Happy Chinese New Year !!!!

Chinese Spring New Year is approaching. Tomorrow is the New Year’s Eve. I will only rush back early morning to avoid the heavy traffic. One thing good in our country is that whenever one race celebrates its festive season, the others can also enjoy a long break. My Malay colleague, who sits in front of me and just stays in KL, has asked for one week break, same with me. My boss laughed at him, “You also celebrate gong xi fa choi?” ……

For those who have missed the opportunities to return home for celebration, such as PohKit, CheeMing, ZhenJie, Jinho…., wishing you all have a nice rest and enjoy a different atmosphere in respective countries. For those Dema related friends, don’t forget to attend Khailloon’s open house on 2nd day of CNY. Call me if you can’t find the way. You also can come to my house on 2nd day of CNY....

Happy Chinese New Year and Have a Prosperous Year to come…
Ein Glückliches Chinesisch Neues Jahr ------ (not enough Wortschatz)

Technology Update

Yesterday, two IEEE ComSoc technical talks entitled “IPv6: Enhanced Mobility and Security Support?” and “Location Based Services” had been held in Auditorium UPM. The first section and second section were conducted by Dr. Daniel Wong from MUST and Dr. Mahamod Ismail from UKM respectively. I can say that both of the technical talks are related to mobile communication. DNSSEC and location tracking algorithms are those new things for me. We have able to invite Dr. Daniel Wong who had worked with Telecordia before on WLAN/UMTS convergence. However, the amount of participants frustrated me. Only around 50 persons came to the talk and not many questions have been asked. We need to do something to increase the number of “active” participants.

Back to IPv6, I knew that majority of the advanced countries in Far East, such as China, Korea and Japan, have worked out their IPv6 backbone. NTT Japan is in a leading role. I am not too sure about our own country. I have worked with Mimos before and knew that MANIS is promoting IPv6 in Malaysia. Anyway, I don’t hear about any initiative from TM Net. The future communication network, especially on rolling out the 3G or perhaps 4G services, which are full IP-based network, will play an important role on stirring up the IPv6 deployment. Our government reacts rather slowly in this. Same old story!

Education System in Danger?

I really worry about the education system in Malaysia. I have started my German language last Saturday and managed to meet Ivan, who is in Form 4 right now. He has complaint that his teachers are not capable to teach their Science subjects properly and he found that he lost interest in his studies. If the government really sincere to use English as the teaching medium, they must first ensure that all the schools have enough manpower to do that. I read a new in the Star that 5 Malay students have made a legal claim against the government. They cited that the government has stolen their rights to use their mother tongue to continue their studies. I am not here to debate whether it is good or bad to use English as the medium but I just want the government to be more sincere in their moves.

Another issue is the quality of local universities. I really worry about that. “Do you still remember what the promise of BN to the peoples in Sabah and Kelantan?” The BN will setup a university in those states if the peoples vote for BN and take over from the opposition. Huh….what the heck! You think that setup a university is like building a house. We have facing the shortage of qualified lecturers in local universities nowadays. How can you simply setup a university like that! I tried to compare the core courses of universities in Germany and we are not far behind! Please wait a moment. I have to say that we are not far behind in terms of structuring of the programs but the coverage of core courses is nowhere near their level. Found out an interesting discussion on UPM in Wikipedia. Perhaps, it’s true but I am not too sure about UPM.

Liverpool was beaten by one Man, Rooney who was a defender, midfield and striker in that match. Why? Don’t forget that Rooney is Evertonian!

Jinho, all the best in your new job in Singapore and hope that you succeed in your life!

I have decided to take out the link on Wikipedia upon recommendation. I agreed that some of the claims on the discussion will not be fair for those who really work hard for themselves in UPM. Anyway, you should able to find it yourself if it is still there.

Wikipedia’s slogan: “The Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit"

Network Down

All the network elements, such as mail server, internet and etc. for my company had been downed the whole morning. It was started since Friday evening. Staffs here always bemoan the downtime for our network systems are longer since the setup of IT unit. I was making a joke to one of the IT staffs before that. “You are the one who purposely created the network problem and solved it after all.” FP/ATM system is improved after switching to round-robin with preemptive scheduler. Probably, there are certain tasks that consume too much processing delay and defer the other tasks for too long.

Khai Loon and Liza came back from HK and Taiwan respectively on last Saturday. I just had a strange feeling that both of them were actually back from China. Is it a sensitive statement? I don’t think so. After all, we spent most of our time hanging around in café and restaurant before sending Liza to KL sentral. Later, watched the derby match and it’s a terrible performance by ManU. Time to change! Please pack up yourself, Ferguson! Ended up in Wakiki Bar in Petaling Club with Jinho (who manages to introduce this bar after a date with a German girl) and my old schoolmate, Kok Theng, same primary school, same secondary school and same university…..He said that he will marry soon since he is getting older. And Jinho met his neighbor who spent almost all the night playing pool. KT said that my life is almost same with him. Anyway, bless KT good luck….

Reunion dinner in Dema house yesterday. A “huge” number of UPM students attended the event. The agenda of the day was the sharing section for out friends who went to join the “Junk WTO” in Hong Kong. Get a book from K.Loon on “Football Analysis”. The author of the book is an associate professor in HK University. He wrote a very comprehensive view on EPL and also the relationship between football and politics. I can say that it’s much better than our local Chinese press but http://www.soccernet.com/ seems to have more detailed analysis.

Last Week....

43 dBm was a fake. The CPICH channel is actually transmitting only 33 dBm or 10% of the total power setting in the Basestation. Figure it out with the spectrum analyzer. So why are we feeling headache before that? Physiological effect, I think. Screwed up the system when configuring the system clock rate to 1000 clock ticks per second. It all because of the watchdog timer using 1ms timer resolution.

Suddenly, I found out that Teh owes me 2 or 3 can of 100Plus. I don’t know why we start to bet for badminton match. I think that probably because of Goi’s sister and lack of motivation recently. Went to the Bowling Center in Sunway with a group of “Crazy” ppls. One of them threw the ball to me while I was standing behind. Even the security guard behind us was shocked. But the most embarrassing moment was that I finished a game with merely 45 points!

Future Mobile Evaluation

Finished reading an article entitled “Future Mobile Technology: Lessons from China and Korea” by Department of Trade and Industry UK. DTI picked the two most promising countries in Far East as the study case to find out the future mobile evolution. There are some good points to be shared. Let’s look at Korea first,
- Korean companies put more focus on “R” rather than “D” to compete against the USA and Europe.
- Korea, positioning itself, through its national telecommunications research institute, ETRI, as an ally of Qualcomm to develop and deploy high risk and unproven wireless technology.
- Future infrastructure evolution, such as BcN, IPv6 and USN.
- Funding from governments: 15.5 billion won is directed to ETRI, and 2.4 billion won to three universities: Seoul Nat. U, ICU and Hanyang U.
- ~200 spin-off companies from ETRI work closely with IPR development.

Then, some interesting points extracted from the report regarding China,
- Promoting its own TD-SCDMA as a base and direction towards 4G.
- Use a very low cost services and technologies to accelerate the development in rural area.
- Universities and Research Institutes are divided into 2 major groups, FDD and TDD.
- CATR carries out the fundamental research as a state research body on Telecommunication.

Both countries have spent significantly on research and development and enable a rapid transition to demonstration. I predict the same model should be used by our country. The same theory had been applied to semiconductor field previously. Heavy investment on the state research body Mimos but it is hard to see any significant outcome that our country can proud of. Perhaps, just the all Malaysian 16 Bit RISC Microprocessor.......

A New Year to Come

What were you doing during the last moment of year 2005? I was lucky enough to watch a football match from year 2005 till year 2006. This was the first experience in my life after living for 27 years. You are correct! Manchester United again… I used to tell Zimin that I would like to take up the job as a staff in Old Trafford in the future. But first of all, I have to get myself a ticket to Old Trafford, the Theatre of Dream… Hmm, this year is the World Cup year. Still remember those days in Mimos when we stayed in the “secrete room” watching our favorite teams. So, 4 years had been passed! I had been in the Olimpia Stadion, the venue of World Cup final, in a wrong timing, 2 years early. It’s indeed a beautiful stadium, a very simple and straight forward but realistic architecture. I still keep the tour ticket in my wallet and promised to myself to be there again. Still remember how to take the Bahn there…

Decided to clean my room yesterday. It looks like a huge project for me! A Markus mug was placed beside my bed for almost 2 years and I simply don’t aware about it. And many other things to be found out…. My brother came to pick up his motor and we had “cendol” near my home. All of a sudden, the rain was pouring. It’s quite common in Klang area these day!