheer variety! Practically every Na’vi had its own characteristics and features – the avatars were even made to look like their human counterparts. It was odd seeing my favourite Alien lady in blue spotted skin but it was cool – makes me want to watch all the Alien films again.

Aside from the CGI, the world itself is pretty amazing. A lot of detail and attention had been put into the creation of the world. While it shamelessly borrows a lot of elements from Native American culture it is still unique in itself. I particularly liked the idea of a care-taker species who were conveniently born with organs that allow them to jack directly into nature. They can communicate with animals and plants by simply jacking in directly. Every living creature on the planet seemed to have a compatible organ for jacking into. As the Alien lady put it – the entire ecosystem of the planet is like a massive network and the Na’vi are capable of directly uploading and downloading information from it. Wonderful!

The film’s many messages were also clear. Any idiot can spot the obviously environmental messages being put across – about how important it is to find balance with the world. There is also a more subtle message about how we humans are a colonising force and tend to just take whatever we want as long as we can bully the natives and get away with it. Then, there is the one-line reference to fighting terrorism with more terrorism – that piece of dialogue was obviously forced into the film just for that one purpose.

I loved the film and will definitely get it on bluray when it comes out next year.

PS: I also liked the fact that the Na’vi language was subtitled in Malay with an alien script to boot. Shows attention to detail.

I have spent many years complaining about the lack of new games in this world since the 90s. Every possible game genre seems to have been developed then and there have been nothing but rehashes over the years. However, I can now see the beginnings of a new form of game – the open world game. The growth in computing capabilities over the last decade have given developers the opportunity to create endless games set in an open interactive world where anything is possible – almost.

The risk with these open world games is that they get repetitive after a while. The computer is a finite state machine and there are only so many combinations of actions that can be executed. Like in Assassin’s Creed, you will either eavesdrop, pick-pocket, interrogate, assassinate or something else. There are less than 10 game modes and this becomes clearly repetitive after a while. The same thing happens in every other game that lays claim to an ‘open world’ experience.

However, it is theoretically feasible to create a game world where the interaction between the game elements becomes virtually limitless, with the right amount of powerful hardware. The game does not actually need an infinite combination of game modes. All it needs is enough game modes to keep people happy throughout its lifetime of a few years. While some of the games today can lay claim to extensive hours of game-play, this is mainly controlled through the use of some sort of plot-based story line that moves things along.

It would be totally interesting to see how this ‘new’ genre of games develop.

Then, I read this article on BAI – Google is laying its own pipe to Southeast Asia and Japan. The pipe will connect Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Phillipines, and Japan. When finished the SJC will provide the fastest connection in the world.

Now, I wonder if someone here will lay a pipe and connect it to the Singaporean end of the SJC. That will provide Malaysia with access to the fastest Internet connection in the world and our dreams of having high speed broad band might actually come to being.

This has always been a problem for me and I have tried to look a bit older. One way of doing that is by wearing my spectacles – without them I would look even younger. It is a problem when trying to convince others to use your system or buy your product. People tend to get the impression that I am a blur young kid with no experience at all when the opposite is actually more true. Hence, a lack of trust for whatever I say. Sigh…

But it seems like there is a silver lining in the cloud. According to this BBC article, “People who look young for their age live longer”. It has something to do with telomeres, which is known to control ageing and has recently shown signs of controlling how young we look as well. I guess that the caveat is: assuming that nothing else kills these people first, like car accidents, disease and what nots – people who look young could possibly age slower.

Like what a friend told me the other day – with me, it is not about the money. For me, my career plans are not predicated on the amount of money that I will make because that would just be pointless. If it was all about making money, I would not have accomplished the things that I have. That is not to say that I don’t care about the money. I am not idealistic enough to think that I can survive on mere fresh air and sunshine. Money is important but simply making money will never be enough to motivate me. I need something more than that to satiate my thirst.

Then, I came across point #18 from The Cathedral and The Bazaar: “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”.

While there are lots of important problems to solve in this world – particularly with our society at home, none of them twixt my nethers – not enough anyway. I am looking for something that will give me the semangat berkobar-kobar to work on. I hope that I will be able to bite onto something soon.

It was basically an excuse to get a few friends together for a few hours. Some of my friends have not seen each other for more than a year. So, it was nice to get everyone to spend some quality time together. The PS3 is surprisingly good at being a party console, as long as the right game is used. Besides LBP, we also played Katamari Forever, which is basically a compilation of all past Katamari games with new moves and maps added. We also watch Star Trek on bluray, which was fun. Star Trek also turned out to be a very suitable film for a small party. It is mainstream enough to appeal to everyone and not just fans of the franchise.

All in all, I had a pretty wonderful day. I’ve not had a get together like this in a while.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.”
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

A friend of mine attended an interview for a job at Dyson and told me about this product that they have – the air multiplier. I did not think much more about it until I saw it in a recent copy of IET’s newsletter. It is pure genius – the only bladeless fan in the world. Don’t ask me how it works – my knowledge in fluid dynamics is iffy. However, I can immediately appreciate the strength of the product.

All that I wonder about is – the exorbitant price tag!

Anyway, Dyson is a company that sells products, manufactured in Malaysia, outside of Malaysia. If you google for Dyson you will see a bunch of Malaysian hits for their local production facilities. However, try buying any Dyson product in Malaysia and you would be out of luck.

According to the AFP article on France 24, the maestro is back. I guess that he got tired of just watching the race from the side-lines for the last few years. According to the article, he has signed up with Mercedes, which should prove interesting. After his successful career and retirement at Ferrari, he is giving them the slip and going for their rivals. His former colleagues and team mates are now going to be his rivals. This will probably spice things up a bit.

Anyway, I’ve not always been a fan of Michael. He has his ups and downs but there is no denying that he is a great driver who has yet to be dethroned. However, I am not quite sure how competitive he will find himself with the current crop of young drivers. They are pretty good themselves and some of them may have the chance of breaking his records some day.

Or maybe this is just a case of mid-life crisis? He is exactly 40 after all – just the right age for a mid-life crisis.